Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Disclosure is good, especially if the tournament requires it. If you don't disclose your unbroken positions on this wiki at least 30 minutes before the round, I am inclined to read Disclosure Theory. I would only read this theory if it's mandated by tournament rules.

Interp: Debaters must disclose previously run constructive positions – all cases, off cases and theory arguments – at least 30 minutes before the round on the NDCA wiki or when asked. This means providing proper citations for all evidence including first three and last three words and tags as well as advocacy, standard, and interpretation texts.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I extemp it most of the time for theory/T, but if I actually READ some shell, I'll disclose it here.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Email: ashbhat10@gmail.com
Facebook: Ashwin Bhat
Cell Phone: 503-703-0222

If you want me to disclose and I haven't already, then ask me. Contact me if there are any questions or anything. I use email and Facebook more than my phone.

Tournament: SeptOct | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it.
Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
And the fear of death causes psychological damage – rejection of this fear causes greater appreciation of life.
 Van Nuys ‘8: Dr. David Van Nuys writes in “AN INTERVIEW WITH IRVIN YALOM, MD ON DEATH ANXIETY” under the Psychotherapy section, February 20th. Dr. Irvin Yalom is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University and the author of several highly acclaimed textbooks, including Existential Psychotherapy and The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. He is also the author of stories and novels related to psychotherapy, including Love's Executioner, When Nietzsche Wept, Lying on the Couch, Momma and the Meaning of Life, and The Schopenhauer Cure. His latest non-fiction book is Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=docandid=28821; AB
Though death cannot be avoided, confronting the fact that you will die has rewards, namely that people who are able to do it tend to become calmer, more centered and aware and more able to ignore distractions and anxieties and focus on what is truly important (e.g., loving relationships). Confronting death makes life more poinient and meaningful in essence. You appreciate life more if you treat each day as your last. This is illustrated quite well by Dicken's classic story, "A Christmas Carol" in which the protagonist, Scrooge, has an awakening into life and compassion only after the Ghost of Christmas Future shows him his grave.
The fear of death dissolves the ability to live a mentally liberated life in which we can live life to the fullest – embracing death is necessary to remove the shackles of death’s supposed evil ontology.
Howard ‘9: January 1, 2009, Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness, Review by Benjamin Howard of Roshi’s new book: BEING WITH DYING: CULTIVATING COMPASSION AND FEARLESSNESS IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH, PhD in anthropology
“Snow was general all over Ireland,” writes James Joyce at the end of his short story “The Dead.” In this celebrated story Gabriel Conroy, a middle-aged Dubliner, comes to terms with his own mortality. As often in Western literature, snow is a metaphor for death. Today, what is general all over America—and indeed the world—is fear, whether its object be joblessness, a terrorist attack, or the more familiar specters of aging, sick-ness, and death. What have Zen teachings to say about fear? And what has Zen practice to offer? One person who has confronted fear in general and the fear of death in particular is Joan Halifax Roshi, founder and Abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Trained as an anthropologist, Roshi Joan turned to Zen practice after the death of her grandmother. For the past four decades she has devoted her life to teaching Zen and caring for the dying. In her new book, Being with Dying (Shambhala Publications), Halifax presents the fruit of her life’s work. Observing that the fear of death causes many of us to avoid, ignore, or otherwise deny the “only certainty of our lives,” she reminds us that “to deny death is to deny life.” And to embrace death can be the ultimate form of liberation: The sooner we can embrace death, the more time we have to live completely, and to live in reality. Our acceptance of death influences not only the experience of dying but also the experience of living; life and death lie along the same continuum. One cannot—as so many of us try to do—lead life fully and struggle to keep the inevitable at bay.
The 1AC prescribes death to have an evil ontology – this is a terrible foundation for making decisions because it actively prohibits discourse against oppressive structures under a rhetoric of a greater good and is an independent reason to reject the aff.
Their use of nuclear extinction rhetoric specifically guarantees structural violence – makes war inevitable
Martin ‘84: (Brian, research associate in the Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, and a member of SANA, “Extinction Politics,” Scientists Against Nuclear Arms Newsletter, number 16, May, pp. 5-6, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/84sana1.html)
The peace movement also has denigrated the value of civil defence, apparently, in part, because a realistic examination of civil defence would undermine beliefs about total annihilation. The many ways in which the effects of nuclear war are exaggerated and worst cases emphasized can be explained as the result of a presupposition by antiwar scientists and activists that their political aims will be fulfilled when people are convinced that there is a good chance of total disaster from nuclear war.7 There are quite a number of reasons why people may find a belief in extinction from nuclear war to be attractive.8 Here I will only briefly comment on a few factors. The first is an implicit Western chauvinism The effects of global nuclear war would mainly hit the population of the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union. This is quite unlike the pattern of other major ongoing human disasters of starvation, disease, poverty and political repression which mainly affect the poor, nonwhite populations of the Third World. The gospel of nuclear extinction can be seen as a way by which a problem for the rich white Western societies is claimed to be a problem for all the world. Symptomatic of this orientation is the belief that, without Western aid and trade, the economies and populations of the Third World would face disaster. But this is only Western self-centredness. Actually, Third World populations would in many ways be better off without the West: the pressure to grow cash crops of sugar, tobacco and so on would be reduced, and we would no longer witness fresh fish being airfreighted from Bangladesh to Europe. A related factor linked with nuclear extinctionism is a belief that nuclear war is the most pressing issue facing humans. I disagree, both morally and politically, with the stance that preventing nuclear war has become the most important social issue for all humans. Surely, in the Third World, concern over the actuality of massive suffering and millions of deaths resulting from poverty and exploitation can justifiably take precedence over the possibility of a similar death toll from nuclear war. Nuclear war may be the greatest threat to the collective lives of those in the rich, white Western societies but, for the poor, nonwhite Third World peoples, other issues are more pressing. In political terms, to give precedence to nuclear war as an issue is to assume that nuclear war can be overcome in isolation from changes in major social institutions, including the state, capitalism, state socialism and patriarchy. If war is deeply embedded in such structures - as I would argue9 - then to try to prevent war without making common cause with other social movements will not be successful politically. This means that the antiwar movement needs to link its strategy and practice with other movements such as the feminist movement, the workers' control movement and the environmental movement. A focus on nuclear extinction also encourages a focus on appealing to elites as the means to stop nuclear war, since there seems no other means for quickly overcoming the danger. For example, Carl Sagan, at the end of an article about nuclear winter in a popular magazine, advocates writing letters to the presidents of the United States and of the Soviet Union.10 But if war has deep institutional roots, then appealing to elites has no chance of success. This has been amply illustrated by the continual failure of disarmament negotiations and appeals to elites over the past several decades. Just about everyone, including generals and prime ministers, is opposed to nuclear war. The question is what to do about it. Many people have incorporated doomsday ideas into their approaches. My argument here is that antiwar activists should become much more critical of the assumptions underlying extinction politics.
Turns the aff - structural violence outweighs – kills more people than nuclear war.
Gilligan '96: (James, Faculty – Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, p. 191-196)
You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcibly and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterize their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhi’s observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their virulent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence of our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence of this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint By “structural violence” I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstratably large portion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society’s collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting “structural” with “behavioral violence,” by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence in at least three major respects The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time. Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acs; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. Structural violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. Neither the existence, the scope and extent, nor the lethal power of structural violence can be discerned until we shift our focus from a clinical or psychological perspective, which looks at one individual at a time, to the epidemiological perspective of public health and preventative medicine. Examples are all around us. Continues – Page 195 The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those caused by genocide-~--or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 deaths, and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetuated on the week and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence—structural or behavioral—is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.
Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative.
Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not.
Emotional numbing is the result of fearing death – we must free ourselves to regain full emotion
Anderson ‘4: Nancy Anderson writes in “Work with Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living” in 2004.  
Fear of death causes preoccupation with the idea of death, fostering lack of purpose and concentration on what you cannot control. People who fear death often numb their feelings as a way to avoid awareness of their impending deaths. Without the feelings, they live in the illusion that time is not passing by. Concentrating on the future is also an effective way to avoid the present. For example, one of my clients worried about old age and death even though she was in her early fifties. Sarah’s preoccupation with her demise was reinforced by all other fears: the fear of poverty, losing love, criticism, and illness. Underneath all the fears was an unconscious belief that life was meaningless.
The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting their survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death.
AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key.
Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171
This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power. 

The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm.
Extinction is inevitable – especially under the aff’s fear of death
Burrowes ‘14: Robert J. Burrowes writes in “Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?” on December 17th, 2014. Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40499.htm; AB
In my view, human extinction is the most likely outcome. But not simply because we are inflicting too many insults on the planetary environment. Extinction is inevitable because of human fear and, specifically, unconscious fear: The fear in ourselves and others that is not experienced consciously but which often drives three capacities that are vitally important in any context: the focus of our attention, our capacity to adequately analyse the evidence (if we get our attention focused on it) and our behaviour in response to this analysis. For example, if you do not know that your fear is making you screen out unpalatable information, then you won't even notice that you have turned your attention elsewhere and have now forgotten what you just read. Or your fear might prevent you adequately analysing the evidence and/or responding intelligently to it.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The 1AC places faith in current institutional society and assumes that they could solve for the oppression that they talk about in the 1AC, but modern politics and ethics are morally hopeless - the state currently acts as the ultimate sovereign – it decides where and when rights are applied – no solvency for the aff. The link is their claim to solvency through a government policy plan.
Agamben ‘8: Giorgio Agamben writes in “Beyond Human Rights” in 2008. Giorgio Agamben (Italian: aˈɡambɛn; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, 4 form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and homo sacer. The concept of biopolitics (borrowed and adapted from Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. http://jstor.reed.edu/stable/pdf/40644981.pdf; AB
The reasons for such impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic apparatuses, but also in the very ambiguity of the fundamental notions regulating the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the juridical order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled the chapter of her book Imperialism that concerns the refugee problem ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’. 2 One should try to take seriously this formulation, which indissolubly links the fate of the Rights of Man with the fate of the modern nation-state in such a way that the waning of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former. Here the paradox is that precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other – namely, the refugee – marked instead the radical crisis of the concept. The conception of human rights based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, Arendt tells us, proves to be untenable as soon as those who profess it find themselves confronted for the first time with people who have really lost every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human. 3 In the system of the nation-state, so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state. This is implicit, after all, in the ambiguity of the very title of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, in which it is unclear whether the two terms are to name two distinct realities or whether they are to form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is actually always already contained in the second. That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very least from the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has always been considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself is inconceivable in the law of the nation-state.
THE ACT OF AFFIRMING IS AN ACT OF LINE DRAWING, SAYING THE LAW GOES TOO FAR IN THE CASE OF SPEECH CODES, BUT IS JUST RIGHT WHEN IT IS RESTRAINED ONLY BY THE CONSTITUTION, THIS FORM OF LINE DRAWING ONLY REIFIES THE STATE OF EXCEPTION, ENSNARING US IN THE TRAP OF POLITICS.
Edkins and Pin-Fat 05: (Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University (in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at Manchester Universit, “Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2005 34: pg. 14)
One potential form of challenge to sovereign power consists of a refusal to draw any lines between zoe- and bios, inside and outside.59 As we have shown, sovereign power does not involve a power relation in Foucauldian terms. It is more appropriately considered to have become a form of governance or technique of administration through relationships of violence that reduce political subjects to mere bare or naked life. In asking for a refusal to draw lines as a possibility of challenge, then, we are not asking for the elimination of power relations and consequently, we are not asking for the erasure of the possibility of a mode of political being that is empowered and empowering, is free and that speaks: quite the opposite. Following Agamben, we are suggesting that it is only through a refusal to draw any lines at all between forms of life (and indeed, nothing less will do) that sovereign power as a form of violence can be contested and a properly political power relation (a life of power as potenza) reinstated. We could call this challenging the logic of sovereign power through refusal. Our argument is that we can evade sovereign power and reinstate a form of power relation by contesting sovereign power’s assumption of the right to draw lines, that is, by contesting the sovereign ban. Any other challenge always inevitably remains within this relationship of violence. To move outside it (and return to a power relation) we need not only to contest its right to draw lines in particular places, but also to resist the call to draw any lines of the sort sovereign power demands. The grammar of sovereign power cannot be resisted by challenging or fighting over where the lines are drawn. Whilst, of course, this is a strategy that can be deployed, it is not a challenge to sovereign power per se as it still tacitly or even explicitly accepts that lines must be drawn somewhere (and preferably more inclusively). Although such strategies contest the violence of sovereign power’s drawing of a particular line, they risk replicating such violence in demanding the line be drawn differently. This is because such forms of challenge fail to refuse sovereign power’s line-drawing ‘ethos’, an ethos which, as Agamben points out, renders us all now homines sacri or bare life. Taking Agamben’s conclusion on board, we now turn to look at how the assumption of bare life can produce forms of challenge. Agamben puts it in terms of a transformation: This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe-.... If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence.60
The standard is demystifying the power of the state hierarchies—it’s the hope that we have for meaningful change that spills over this debate round. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state biopolitical power.
Gündoğdu ‘11: Ayten Gündoğdu writes in “Potentialities of human rights: Agamben and the narrative of fated necessity” on 19 July 2011.  Contemporary Political Theory February 2012, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp 2–22. http://link.springer.com/article/10.10572Fcpt.2010.45; AB
In his analysis of biopolitical sovereignty, Agamben provides us with what might be called a counternarrative of Western politics with the explicitly stated goal of ‘unveiling’ or ‘unmasking’ what has become mystified, hidden, secret or invisible, particularly with the prevalence of contractarian accounts of political power (1998, p. 8; 2005, p. 88). Agamben describes this critical task in terms of ‘disenchantment’, or the ‘patient work’ of unmasking the fiction or myth that covers up and sustains the violence of sovereignty (2005, p. 88). What underlies this urge to demystify and unveils is a particular understanding of myth as a deceptive narrative naturalizing and legitimizing violence in the name of the preservation of life. I use the term ‘counternarrative’ to call attention to what Agamben's account aims to do6: This is a critical analysis, as Agamben himself insists, that does not offer ‘historiographical theses or reconstructions’ but instead treats some historical phenomena as ‘paradigms’ so as to ‘make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context;’ to do this, it proceeds at ‘a historico-philosophical level’ (1998, p. 11; 2009, p. 9). In that sense, it is not an account that claims historical accuracy or factual verifiability. This is a crucial point that is sometimes overlooked by Agamben's critics who call into question his inaccurate treatment of historical phenomena such as the concentration camps.7 In addition, ‘counternarrative’ draws our attention to the inventive dimensions of Agamben's endeavor; as one of his critics aptly (though disapprovingly) puts it, ‘Agamben does not discover a concealed biopolitical paradigm stretching back to fourth-century Athens; rather he invents one’ (Finlayson, 2010, p. 116). The invention of a counternarrative of Western politics involves literary devices (e.g. hyperbole), which aim to provoke the readers and persuade them to abandon any politics centered on modern concepts such as sovereignty, rights and citizenship (LaCapra, 2007; cf. de la Durantaye, 2009). In analyzing Agamben's account as a ‘counternarrative’, I aim to attend to the goals that it sets for itself. It is these goals – particularly the goal of freeing human potentialities from myths that render the contingent necessary and mask other possibilities – that provide the starting point for my critical engagement with Agamben. Instead of resorting to an ‘outside’ – whether this be an alternative historical account or another theoretical tradition – I aim to read Agamben on his own terms, and suggest that as he tries to free human potentialities from contractarian myths, he might be entrapping them in another myth that ends up casting the contingent as necessary. Agamben's counternarrative of Western politics aims to uncover what has become hidden or invisible with ‘our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts’ (1998, p. 106). Its main target is the contractarian accounts of sovereign power. As he identifies the production of bare life as the originary or foundational activity grounding sovereign power (1998, pp. 6, 83), he particularly aims to question the social contractarian ‘myth’ that covers up sovereign violence (1998, p. 109). After unveiling the foundational myths of Western politics, Agamben concludes that we cannot effectively respond to ‘the bloody mystification of a new planetary order’ if we let these myths continue to obstruct our political imagination (1998, p. 12). With his counternarrative presenting a catastrophic view of the historical present – a view that emphasizes how exception has become the rule, camp has become the paradigmatic structure organizing political space, and we have all virtually become homines sacri (1998, pp. 38, 176, 111) – Agamben aims to convince his readers of the need to think of a ‘nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life’ (2000, p. 112). This new politics requires the renunciation of concepts associated with sovereignty – for example, state, rights, citizenship. The contemporary predicament cannot be remedied by a return to conventional political categories and institutions, Agamben suggests, since these are deeply involved in the creation of this catastrophe in the first place. Almost anticipating his critics who would be puzzled by his renunciation of rights and rule of law at a time when the problem of legal dispossession increasingly threatens populations around the world, he explicitly states that the response to the current permanent state of exception cannot consist in confining it within constitutional boundaries and reaffirming the primacy of legal norms and rights (2005, p. 87).8 As legal norms and rights are ultimately grounded in the originary violence of separating a bare life, legal dispossession is already inscribed in them as an inescapable condition. Neither the liberal remedy of reasserting the rule of law, nor the Derridean strategy of ‘infinite negotiations’ with a law that is in force without any significance, are viable options (2005, p. 87; 1998, p. 54). Both are futile, if not lethally dangerous, endeavors.9 The only politically tenable option, Agamben contends, is to move out of sovereignty with ‘a complicated and patient strategy’ of getting the ‘door of the Law closed forever’ (1998, pp. 54, 55)
THIS MEANS THAT 1. THE AC DOESN’T MEET ROLE OF THE BALLOT, THERE IS NO COUNTERNARRATIVE BEING OFFERED, ONLY THE SAME MECHANISM THAT HAS BEEN HISTORICALLY USED THAT DOESN’T CHALLENGE THE STATE AND 2. AC MAKES THE ISSUE WORSE. MY EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT WORKING THROUGH THE LAW IS A WAY THAT THE STATE LEGITIMIZES ITSELF.
THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO ENDORSE DESTITUENT POWER. POLITICAL NIHILISM DIVEST HOPE IN THE POLITICAL, THE DISCOURSE OF THE AC SITUATES OUR SOLUTION TO THE STATE OF EXPECTION INSIDE OF THE MECHANISM THAT CREATES THAT EXPECTION, THE NC ALLOWS US TO THINK OUTSIDE OF THE STATE
Refusing attempts to reform the legal system dooms it to its own nihilistic destruction. We should instead consider the emergence of whatever-singularity, an acceptance of bare life instead of reforming it.
Prozorov 10. Sergei Prozorov, professor of political and economic studies at the University of Helsinki, “Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist,” Philosophy Social Criticism 2010 36: pg. 106
In a later work, Agamben generalizes this logic and transforms it into a basic ethical imperative of his work: ‘There is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent. What is disgraceful – both politically and morally – are the apparatuses which have diverted it from their possible use. We must always wrest from the apparatuses – from all apparatuses – the possibility of use that they have captured.’32 As we shall discuss in the following section, this is to be achieved by a subtraction of ourselves from these apparatuses, which leaves them in a jammed, inoperative state. What is crucial at this point is that the apparatuses of nihilism themselves prepare their demise by emptying out all positive content of the forms-of-life they govern and increasingly running on ‘empty’, capable only of (inflict- ing) Death or (doing) Nothing.¶ On the other hand, this degradation of the apparatuses illuminates the ‘inoperosity’ (worklessness) of the human condition, whose originary status Agamben has affirmed from his earliest works onwards.33 By rendering void all historical forms-of-life, nihi- lism brings to light the absence of work that characterizes human existence, which, as irreducibly potential, logically presupposes the lack of any destiny, vocation, or task that it must be subjected to: ‘Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities. There is pol- itics because human beings are argos-beings that cannot be defined by any proper oper- ation, that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust.’34¶ Having been concealed for centuries by religion or ideology, this originary inoperos- ity is fully unveiled in the contemporary crisis, in which it is manifest in the inoperative character of the biopolitical apparatuses themselves, which succeed only in capturing the sheer existence of their subjects without being capable of transforming it into a positive form-of-life:¶ Today, it is clear for anyone who is not in absolutely bad faith that there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even simply assigned to, men. It was evident start- ing with the end of the First World War that the European nation-states were no longer capa- ble of taking on historical tasks and that peoples themselves were bound to disappear.35¶ Agamben’s metaphor for this condition is bankruptcy: ‘One of the few things that can be¶ declared with certainty is that all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt’.36 Thus, the destructive nihilistic drive of the biopolitical machine and the capitalist spectacle has itself done all the work of emptying out positive forms-of-life, identities and vocations, leaving humanity in the state of destitution that Agamben famously terms ‘bare life’. Yet, this bare life, whose essence is entirely con- tained in its existence, is precisely what conditions the emergence of the subject of the coming politics: ‘this biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form-of-life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.’37¶ The ‘happy’ form-of-life, a ‘life that cannot be segregated from its form’, is nothing but bare life that has reappropriated itself as its own form and for this reason is no longer separated between the (degraded) bios of the apparatuses and the (endangered) zoe that functions as their foundation.38 Thus, what the nihilistic self-destruction of the appara- tuses of biopolitics leaves as its residue turns out to be the entire content of a new form-of-life. Bare life, which is, as we recall, ‘nothing reprehensible’ aside from its con- finement within the apparatuses, is reappropriated as a ‘whatever singularity’, a being that is only its manner of being, its own ‘thus’.39 It is the dwelling of humanity in this irreducibly potential ‘whatever being’ that makes possible the emergence of a generic non-exclusive community without presuppositions, in which Agamben finds the possi- bility of a happy life.¶ If instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and sense- less form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects.40¶ Thus, rather than seek to reform the apparatuses, we should simply leave them to their self-destruction and only try to reclaim the bare life that they feed on. This is to be achieved by the practice of subtraction that we address in the following section.¶
This divestment is the only solution to the state of exception – a complete rejection of the affirmative’s political futurity to find a new place for being within the world.
Caldwell 4, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville (Anne, “Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity” https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.2caldwell.html#authbio)
Agamben's alternative is therefore radical. He does not contest particular aspects of the tradition. He does not suggest we expand the range of rights available to life. He does not call us to deconstruct a tradition whose power lies in its indeterminate status.21 Instead, he suggests we take leave of the tradition and all its terms. Whatever being is a life that defies the classifications of the tradition, and its reduction of all forms of life to homo sacer. Whatever being therefore has no common ground, no presuppositions, and no particular attributes. It cannot be broken into discrete parts; it has no essence to be separated from its attributes; and it has no common substrate of existence defining its relation to others. Whatever being cannot then be broken down into some common element of life to which additive series of rights would then be attached. Whatever being retains all its properties, without any of them constituting a different valuation of life (1993: 18.9). As a result, whatever being is "reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims) -- and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself." (0.1-1.2). We should pay attention to this comparison. For what Agamben suggests is that whatever being is not any abstract, inaccessible life, perhaps promised to us in the future. Whatever being, should we care to see it, is all around us, wherever we reject the criteria sovereign power would use to classify and value life. "In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity -- even that of a State identity within the State . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without a representable condition of belonging" (Agamben 1993:85.6). At every point where we refuse the distinctions sovereignty and the state would demand of us, the possibility of a non-state world, made up of whatever life, appears.

Tournament: x | Round: Finals | Opponent: x | Judge: x
CP: Public colleges and Universities in the United States ought to restrict denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915.
Kyrou ‘15: Alexandros K. Kyrou writes in “Erasing Memory, Erasing People: Armenian Genocide Remembrance and Denial at Harvard” in November 2015. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/november-2015/erasing-memory-erasing-people-armenian-genocide-remembrance-and-denial-at-harvard; AB
In the case of students who engage in organized genocide-denial efforts, administrations should make it absolutely clear that while they support free speech, the commitment to free speech must be accompanied by a commitment to respect for procedure and organized events. Universities should reiterate that supporting free speech does not endorse a policy of genocide denial. Conversely, by ignoring and not applying any consequences to such actions, universities are emboldening apologists of genocide. The centennial of the Armenian Genocide affords an opportunity for university administrations to develop such policies where none currently exist for dealing with this issue. To be clear, I am not making an argument for silencing genocide deniers, however morally reprehensible, politically insidious, or intellectually dishonest they may be. What I am arguing is that genocide deniers, such as those students at Harvard's Kennedy School, by their very acts of denial in the face of overwhelming and incontrovertible empirical evidence of genocide, continue to perpetrate that crime against humanity with their efforts to deny and silence scholarly research and pubic remembrance. I am also arguing that universities have a responsibility to avoid becoming the unwitting accomplices of genocide deniers, whether by caving in to their demands and pressures to cancel or prevent events such as the one detailed in this article, or by failing to make clear to disrupters who would seek to silence others that there are consequences for their failures to play by the rules of free speech and norms of respect that are the hallmarks of "the university."
Armenian genocide denial dishonors the victims.
Stanton 2k: Dr. Gregory Stanton writes in “The Cost of Denial” President, International Association of Genocide Scholars, President, Genocide Watch. 1 Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, Taderon Press, 2000, p. 222. http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutus/thecostofdenial.html; AB
Congressman Pallone, Congressman Knollenberg, Archbishop Aykazian, Archbishop Choloyan, Senator Menendez, Ambassador Markarian, Members of Congress, and Honored Guests: Today, we honor the memory of Congressman Tom Lantos, who left us this year. One of his final acts in Congress was to support House Resolution 106, commemorating the Armenian genocide, and to send it for a vote in the House. But last year, as every year, it never reached a vote in the full House. Again the United States surrendered to the ninety year campaign of denial by the government of Turkey. The State Department and the White House have continued the cowardly policies of every Secretary of State since Lansing who have considered it more important to placate the Turkish government than to be truthful about history. The tactics of genocide denial are predictable, and the Turkish government has used them all. Question and minimize the statistics. Attack the motivations of the truth-teller. Blame “out of control” forces for committing the killings. Claim that the massacres don’t fit the legal definition of genocide, even if over a million people were killed. The Turkish government has three favorites: Blame the victims. Claim that the killings were in self-defense against people who were disloyal to the Ottoman Empire during a World War. In fact, very few Armenians joined the Ottoman Empire’s enemies, and certainly none of the women and children could have. But they were murdered nevertheless. Claim that Muslim Turks also suffered many deaths. The problem with this argument is that the deaths were in battles with European troops, not at the hands of the Armenians, who were deported like sheep into the desert. Finally, claim that the deaths were inadvertent, due to lack of food and water, not due to intentional destruction. The falsehood of this claim is amply proven by the thousands of pages of eye-witness reports from Armenian survivors, American consular officers, missionaries, and most tellingly, in the archives of the Ottoman Empire’s allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, as well as by the records of the Ottoman Corts-Martial of 1918-1920. This was intentional mass murder by starvation. It wasn’t an unfortunate by-product of a deportation. So why can’t a resolution telling the truth about the Armenian genocide pass Congress? Here we run into two more tactics of denial: Claim that current peace and reconciliation are more important than blaming past perpetrators for genocide. The latest version of this tactic is the Turkish government’s proposal to set up an “historian’s commission” with half of the members appointed by the Turkish government and half by the government of the Republic of Armenia to “study” the facts of what occurred in 1915 – 1923. The problem with this proposal is that the Armenian genocide has been thoroughly documented and studied by genocide scholars, many of whom are not Armenian, and the historical record is unambiguous. In 1997, The International Association of Genocide Scholars declared unanimously that the Turkish massacres of over one million Armenians was a crime of genocide. A “commission of historians” would only serve the interests of Turkish genocide deniers. There is no more “another side” to the truth about the Armenian genocide than there is about the Holocaust. Most importantly, don’t tell the truth because to do so would not be in current US political, economic, and military interests. The US has a huge airbase in Turkey that we need for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Turks have threatened to close that base, cancel purchases of American military equipment, boycott American goods, and even pass their own resolution condemning nineteenth century US government massacres of Native Americans. (A number of US Congressmen and Senators have beaten them to it and already introduced such resolutions, and those resolutions should also be passed.) The Cost of Denial In my studies of genocide, I have discovered that the process of every genocide has predictable stages. They aren’t linear, because they usually operate simultaneously. But there is a logical order to them, because a “later” stage cannot occur without a logically “prior” stage. It is also useful to distinguish them, because they can help us see when genocide is coming and what governments can do to prevent it. The first is Classification, when we classify the world into us versus them. The second is Symbolization, when we give names to those classifications like Jew and Aryan, Hutu and Tutsi, Turk and Armenian. Sometimes the symbols are physical, like the Nazi yellow star. The third is Dehumanization, when perpetrators call their victims rats, or cockroaches, cancer, or disease; so eliminating them is actually seen as “cleansing” the society, rather than murder. The fourth is Organization, when hate groups, armies, and militias organize. The fifth is Polarization, when moderates are targeted who could stop the process, especially moderates from the perpetrators’ group. The sixth stage is Preparation, when the perpetrators are trained and armed, victims are identified, transported and concentrated. The seventh stage is Extermination, what we legally define as genocide, the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. When I first outlined these stages in a memo I wrote in the State Department in 1996, I thought these seven stages are all there are. Then I realized there is an eighth stage in every genocide: Denial. It is actually a continuation of the genocide, because it is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. Denial has a profoundly negative impact on everyone concerned. Denial harms the victims and their survivors. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world. Elie Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey’s denial a double killing, as it strives to kill the memory of the event. We believe the US government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan to exterminate the Jews. Around the world, victims of genocide ask first for recognition of the crime committed against them. It is as essential to healing as closing an open wound. Without such healing, scars harden into hatred that cripples the victim and cries out for revenge. Denial harms the perpetrators and their successors. After the Ottoman Courts-Martial of 1918-1920, there were no further trials. The killers literally got away with mass murder. With blood on their hands, they returned to their work. But out of that denial grew a Turkish state that denied the existence of all non-Turks within Turkey. Kurds became “mountain Turks,” Kurdish schools were closed, and people speaking Kurdish had their tongues cut out. Studies by genocide scholars prove that the single best predictor of future genocide is denial of a past genocide coupled with impunity for its perpetrators. Genocide Deniers are three times more likely to commit genocide again than other governments. We should be on guard for Turkish attempts to suppress Kurds, which continue to this day, and recently resulted in an invasion of Iraq. Turkish school children are taught that the Armenian genocide is a myth. Turkish writers who write the truth are prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness,” even if they have won the Nobel Prize. Publishers like Hrant Dink who dare publish the truth are murdered, and their murderers are celebrated as national heroes. These are the remnants of racist ultranationalism, of fascism, and do not belong in a member of NATO that hopes to join the European community. The next step that Turkey must take to become a real democracy is to acknowledge its own past. Like an alcoholic drunk on the liquor of ultranationalism, it must first admit its own problem before it can leave its addiction. Why should this be so hard? Germany has done it, and has become one of the strongest democracies on earth. The current Turkish government did not commit the Armenian genocide. Why should it not face the truth about the crimes the Ottoman Empire committed over ninety years ago? Denial harms the bystanders Countries that recognize the truth about the Armenian Genocide are considered enemies by Turkish successor regimes. The parliaments of many countries have affirmed the fact of the Armenian Genocide in unequivocal terms, and proposed congressional resolutions like H. Res. 106 are commemorative and non-binding. Yet the resolution faced opposition from those who fear it would undermine US relations with Turkey. It is worth noting that, notwithstanding France’s Armenian Genocide legislation, France and Turkey are engaged in more bilateral trade than ever before. We would not expect the US government to be intimidated by an unreliable ally with a deeply disturbing human rights record, graphically documented in the State Department’s 2007 International Religious Freedom Report on Turkey. We would expect the United States to express its moral and intellectual views, not to compromise its own principles. In fact, telling the truth would ultimately be good for US-Turkish relations, because they would no longer be based on diplomatic lies. The Joint Congressional Resolution recognizing and commemorating the Armenian Genocide will honor America’s extraordinary Foreign Service Officers (among them Leslie A. Davis, Jesse B. Jackson, and Oscar Heizer) who often risked their lives rescuing Armenian citizens in 1915. They and others left behind some forty thousand pages of reports, now in the National Archives, that document that what happened to the Armenianpeople was government-planned, systematic extermination.—what Raphael Lemkin (the man who coined the word genocide) used in creating the definition. By passing the resolution, the U.S. Congress would also pay tribute to America’s first international human rights movement. The Foreign Service Officers and prominent individuals such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, and Cleveland Dodge, who did so much to help the Armenians, exemplify America’s legacy of moral leadership. Of course, the State Department did not want Ambassador Morgenthau to tell the truth, and after he returned to the United States he never got another diplomatic assignment. But he inspired his son, Henry Morgenthau, Junior, who became FDR.’s Secretary of the Treasury and was a tireless advocate for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. Let us today commemorate those who died in the Armenian Genocide, but also Ambassador Henry Morgenthau and others who had the courage to tell the truth about it. Let us remember Ambassador Morgenthau’s words when he met with Talaat Pasha, who asked him: “Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew, these people are Christians..” Morgenthau replied: “You don’t seem to realize that I am not here as a Jew but as the American Ambassador.….I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion, but merely as a human being..”1
Awareness is key – 1.5 million Armenian people were killed and their experiences have been erased by ignorance.
Asbarez ‘16: Asbarez journal writes in “All-Armenian Student Association to Coordinate Silent Protest Against Armenian Genocide Denial” on February 1st, 2016 http://asbarez.com/145352/all-armenian-student-association-to-coordinate-silent-protest-against-armenian-genocide-denial/; AB
The All-ASA released a statement preceding the protest, reading: “The Armenian Genocide claimed the lives of 1.5 million people and forced the dispersion of Armenians throughout the world. The Republic of Turkey, a descendant regime of the Ottoman Empire, has led a denial campaign since its founding to stave off responsibility for necessary reparations, setting a cyclical precedent for the repression of justice. The United States, under political pressure from Turkey, has also refused to acknowledge the genocide by its rightful classification. As Armenian-Americans, we believe that politics and humanity need to be held in separate realms. The Stain of Denial is a tool to educate each campus’ community about the Armenian experience and the cycle of genocide.”
Everyday struggle for Armenian students.
Ghazanchyan ‘17: Siranush Ghazanchyan writes in “Students accross US and Canada stage silent protest against Armenian Genocide denial” for PUBLIC RADIO OF ARMENIA” on 10 Feb 2017. http://www.armradio.am/en/2017/02/10/students-accross-us-canada-stage-silent-protest-against-armenian-genocide-denial/; AB
On Thursday, February 9th, the All-Armenian Student Association (All-ASA) coordinated the annual “Stain of Denial” silent protest against the continuous denial of the Armenian Genocide. The protests were simultaneously held by ASA chapters and affiliated organizations on their respective college and university campuses. “Stain of Denial” was initiated in 2011 as a silent protest in order to raise awareness of the ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide and the need for recognition and reparations. The students, faculty, and community members who participated on Thursday stressed that the Armenian Genocide is not an issue only reserved for the month of April, but it has a profound effect on Armenians every day. Whereas April 24th is traditionally the day that the world commemorates the Armenian Genocide, the memory of the genocide and its ensuing denial continues to be a daily struggle. The All-ASA prioritizes this campaign because Armenian students in college, where the free interchange of ideas and perspectives is encouraged, continuously find that the denial of their history is an injustice that they are blatantly faced with. The participating ASA’s have continuously increased throughout the years. This year, Armenian students from various schools in the West coast, East coast, and Canada organized on their respective campuses. The participating schools in this years protests were: UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Los Angeles, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, Glendale Community College, Pasadena Community College, Occidental College, University of Southern California, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Northridge, Woodbury University, Massachussets College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Emmanel College, Boston University, Northeastern University, Tufts University, Suffolk University, Yale University, and Princeton University. For the first time, the protests reached an international scope, with participation from the following Canadian universities: University of Ottawa, Carleton University, and the University of Montreal. Members from the following organization also participated: ARF Shant Student Association, Armenian Youth Federation, Alpha Gamma Alpha, and Alpha Epsilon Omega. Thousands of Armenian students, community members, and faculty, both Armenian and non-Armenian, took a stand and reiterated that the Armenian Genocide is not just a “day in April,” but a year-round struggle for justice. The campaign also included an online component, as those who were not able to attend raised awareness through social media, by incorporating the hashtags #StainofDenial, #ArmenianGenocide, and #DivestTurkey into their online posts. While the protests highlighted the history of the Armenian Genocide and the consequences that still continue, it also raised awareness of the #DivestTurkey initiative. This included education about resolutions that ASAs have passed through their student government councils, including both Armenian Genocide recognition and divestment bills, the latter of which targets over $70 million of University of California funds allocated toward the Turkish government.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Capitalism is the root cause of identity and race division—it’s rooted in underlying structures of power found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements—that means discussion of class is a prerequisite to solvency.
McLauren et al ‘3:: V. and Peter McLaren, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of ‘Race’ and ‘Difference’”, UCLA, 2003, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren20and20valerie.pdf
However, it is still important to move beyond the discursive and cultural realms. It is necessary to understand the history of such cultural developments and their connection to class analysis. It is necessary to grasp the 'totalizing... power and function of capital' (153). In this sense, '"culture" is not the "other" of class but rather constitute part of a more comprehensive theorization of class relations' (153). Difference arises from social contradictions themselves stemming from domination and oppression in particular contexts. In this sense, separating class from culture is a misleading abstraction. What is needed is to understand why particular differences become important in particular circumstances. In some circumstances, culture is treated as if it were separate and autonomous, hence analyses can take that for granted as an abstract this is an example of the classic Marxian critique of the methods of political economy and abstract philosophy. A politics of difference often means little more than a demand for inclusion 'into the metropolitan salons of bourgeois representation' (154). This is nothing more than a demand for access to the cultural market place, and did assumes that difference is based on some essential cultural qualities and not constructed. Excessive attention to difference simply 'averts our gaze from relations of production' (154). Celebrations of difference can also 'mesh quite nicely with contemporary corporate interests precisely because they revere lifestyle' (154). The dangers of such uncritical celebrations life in their advocates' inability to distinguish between good and bad differences -- why not celebrate different fascist parties for example? Class differences are not celebrated either. An empty liberal pluralism seems to inform the discussion. However, categories of difference can be ideological. In particular, different kinds of identity are 'central to the exploitative production/reproduction dialectic of capital' (155), especially those differences stressing race and gender. It is clear that 'people of colour' find themselves in the most exploited groups: as with women, these groups 'provide capital with its superexploited labour pools -- a phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world' (156). The concept of superexploitation presumably refers to the need to exploit people even more than would be required on the basis of the production of surplus value alone? It is a way of generating super profits, characteristic of monopoly capital? There may also be a political issue -- that some groups need to be exploited even more than would be required to make them conform to capitalist economic forms? I am most familiar with this argument when it is applied to women -- women need to be superexploited in order to produce free domestic labour as well as paid wage labour. I'm not sure I grasped the point in connection with 'race': it may be necessary to superexploit black people in order to pursue a specific strategy of 'neo-colonialism'?. Class is not just another dimension of difference. It is necessarily related to capitalism, not just a 'subject position', but the source of value itself lots to discuss here of course. It is universal, and the only one which will require revolutionary change to abolish it. Other categories have their importance -- gender is perhaps the most long-standing form of oppression, while racial identity can be the most immediate existentially, as in brutally racist societies -- but class relations are fundamental to the whole capitalist system, including the state. It is also one of the more recent and therefore most open to doubt -- 'a world without class is preeminently imaginable -- indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth' (quoting Kovel, page 157). For marxists, ending class is a prior necessity to ending all other forms of oppression. Recent marxist analysis has focused on the relations between class and other forms of division. All social constructs gain their force from the reproduction of capitalism. These social forms 'constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system' (158), and they help to reproduce it. Class is thus central to exploitative relations of all kinds. Personal experiences, and the categories they generate, are valid, but should not be seen as completely self-explanatory. They must be transcended and traced back to a social and historical context. Many recent perspectives fail to explain how particular kinds of different have emerged -- in particular, '"race" is not an adequate explanatory category on its own' (159), and focusing on it can obscure 'the actual structure of power and privilege' (159). 'Race' is not a scientific category anyway, although it persists in popular discourses and even in 'mainstream social sciences' (160). Gilroy is right to renounce it, even though it may weaken historical movements for liberation based on 'race struggles' (160). Instead, race needs to be seen as a construct rooted in underlying structures of power, especially those found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements. In this way, specific forms of racism will become more apparent. Race cannot be subsumed into class, but racism is only explicable with the development of capitalism -- for example, 'Capitalism once relied on slave labour and needed an ideological legitimation' (161). Contemporary race-relations are still best understood as arising from the dynamics of capitalism, and challenging racism must therefore involve challenging capitalism. This would be much more threatening than a politics based on difference alone. Class differences have sharpened, deepened and become fundamental in recent years: it makes even more sense to see capitalism as 'an overarching totality... more universal, more ruthless and more deadly' (163) The connections can also be seen if we realise that 'the vast majority of the working class consists of women and people of colour' (quoting Foster, page 162). It does not make sense to ignore the class dimension in their experiences and struggles. Indeed, 'a good deal of post-marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) in so far as it implies that "people of colour" could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their racial, ethnic, cultural "difference"' (163). It also assumes that 'working class' means 'white'. Radicals may be posturing based on discourses of difference which simply reflect academic politics and a disinterest in economic exploitation outside. As Marx said about the young Hegelians, their battle seems to be about phrases and counterphrases, reflecting their own class positions, while capitalism itself remains uncriticised. Really radical positions have been marginalised by the academic left who celebrate differences while capitalism increasingly imposes a universality. Marxism should be revived if 'the triumph of globalised capitalism and its political bedfellow, neo-liberalism' are to be challenged (165). Inequalities of wealth and power exceed those in Marx's day. Exploitation and oppression need to be understood in modern context, applying marxism rather than rejecting it, and proceeding on both theoretical and a more politically engaged basis. It is common experience of exploitation rather than apparent differences that needs investigation. Of course, the struggles of black people against racism must not be ignored, but it should be traced to class relations. Notions of class may seem outdated, but those found in post-marxist analyses are even more so -- '"experience of multiple oppressions no longer requires multiple theories of oppression because corporations multiply oppress (Starr, 2000)' (167). A common enemy is emerging on a global basis, as seen in globalised protest movements. A new socialist struggle is required.
The determinism of capital causes life instrumentalism — it is this logic that mobilizes and allows for the oppressions they isolate.
Dyer-Witherford ‘99: Professor of Library and Info. Sciences @ the Univ. of Western Ontarion, Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism.
For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of “will over nature” is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was that capital’s dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of “instrumental reason” that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority—enshrined in phrases such as “progress,” “efficiency,” “productivity,” “modernization,” and “growth”—assumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.
AND, cap causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.  
Farbod ‘15: (Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
This debate is about competing methodologies – the question of the ballot is whose ethical orientation best catalyzes political organization against Capitalism. Vote negative to accept the Communist Hypothesis, which is a recognition of socialism’s necessity and a historical analysis of cap. This is, in other words, a genealogical investigation and a representations alt.
Walker 14: (Gavin, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies at McGill University, “The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4, Fall 2014)
S in c e the turn of the twenty-first century, the term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and a surprising novelty. 1 In a wide range of fields of knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the history of the world  communist movement, the theoretical tendencies of communist thought, and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and addressed anew. In the social movements that have sprung up in nations around the world—from Spain to Greece to Quebec, throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond—-the word communism has again acquired a critical force, not a force of nostalgia or simple retrospection, but a new and creative force. We can only be struck by the degree to which it now seems that communism, far from the dead end of the twentieth century it was long assumed to be, may be something profoundly of the twenty-first century, an idea and field of concepts whose time has come. When Antonio Negri emphasizes that the communists today are “alone and potent,” he alerts us to a crucial point that I want to highlight, from two divergent directions, in the following essay. Rather than see the contemporary communist moment simply as a “return,” implying a transposition of the same forces, forms, and contents, this moment indicates instead an open field for the reinvention of communism. The earlier modality of twentieth-century communism, linked above all to the existence and continuity established by the Soviet Union, no longer exists. No longer is there a national form or federated space that would serve as a “bulwark” of the communist project. In this sense, the communists today are alone. Yet Negri insists that the communists are alone and potent. This potency is derived, not as in the previous arrangement, from a site of institutional force that could be treated as a model of explanation, but from this fact of being alone, untethered, unguaranteed, not beholden to a specific historical telos. In this sense, the communists today are potent because they are alone. What does this new political solitude mean for the concepts and contents of communism in our contemporary moment? Two distinct trends emerge in this development of communism in our global present. One is the great historic movement that has transferred the center of gravity of a reinvented communist politics to the exterior of the West, taken in the broadest sense. This globality of communism is in essence a fulfillment of a promise rather than a historical accident, the fulfillment of a politics that from the outset sought a new theoretical and political destiny beyond the horizon of the national and local. The second is the striking link between this return—and reinvention—of communism and its site of return, one of which is without doubt the field of “critical theory.” What makes this site peculiar is that it too, like the political potential of communism itself, has been in a long retreat since the 1980s in the fields of knowledge production around the world. Theory’s originary impulse toward the politicization of knowledge, the immanent critique of the university, and its globality, the fact that theory has long provided a common language beyond the regime of national language, has been the target of an intense revanchist attack by institutional neoliberalism, conservative politics, and positivist knowledge work. But new experiences have emerged in recent years to produce a situation in which these two developments—one linked to the practical social movements and reinventions of political organization and the other linked to the crystallization of a new trend in theory—are experiencing complex and volatile articulations and points of contact. What we are seeing today is perhaps the first emergence of a new direction and politicization of theory itself, the first stirrings of a communist critical theory. P o litics: P e rs is te n c e a n d S cissio n One distinguishing feature of the current discussions of the “communist hypothesis” (Badiou), the “actuality of communism” (Bosteels), and “the communist horizon” (Dean) is a renewal of an insistence on the primacy of politics over the mere presupposition of a politics derived from the structural analysis of global capitalism’s current tendencies, level of technical composition, and scale of development of the productive forces. These thinkers maintain a conception of politics that upholds its rarity, its intermittent or hazardous quality. Rather than accept the given character of politics, in which it would become a figure of ubiquity or immanence (the banal argument that “everything is political”), the rethinking of the question of communism has also insisted on a divergent genealogy of what is and what is not political. Rather than a constantly presupposed undercurrent, this figure of politics would instead be, for instance, in Alain Badiou (2001), the rare event that grounds a political sequence and convokes a subject through a fidelity, or in Jacques Ranciere’s (1999) terms, the egalitarian proposal that suspends the representations possible in the dominant order (“the police”).2 This concept of politics is, above all, linked to new attempts to think the place of the subject of politics, and it is this point that provides an entry into the critical dimensions of this “communist hypothesis” within the theoretical field. The rethinking of communism today has distinguished itself as a trend in insisting on antagonism, contradiction, the subject, politics, and organization; it refuses gestures of diffusion, multiplicity as such, focusing on the dialectical conditions of the possible rather than the immanent conditions of the impossible. There is here a reaction to the monopoly held by a very specific register—the Derridean register of defeat and withdrawal, the Deleuzian register of immanence and multiplicity—within the broadly left trends of thought and knowledge production. Metapolitically speaking, we can observe within the works associated with this “communist hypothesis” a rebirth of simple, seemingly “obvious” concepts: truth, justice, fidelity, struggle, honor, courage, and so forth, concepts largely derided in the postdeconstruction trends of thought and relegated to the realm of the “popular,” avoided as vulgarities too “earnest” for the field of so-called theory. Instead, detachment, irony, withdrawal, defeat, finitude, the impossibility of presence, the impossibility of naming, the impossibility of an affirmative creation, and the impossibility of an interventionist politics proper often constitute the typical terms of theoretical work. There is thus in the recent communist current a refusal to accept this by-now rigid division of labor, one that has decisive consequences for both politics and critical theory itself. What lies behind this new vocabulary and new set of gestures? Above all, it is the insistence on a link between the internal dynamics of theory and the external situation, in particular, on the question of organization. Let us consider a few short texts that might be taken as a “pre-history” of this notion, a polemical period of Badiou’s work that expresses the essence of the overall problem: how to develop and conceptualize a theory of politics that is not simply a reflection or proof of a structural or given feature of the situation in which we find ourselves, a theory of politics that is not beholden to concepts of historical necessity. Behind this thesis lies a resistance to the notion that politics is involved in a flattening of phenomena, a fear of antagonism, the preference for holism over division, the emphasis on consensus, on “friendship,” against contestation. In 1977 Badiou launched a frontal attack against Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work for its implied political pitfalls. This attack on their “fascism of the potato” is excessive, dogmatic, beyond the demands of the political conjuncture (going so far as to identify them as “prefascist ideologues”). But it also contains an extremely important point for the paradox of organization within politics, perhaps the key kernel of the new trend inaugurated in theoretical work by the hypothesis of communism. In this text, Badiou (2012:199-200) reacts against Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of multiplicity, appeals to escape, to flight, to becoming-multiple, becomingschizophrenic, becoming-minor, and so forth,3 by intersecting this theoretical work with the concrete terms of the political situation: We have seen this in May ’68: If you have the mass revolt, but not the proletarian antagonism, you obtain the victory of the bourgeois antagonism (of bourgeois politics). If you have ideas that are just, but not Marxism, you obtain the return to power of the bourgeois reformists of the Parti Socialiste. If you have the objective forces, but neither the programme nor the party, you obtain the revenge of Pompidou’s parliamentarianism, you obtain the return to the scene of the PCF and the unions. Badiou argues that Deleuze and Guattari fail to carry through the very ideas that found their major theoretical concepts. They support the mass revolt, but lack the antagonism between “friends” and “enemies” of the people; they have “just ideas”—freedom, the overturning of injustice, the defense of the workers, the poor, the targets of a vicious imperialism in and out of the metropole—but no structural features link the situation of domination with an affirmative politics of inversion; they include the objective forces of the masses in social motion, but lack direction, a concrete framework within which the mass movement can orient itself. Badiou argues that these elements finally invert into their opposites: the victory of bourgeois politics, reformism, parliamentarism, and so forth. But what is behind this charge, this accusation? Two elements subtend this polemic whose compositional elements are returning today to the theoretical scene through the return to the communist hypothesis, namely, persistence and scission. Badiou charges Deleuze and Guattari with the production of a theoretical system that is itself in a constant process of diverting, redirecting, and moving sideways to avoid “capture.” Such a politics cannot sustain the forces it unleashes; it can initiate moments of dissensus within the dominant order, but it cannot persist in a full overturning of their foundations or proceed from this moment of dissensus to a new hegemony over the situation. Such a mode of thought poses questions, identifies structural injustices, and marks points of rupture, but it nevertheless chooses, at the final moment, to refuse to uphold a strong division, a strong break, an insistence on one side over another, one line over another. Badiou (2012:199-200) puts this point in a dense and powerful formulation: “To think the multiple outside the two, outside scission, amounts to practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” If you think the multiple, you can expose the One to its internal disunity, the false impression of substantiality. But merely pointing to the multiple character of a social and political situation is not in itself a bridge to a politics. Remarking on the multivocal character of what appears as a unity is in no way a critique, much less an intervention, within this situation. Instead, the multivocal reality of the unitary image can always be recuperated precisely in the service of the One. In a circumstance of social struggle, it is never enough to point to the heterogeneous composition of all positions—“the police are also drawn from the lower stratum of society,” “their pensions are also being cut back by the state,” “within the ranks of the workers are some with terrible ideas,” “the activists are not as upstanding as they say they are,” and so on—and thereby to end in the original abstentionist position: “It’s all so complicated, it’s not just one thing and another.” This type of analysis, which always underscores the hybridity and mutual complicity of political scenarios, itself participates in the naive fantasy of imagining that exposing this multiplicity allows one out of the practice of partisanship. In such an optic, you can go on multiplying the options, always finding yet another option, always finding a “third way,” always insisting on escape from the binary, escape from the pressure of limited choices, always demanding an evacuation of responsibility, of having to uphold the consequences of a choice. To force a cut in the situation is to assert that the One is forever split, that there is a two-line struggle in every social and political scenario, that politics proper consists in this scission itself: the formation of an antagonism where previously there was only a semblance of unity. This is why Badiou emphasizes the Two—when you choose to say, “I don’t want either side, they’re all bad, we don’t have to make a choice, we don’t have to have just one thing,” what is installed in theory and in practice is not a splitting or splintering of the One into its infinitely heterogeneous elements (the thesis of multiplicity) but a withdrawal that allows the One to remain intact. This is precisely what Badiou calls, in the above formulation, “practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” By choosing flight or escape, the status quo (i.e., the One) reasserts itself, this time stronger than before, bolstered by the experience of finding in its own image of multiplicity a renewed unity. What remains a true politics is the courage to choose, to insist on the Two, to not fear division, separation, scission. To accept the responsibility of the choice, to accept that there is no way to opt out—that the act of a supposed withdrawal is in fact a refusal to countenance real movement, real overturning of the situation, a break that has to be sustained—is to accept the responsibility to uphold the choice despite the fact that there is no going back. What does this argument contain for the current rethinking of communism? Above all, it holds that politics is contained not in overturning the system of social binaries, or in finding a “third way,” or in escapism, defeatism, or abstention. A common thread today, in all the thinkers reinventing the term communism, is a long and arduous struggle for hegemony in the world of thought, a world devoted to concepts of the “death of the subject,” the refusal of binaries, the emphasis on incessant multiplicity, and so forth. This struggle for a new politics recognizes the dead end of these “philosophies of defeat,” in Bruno Bosteels’s terms. It recognizes that a new communist development will come, not from the endless work of withdrawal and negation as such, but from the affirmative and interventionist declaration that politics is possible and the status quo can be permanently fractured. And this fracture produces the need for a persistence, the ability to carry through the full consequences of the initial break.
Cap is an inertial system—any vestige left remaining by the perm will inevitably spin back up.  Like a many-headed hydra, it will regenerate with every attempt that attacks the instruments as opposed to the system itself – the perm fails.
Kovel ‘2: Joel, The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, p. 142-3
The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets going a kind of wheel of accumulation, from production to consumption and back, spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating its force field as a spinning magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the reformability of the system. Because capital is so spectral, and succeeds so well in ideologically mystifying its real nature, attention is constantly deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments by which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally accumulated capital, along with the speed of its circulation and the class structures sustaining this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own scale; and it is this force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever larger agglomerations of capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For one fact may be taken as certain — that to resolve the ecological crisis as a whole, as against tidying up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the existence of gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they connect, and, by extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not resolving the crisis as a whole, we open ourselves to the spectre of another mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that regenerated itself the more its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to recognize that there is no compromising with capital, no schema of reformism that will clean up its act by making it act more greenly or efficiently We shall explore the practical implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply to restate the conclusion in blunt terms: green capital, or non-polluting capital, is preferable to the immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the lesser point, and diminishes with its very success. For green capital (or ‘socially/ecologically responsible investing’) exists, by its very capital-nature, essentially to create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location to join the great pool, and follows its force field into zones of greater concentration, expanded profitability — and greater ecodestruction
AND the role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best pushes radical politics to challenge the state’s power. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state sovereign-hood for any hope of sustainable change in institutional society.
Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
AND, the knowledge claims of the AC are the starting points for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their diagnosis of the issue is wrong, you must drop them.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
CP: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought to maintain/and or develop anti-cyberbullying legislation as a hate speech limitation applicable to college campuses.
Anti-cyberbullying laws key to prevent cyberbullying.
Patchin ‘10: Justin W. Patchin, Professor of Criminal Justice in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 09/28/10, "Cyberbullying Laws and School Policy: A Blessing or Curse?," Cyberbullying Research Center, http://cyberbullying.org/cyberbullying-laws-and-school-policy-a-blessing-or-curse
Many schools are now in a difficult position of having to respond to a mandate to have a cyberbullying policy, without much guidance from the state about the circumstances under which they can (or must) respond. When folks ask me if I think there needs to be a “cyberbullying law” I basically respond by saying “perhaps – but not the kind of law most legislators would propose.” I would look for a law to be more “prescriptive” than “proscriptive.” By that, I mean I would like to see specific guidance from states about *how* and *when* schools can take action in cyberbullying incidents. Many states have taken the easy way out by simply passing laws saying effectively “schools need to deal with this.” Not only have they stopped short in terms of providing specific instructions or even a framework from which schools can evaluate their role, but they have not provided any additional resources to address these issues. Some states are now requiring schools to educate students and staff about cyberbullying or online safety more generally, but have provided no funding to carry out such activities. Unfunded mandates have become cliché in education, and this is just another example. Moreover, school administrators are in a precarious position because they see many examples in the media where schools have been sued because they took action against a student when they shouldn’t have or they failed to take action when they were supposed to. Schools need help determining where the legal line is. Many states already have existing criminal and civil remedies to deal with cyberbullying. Extreme cases would fall under criminal harassment or stalking laws or a target could pursue civil action for intentional infliction of emotional distress or defamation, to name a few. Bullying (whatever the form) that occurs at school is no doubt already subject to an existing bullying policy. To be sure, schools should bring their bullying and harassment policies into the 21st Century by explicitly identifying cyberbullying as a proscribed behavior, but they need to move beyond the behaviors that occur on school grounds or those that utilize school-owned resources. But in order to do this they need guidance from their state legislators and Departments of Education so that they draft a policy and procedure that will be held up in court. School, technology, and privacy lawyers disagree about what should (or must) be in a policy. It’s no wonder many educators are simply throwing their hands up. We really like New Hampshire’s recently passed bullying law, even though like other efforts it demands a lot from schools without a corresponding increase in resources. This section is key: “Bullying or cyberbullying shall occur when an action or communication as defined in RSA 193-F:3: … (b) Occurs off of school property or outside of a school-sponsored activity or event, if the conduct interferes with a pupil’s educational opportunities or substantially disrupts the orderly operations of the school or school-sponsored activity or event.” This puts schools, students, and parents on notice that there are instances when schools can discipline students for their off campus behavior. It will take many years, though, before we will know if this law can be used as a model. Schools will need to pass policies based on the law; a school will then need to discipline a bully based on the new policy; then they will need to be sued; then the case will need to be appealed. Perhaps then the case will get to a significant enough court that it will matter. Hang on and see how it turns out. In the meantime, lobby your legislators to pass meaningful, prescriptive laws instead of laws that simply say “cyberbullying is wrong, now YOU do SOMETHING about it.” It’s election time, so I’m sure your local representative will be all ears…
Cyberbullying is conducive to abuse and kills self-worth – impedes the ability to get education, turns case.
ETCB ‘16: End To Cyber Bullying, The End to Cyber Bullying (ETCB) Organization was founded in 2011 to raise global awareness on cyberbullying, and to mobilize youth, educators, parents, and others in taking efforts to end cyberbullying, "A Surprising Long-Term Effect of Cyberbullying, ETCB Organization, 2016, http://www.endcyberbullying.org/a-surprising-long-term-effect-of-cyberbullying
If someone repeatedly tells the victim online that they is are worthless, useless, a waste of space or that they should kill themselves, soon the victim might – at least partially – begin to believe it. According to Psychcentral.com, signs that someone is experience low self-esteem include: • Self-critical or a negative opinion of themselves • Sensitivity to even constructive criticism • Fatigue, insomnia, headaches • Poor performance at school or work due to lack of trying or lethargy It is important for an individual to maintain a healthy self-esteem so that they can achieve in life. A cyberbullying victim may miss out on opportunities because the victim believes they is unworthy of achievement. It’s important to realize that these two effects go well beyond being in a bad mood and not liking something about oneself. Depression, Low Self-Esteem and Dating Abuse Research is inconclusive, but most would agree that people who are victimized in abusive dating relationships often choose those relationships because of their depression or low self-esteem. Findyouthinfo.gov states that past experience with stressful life events – cyberbullying, for example – can put someone at risk for entering an abusive dating relationship. This is especially true if the cyberabuse included abuse directed at a female victim’s sexuality, or lack thereof. Feelings of worthlessness and a negative outlook on life can throw a previously-cyberbullied victim into yet another abusive relationship. However, instead of faceless strangers and bullies dolling out abuse, it would be the victim’s significant other. Dating abuse can encompass many forms of abuse, including cyberabuse. According to Dosomething.com, other forms of abuse in dating relationships include: • Physical abuse – in the form of “hitting, punching, slapping, biting” and anything that causes physical pain. • Mental abuse – in the form of verbal putdowns and belittling. The abuser might call their victim names, “make threats, or accuse the other person of cheating.” • Emotional abuse – in the form of control over the victim’s “behavior, personality, and life.” • Sexual abuse – in the form of unwanted touching, pressuring the victim to have sex, or rape. It’s getting harder to track cyberbullying since most people make their online profiles and social networking pages private. Also, apps like Snapchat would allow cyberbullies to attack their victim and have the evidence wiped away within seconds. According to this tech expert, “Users are drawn to the impermanence of the site’s uploads and the anonymity that impermanence provides.” However impermanent the actual abusive message may be, the lasting effects of the abuse upon the psyche of the victim are anything but impermanent.
Cyberbullying disproportionately affects racial/sexual minorities
Brandon ‘14: Mary Howlett-Brandon, Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University "CYBERBULLYING: AN EXAMINATION OF GENDER, RACE, ETHNICITY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS FROM THE NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY: STUDENT CRIME SUPPLEMENT, 2009", 2014, http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4485andcontext=etd
Other and mixed race students reported cyberbullying victimization at 4.2, 26 Black students at 1.9, and Hispanic students at 1.3. Whites, however, experienced 3.1 victimization by electronic   technology. Wang et al. (2009) also reported the percentage of cyberbullying by race. Black students reported the highest level of cyberbullying activity at 10.9, Hispanic students at 9.6, and the category of students classified as other at 7.3. White students reported cyberbullying victimization at 6.7. The Kessel Schneider et al. (2012) study also addressed the cyberbullying behavior of students by race and ethnicity. The race/ethnic breakdown of the sample is as follows: 75.2 White, 12.3 mixed/other, 5.8 Hispanic, 3.9 Asian, and 2.8 Black. Kessel Schneider et al. (2012) found that 5.7 of the White students and 8.4 of the non-White students conveyed they had been cyberbullied during the previous 12 months.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Extinction is inevitable—the will to survival embodied by the aff strips value from life and freezes becoming, which outweighs on magnitude — vote neg to comport our ethics towards the world-to-come—this can include endorsing their extinction discourse while still doing the plan—it’s a mutually exclusive strategy of joyous ethics that doesn’t affirm all death but undercuts the metaphysical justifications for all modes of oppression
Mitchell ‘16: Wilfrid Laurier University (Audra, “Is IR going extinct?,” European Journal of International Relations 1–23, dml)
Perhaps most profoundly, taking extinction seriously would involve relinquishing the fetishism of survival as it relates to dominant conceptions of the human rather than simply adapting these conceptions to new sources and registers of threat.6 In other words, it would be necessary to dispense with the imperative to ensure at all costs the survival of currently existing norms and modes of human life. However, why should emancipation from this imperative be desirable? Simply put, the imperative to preserve dominant, existing modes of human life monopolizes human energy, dominates frameworks of value and imposes stasis on extant life forms. This imperative imposes a kind of death (in the Heideggerian sense) on life forms: it prevents them from unfolding into their indeterminate, virtual possibilities, entrapping them in the mode of rigid metaphysical categories. The severing of possibilities of becoming can already be intuited within the biopolitical discourses of extinction discussed earlier. These discourses simultaneously frame the survival of ‘humanity-as-it-is’ as the dominant principle of being and highest value, while presenting it as imminently and irreversibly threatened (see Evans and Reid, 2014). Within this stark opposition, the political possibilities of becoming are precluded by the imperative to survive ‘as we are’ at all costs. What if, instead, it were possible to refuse the demand to survive — without embracing an extinction-wish or desiring the elimination of any species? In the context of IR, this would entail resisting the powerful discourses of biopolitical discipline, catastrophism, resilience and mitigation discussed earlier and becoming open to the possibilities of extinction, in two senses: in the sense that extinction may occur; and in the sense of the new modes of ethico-political action and forms of life it might enable. Being open to the possibility of extinction does not involve relinquishing all claims to continued existence or the desire to pursue them. Instead, by removing the imperative to secure the indefinite survival of dominant forms of life at all costs, it might free these energies to develop modes of being-otherwise. As Colebrook (2014a: 58) puts it: As long as we calculate the future as one of sustaining, maintaining, adapting and rendering ourselves viable … there would be no future for us other than an eventual, barely lived petering out. If, however, we entertained the erasure of the human … then there might be a future. (Colebrook, 2014a: 58) What visions, logics and inputs might IR contribute to this new future, and how might it be transformed as a result? Cosmopolitics and the possibilities of extinction Extinction is not only about endings; it can also be understood as a force that engenders ethico-political creativity in and with the conditions of finitude (Mitchell, 2016). Viewing (mass) extinction in this way consists of ‘a confrontation with perishing, finitude, and fragility but one that fills us with at least as much wonder as dread, more political energy than resignation, and takes seriously that apocalypses are not ends but irreversible transitions’ (Grove, 2015). This, in turn, involves reframing nihilism not as an apolitical collapse into apathy and submission to visions of the inevitable, but rather as a ‘speculative opportunity’ that opens up new futures (Brassier, 2007: xi). In other words, rather than promoting (only) a ‘will to nothingness’, let alone a malevolent extinction-wish, engaging with the possibilities of non-being can make it possible to embrace the indeterminacy of the universe and its creative forces. I shall now argue that it demands and enables a politics attuned to the biological, geological and cosmological forces of the universe: a cosmopolitics. According to Isabelle Stengers (2005), ‘cosmopolitics’ is politics rooted in the acknowledgement of the multiple, diverse and constantly transforming beings that constitute the cosmos. It hinges on the belief that all beings make interventions that shape, disrupt and transform political processes. Importantly, participation in these processes does not require representation in terms of human interests or even the ability to act or speak in a human-oriented sense. Indeed, Stengers (2005: 996) asserts that ‘the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have, cannot have or does not want to have a political voice’. A range of beings — whether they are considered human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and inorganic — can intervene in politics by ‘forcing thought’ through their effects, properties, presence or absence. For instance, water can make its force felt politically by destroying human habitations and ecosystems in the form of floods, by withdrawing and creating droughts, or by sustaining and nurturing multiple life forms. For Stengers, these issues are not made political by humans: to the extent that they have an effect in the world, they are always-already political. According to Stengers, the interventions of multiple beings help to slow down processes of universalization central to traditional modes of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the presence of other beings with conflicting interests and needs makes universalization, and political decisionmaking, ‘as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005: 1003). Cosmopolitics is conflictual and agonistic: the insurgence of awkward subjects and the obstructions, disruptions and disjunctures they create can nurture pluralism and generate creative politics. Crucially, cosmopolitics is not simply an intensification or variant of cosmopolitanism. Whereas cosmopolitanism stresses the suffix -politan, cosmopolitics shifts emphasis to the prefix cosmo-, that is, it takes the cosmos, rather than human communities, as the basis and locus of political action. Cosmopolitanism, as Colebrook contends, is based on the extrapolation and expansion of a polity that, while it may be expanded to include other beings, is centrifugal to the figure of humanity. In other words, the cosmos of cosmopolitanism ‘is always an extension of the composed polity, an abstraction or idealization of man englobed in his world of human others’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 110). Even the most radical contemporary reframings of cosmopolitanism, in contrast, involve stretching the scope of the human-dominated polity to include all humans and (certain) nonhumans (see Linklater, 2011). Anthony Burke (2013, 2015) has attempted to radically rethink cosmopolitanism in terms of the intermeshing of complex processes, material conditions and (human and nonhuman) actors across planetary space-time. However, I want to argue that this project is better understood in the context of cosmopolitics, insofar as it seeks to render the cosmos the ontological basis of politics. I want to argue that a modified form of cosmopolitics — one attuned to the inhuman — is demanded by, and can ground meaningful responses to, (mass) extinction. Specifically, Stengers’s cosmopolitics acknowledges the role of the weak, marginalized and ‘shadowy’ subjects; it focuses largely on presence, that is, on the positive beings that interrupt human activities. In order to respond to mass extinction, cosmopolitics must place more focus on absence, negation and non-being. Colebrook hints at this in her call to ‘destroy cosmopolitanism for the sake of the cosmos’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 96) She claims that arguing that: if the crises of the twenty-first century were to prompt us to think at all it may be in a cosmic and inhuman mode, asking … what the elements of this earth are, what force they bear, how we are composed in relation to those forces. (Colebrook, 2014a: 114) If we consider (mass) extinction as one of these forces, a different kind of cosmopolitics emerges — one that responds to extinction and considerably adds to the conceptual mass of IR. This mode of cosmopolitics makes it possible to generate new forms of solidarity based not on the fear of collective annihilation, but rather on a sense of shared vulnerability that is the condition of earthly coexistence. For Rosi Braidotti (2013), such solidarities emerge from the defamiliarization of dominant norms of ‘humanity’, which, she argues, is best achieved by thinking as if ‘humanity’ were already extinct. This, she contends, compels humans to ‘think critically about who we are and what we are actually in the process of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). From this perspective, attention to the inhuman, and to the possible extinction of humans, can produce an ‘enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). The same processes of defamiliarization, Colebrook (2014a: 58) suggests, would make possible a radical new form of feminism that, in embracing ‘a thought of life beyond the human’, would place neither man nor woman at its centre (Colebrook, 2014b: 16). By unsettling the foundations of ‘humanity’ itself, she contends, thinking the inhuman makes it possible to transcend boundaries such as gender and race that essentialize characteristics as ‘essentially’ human. This would have profound importance for feminist, queer and decolonial international politics: it would undercut the metaphysical foundations of sources of exclusion and oppression against which they struggle. In short, contemplating the extinction of ‘the human’ makes it possible to imagine alternative, future life forms that bear resemblances to, but are not restricted by, existing norms of ‘humanity’. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to the inhuman could profoundly transform global ethics by grounding it not in a politics of ressentiment, but rather one of gratitude. The geographer Nigel Clark (2011) argues that humans should embrace the finite, deeply contingent and potentially meaningless (in a transcendent, metaphysical sense) existence furnished by an indifferent Earth. Specifically, he claims that human existence is contingent upon conditions created by previous (largely extinct) life forms and by inhuman forces, both contemporary and temporally distant. From this perspective, existence is a gift given to humans (among others) but it is not given-for-us in the correlationist sense. Instead, humans are indebted to a chain of interlocking forces that are ultimately indifferent to their existence. Clark argues that humans should embrace this gift with the knowledge that it can, and eventually will, be withdrawn. This means accepting and honouring it without treating it as an entitlement or devaluing it on account of its finitude. His account contrasts sharply with the discourses of catastrophe, resilience and biopolitics discussed earlier, which devalue any mode of life that cannot be indefinitely sustained through human intervention. Clark finds an ethico-political alternative to these logics in an ethos of gratitude and reciprocation. For Clark, the latter is epitomized by the actions of the government of Kiribati — the small island state perhaps most imminently threatened by rising sea levels — in creating one of the world’s largest marine parks in 2006 (the Phoenix Islands Protected Area). In so doing, Clark contends, this community expressed unconditional gratitude for the gift of existence rather than resentment of its endangerment. Moreover, by seeking to protect and preserve the watery medium that threatens to destroy it, Kiribatians embodied a mode of meaningful response to disaster that was not constrained to sustaining survival-as-we-know-it. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and to the inhuman would foster a new mode of future-oriented politics based not on the continuity of the present, but rather on the creative possibilities of discontinuity and unpredictable difference. For Evans and Reid (2014: 164), biopolitical responses to extinction reflect a ‘cult of mourning’ for the coming death of existing species life that ‘manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of the emergence of new forms of life … into a problematic of security and threat’. Indeed, in popular literature on extinction, there is a marked tone of mourning and fear about what might ‘replace’ humans as Earth’s dominant species, and the readers’ focus is trained on monstrous figures such as robots, microbes or giant rats (see Zalasiewicz, 2008). In contrast, cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and the inhuman would be open to the new forms of being that might emerge from, or even in place of, humans. For instance, it might involve overcoming fear and revulsion of the hybrid or mutant creatures that are emerging, at least in part from human scientific interventions, treating them with love and care instead of abjection (see Haraway, 2011; Latour, 2012). Crucially, it would also involve embracing the defamiliarized modalities of currently existing humanity discussed earlier. This includes beings so transformed through technological and evolutionary change as to be almost unrecognizable to ‘us’ (currently existing humans), and the ‘defamiliarized’ beings no longer essentialized in terms of race, sex or gender. The cosmopolitics I am outlining here would embrace these beings-to-come instead of fearing and resenting them. This amounts to a kind of futural gratitude that mirrors the Kiribatian marine park — an ethics of comportment towards the unknowable other that might displace ‘us’. However, how can currently existing humans adopt such an ethics? Emmanuel Levinas (1998: 50) terms this mode of ethics ‘being-forbeyond-my-death’, that is, being ‘for a time that would be without me … in order to be for that which is after me’. Although Levinas is referring to human individuals and their comportment towards future generations of humans, this principle can be translated across species boundaries and to a collective register. It profoundly shifts the emphasis of human action — instead of attempting to secure existing conditions, it encourages ‘action for a world to come’, and responsiveness to the ethical demands of the (remote, unknowable) Other (Levinas, 1998: 51). Clark, writing in a Levinasian vein, agrees that embracing future life forms is not passive. Instead, it requires the ability to see ‘the intolerability of the world as it is presently imagined and demands the seemingly impossible; the creation of a new one’ (Clark, 2011: 195). Crucially, this ethos is not a replacement for security or the pursuit of indefinite survival, but rather a qualitatively different kind of politics. It cannot guarantee the survival of humanity-as-it-is — the goal to which all existing strategies and responses to extinction are oriented. It entails an ‘eschatology without hope for oneself’ (Levinas, 1998: 51): welcoming new worlds makes, and demands, no promises. While this ethos engenders cautious hope for undetermined futures, it cannot be made conditional on the survival of existing forms of life. Instead, it must be pursued ‘for the hell of it and for love of the world’ (Braidotti, 2010: 17). This shifts the logic of responsiveness to extinction from one of mastery and control to one of gratitude and hopeful, creative experimentation. As Clark (2011: 217, paraphrasing Allan Stoekl) puts it: we might have a better chance of prising the planet out of its downward ecological spiral accidentally, not as the goal of a grand, visionary project but as the unintended consequence of more joyous and generous living right here and now. In other words, adopting an attitude of hospitality and generosity towards other beings might help to open up a future of long-term flourishing for humans and other beings. However, as Clark argues, this kind of action needs to have the character of Derridean hospitality, that is, it needs to be undertaken without conditionality, or, in this case, the demand for security. Adopting this ethico-political orientation does not involve capitulation to extinction, and even less an extinction-wish. Instead, it widens the range of human responsiveness far beyond the spectrum of pre-emptive trauma, loss and tragedy, and a future of rapidly diminishing life lived in survival mode.
Their appeal to catastrophe is nothing but an emotive training ground to fit the catastrophe within familiar modes of politics and lull the population into fear-laden productivity. Our frantic attempts to resolve such problems merely institutionalize the most horrendous homicidal violence and push us to the brink of war. The only political task left is that of the philosopher who interrupts the absorption of the resonance of fear that greases the wheels of modern power.
Scranton ‘15: Jeremy Scranton, acclaimed journalist, activist and author, PhD in English from Princeton, currently teaching at Notre Dame, New York Times contributor, Iraq War veteran, Learning To Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization, City Lights Books, 2015, online
“When it comes to global warming, differing visions of the human future are already hardening into conflict. Coal and oil companies and their government proxies have made their willingness to use military force to defend themselves and advance their interests spectacularly obvious. The labor wars of the 19th and 20th centuries show this clearly. The brutal decades-long war waged by the Nigerian government against its own people, undertaken with the outright support of Shell and Chevron, is another example, well documented in books such as A Year and a Day and Genocide in Nigeria by Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed for his activism. You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives. The aggression and fear that arise in response to perceived threats are some of the most intense emotions we ever experience. For human society to function at all, these instinctive reactions have to be carefully managed and channeled. Outbreaks of panic and hate are dangerous, but lower levels of aggression and fear help keep a population controllable and productive. Restrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working hard to overcome their fellows, while constant, generalized anxiety keeps people servile, unwilling to take risks, and yearning for comfort from whatever quarter, whether the dulling sameness of herd thought or the dumb security of consumer goods. Since at least September 11, 2001, people in the United States have been subject to an unprecedented terror campaign—not from Al Qaeda, but from the United States government. National domestic policy transformed “security” into constant fear, threatening its citizens at every turn: first with alarms of explosions and anthrax, then with prison, austerity-produced structural unemployment, and harassment, and finally with torture, SWAT tanks, snipers, drones, and total surveillance. Owing to the racial logic of US politics, in which white/black is the definitive semiotic distinction structuring American society, most of the government’s violence against its own citizens is directed against those with darker skin, but in subtler ways its terror campaign targets every single person who flies coach, watches the news, or uses the Internet. Fear comes to us every day in our encounters with increasingly militarized police and our humiliating interactions at metal detectors and ” “body-scan machines. Fear comes to us in the absence of job security, in our want of appeal when confronted by institutionalized inequality, and in our mistrust of corrupt institutions. Fear comes to us in widespread surveillance, in the form of a homeless woman or a hospitalized friend without adequate financial support, and in the constant nagging worry that we’re not working hard enough, not happy enough, never going to “make it.” Fear comes to us in weather porn, unpredictable shifts in formerly stable climate dynamics, and massive storms. More than in any other way, fear comes to us in images and messages, as social media vibrations, products of cultural technologies that we have interpolated into our lives. Going about our daily business, we receive constant messages of apprehension and danger, ubiquitous warnings, insistent needling jabs to the deep lizard brain. Somebody died. Something blew up. Something might blow up. Somebody attacked somebody. Somebody killed somebody. Guns. Crime. Immigrants. Terrorists. Arabs. Mexicans. White supremacists. Killer cops. Demonic thugs. Rape. ” “Murder. Global warming. Ebola. ISIS. Death. Death. Death. Sociologist Tom Pyszczynski writes: “People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite the best efforts, fear and anxiety do break through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them down.”88 Sometimes when these vibrations shake us, we discharge them by passing them on, retweeting the story, reposting the video, hoping that others will validate our reaction, thus assuaging our fear by assuring ourselves that collective attention has been alerted to the threat. Other times we react with aversion, working to dampen the vibrations by searching out positive reinforcements, pleasurable images and videos, something funny, something—anything—to ease the fear. We buy something. We eat food. We pop a pill. We fuck. In either passing on the vibration or reacting against it, we let the fear short circuit our own autonomous desires, diverting us from our goals and loading ever more emotional static into our daily cognitive processing. We become increasingly distracted from our ambitions and increasingly susceptible to such distraction. And whether we retransmit or react, we reinforce channels of thought, perception, behavior, and emotion that, over time, come to shape our habits and our personality. As we train ourselves to resonate fear and aggression, we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society that breeds the same. Fight-or-flight is compelling because it serves essential evolutionary purposes. It increases alertness and adrenaline flow, and generally works to keep the human animal alive. As we proceed into the Anthropocene, though, capitalism’s cultural machinery for balancing fear and aggression against desire and pleasure is grinding and sputtering sparks. What cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has identified as the “cruel optimism” of a system sustained by hopes that can never be fulfilled mixes dangerously with an atmosphere of beleaguered anxiety, increasing frustration with working-class and middle-class economic stagnation, and a pervasive sadistic voyeurism that grows by what it feeds on.89 While America’s fraying social infrastructure holds together, our fear and aggression can be channeled into labor, consumption, and economic competition, with professional sports, hyperviolent television, and occasional protests to let off steam. Once the social fabric begins to tear, though, we risk unleashing not only rioting, rebellion, and civil war, but homicidal politics the likes of which should make our blood run cold.” “Consider: Once among the most modern, Westernized nations in the Middle East, with a robust, highly educated middle class, Iraq has been blighted for decades by imperialist aggression, criminal gangs, interference in its domestic politics, economic liberalization, and sectarian feuding. Today it is being torn apart between a corrupt petrocracy, a breakaway Kurdish enclave, and a self-declared Islamic fundamentalist caliphate, while a civil war in neighboring Syria spills across its borders. These conflicts have likely been caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the Middle East has seen in modern history. Since 2006, Syria has been suffering ” “crippling water shortages that have, in some areas, caused 75 percent crop failure and wiped out 85 percent of livestock, left more than 800,000 Syrians without a livelihood, and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming into Syria’s cities.90 This drought is part of long-term warming and drying trends that are transforming the Middle East.91 Not just water but oil, too, is elemental to these conflicts. Iraq sits on the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena, but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”92 A few hundred miles away, Israeli soldiers spent the summer of 2014 killing Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has also been suffering drought, while Gaza has been in the midst of a critical water crisis exacerbated by Israel’s military ” “aggression. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported that during summer 2014, Israeli bombers targeted Palestinian wells and water infrastructure.93 It’s not water and oil this time, but water and gas: some observers argue that Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was intended to establish firmer control over the massive Leviathan natural gas field, discovered off the coast of Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean in 2010.94 Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the north, Russian-backed separatists fought fascist paramilitary forces defending the elected government of Ukraine, which was also suffering drought.95 Russia’s role as an oil and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through Ukraine from Russia to Europe cannot but be key issues in the conflict. Elsewhere, droughts in 2014 sent refugees from Guatemala and Honduras north to the US border, devastated crops in California and Australia, and threatened millions of lives in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, India, Morocco, Pakistan, and parts of China. Across the world, massive protests and riots have swept Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, while conflicts rage on in Colombia, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and India. And while the world burns, the United States has been playing chicken with Russia over control of Eastern Europe and the melting Arctic, and with China over control of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, threatening global war on a scale not seen in seventy years. This is our present and future: droughts and hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas, and food. We experience this world of strife today in one of two modes: either it is our environment, and we are in it, or it comes to us as images, social excitation, retransmitted fear. People are fighting and dying in ruined cities all over the planet. Neighbors are killing each other. Old women are bleeding to death in bombed rubble and children are being murdered, probably as you read this sentence. To live in that world is horrific. Constant danger strains every nerve. The only things that matter are survival, killing the enemy, ” “reputation, and having a safe place to sleep. The experience of being human narrows to a cutting edge. I remember living in that world many years ago in occupied Baghdad. Today that world seems impossibly distant, yet every day it presses in on me in a never-ending stream of words, images, appeals, and reports. I see videos. I read stories. I see pictures of this or that suffering or injustice and I am moved. To act, perhaps, but more accurately to emote. To react. To feel. To perform. We do not usually ask where these feelings come from or who they serve, but we all know that the cultural technologies transmitting these affective vibrations are not neutral: news outlets shape information to fit their owners’ prejudices, while Facebook, Twitter, and Google shape our perceptions through hidden algorithms. The specialization and demographic targeting of contemporary media tend to narrow the channels of perception to the point that we receive only those images and vibrations which already harmonize with our own prejudices, our own pre-existing desires, thus intensifying our particular emotional reac” “tions along an increasingly limited band, impelling us to discharge our emotions within the same field of ready listeners, for which we are rewarded with “Likes” and “Favorites.” Our consciousness is shaped daily through feedback systems where some post or headline provokes a feeling and we discharge that feeling by provoking it in others. Social media like Facebook crowdsource catharsis, creating self-contained wave pools of aggression and fear, pity and terror, stagnant flows that go nowhere and do nothing. Pictures of children killed by bombs or police, or pictures of the devastation left in the wake of a tropical storm may move me to sadness and horror. Retransmitting such images will pass along that sadness and horror. My act of transmission will mark me as someone who has feelings about these things and who condemns them. I can rationalize my retransmission by saying that I am “raising awareness” or trying to influence public policy: I want my fellow citizens to be as horrified as I am, so they’ll think like I do, or so they’ll vote for a representative who works to prevent such horrors from happening, or maybe so that if ” “enough of us all think the same way and feel the same way, the organs and institutions of power will be forced to hear us and align themselves along our vibrations, the way a honeybee colony will pick a site for a new hive through the dance of its advance guard scouts. These are perfectly reasonable human assumptions, because that is how physical human collectives function. Anyone who has been in a crowd, a basketball team, a nightclub, a choir, or a protest knows how bodies resonate together. But politics is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems, and we live in a system of carbon-fueled capitalism that we shouldn’t expect to work in physical human ways for several reasons, especially when it comes to responding to the threat of global warming. First, our political and social media technologies are not neutral, but have been developed to serve particular interests, most notably targeted advertising, concentration of wealth, and ideological control, and the vibrations that seem to resonate most strongly along these channels are envy, adulation, outrage, fear, hatred, and mindless pleasure. Second, the more we pass on or react to social vibrations, the more we strengthen our habits of channeling and the less we practice autonomous reflection or independent critical thought. With every protest chant, retweet, and Facebook post, we become stronger resonators and weaker thinkers. Third, however intense our social vibrations grow, they remain locked within machinery that offers no political leverage: they do not translate into political action, because they do not connect to the flows of power. Finally, while the typical collective human response to threat is to identify an enemy, pick sides, and mobilize to fight, global warming offers no apprehensible foe. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to find one. The Flood Wall Street protesters say the enemy is American corporations. Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete and Nauru’s Baron Waqa say the problem is the United States and Great Britain. Shell Oil and the Environmental Defense Fund seem to think that it’s intractable UN bureaucracy that’s holding us up. Barack Obama has implied that it’s China. Tea Party Republicans prod us to ever more intense levels of manic despair? One way we might begin to answer these questions is by considering the problem of global warming in terms of Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of the philosopher as an interrupter: We live constantly in collective fields of excitation; this cannot be changed so long as we are social beings. The input of stress inevitably enters me; thoughts are not free, each of us can divine them. They come from the newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper. My sovereignty, if it exists, can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or, should this fail, by my retransmitting it in a totally metamorphosed, verified, filtered, or recoded form. It serves nothing to contest it: I am free only to the extent that I interrupt escalations and that I am able to immunize myself against infections of opinion. Precisely this continues to be the philosopher’s mission in society, if I may express myself in such pathetic terms. His mission is to show that a subject can be an interrupter, not merely a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow through it. The classics express this with the term ‘pondering.’ With this concept, ethics and energetics enter into contact: as a bearer of a philosophical function, I have neither the right nor the desire to be either a conductor in a stress-semantic chain or the automaton of an ethical imperative.97 Sloterdijk compares the conception of political function as collective vibration to a philosophical function of interruption. As opposed to disruption, which shocks a system and breaks wholes into pieces, interruption suspends continuous processes. It’s not smashing, but sitting with. Not blockage, but reflection. Sloterdijk sees the role of the philosopher in the human swarm as that of an aberrant anti-drone slow-dancing to its own rhythm, neither attuned to the collective beat nor operating mechanically, dogmatically, deontologically, but ” “continually self-immunizing against the waves of social energy we live in and amongst by perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life. So long as one allows oneself to be “a conductor in a stress-semantic chain,” one is strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content, thickening the reflexive connective tissues of mass society, making all of us more susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism, scapegoating, panic, and war fever. Interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and counterproductive, like all good philosophy: if it works, it helps us stop and see our world in new ways. If it fails, as it often and even usually does, the interrupter is integrated, driven mad, ignored, or destroyed. What Sloterdijk helps us see is that responding autonomously to social excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it, then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely. Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence, responding freely to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror, responding freely to the ongoing ” “alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.”
AND the aff causes endless structural violence with their death bad rhetoric. The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it. Vote neg on impact.
Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting the aff’s survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death. Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative.
Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not.
AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key.
Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171
This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power.
The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t.
The negative authors dogmatically view the world from the point of the dominant but flawed ontology.  The neg’s so called “intellectuals” jobs depend on them representing capital as benevolent and inevitable.  Their framework is an attempt to make the debate space a training ground for a new generation passive participants in the machinery of the state.
Lambie ‘10: – Ph.D., joint-editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University (George Lambie, “The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century”, Pluto Press, pg. 150-152) AB
It is interesting that when most academics analyse revolutions and transformative processes, they focus almost exclusively on leaders. In turn, they seek to interpret the ideas and actions of these prominent figures based on the influence of other elites. These factors are important, but must be recognised as only partial explanations for most instances of significant socio-economic change. The issue of the role of intellectuals in society, and exactly what constitutes intellectual formation, is a complex debate (Lambie 2000). However, on the specific issue of academic approaches to leaders, the difficulty lies ultimately in the ideological composition of the academics themselves, which is rooted in the dominant ontology, one that emphasises individualism, elite leadership and an immutable order of human nature. Given this perspective, it is difficult to imagine a set of ideas or a consciousness emerging out of what seems to be thin air. From the ridicule of Marx’s observations on the autonomy of workers in the Paris Commune, to contemporary views that see socialism as utopian, there is an ideological intolerance of any idea that defies the implicit ontological parameters of liberalism. When the dominant liberal interpretive framework does encounter what appears to be spontaneous action and organisation at the grassroots level, it sees this in terms of civil society freeing itself from the state, and as an expression of self-help. This view is theorised in Hernando de Soto’s work The Other Path (1989), which interprets the survival strategies of the poor in developing countries as a blossoming of individual initiative. A similar ideological perspective permeates much of the NGO philosophy, with its emphasis on micro-credit and market-orientated initiatives to resolve problems in civil society without the involvement of the state. This kind of thinking also informs much of the policy-driven theory that dominates sections of academia in Western countries. For instance, as procedural democracies such as the UK struggle to deal with the ‘democratic deficit’, and governments become concerned about political legitimacy, policies are devised to enhance ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’ in an attempt to give substance to liberal hegemony. Lack of ‘participation’ or understanding of ‘citizenship’ is seen as an educational issue, and citizens have to be instructed and ‘enabled’ by policy makers and academics to realise their ‘democratic’ rights. At its core, this is nothing more than a thinly concealed indoctrina- tion exercise to impose the rule of the market onto the organisation of local structures. Commenting on the role of academics and intellectuals in general, Wayne (2003:23–24) points out: One way in which intellectuals have attempted to explain their social role has been to depoliticise what it means to be elaborators and disseminators of ideas. This involves uncoupling knowledge production from vested social interests, defining professionalism as rising above the social conflict between capital and labour, and instead promoting ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ as the very essence of what it is that intellectuals do ... the ideology of ‘objectivity’ has, under the guise of working for all humanity, justified their role to capitalists ... This attitude concerning the role of academics and intellectuals was famously defended by the French writer Romain Roland after the First World War, in his work Au-dessus de la mêlée (‘Above the Battle’) (1915). Roland’s position may be justified if one argues that the shock and horror of war temporarily divested life of meaning in the minds of rational people, and retreat into the ivory tower became a mode of defence against this malaise. However, modern intellectuals have no such excuse, and have increasingly become apparatchiks of a knowledge-production system that is driven by money, career climbing and prestige, all of which can be attained through conformity. Ultimately, only by grasping the idea that human nature is not immutable can one transcend these intellectual limitations and imagine the unimaginable. Martí, Guevara, Castro and other Cuban leaders understood this intellectually and intuitively, both by participating in the historical process themselves, and by not losing touch with the masses. Of course, the Cuban political process has fluctuated in the emphasis it has given to leadership or to participation, but the two have interacted more fully and more continuously than has been seen in any other country.
Their framework crowds out deliberation and turns decision making. Focusing solely on implementation cannot effectively challenge the state; analysis is key.
Adaman and Madra ‘12: – Adaman: economic professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul; Madra: has a PhD from University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is an economics professor Fikret and Yahya. “Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology”. http://ideas.repec.org/p/bou/wpaper/2012-04.html.
Neoliberal reason is therefore not simply about market expansion and the withdrawal of the welfare state, but more broadly about reconfiguring the state and its functions so that the state governs its subjects through a filter of economic incentives rather than direct coercion. In other words, supposed subjects of the neoliberal state are not citizen-subjects with political and social rights, but rather economic subjects who are supposed to comprehend (hence, calculative) and respond predictably (hence, calculable) to economic incentives (and disincentives). There are mainly two ways in which states under the sway of neoliberal reason aim to manipulate the conduct of their subjects. The first is through markets, or market-like  incentive-compatible institutional mechanisms that economic experts design based on the  behaviorist assumption that economic agents respond predictably to economic (but not  necessarily pecuniary) incentives, to achieve certain discrete objectives. The second involves a revision of the way the bureaucracy functions. Here, the neoliberal reason functions as an internal critique of the way bureaucratic dispositifs organize themselves: The typical modus operandi of this critique is to submit the bureaucracy to efficiency audits and subsequently advocate the subcontracting of various functions of the state to the private sector either by fullblown privatization or by public-private partnerships. While in the first case citizen-subjects are treated solely as economic beings, in the second case the state is conceived as an enterprise, i.e., a production unit, an economic agency whose functions are persistently submitted to various forms of economic auditing, thereby suppressing all other (social, political, ecological) priorities through a permanent economic criticism.  Subcontracting, public-private partnerships, and privatization are all different mechanisms through which contemporary governments embrace the discourses and practices of contemporary multinational corporations. In either case, however, economic policy decisions  (whether they involve macroeconomic or microeconomic matters) are isolated from public  debate and deliberation, and treated as matters of technocratic design and implementation,  while regulation, to the extent it is warranted, is mostly conducted by experts outside political  life—the so-called independent regulatory agencies. In the process, democratic participation in decision-making is either limited to an already highly-commodified, spectacularized, mediatized electoral politics, or to the calculus of opinion polls where consumer discontent can be managed through public relations experts. As a result, a highly reductionist notion of economic efficiency ends up being the only criteria with which to measure the success or failure of such decisions. Meanwhile, individuals with financial means are free to provide support to those in need through charity organizations or corporations via their social responsibility channels. Here, two related caveats should be noted to sharpen the central thrust of the argument proposed in this chapter. First, the separation of the economic sphere from the social-ecological whole is not an ontological given, but rather a political project. By treating social subjectivity solely in economic terms and deliberately trying to insulate policy-making from popular politics and democratic participation, the neoliberal project of economization makes a political choice. Since there are no economic decisions without a multitude of complex and over-determined social consequences, the attempt to block (through economization) all political modes of dissent, objection and negotiation available (e.g., “voice”) to those who are affected from the said economic decisions is itself a political choice. In short, economization is itself a political project. Yet, this drive towards technocratization and economization—which constitutes the second caveat—does not mean that the dirty and messy distortions of politics are gradually being removed from policy-making. On the contrary, to the extent that policy making is being insulated from popular and democratic control, it becomes exposed to the “distortions” of a politics of rent-seeking and speculation—ironically, as predicted by the representatives of the  Virginia School. Most public-private partnerships are hammered behind closed doors of a bureaucracy where states and multinational corporations divide the economic rent among themselves. The growing concentration of capital at the global scale gives various industries (armament, chemical, health care, petroleum, etc.—see, e.g., Klein, 2008) enormous amount of leverage over the governments (especially the developing ones). It is extremely important, however, to note that this tendency toward rent-seeking is not a perversion of the neoliberal reason. For much of neoliberal theory (in particular, for the Austrian and the Chicago schools), private monopolies and other forms of concentration of capital are preferred to government control and ownership. And furthermore, for some (such as the Virginia and the Chicago  schools), rent-seeking is a natural implication of the “opportunism” of human beings, even  though neoliberal thinkers disagree whether rent-seeking is essentially economically efficient (as  in “capture” theories of the Chicago school imply) or inefficient (as in rent-seeking theories of  the Virginia school imply) (Madra and Adaman, 2010). This reconfiguration of the way modern states in advanced capitalist social formations govern the social manifests itself in all domains of public and social policy-making. From education to health, and employment to insurance, there is an observable shift from rights-based policymaking forged through public deliberation and participation, to policy-making based solely on economic viability where policy issues are treated as matters of technocratic calculation. In this regard, as noted above, the treatment of subjectivity solely in behaviorist terms of economic  incentives functions as the key conceptual choice that makes the technocratization of public policy possible. Neoliberal thinking and practices certainly have a significant impact on the ecology. The next section will focus on the different means through which various forms of neoliberal governmentality propose and actualize the economization of the ecology.

Tournament: CPS | Round: 2 | Opponent: Dougherty Valley | Judge: Cameron Cohen
CP: The United States Federal Government ought to restrict hate speech in graffiti on public colleges and campuses.

Solves the aff – allows for marginalized voices to be expressed, but not hate speech done through misconduct.

Net benefit are property rights and reduced hate speech.

Hate speech through graffiti on college campuses is on the rise since Trump’s presidency – it’s not open discourse – it’s a completely malicious act with the intent of intimidation
Weill ‘16: Kelly Weill writes in “The Hate After Trump’s Election: Swastikas, Deportation Threats, and Racist Graffiti” for The Daily Beast. About Kelly Weill. Kelly Weill is Editor-In-Chief at NYU Local. She writes about politics for POLITICO New York. She's also done words for MSNBC, the New York Times and other news outlets. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/13/the-hate-after-trump-s-election-swastikas-deportation-threats-and-racist-graffiti.html}; AB
In the chaotic wake of Donald Trump’s election, many Americans fear a surge in hate acts based on race or religion. Trump, who campaigned on an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant platform, managed to mobilize a uniquely hateful base, garnering the endorsement of the KKK. And now that Trump’s been elected, his newly emboldened fans are already testing boundaries. As of Friday, the Southern Poverty Law Center had collected reports on over 200 alleged incidents of harassment. And while some skeptics say the unverified reports look like fraud or run-of-the-mill racism, others worry that the incidents forecast a grim future. Muslim Americans have reported a spike in physical and verbal attacks since Trump’s election. On Wednesday morning, just hours after Trump declared victory, Muslim students at New York University found the word “Trump!” scrawled on the door of their prayer room. The school’s Muslim Students Association called the graffiti a “chilling wake-up call,” a feeling many Muslims shared across the country. “Your time’s up, girlie,” a man on a subway platform reportedly told journalist Mehreen Kasana while she was wearing a headscarf on Wednesday morning. That same day at San Diego State University, a Muslim student was walking to her car when two men confronted her with “comments about President-elect Trump and the Muslim community,” a report from campus police reads. The men reportedly robbed her of her purse, along with her keys, and drove away in her car. A Muslim student at San Jose State University reportedly experienced a similar attack in a parking garage on Wednesday, when an unknown man pulled at her hijab from behind, choking the student and causing her to fall, according to a campus-wide alert. Also on Wednesday, a University of New Mexico freshman said one of her Trump-supporting classmates attempted to rip her hijab off her head. After the girl fought off her classmate, she reportedly confronted the man, who mentioned Trump and told her “I am going to sit down before you throw a grenade at me,” the Albuquerque Journal reports. Near the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Wednesday, a Muslim woman was reportedly confronted on a bus with a knife. At the University of Michigan on Friday, a student wearing a hijab was confronted by a stranger who brandished a lighter at her and threatened to set her on fire if she did not remove the scarf, police say. Muslim educators also reportedly came under attack in their schools. A Georgia high-school teacher who wears a hijab reported that someone left a threatening note on her desk on Friday. “Your head scarf isn’t allowed anymore. Why don’t you tie it around your neck and hang yourself,” reads the handwritten card, which is signed “America!” And in a nearby Georgia high school, a pro-Trump teacher reportedly joined the offensive against minorities, launching into a tirade about undocumented immigrants. The unnamed teacher has been placed on leave pending an investigation into her allegedly “abusive” rant against immigrants on Wednesday. Eighty-six percent of the students at the teacher’s school are Latino, and many speak English as a second language. In a Los Angeles middle school on Wednesday, a substitute teacher was recorded mocking sixth-grade students over deportations. “If you were born here, then your parents got to go. Then they will leave you behind, and you will be in foster care,” the teacher is heard saying on the recording. When a student asks how Trump’s administration will find her parents, the teacher threatens that “I have your phone numbers, your address, your mama’s address, your daddy’s address. It’s all in the system, sweetie.” Students at a California high school were also subjected to deportation threats, after a classmate handed out “deportation letters” to minorities and posted footage to social media. Video from a middle school outside Detroit shows students chanting “build the wall” in the cafeteria, while their Latino classmates cried or looked on with extreme discomfort on Wednesday. At a different Detroit-area middle school that same day, white students reportedly linked arms to block minority students from passing. A teacher in Washington state reported similar anti-Latino comments in school. “‘Build a wall’ was chanted in our cafeteria Wed at lunch,” the teacher told the SPLC. “‘If you aren’t born here, pack your bags’ was shouted in my own classroom. ‘Get out spic’ was said in our halls.” A Mexican-American high school teacher told the SPLC that one of his students told him to leave the country as “he wasn’t welcome any longer.” A Harvard professor registered an official complaint with the U.S. Postal Service after he reportedly witnessed an employee shouting “go back to your country. This is Trump land. You ain’t getting your check no more,” at a Latino man. A University of Denver law professor of Asian descent said a man shouted “build the wall” at her from a distance on Thursday. “Guessing he saw a brown woman at a distance and assumed I was Latina,” she wrote on Twitter. African Americans have reported a dramatic rise in racist remarks since Trump’s Tuesday election. At the University of Pennsylvania, black students were added to a chat group where users with names like “Daddy Trump” sent them racial and sexist slurs, along with an invitation to an event called “Daily Lynching.” The anonymous users also called the students “dumb slaves” and sent a picture of a mass-lynching with the caption “I love America.” A University of Oklahoma student has been suspended in connection with the messages. In Louisiana, a black woman says she was waiting to cross the street when a truck with three white men pulled up alongside her. “One of them yelled, ‘Fuck your black life!’” the woman told the SPLC. “The other two began to laugh. One began to chant ‘Trump!’ as they drove away.” A bathroom at a Minnesota high school was defaced with racist messages: “whites only,” “Trump train,” “white america,” and explicit racial slurs were written inside a stall, pictures reveal. In Durham, North Carolina, a large outdoor wall was graffitied with an anti-black message: “Black lives don’t matter and neither does your votes,” the message read. In the Upstate New York town of Wellsville, a large swastika was found painted on a baseball dugout, accompanied by the words “Make America White Again.” The swastika was one of many to appear across the country in the wake of the election, including one an hour away on the campus of SUNY Geneseo. In New York City, students at the New School reported finding swastikas drawn on four dorm rooms, including those of Jewish students. Another swastika appeared on a sidewalk in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. In Philadelphia, two swastikas and the words “sieg heil” were spray painted on a storefront early Wednesday morning. In Indiana, an Episcopal church shared pictures of a swastika and the words “fag church” and “heil Trump” spray painted on the side. In Montana, self-professed Nazis allegedly began campaigning in earnest after Trump’s victory. Flyers promoting the American Nazi Party and disparaging Jewish people began appearing on Missoula doorsteps last week.
Graffiti is an explicit violation of property rights – It’s vandalism – PUBLIC COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ARE PUBLIC SPACES THAT DON’T GIVE PERMISSION FOR GRAFFITI, LET ALONE HATE GRAFFITI
MacDonald ‘14: Heather MacDonald writes in “Graffiti Is Always Vandalism” for the New York Times Opinion Pages on December 4th, 2014 @ 9:16 AM. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/07/11/when-does-graffiti-become-art/graffiti-is-always-vandalism; AB
Anyone who glorifies graffiti needs to answer one question: If your home were tagged during the night without your consent, would you welcome the new addition to your décor or would you immediately call a painter, if not the police? No institution that has celebrated graffiti in recent years – like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles or the Museum of the City of New York – would allow its own premises to be defaced for even one minute. Graffiti is something that one celebrates, if one is juvenile enough to do so, when it shows up on someone else’s property but never on one’s own. The question “When does graffiti become art?” is meaningless. Graffiti is always vandalism. By definition it is committed without permission on another person’s property, in an adolescent display of entitlement. Whether particular viewers find any given piece of graffiti artistically compelling is irrelevant. Graffiti’s most salient characteristic is that it is a crime. John Lindsay, the progressive New York politician who served as mayor from 1966 to 1973, declared war on graffiti in 1972. He understood that graffiti signaled informal social controls and law enforcement had broken down New York’s public spaces, making them vulnerable to even greater levels of disorder and law-breaking. A 2008 study from the Netherlands has shown that physical disorder and vandalism have a contagious effect, confirming the “broken windows theory.” There is nothing “progressive about allowing public amenities to be defaced by graffiti; anyone who can avoid a graffiti-bombed park or commercial thoroughfare will do so, since tagging shows that an area is dominate by vandals who may be involved in other crimes as well. New York’s conquest of subway graffiti in the late 1980s was the first sign in decades that the city was still governable; that triumph over lawlessness paved the way for the urban renaissance that followed.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Lack of regulation leads to ad hoc restrictions that chill speech – creates hostile environment
Juhan ‘12: S. Cagle Juhan (Judicial Law Clerk, Western District of Virginia; JD University
of Virginia School of Law). “Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Hostile Speech Environ-
ment.” Virginia Law Review. November 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23333530.pdf
Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University) 70 illustrates the problem with a discretionary system: government bureaucrats serve as roving commissioners, picking and choosing which speech to regulate, often on the grounds that cer-tain groups object to it.‘The danger is threefold. First, the absence of a written policy leaves a vacuum. By their very nature, decisions made on a case-by-case basis lack debated, agreed-upon, and disseminated principles that can guide action.’ Thus, one cannot ex ante abide by guidelines that are unknowable until after one speaks. The result is the commonly cited “chilling effect”: speakers will say less, even if their speech would be constitutionally pro-tected, because they cannot be assured that they will not be punished for it.‘ Second, informal, standardless decision-making processes about what speech should be allowed are viewed with particular skepticism in First Amend- ment doctrine because they both contribute to the chilling effect and enhance the risk of discriminatory or arbi-trary regulation.’ Ad hoc judgments allow universities to sanc- tion speech because they disapprove of it, which is precisely the out-come that the First Amendment was designed to prevent.‘The third and related concern is that administrators are easily captured by campus constituencies that mobilize  against hateful or mer:ely unpopular speech.’ The Iota Xi case offers a clear example of this problem. Students objecting to the fraternity’s speech con-vinced an administrator that the speech created a hostile educa-tional environment and conflicted with the university’s mission; administrators subsequently imposed sanctions, despite not having done so in an initial meeting with the fraternity that occurred the same day as the one with the offended students. ‘The risk of “captured” administrators is especially high when hate speech is at issue.’ Hate speech frequently targets minorities or historically disfavored groups. These constituencies, in addition to understandably disagreeing with hate speech that disparages them, are some of the most vocal proponents and defenders of the equal- ity, diversity, and tolerance norms that have gained incredible purchase in the realm of higher education.‘Accusations or percep-tions that a university or its administrators are not sympathetic enough to these norms or to the groups invoking them can have ad- verse consequences for a university’s prestige and an administra- tor’s career.’ Therefore, there are strong personal and institutional incentives to err on the side of equal- ity, diversity, and tolerance ideals and against constitutionally protected speech.‘One observer has aptly termed ad hoc decision-making proc-esses “implicit speech codes.” ’ Ultimately, however, whether ex-plicit or implicit, speech codes increase (1) the chilling effect on speech, (2) the danger of viewpoint discrimination, and (3) the op-portunity for constituencies to suppress opponents by capturing administrators.’
Hostile campuses lead to lower graduation rates, perpetuating exclusion and hate speech– empirically proven.
Perry ‘15: Andre M. Perry, 11-11-2015, "Campus racism makes minority students likelier to drop out of college. Mizzou students had to act.," https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/11/campus-racism-makes-minority-students-likelier-to-drop-out-of-college/?tid=a_inl
By now you know the story: Three days ago, University of Missouri footballers offered administrators an ultimatum: University system President Tim Wolfe had to go or the team wouldn’t play. Monday morning, Wolfe resigned. Credit players and protesters, led by hunger-striking grad student Jonathan Butler, for drawing attention to Wolfe’s failure to address campus racism. But beyond applauding the activism of students, it’s important to understand what’s at stake at Missouri and other campuses — like Yale University, where students at the Silliman residential college have taken on their live-in faculty advisers over competing views about the impact of racially insensitive Halloween costumes — is college survival itself: In hostile environments, students of color graduate at lower rates, jeopardizing not only their academic careers but also future success. In one sense, given the controversies at Mizzou — where a hostile campus climate serves as a mechanism by which students of color remain outsiders — the students didn’t have a choice. It would be illogical, and self-defeating, if they didn’t use the power they had at their disposal. Campus racial climate has been linked to academic success. And research has long shown that academic preparedness is only one of many factors that determine why students do or don’t graduate. The psychological attitudes between and among groups, as well as intergroup relations on campuses, influences how well students of color perform and whether they stay on track toward graduation. Graduation rates lag when schools don’t provide an environment that fosters the scholastic pursuits of minority students, particularly black men. Researcher Sylvia Hurtado explains that “Just as a campus that embraces diversity provides substantial positive benefits, a hostile or discriminatory climate has substantial negative consequences.” Her research found that “Students who reported negative or hostile encounters with members of other racial groups scored lower on the majority of outcomes.” A study of students at the University of Washington found that black students there were the only campus group to suffer a clear statistical GPA disadvantage from a nasty campus climate: “Results indicate that campus climate is significantly related to academic achievement of African American students, as represented by GPA, accounting for about 11 percent of the variance.” That means black students facing adverse conditions are likelier to leave college early — and would, presumably, be likelier to stay in what they felt to be a safe space. In “Interactional Diversity and the Role of a Supportive Racial Climate” the University of Maryland’s Leah Kendra Cox found much the same thing: “In unhealthy climates, students — both majority and minority — are less likely to thrive academically or socially.” She found that a supportive racial climate had more impact than any other factor on the strength of diversity on campus. Perhaps not coincidentally, a Gallup survey last month illustrated that students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs — where the climate, by design, nurtures students of color — were far more likely to “strongly agree that their colleges prepared them for life after graduation (55) than black graduates of other institutions (29).” In that context, consider the reports of what’s taken place in the Mizzou community. In September, Missouri Students Association President Payton Head, who is black, took to Facebook to report being called the n-word by a driver in a passing car as he walked down a street near campus. In early October, the Legion of Black Collegians tweeted that intoxicated white students had shouted the n-word at them during a campus protest. Later that month, tensions flared when someone smeared feces in the form a swastika in a campus bathroom — creating the kind of climate that alienates and marginalizes minority students, who have just as much right to pursue their education on the Missouri campus, free from harassment, as anyone else. Students still remember the 2010 incident in which two Missouri students were suspended for dropping cotton balls in front of the campus’ Black Culture Center. Wolfe’s inaction, in the face of repeated demands to better address students’ frustration with the charged campus environment, precipitated his ouster. Though he later apologized, many cite his failure to engage with students — remaining cloistered in his car — when approached by the campus group ConcernedStudent1950 at a homecoming parade, as one of the last straws that ended his administration. And while commentators like Rush Limbaugh say Wolfe resigned for “committing the crime of being a white male,” their argument, beyond the hyperbole, is the wrong way to evaluate the relationship of the university to its students. Wolfe’s job was to use the resources at his disposal to build a campus community where all students feel they can pursue their academic careers in an environment where they’re respected and taken seriously. But as Butler told The Post: When you localize it to the hunger strike it really is about the environment that is on campus. We have reactionary, negligent individuals on all levels at the university level on our campus and at the university system level, and so their job descriptions explicitly say that they’re supposed to provide a safe and inclusive environment for all students … but when we have issues of sexual assault, when we have issues of racism, when we have issues of homophobia, the campus climate continues to deteriorate because we don’t have strong leadership, willing to actually make change. So, for me, I’m fighting for a better tomorrow. As much as the experiences on campus have not been that great for me — I had people call me the n-word, I had someone write the n-word on the a door in my residence hall — for me it really is about a call for justice. I’m fighting for the black community on campus, because justice is worth fighting for. And justice is worth starving for. So is education. The U.S. Department of Education found markedly lower graduation rates for blacks and Latino men (33.2 percent and 44.8 percent, respectively, graduate from college within six years) compared with their white and Asian peers (57.1 percent and 64.2 percent, respectively). These disparities have been depressingly constant in recent years. One factor contributing to these disparities is that universities frequently place a premium on meeting the (short-term) needs of black athletes in revenue generating sports while paying lip service to the needs of other students of color. From the disciplines faculty teach in to the traditions they uphold, predominantly white institutions haven’t fully dealt with the changing demographics of collegians. For many students, especially first-generation collegians, these institutions often place the burden on students to adapt to an unwelcoming environment. But the Missouri case illustrates the imperative for colleges to transform what they are and who they serve if they are to fulfill their mission of addressing societal problems, training the workforce and educating the public. And black student-athletes, who are overrepresented in the major-revenue sports — football and basketball — may be uniquely empowered to move university leaders who, in the case of the University of Missouri, at least, didn’t demonstrate they were otherwise compelled by the data. If colleges can prioritize the needs of students of color in their athletic programs, they also can prioritize the development of scientists, historians and teachers of color. In order to do this, postsecondary institutions must change at a structural level. One approach would be to transition their merit-based scholarships into need- or place-based scholarships. First-generation collegians should have access to living-learning communities in which dormitories provide wrap-around supports. Colleges must attract and retain black and brown faculty at much higher levels. Faculty must embrace their role as counselors, not just instructors or researchers. Academic support for first-generation collegians shouldn’t be treated as remediation. Finally, faculty and administrators should be held accountable for graduation rates. Success isn’t just on students’ shoulders.
Hate speech creates academic and discursive exclusion, kills minority education, turns case.
Garrett ‘2: Deanna M. Garrett, Deanna M. Garrett graduated from the University of Virginia in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in Religious Studies and a minor in Biology. She is a second-year HESA student and a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Residential Life, “Silenced Voices: Hate Speech Codes on Campus”, University of Vermont, 07/29/2002, https://www.uvm.edu/~vtconn/?Page=v20/garrett.html  
Advocates of hate speech codes contend that the inclusion of racist, sexist, and homophobic speech serves only to silence others’ voices. "Such speech not only interferes with equal educational opportunities, but also deters the exercise of other freedoms, including those secured by the First Amendment" (Strossen, 1994, p. 193). Faced with hate speech, many individuals are silenced or forced to flee, rather than engaging in dialogue (Lawrence, 1993). In higher education, dialogue is key to learning and gaining new knowledge. Students engage in dialogue with one another, challenge each other, and propose new ideas. However, racist speech does not invite this exchange but seeks to silence non-dominant individuals. Post (1994) outlines three ways in which minority groups are silenced by hateful speech: (1) Victim groups are silenced because their perspectives are systematically excluded from the dominant discourse; (2) victim groups are silenced because the pervasive stigma of racism systematically undermines and devalues their speech; and (3) victim groups are silenced because the visceral "fear, rage, and shock" of racist speech systematically preempts response. (p. 143)

Tournament: CPS | Round: 4 | Opponent: Dougherty Valley | Judge: Ryan Leigh
Their attempt to reframe power relations remains structured by neoliberalism – the aff generates an illusion of reform that covers up the underlying dominance of neolib – the problem is the state manifests itself in many forms – the AC acts like it solved speech silencing through state action. The 1AC is false hope.
Zizek ‘97: Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, 1997, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.”
What these leftist advocates of populism fail to perceive is that today’s populism, far from presenting a threat to global capitalism, remains its inherent product. Paradoxically, today’s true conservatives are rather the leftist ‘critical theorists’ who reject liberal multiculturalism as well as fundamentalist populism, those who clearly perceive the complicity between global capitalism and ethnic fundamentalism. They point towards the third domain which belongs neither to global market-society nor to the new forms of ethnic fundamentalism: the domain of the political, the public space of civil society, of active responsible citizenship—the fight for human rights, ecology and so forth. However, the problem is that this very form of political space is more and more threatened by the onslaught of globalization; consequently, one cannot simply return to it or revitalize it. To avoid a misunderstanding: our point is not the old ‘economic essentialist’ one according to which, in the case of England today, the Labour victory really did not change anything—and as such is even more dangerous than continuing Tory rule, since it gave rise to the misleading impression that there was a change. There are a lot of things the Labour government can achieve; it can contribute a lot to the passage from traditional English parochial jingoism to a more ‘enlightened’ liberal democracy with a much stronger element of social solidarity (from health care to education), to the respect for human rights (in its diverse forms, from women’s rights to the rights of ethnic groups); one should use the Labour victory as an incentive to revitalize the diverse forms of the struggle for égaliberté. (With the Socialist electoral victory in France, the situation is even more ambiguous, since Jospin’s programme does contain some elements of a direct confrontation with the logic of capital.) Even when the change is not substantial but a mere semblance of a new beginning, the very fact that a situation is perceived by the majority of the population as a ‘new beginning’ opens up the space for important ideological and political rearticulations—as we have already seen, the fundamental lesson of the dialectic of ideology is that appearances do matter. Nonetheless, the post-Nation-State logic of capital remains the Real which lurks in the background, while all three main leftist reactions to the process of globalization—liberal multiculturalism; the attempt to embrace populism by way of discerning, beneath its fundamentalist appearance, the resistance against ‘instrumental reason’; the attempt to keep open the space of the political—seem inappropriate. Although the last approach is based on the correct insight about the complicity between multiculturalism and fundamentalism, it avoids the crucial question: how are we to reinvent political space in today’s conditions of globalization? The politicization of the series of particular struggles which leaves intact the global process of capital is clearly not sufficient. What this means is that one should reject the opposition which, within the frame of late capitalist liberal democracy, imposes itself as the main axis of ideological struggle: the tension between ‘open’ post-ideological universalist liberal tolerance and the particularist ‘new fundamentalisms’. Against the liberal centre which presents itself as neutral and post-ideological, relying on the rule of the Law, one should reassert the old leftist motif of the necessity to suspend the neutral space of Law.
Neolib causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.  
Farbod ‘15: (Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.  
Thus, the alternative is to create spaces beyond the grasp of bureaucratic institutions – our utopian ethic is key to breaking out of normative legal thought in the present. This says SCREW YOU to the class fracturing of neoliberalism. The system wants us to be silent and complicit, but collective utopian discourse creates unity and functional pedagogy which works outside the neoliberal order, creating spaces for alternative thought. The debate is about starting points - the AFF limits qualified immunity, which is simply a tool of the state from which it comes. We need to re-orient our methodological starting point. Neolib is not inevitable.
Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
AND the role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
The role of the ballot is to vote for debater who best deconstructs the state.
Our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making – only once discourse is ethical can policy actions be pursued.
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
AND, the knowledge claims of the AC are the starting points for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their diagnosis of the issue is wrong, you must drop them.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The term "prison industrial complex" is dangerously misleading – rather than a means of 'industry', prisons are an expensive tool of maintaining social control.
MIM(Prisons) ’12: (MIM stands for Maoist International Movement, and the (prisons) part refers to the fact that it's written by current and former prisoners. Website description: 'MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (this is obviously amazing) "The Myth of the 'Prison Industrial Complex'," July 2012 https:www.prisoncensorship.info/article/the-myth-of-the-prison-industrial-complex/~)
Many people are caught up in the line that millions are enslaved in this country, and that the main motivating factor behind the prison boom of recent decades is to put prisoners to work to make money for corporations or the government. MIM(Prisons) has clearly shown that U.S. prisons are not primarily (or even significantly) used to exploit labor, and that they are a great cost financially to the imperialists, not a source of profit.(1) "Indeed, at peak use around 2002, fewer than 5,000 inmates were employed by private firms, amounting to one-quarter of one per cent of the carceral population. As for the roughly 8 of convicts who toil for state and federal industries under lock, they are 'employed' at a loss to correctional authorities in spite of massive subsidies, guaranteed sales to a captive market of public administrations, and exceedingly low wages (averaging well under a dollar an hour)."(2) Instead, we argue that there is a system of population control (including all the elements of the international definition of genocide) that utilizes methods of torture on mostly New Afrikan and Latino men, with a hugely disproportionate representation of First Nation men as well, across this country on a daily basis. As the new prison movement grows and gains attention in the mainstream, it is of utmost importance that we maintain the focus on this truth and not let the white nationalists define what is ultimately a struggle of the oppressed nations. To analyze why the term "prison industrial complex" ("PIC") is inaccurate and misleading, let's look at some common slogans of the social democrats, who dominate the white nationalist left. First let's address the slogan "Welfare not Warfare." This slogan is a false dichotomy, where the sloganeer lacks an understanding of imperialism and militarism. It is no coincidence that the biggest "welfare states" in the world today are imperialist countries. Imperialism brings home more profits by going to war to steal resources, discipline labor, and force economic policies and business contracts on other nations. And militarism is the cultural and political product of that fact. The "military industrial complex" was created when private industry teamed up with the U.$. government to meet their mutual interests as imperialists. Industry got the contracts from the government, with guaranteed profits built in, and the government got the weapons they needed to keep money flowing into the United $tates by oppressing other nations. This concentration of wealth produces the high wages and advanced infrastructure that the Amerikan people benefit from, not to mention the tax money that is made available for welfare programs. So it is ignorant for activists to claim that they are being impoverished by the imperialists' wars as is implied by the false dichotomy of welfare vs. warfare. Another slogan of the social democrats which speaks to why they are so eager to condemn the "PIC" is "Schools not Jails." This slogan highlights that there is only so much tax money in a state available to fund either schools, jails, or something else. There is a limited amount of money because extracting more taxes would increase class conflict between the state and the labor aristocracy. This battle is real, and it is a battle between different public service unions of the labor aristocracy. The "Schools not Jails" slogan is the rallying cry of one side of that battle among the labor aristocrats. Unlike militarism, there is not an imperialist profit interest behind favoring jails over schools. This is precisely why the concept of a "PIC" is a fantasy. While the U.$. economy would likely collapse without the spending that goes into weapons-related industries, Loïc Wacquant points out that the soft drink industry in the United $tates is almost twice as big as prison industries, and prison industries are a mere 0.5 of the gross domestic product.(2) Compared to the military industrial complex, which is 10 of U.$. GDP, the prison system is obviously not a "complex" combining state and private interests that cannot be dismantled without dire consequences to imperialism.(3) And of course, even those pushing the "PIC" line must admit that over 95 of prisons in this country are publicly owned and run.(4) Federal agencies using the prison system to control social elements that they see as a threat to imperialism is the motivating factor for the injustice system, not an imperialist drive for profits. Yet the system is largely decentralized and built on the interests of the majority of Amerikans at the local level, and not just the labor unions and small businesses that benefit directly from spending on prisons. We would likely not have the imprisonment rates that we have today without pressure from the so-called "middle class."
It suggests analogy with the 'military industrial complex', which obscures the decentralized character of imprisonment – this directly limits activist imagination.
Wacquant ‘10: (Loic, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the 'Centre de sociologie européenne' in Paris, member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association, also gets cited by Wilderson, Rodriguez, and Sexton a lot, "Prisoner reentry as myth and ceremony," Dialect Anthropol (2010) 34:605–620 DOI 10.1007/s10624-010-9215-5)
1.1. PIC is based on a loose analogy with MIC, the ‘‘Military Industrial Complex’’ alleged to have driven the expansion of America’s warfare economy during the Cold War era (e.g., Gilmore 2009). Aside from the dubious analytic validity of a notion coined by a speechwriter for a despondent President Eisenhower on the occasion of his farewell address,2 the claim that PIC parallels MIC in handling security on the home front for the benefit of corporations founders on the fact that there is no justice equivalent for the Pentagon. Whereas the federal Department of Defense is a single decision-making center that manages a single budget and implements military policy through hierarchical command, there exists no bureaucratic lever to direct crime control and submit it uniformly to private interests. Legal punishment in America is meted out through a highly decentralized, disjointed, and multilayered patchwork of agencies. The police, courts, and corrections are separate government institutions, subjected to disparate political, funding, and bureaucratic imperatives, that are poorly coordinated and whose relations are riven with tension and conflicts (Neubauer 2005: 6–7)—to say nothing of probation, parole, halfway houses, drug treatment facilities, and assorted outfits entrusted with handling convicts after their release. In addition to being weakly connected to each other, each of the three components of the penal chain is deeply fragmented across geographic space and political scale. Over 18,000 local and state law-enforcement agencies decide their policing strategies at ground level; some 2,341 distinct prosecutors’ offices set their judicial priorities; thousands of counties run their own jail while the fifty states and the federal government each run their separate prison system (and release programs) with little regard for what other administrative units are doing. Moreover, because they are located at the back-end of the penal chain, prisons depend for their key operational inputs on measures and processes set in motion by the police and the courts, over whom they have virtually no influence. The incipient ‘‘federalization of crime’’ (Waisman 1994), which provides a measure of coordination, has been largely undermined by the diversification of prosecution and corrections philosophies across jurisdictions after the abandonment of indeterminate sentencing (Tonry 2000). In organizational and political terms, then, the government function of punishment is decentralized, fragmented, and horizontal, that is, the polar opposite of the military. The connection between MIC and PIC is purely rhetorical; it pertains to metaphor and not to analogy. Even if some malevolent alliance of politicians, corporate owners, and correctional officials wished to harness carceral institutions to the pecuniary aims of ‘‘multinational globalization’’ and foster ‘‘a project in racialization and macro injustice’’ (Brewer and Heitzeg 2008: 625), they would lack the bureaucratic means to do so. Rather than explaining it, PIC precludes posing the crucial question of how and why a de facto national policy of penal expansion has emerged out of the organizational hodge-podge formed by criminal justice institutions.
Reject the aff – better analytical grammar is crucial to radical politics.
MIM(Prisons) ’12: (MIM stands for Maoist International Movement, and the (prisons) part refers to the fact that it's written by current and former prisoners. Website description: 'MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (this is obviously amazing) "The Myth of the 'Prison Industrial Complex'," July 2012 https:www.prisoncensorship.info/article/the-myth-of-the-prison-industrial-complex/~)
This unfortunate term has been popularized in the Amerikan left by a number of pseudo-Marxist theorists who are behind some of the popular prison activist groups on the outside. By explicitly rejecting this term, we are drawing a clear line between us and the organizations these activists are behind, many of whom we've worked with in one way or another. For the most part, the organizations themselves do not claim any Marxist influence or even a particular class analysis, but the leaders of these groups are very aware of where they disagree with MIM Thought. It is important that the masses are aware of this disagreement as well. It is for these reasons that MIM(Prisons) passed the following policy at our 2012 congress: The term "Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)" will not generally be used in Under Lock and Key because the term conflicts with MIM(Prisons)'s line on the economic and national make up of the U.$. prison system. It will only be printed in a context where the meaning of the term is stated by the author, and either criticized by them or by us.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Rejecting oppression must be prioritized – everyday instances of oppression is the largest proximate cause of psychological and physical warfare against the excluded.
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois ‘4: (Nancy and Philippe, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39 Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hyper vigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudo speciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyper arousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
Theory absent real solutions is as useless as action divorced from theory.
Giroux ‘14: Henry A. Giroux American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Neoliberalism’s War on Democracy”, Truthout, 26 Apr 2014 BE
In this instance, understanding must be linked to the practice of social responsibility and the willingness to fashion a politics that addresses real problems and enacts concrete solutions. As Heather Gautney points out, ¶ We need to start thinking seriously about what kind of political system we really want. And we need to start pressing for things that our politicians did NOT discuss at the conventions. Real solutions—like universal education, debt forgiveness, wealth redistribution, and participatory political structures—that would empower us to decide together what’s best. Not who’s best.75¶ Critical thinking divorced from action is often as sterile as action divorced from critical theory. Given the urgency of the historical moment, we need a politics and a public pedagogy that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. Or, as Stuart Hall argues, we need to produce modes of analysis and knowledge in which "people can invest something of themselves . . . something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition."76 A notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere is crucial to this project, especially at a time in which the apostles of neoliberalism and other forms of political and religious fundamentalism are ushering in a new age of conformity, cruelty, and disposability. But as public intellectuals, academics can do more.

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Interpretation: The aff must defend and can only garner offense from the desirability of the hypothetical enactment of the resolution.
Most predictable—the agent and verb indicate a debate about hypothetical action
Ericson ‘3: (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting -~--“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
Violation: CX confirms that they’re not defending res.
Standards:
1) Procedural Fairness -~-- affirming the predetermined subject of the resolution is a prior question to substantive debate because the aff can’t just determine what we’re debating about -~-- if they run a racism bad aff without resolution context, how am I supposed to contest? -~-- that denies a role for the debate, destroys research and turns accessibility. The aff has devolved into a monologue that can’t properly be contested. Topicality ensures a balance of ground.
Dascal and Knoll ‘11: Professors Philosophy at Tel Aviv University (Marcelo and Amnon, “‘Cognitive systemic dichotomization’ in public argumentation and controversies” Argumentation: Cognition and Community. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, p. 1-35)
4.1 Adapting critical discussion to the public sphere according to the PD view In several publications, including his recent book published in 2010, Frans van Eemeren claims that critical discussion is a general model which is adequate for handling differences of opinion in the public and political spaces: The standpoints at issue in the difference of opinion can pertain to any kind of subject and they can be descriptive as well as evaluative or prescriptive…can be encountered in all areas of life, from the family circle…to…political arenas (van Eemeren 2010: 1-2). He opposes positions whose ‘exclusionist’ outlook rejects the normative approach to the political sphere on the grounds that “normative statements can never be subjected to a reasonable discussion” (ibid.: 2), because—he argues—the discussion of politics “is an area of vital interest to all of us and should clearly not be excluded from argumentative reasonableness” (ibid.: 3)—a view with which we are prone to agree. Nevertheless, he admits that in the present situation critical discussion is far from being systematically and successfully applied to that vital area: “In representative democracies, however, the out-comes of the political process tend to be predominantly the product of negotiations be-tween political leaders rather than the result of a universal and mutual process of deliberative disputation” (ibid.). Political debates, therefore, are ‘quasi-discussions’, i.e., “monologues calculated only to win the audience’s consent to one’s own views”, rather than ‘genuine discussions’, i.e., serious attempts to have an intellectual exchange, which is typical of critical discussions (ibid.). In order to overcome this situation, “democracy should always have promoted such a critical discussion of standpoints as a central aim. Only if this is the case can stimulating participation in political discourse enhance the quality of democracy" (ibid.). This can be achieved, however, only by following “the dialectical rules for argumentative discourse that make up a code of conduct for political discourse and are therefore of crucial importance to giving substance to the ideal of participatory democracy” (ibid.: 4); thereby fully acknowledging that “education in processing argumentation in a critical discussion is indispensable for a democratic society (van Eemeren 1995: 145-146). The reasons provided for the failure of the adoption of the critical discussion model in reality ranges from a general allusion to human nature (“in real-life contexts, it has to be taken into account that human interaction is not always automatically 'naturally' and fully oriented toward the ideal of dialectical reasonableness "; van Eemeren 2010: 4) to specific political sphere argumentation handicaps (unwillingness of people “to subject their thinking to critical scrutiny”; “vested interest in particular outcome”; “inequality in power and resources; “different levels of critical skills”; and “a practical demand for an immediate settlement”; van Eemeren 2010: 4). Although these causes may have some explanatory value in some cases, in our opinion their modus operandi is not accounted for and, what is more important, they do not cover the full spectrum of challenges that the successful use of critical discussion in the public and political spheres must face, as we have seen (cf. sections 2 and 3). No wonder that van Eemeren himself raises the question “whether maintaining the dialectical ideal of critical discussion in political and other real-life contexts is not utopian” (ibid.), to which he replies by admitting that "the ideal of a critical discussion is by definition not a description of any kind of reality but sets a theoretical standard that can be used for heuristic, analytic and evaluative purpose” (ibid.). This ideal seems to be so inspiring that it remains valid as a pure theoretical ideal, “even if the argumentative discourse falls short of the dialectical ideal” (ibid.). In the light of the substantial gap between the normative ideal and the actual practices of public and political argumentation that PD’s description and explanation provides, a number of doubts arise: Are there structural, rather than merely contingent obstacles in idealized critical discussion that prevents even its approximate use in the public sphere? Can a theory that claims to be a praxis based normative system fulfill its promise if it sets up a threshold that no one who tries to apply it to the public sphere can reach? Doesn’t the very fact that argumentation is excessively idealized in the model PD proposes cause the gap by distancing people concerned by public issues from argumentation at all? All these doubts suggest that a powerful structural phenomenon like the existence of CSDs in the public sphere is perhaps overlooked by PD and requires, for its overcoming, a radically different approach. 4.2 Discrepancies between the PD approach and reasonable argumentation in the public sphere The discrepancies in question have to do with basic parameters relevant to every argumentative process, namely: (A) The discussants’ goals and targets: what do they expect to achieve through the argumentation process and what is it capable of providing. (B) The preconditions for initiating a critical discussion: what are the discussants presumed to know and accept of these preconditions. (C) The argumentative process that is supposed to lead to the achievement of the discussants’ goals. (D) The influence of context and agents on the argumentative process. 4.2.1 Goals Assuming that argumentation is a voluntary endeavor, the parties are presumed to engage in it if and only if:  the process will serve their goals; (ii) these goals cannot be achieved by different, better means.  PD describes as follows the aim of engaging in an argumentative process: Argumentation is basically aimed at resolving a difference of opinion about the acceptability of a standpoint by making an appeal to the other party's reasonableness. (van Eemeren 2010: 1, with reference to van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004: 11-18) The difference of opinion is resolved when the antagonist accepts the protagonist's viewpoint on the basis of the arguments advanced or when the protagonist abandons his viewpoint as a result of the critical responses of the antagonist. (van Eemeren 2010: 33) Simply put, the basic assumption is that a critical discussion’s aim consists in putting forth a certain position by one of the parties for the critical examination of the other, who calls it into question. The latter undertakes to refute the former’s position, while its proponent is committed to defend it. Four stages (see below) are supposed to ensure a valid performance of the refutation and defense tasks. The essential point is that at the end of the four stages the parties clearly agree whether the proponent’s position has been refuted or not and, accordingly, change their position (either retracting it or withdrawing from his questioning). In ‘mixed’ disagreements, in which the antagonist not only questions but also puts forth an opposed position, the same process takes place sequentially, i.e., at first one side (A) attacks trying to refute the other’s (B) position, and after this stage is concluded, they switch roles and the second side (B) proceeds to attack the first (A) in the same fashion. Regardless of whether the described process is indeed capable to yield a conclusive decision about the refutation of a position, and of whether the linearity of the refutation process makes sense, it is obvious that debates in the public sphere are for the most part ‘mixed’. Furthermore, in so far as these debates involve dichotomous positions (rather than just opposed ones), it is necessary that at the end of the PD process one of the parties accept the position of the other. It is also worth noticing that, contrary to deliberative democracy approaches, which in some cases approve the attempt to reach agreement in a (public) debate as a form of justification of political systems, PD claims that it is not a consensus theory at all. Instead, it conceives itself as a theory based on Popper’s critical rationality, i.e., as having as its principal goal to provide each party with the means—i.e., refutation attempts—to test critically its position: The conception of reasonableness upheld in pragma-dialectics insights from critical rationalist epistemology and utilitarian ethics conjoin … The intersubjective acceptability we attribute to the procedure, which is eventually expected to lend conventional validity to the procedure, is primarily based on its instrumentality in doing the job it is intended to do: re-solving a difference of opinion. … This means that, philosophically speaking, the rationale for accepting the pragma-dialectical procedure is pragmatic—more precisely, utilitarian italics in quoted text. … However, based on Popper's falsification idea, this is a ‘negative’ and not ‘positive’, utilitarianism. … Rather than maximization of agreement, minimization of disagreement is to be aimed for. (van Eemeren 2010: 34) The distinction between maximization of agreement and minimization of disagreement purports to stress that PD doesn’t view agreement as the suitable end of the process, but just as “an intermediate step on the way to new, and more advanced, disagreements” (van Eemeren 2010: 26n). Nevertheless, no explanation is given of how these “more advanced disagreements” are engendered as a part of the dynamics of the critical process, nor what is the role or value of such disagreements in the public sphere or elsewhere. This may be due to the fact that PD’s ‘critical discussion’ is not tuned to the generation of new positions or ideas but only to the testing of extant ones, thus echoing once again Popper, now in his focus on the justification rather than on the discovery of theories (see sections 4.2.4 and 5). In any case, it is quite clear that the only practical result of the critical discussion à la PD of opposed positions on a public issue is to determine whether one discussant succeeded in refuting the other’s position, thus obtaining the adversary’s agreement, who will then share his/her position, at least for some time. In this respect, PD’s critical discussion is close to Habermas’s ‘reasonable argumentation’, whose aim is to reach consensus.15 In spite of the apparent difference between a critical examination of a position aiming at its refutation or at its acceptance, even van Eemeren admits, to some extent, their similarity. He points out that “the pragma-dialectical procedure deals only with ‘first order’ conditions for resolving differences of opinion on the merits by means of critical discussion” (van Eemeren 2010: 34), and stresses that there are ‘higher order’ conditions, ‘internal’ and ‘external’, that are “beyond the agent’s control”, conditions that are similar to Habermas’s “ideal speech conditions” (van Eemeren 2010: 35n). Anyhow, whether according to PD the main goal of the critical discussion process in the public space is to create the opportunity for refutation or for agreement (meaning that one of the discussants acknowledges that his position is wrong), the essential assumption of this process is that the participants in it in the public sphere (or elsewhere) must be aware that one of them holds a wrong position and will have to explicitly acknowledge this. Is such a goal, especially when conceived as the ultimate aim of the proposed argumentative process, feasible and acceptable in the public sphere? In our opinion, there are at least four reasons for arguing that it is a utopian, hence unacceptable goal, if one takes seriously what should be expected from argumentative practice and theory in the public sphere. First, because PD deserves a critique similar to the one leveled against the Popperian version of critical rationalism it espouses,16 which defends a theory of knowledge “without a knowing subject” (Popper 1972); obviously, such a-contextual position becomes even more problematic if applied to the public and political spheres, where it must operate in a context essentially involved with practical rationality. Second, due to its analogy with theories such as Habermas’s that were discussed in this section as well as in 2.2—an analogy that deserves additional criticism because, unlike Habermasianism, PD overlooks the relationship between the political and public context and argumentative practice. Third, because of PD’s total overlooking of the role of CSDs in public argumentation (cf. 4.2.2). And fourth, due to unilateral value judgments of positions in the public sphere, which lead to simplistic criteria of refutation or acceptance in a domain where complexity is the rule (cf. 2.1.1 and 4.2.3). (ii) Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that the refutation goal as claimed by PD is central, feasible, acceptable, and useful in public argumentation. Aren’t there better ways to achieve this goal? The refutation and defense moves stipulated by the PD critical discussion model include, on the one side, the antagonist’s critical remarks or demands and on the other, the proponent’s replies. We believe that it must be assumed that neither the critique nor the replies are previously known to the contenders, which is why they have an interest in engage in the argumentation process: presumably, the expression of both, counter-arguments and defensive-arguments, is good to both sides. In spite of its usefulness in certain situations, this kind of exchange does not amount to the full manifestation of the dialectical critical process, wherein the context and co-text of the dialectical exchange, as well as the cognitive interaction that takes place and evolves throughout the exchange, play a decisive role in the design and ‘inner’ justification of each of the participants’ moves. Argumentation strategies that take into account these resources and make full use of their potential are no doubt setting up another, broader span of goals for the argumentative process, and are more likely to achieve these goals more effectively than they certainly would achieve their PD more limited counterparts (cf. 4.2.4 and 5). 4.2.2 Preconditions The ideal PD critical discussion can only be realized if some preconditions are satisfied. The most important ones are a) a clear-cut identification of the standpoint that provokes the disagreement, b) the decision of the parties to engage in a discussion, and c) the participants’ commitment to obey the procedural rules. As we shall see, these preconditions share a common assumption, which calls into question the feasibility of using critical discussion in the public sphere. (A) This precondition assumes that it is possible to isolate rigorously the subject matter of a critical discussion, so as to conduct a focused discussion that makes use only of relevant arguments. This precondition is quite strict, for whenever both discussants defend contrary standpoints, their disagreement should be treated as two separate fully fledged discussions: “… if another discussion begins, it must go through the same stages again—from confrontation stage to concluding stage” (van Eemeren 2010: 10n). (B) This precondition subordinates the decision to engage in the discussion to the evaluation that the discussants share enough common ground to pursue it adequately: “After the parties have decided that there is enough common ground to conduct a discussion …” (van Eemeren 2010: 33). (C) This precondition stresses the ‘contractual’ character of a critical discussion, which requires explicit mutual commitments by the discussants. Its rationale is that without such commitments the aim of the critical discussion, i.e., the resolution of the difference of opinions, will not be achieved, which makes engaging in the discussion pointless: “There is no point in venturing to resolve a difference … if there is no mutual commitment to a common starting point, which may include procedural commitments as well as substantive agreement” (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004: 60). These ‘first order’ preconditions, as they are labeled in PD (cf. van Eemeren 2010: 33), are the conditions that candidates to participate in a critical discussion must fulfill if they intend to do so and can afford it personally (a ‘second order’ condition) and politically (a ‘third order’ condition).17 In addition, the first order conditions demand from the prospective discussants a clear, distinct, and detailed picture of the scope of the discussion that they are about to engage in. This means not mixing up the various differences of opinion that the discussion may involve, and being able to separate them properly as the subject matter for independent discussions; a further requirement is the anticipated identification of the pieces of the ‘substantive agreement’ forming the starting point in order to ensure that they are sufficient for conducting the discussion up to a satisfactory closure.
2. Engagement -~-- the debate becomes irresolvable because of the aff’s refusal to engage in the topic. A general topic is impossible to engage in effectively – debate requires a specific point of difference.
Steinberg and Freeley ‘8: *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making pp45
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007. Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose. Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
3) Conclusivity -~-- even if the 1AC is factually correct, failure to subject their claims to testing by a well-prepared opponent produces groupthink that prevents effective advocacy – treat their claims as false until there’s structural fairness.
Poscher ‘16: Director at the Institute for Staatswissenschaft and Philosophy of Law at the University of Freiburg (Ralf, “Why We Argue About the Law: An Agonistic Account of Legal Disagreement”, Metaphilosophy of Law, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki/Adam Dyrda/Pawel Banas (eds.), Hart Publishing, forthcoming, dml)
Hegel’s dialectical thinking powerfully exploits the idea of negation. It is a central feature of spirit and consciousness that they have the power to negate. The spirit “is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This … is the magical power that converts it into being.”102 The tarrying with the negative is part of what Hegel calls the “labour of the negative”103. In a loose reference to this Hegelian notion Gerald Postema points to yet another feature of disagreements as a necessary ingredient of the process of practical reasoning. Only if our reasoning is exposed to contrary arguments can we test its merits. We must go through the “labor of the negative” to have trust in our deliberative processes.104 This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to disagreement can be deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema draws attention to is the group polarization effect. When a group of like‐minded people deliberates an issue, informational and reputational cascades produce more extreme views in the process of their deliberations.105 The polarization and biases that are well documented for such groups106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting voices. In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional deliberative polarization and biases.107 A second deliberative dysfunction mitigated by disagreement is superficial agreement, which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a “presumptuous ‘We’”108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes by challenging superficial agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements stemming from polarization or superficiality. Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if we do not come to terms. Each of the opposing positions will profit from the catharsis it received “by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it”. These advantages of disagreement in collective deliberations are mirrored on the individual level. Even if the probability of reaching a consensus with our opponents is very low from the beginning, as might be the case in deeply entrenched conflicts, entering into an exchange of arguments can still serve to test and improve our position. We have to do the “labor of the negative” for ourselves. Even if we cannot come up with a line of argument that coheres well with everybody else’s beliefs, attitudes and dispositions, we can still come up with a line of argument that achieves this goal for our own personal beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. To provide ourselves with the most coherent system of our own beliefs, attitudes and dispositions is – at least in important issues – an aspect of personal integrity – to borrow one of Dworkin’s favorite expressions for a less aspirational idea. In hard cases we must – in some way – lay out the argument for ourselves to figure out what we believe to be the right answer. We might not know what we believe ourselves in questions of abortion, the death penalty, torture, and stem cell research, until we have developed a line of argument against the background of our subjective beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. In these cases it might be rational to discuss the issue with someone unlikely to share some of our more fundamental convictions or who opposes the view towards which we lean. This might even be the most helpful way of corroborating a view, because we know that our adversary is much more motivated to find a potential flaw in our argument than someone with whom we know we are in agreement. It might be more helpful to discuss a liberal position with Scalia than with Breyer if we want to make sure that we have not overlooked some counter‐argument to our case It would be too narrow an understanding of our practice of legal disagreement and argumentation if we restricted its purpose to persuading an adversary in the case at hand and inferred from this narrow understanding the irrationality of argumentation in hard cases, in which we know beforehand that we will not be able to persuade. Rational argumentation is a much more complex practice in a more complex social framework. Argumentation with an adversary can have purposes beyond persuading him: to test one’s own convictions, to engage our opponent in inferential commitments and to persuade third parties are only some of these; to rally our troops or express our convictions might be others. To make our peace with Kant we could say that “there must be a hope of coming to terms” with someone though not necessarily with our opponent, but maybe only a third party or even just ourselves and not necessarily only on the issue at hand, but maybe through inferential commitments in a different arena. f) The Advantage Over Non‐Argumentative Alternatives It goes without saying that in real world legal disagreements, all of the reasons listed above usually play in concert and will typically hold true to different degrees relative to different participants in the debate: There will be some participants for whom our hope of coming to terms might still be justified and others for whom only some of the other reasons hold and some for whom it is a mixture of all of the reasons in shifting degrees as our disagreements evolve. It is also apparent that, with the exception of the first reason, the rationality of our disagreements is of a secondary nature. The rational does not lie in the discovery of a single right answer to the topic of debate, since in hard cases there are no single right answers. Instead, our disagreements are instrumental to rationales which lie beyond the topic at hand, like the exploration of our communalities or of our inferential commitments. Since these reasons are of this secondary nature, they must stand up to alternative ways of settling irreconcilable disagreements that have other secondary reasons in their favor – like swiftness of decision making or using fewer resources. Why does our legal practice require lengthy arguments and discursive efforts even in appellate or supreme court cases of irreconcilable legal disagreements? The closure has to come by some non‐argumentative mean and courts have always relied on them. For the medieval courts of the Germanic tradition it is bequeathed that judges had to fight it out literally if they disagreed on a question of law – though the king allowed them to pick surrogate fighters.109 It is understandable that the process of civilization has led us to non‐violent non‐ argumentative means to determine the law. But what was wrong with District Judge Currin of Umatilla County in Oregon, who – in his late days – decided inconclusive traffic violations by publicly flipping a coin?110 If we are counting heads at the end of our lengthy argumentative proceedings anyway, why not decide hard cases by gut voting at the outset and spare everybody the cost of developing elaborate arguments on questions, where there is not fact of the matter to be discovered? One reason lies in the mixed nature of our reasons in actual legal disagreements. The different second order reasons can be held apart analytically, but not in real life cases. The hope of coming to terms will often play a role at least for some time relative to some participants in the debate. A second reason is that the objectives listed above could not be achieved by a non‐argumentative procedure. Flipping a coin, throwing dice or taking a gut vote would not help us to explore our communalities or our inferential commitments nor help to scrutinize the positions in play. A third reason is the overall rational aspiration of the law that Dworkin relates to in his integrity account111. In a justificatory sense112 the law aspires to give a coherent account of itself – even if it is not the only right one – required by equal respect under conditions of normative disagreement.113 Combining legal argumentation with the non‐argumentative decision‐ making procedure of counting reasoned opinions serves the coherence aspiration of the law in at least two ways: First, the labor of the negative reduces the chances that constructions of the law that have major flaws or inconsistencies built into the arguments supporting them will prevail. Second, since every position must be a reasoned one within the given framework of the law, it must be one that somehow fits into the overall structure of the law along coherent lines. It thus protects against incoherent “checkerboard” treatments114 of hard cases. It is the combination of reasoned disagreement and the non‐rational decision‐making mechanism of counting reasoned opinions that provides for both in hard cases: a decision and one – of multiple possible – coherent constructions of the law. Pure non‐rational procedures – like flipping a coin – would only provide for the decision part. Pure argumentative procedures – which are not geared towards a decision procedure – would undercut the incentive structure of our agonistic disagreements.115 In the face of unresolvable disagreements endless debates would seem an idle enterprise. That the debates are about winning or losing helps to keep the participants engaged. That the decision depends on counting reasoned opinions guarantees that the engagement focuses on rational argumentation. No plain non‐argumentative procedure would achieve this result. If the judges were to flip a coin at the end of the trial in hard cases, there would be little incentive to engage in an exchange of arguments. It is specifically the count of reasoned opinions which provides for rational scrutiny in our legal disagreements and thus contributes to the rationales discussed above. 2. THE SEMANTICS OF AGONISTIC DISAGREEMENTS The agonistic account does not presuppose a fact of the matter, it is not accompanied by an ontological commitment, and the question of how the fact of the matter could be known to us is not even raised. Thus the agonistic account of legal disagreement is not confronted with the metaphysical or epistemological questions that plague one‐right‐answer theories in particular. However, it must still come up with a semantics that explains in what sense we disagree about the same issue and are not just talking at cross purposes. In a series of articles David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have reconstructed legal disagreements in semantic terms as metalinguistic negotiations on the usage of a term that at the center of a hard case like “cruel and unusual punishment” in a death‐penalty case.116 Even though the different sides in the debate define the term differently, they are not talking past each other, since they are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the same term. The metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the term serves as a semantic anchor for a disagreement on the substantive issues connected with the term because of its functional role in the law. The “cruel and unusual punishment”‐clause thus serves to argue about the permissibility of the death penalty. This account, however only provides a very superficial semantic commonality. But the commonality between the participants of a legal disagreement go deeper than a discussion whether the term “bank” should in future only to be used for financial institutions, which fulfills every criteria for semantic negotiations that Plunkett and Sundell propose. Unlike in mere semantic negotiations, like the on the disambiguation of the term “bank”, there is also some kind of identity of the substantive issues at stake in legal disagreements. A promising route to capture this aspect of legal disagreements might be offered by recent semantic approaches that try to accommodate the externalist challenges of realist semantics,117 which inspire one‐right‐answer theorists like Moore or David Brink. Neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics provide for the theoretical or interpretive element of realist semantics without having to commit to the ontological positions of traditional externalism. In a sense they offer externalist semantics with no ontological strings attached. The less controversial aspect of the externalist picture of meaning developed in neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics can be found in the deferential structure that our meaning‐providing intentions often encompass.118 In the case of natural kinds, speakers defer to the expertise of chemists when they employ natural kind terms like gold or water. If a speaker orders someone to buy $ 10,000 worth of gold as a safe investment, he might not know the exact atomic structure of the chemical element 79. In cases of doubt, though, he would insist that he meant to buy only stuff that chemical experts – or the markets for that matter – qualify as gold. The deferential element in the speaker’s intentions provides for the specific externalist element of the semantics. In the case of the law, the meaning‐providing intentions connected to the provisions of the law can be understood to defer in a similar manner to the best overall theory or interpretation of the legal materials. Against the background of such a semantic framework the conceptual unity of a linguistic practice is not ratified by the existence of a single best answer, but by the unity of the interpretive effort that extends to legal materials and legal practices that have sufficient overlap119 – be it only in a historical perspective120. The fulcrum of disagreement that Dworkin sees in the existence of a single right answer121 does not lie in its existence, but in the communality of the effort – if only on the basis of an overlapping common ground of legal materials, accepted practices, experiences and dispositions. As two athletes are engaged in the same contest when they follow the same rules, share the same concept of winning and losing and act in the same context, but follow very different styles of e.g. wrestling, boxing, swimming etc. They are in the same contest, even if there is no single best style in which to wrestle, box or swim. Each, however, is engaged in developing the best style to win against their opponent, just as two lawyers try to develop the best argument to convince a bench of judges.122 Within such a semantic framework even people with radically opposing views about the application of an expression can still share a concept, in that they are engaged in the same process of theorizing over roughly the same legal materials and practices. Semantic frameworks along these lines allow for adamant disagreements without abandoning the idea that people are talking about the same concept. An agonistic account of legal disagreement can build on such a semantic framework, which can explain in what sense lawyers, judges and scholars engaged in agonistic disagreements are not talking past each other. They are engaged in developing the best interpretation of roughly the same legal materials, albeit against the background of diverging beliefs, attitudes and dispositions that lead them to divergent conclusions in hard cases. Despite the divergent conclusions, semantic unity is provided by the largely overlapping legal materials that form the basis for their disagreement. Such a semantic collapses only when we lack a sufficient overlap in the materials. To use an example of Michael Moore’s: If we wanted to debate whether a certain work of art was “just”, we share neither paradigms nor a tradition of applying the concept of justice to art such as to engage in an intelligible controversy.
This topicality shell outweighs their case and role of the ballot for six reasons:
A) Even if their method is good, it isn’t valuable if it’s not procedurally debatable – they don’t gain any access to their offense because the round isn’t structurally fair.
B) The best solutions are formed with critical contestation from multiple sides – it’s more likely we make a good liberation strategy if both debaters can engage and test it.
Deliberative debate models impart skills vital to respond to existential challenges – this means that I should be able to engage the aff on a substantive level.
Lundberg ‘10: Christian O. Lundberg Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world.
C) Debate is about weighing dissenting opinions, not to just have a performative monologue in which an ethical issue is inherently true or undeniable. Aff can’t just have a moral high ground in which they just claim racism or ableism to be inherently bad without resolution context.
D) They force the neg to extreme generics like cap, neolib, or intersectionality against the aff, which is super predictable for them. ALMOST EVERY AFF DEBATER HAS ENORMOUS BACKFILES OR SPECIFIC CASE ANSWERS FOR THESE K’s? Yeah, that’s a BS grounds limitation of the neg. It’s funny that this T shell is more specific to the aff than the substantive ground you allow.
E) I came to this debate to debate the topic, not what you want us to debate.
The Voter is Jurisdiction.
You as the judge don’t have the jurisdiction to vote on arguments that aren’t substantively debatable and can’t be proven true in the debate space. Three warrants:

1. The ballot says vote for the better debater, my standards prove why they aren’t.
   2. You have the obligation as a moderator to make sure that they adhere to structural commitments and that debate can actually have debates.
   3. The lack of ability to engage means you as a judge cannot vote for them because then it wouldn’t be a debate, but rather a performative monologue.
   If you don’t feel comfortable voting on Jurisdiction, vote on Fairness – Two warrants
2. Fairness is necessary for education insofar as each side must have an equal opportunity to make educational arguments. To deny someone that opportunity in the pursuit of education is to deny them the validity of another educational argument.
   2. The reason that people do debate is because of the competitive nature of the activity, as evidenced by my opponent’s arguments for the ballot. Some debaters will run any argument, no matter how unfair, to win the ballot. That spoils the competition for the opposing debater… in this instance, me.
   Topicality is an issue of competing interpretations. A reasonability paradigm only justifies competing interpretations because there is no metric for what is reasonable without comparing interpretations against one another.
   AND, drop the debater and drop the arg are functionally the same in this round, so drop the debater on T.
   T is the highest layer of the debate – it comes before the AC.

Tournament: CPS | Round: 2 | Opponent: Dougherty Valley | Judge: Cameron Cohen
CP: The United States Federal Government ought to restrict free speech on public college and university campuses by extending Title IX protections to cover racial harassment.

Competition:
A Net Benefits
B Textually competitive – aff ends all restrictions, I increase restrictions on racial harassment

Racial harassment is legal and causes increased attrition rates for minorities and psychological damage – CP solves and is consistent with existing legal frameworks
Gordon and Johnson ‘3: (Jill and Markus, Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 34 2003.  “Race, Speech, and a Hostile Educational Environment: What Color is Free Speech” p.g. 428-9)
Racial harassment in colleges and universities, however, has slipped through the cracks. It cannot be adjudicated under Title VII because Title VII does not extend beyond the workplace to the educational context, and it cannot be adjudicated under Title IX because Title IX proscribes only sexual discrimination in the educational context. Yet it seems more than plausible to infer from the combined spirit of these Civil Rights Acts that they ought to provide the tools to redress harmful types of discrimination. Racial harassment strains the conditions under which black students can remain in college, leads to increased attrition rates for minority students, and causes psychological harm. Just as the protection given to victims of sexual harassment under Title VII was extended to the educational forum through Title IX, so too should the victims of an equally harmful harassment, racial harassment, be protected in that forum. If racial harassment in a school satisfies the Harris standard, then schools ought to have legal avenues toward institutional protections, and victims ought to have legal avenues toward relief, comparable to those provided to victims of sexual harassment. Such an approach would again address the concerns raised by Lawrence over the focus on intent and effects. The focus is not on intentional racism, nor is the focus on the effects that the racism has; just as in the sexual-harassment cases above, the courts could focus on the perception of the environment as hostile and could thus lessen the drowning out of black experience in American institutions. The approach we suggest of giving credence to African Americans’ experience of racism has two virtues beyond its mere consistency with sexualharassment case law: it allays an epistemological problem, and it combats a legal or institutional problem. Racist acts—whether in the form of a court 428 Jill Gordon and Markus Johnson decision or a newspaper editorial—are frequently not recognized by whites as racism, even though African Americans perceive and experience them as such. The experience-based approach mitigates this cognitive handicap that plagues the signatories of the Racial Contract by highlighting racism for them, helping them in “seeing and doing the right thing.”45 Legally or institutionally speaking, the approach mitigates the exclusion of blacks from the “we” of legal discourses. By including black experience and perception, racism can become a problem we are faced with, and that we must deal with in the legal sphere. The preceding argument based on the development of sexual-harassment cases suggests simply that proscription of racial harassment should develop similarly to the proscription of sexual harassment. This entails giving victims the ability to take legal action against a school that fails to respond adequately to such harassment. Furthermore, if legal action against the schools is permitted, then schools must be allowed to enact rules to protect themselves and to safeguard against racial harassment. These rules can develop using the Court’s very own criteria, the Harris test. In practical terms, the mechanisms available in the workplace for such protection are reasonably transferable to the educational environment. What constitutes appropriate response by a school is, of course, dictated by the particularities and policies of the institution. What matters here is merely that the school be allowed to take action against the racism, to protect itself, to end the distress of students, and to allow the work that is done on college campuses—inquiring, studying, evaluating—to continue.

Tournament: CPS | Round: 2 | Opponent: Dougherty Valley | Judge: Cameron Cohen
Welcome to Trump’s dystopian America where the script has been flipped and liberal discourse and activist efforts have been flushed down the toilet. Anti-minority rhetoric and rape-culture have skyrocketed as tribute to Trump’s election – the 1AC’s removal of speech restrictions is devastating for oppressed populations and great for white supremacists.
Dickerson and Saul ‘16: Caitlin Dickerson and Stephanie Saul write in “Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election” on November 10th, 2016 for New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/us/police-investigate-attacks-on-muslim-students-at-universities.html; AB
The fliers depicting men in camouflage, wielding guns and an American flag, appeared in men’s restrooms throughout Texas State University: “Now that our man Trump is elected,” they said. “Time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage.” A year after students at campuses nationwide pushed for greater sensitivity toward cultural differences, the distribution of the Texas State fliers was just one of several episodes this week suggesting that the surprise election of Donald J. Trump is provoking a round of backlash on campuses. At the same time, universities are trying to address more generalized fears about the country’s future, organizing campus meetings and counseling sessions and sending messages to students urging calm. “A lot of Muslim students are scared,” said Abdalla Husain, 21, a linguistics major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who is of Palestinian ancestry. He said some Muslim students on campus were afraid to go outside. “They’re scared that Trump has empowered people who have hate and would be hostile to them.” At San Jose State University in California, a Muslim woman complained that she had been grabbed by her hijab and choked. The police are investigating. At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, alma mater of Hillary Clinton, two male students from nearby Babson College drove through campus in a pickup truck adorned with a large Trump flag, parked outside a meeting house for black students, and spat a black female student, according to campus black student organizations. After being ejected by the campus police, the two students bragged in a video that was widely viewed over social media. Reports of hostility toward minorities were not limited to university campuses. In Durham, N.C., walls facing a busy intersection were painted with graffiti Tuesday with the message, “Black lives don’t matter and neither does your votes,” according to local news reports. Also according to local news reports, a baseball dugout in Wellsville, N.Y., was spray painted with a swastika and the message “Make America white again.” Another swastika, replacing the “T” in Trump, appeared on a storefront in Philadelphia, along with “Sieg heil 2016.” Incidents were also reported at several high schools. At York County School of Technology in York, Pa., a video circulated of students carrying a Trump sign and yelling “white power” as they walked through the hall on Wednesday.” “The whole situation is absolutely horrible,” someone posted on the PTA’s Facebook page. Students at Royal Oak Middle School in Royal Oak, Mich., chanted “build the wall” in the cafeteria on Wednesday, according to a statement by Shawn Lewis-Lakin, the superintendent, who said a video was shared on social media. Throughout the week, threatening messages on social media against racial and religious minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people have spiked. Racist episodes occur regularly at places throughout the United States, including college campuses. Mr. Trump’s election, though, seems to have worked as an accelerant. But the police said that at least some reported incidents on campuses were fake. A Muslim student at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette who said she was attacked on Wednesday by two men – one wearing a Trump hat – recanted her story on Thursday, admitting she had made it up, the police said. At Canisius College in Buffalo, in what officials said began as a prank, a black doll was photographed hanging from a curtain rod in a dorm room on Tuesday night. “One student created a meme with language about ‘Trump fans’ and sent it to friends,” a university statement said. “It’s evident that what may have started as a thoughtless, insensitive prank earlier in the evening in the elevator degraded into a very offensive, inappropriate act later that night,” said the statement by John J. Hurley, the college president. Just last year, a wave of anti-racism protests broke out on campuses across the country. In response, many universities cracked down on students’ insensitivity, and some fired school administrators. But this week, students began to worry that all their work was fruitless with Mr. Trump’s election success. To many, Mr. Trump is the champion of anti-political correctness and embodies the opposition to “safe spaces.” Gay, lesbian, and transgender students were also concerned, said Patrick R. Grzanka, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee. “Our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students are deeply concerned about Trump,” he said. “After enduring months of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric during the campaign, many of us – sexual minorities and gender nonconforming individuals – are asking ourselves, What happens next? Liberal-leaning college students around the country, in a state of shock over the election’s outcome gathered in spontaneous protest marches at some campuses and, at others, asked university leaders to schedule meetings across the campus to reflect on the results. Tennessee was among a large array of universities – public, private, liberal and conservative – that held meetings for concerned students. “Join us for a moment of reflection and gathering of solidarity,” the Office of Multicultural Students wrote in an invitation on Wednesday. “Counseling center staff will be available.” The University of Southern California invited students who had concerns about the election to attend a meeting on Wednesday. About 100 showed up, said Michael Quick, the provost. “We’re hearing a lot from our students, particularly our Muslim students, given the rhetoric of the campaign,” he said. “Given the feeling of many students from last year who expressed concerns about diversity and inclusion, now they’re feeling tremendously marginalized,” he added. Stanford University, in a note signed by its president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, said it would offer “supportive resources and opportunities to gather together” in the wake of the divisive election season. Columbia University scheduled what it called a “post-election conversation and reflection” for its students Wednesday afternoon. Earlier in the day, graduate journalism students at Columbia requested a meeting with faculty members. At Wellesley, which was founded as a safe space for its entirely female student body, the supporters of Mr. Trump driving around campus have rattled students, and administrators have sent a flurry of emails to students this week in response to the episode, which is being investigated by the university police. Wellesley could be considered ground zero for the culture of political correctness that Mr. Trump has criticized; in recent decades, it has introduced guidelines for appropriate language and other protections for addressing racial and religious minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. After the election, even colleges that are unaccustomed to clashes over race or religion struggled to address student safety concerns while fostering free speech. When administrators at Texas State University in San Marcos, which has a mostly minority student body of more than 38,000, learned Wednesday that protests in the campus quad were growing tense, the university president, Denise M. Trauth, tried to head off conflict by releasing a statement to students. “Our aim should be to better understand that which causes divisions among us and to work toward strengthening our bond as a university community. Constructive dialogue is the best way to achieve this goal,” she said. But by late afternoon, the pamphlets depicting men wearing military clothing and bearing arms were already circulating on campus and social media Denise Cervantes, 20, who writes for the student newspaper and is Latina, said she was spat on by a male student wearing a Trump 2016 shirt, who told her she did not belong there anymore. “I didn’t realize that it would get this bad all of a sudden,” Ms. Cervantes said. Thursday evening, Ms. Trauth issued a stronger statement labeling the pamphlets vandalism and saying, “Threats absolutely have no place on our campus or in a free society.” But protests continued throughout the day, and students expressed concern about whether the atmosphere on campus would improve. “This is only two days after,” said Emily Sharp, 21, a senior majoring in communications. “I’m worried that we’re going to see other people doing these things and thinking it’s O.K.”
Rape-culture and sexist rhetoric on college campuses has skyrocketed since Trump’s election.
Hoyt ‘16: James Hoyt writes in “Donald Trump’s election alters the playing field for sexual assault awareness on campuses” on November 21st, 2016 for USA Today College. 5:55 pm EST November 21, 2016 http://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/21/trump-election-sexual-assault-on-campus/; AB
In the days following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, Shelby Bettles has given a lot of thought as to what the result means to her, as an advocate for sexual assault survivors on college campuses. “I think that in the last 36 to 48 hours, I have changed so much as an individual. I think that this election first and briefly shocked me, and then that shock became very concrete in me that this is the climate — and has been the climate — of our United States,” the University of Kansas senior told USA TODAY College on Nov. 10. The context: Trump was caught bragging about his ability to sexually assault women on a tape obtained by the Washington Post. Multiple women have accused him of sexually assaulting them, and he has faced lawsuits alleging sexual assault and sexual harassment. On Nov. 8, he was elected to the highest executive office in the land. His stunning upset of Clinton threw a curve ball at the plans of campus offices and student activists dedicated to preventing sexual assault. Advocates are concerned about the messages Trump’s victory sends in a climate that often treats rape as a minor crime and, specifically, that the administration could roll back enforcement of Title IX. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), a national anti-sexual violence organization, is circulating a petition calling on the president-elect and Congress to address sexual assault on the national level. In Lawrence, Kan., the consequences of the election are exacerbated by recent history. In 2014, KU was rocked by a controversy over its handling of sexual assault cases after the publication of a Huffington Post article that detailed a light punishment for a sexual assault on campus. The university remains embroiled in a Title IX lawsuit in which a former rower alleges that a football player raped her in student housing. In Oct. 2015, KU created the Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Center (SAPEC) after a special task force recommended the university establish an office to address the issue directly. Jen Brockman, the director of SAPEC, said her office is concerned about the tone the election took and how it reflects upon the electorate. “It has given us a lot of examples to use when we speak to students about real experiences and the pervasiveness of rape culture,” Brockman said. “Not even referring to any language that was used necessarily by the president-elect, but by the way our community responded, what we heard by our country responding to, this was the typification of rape culture.” Ronni Cox, a KU senior who staffed a table provided by KU’s Emily Taylor Center for Women and Gender Equity the day after the election, said she was shocked by voters’ decision. “I worry about myself, my peers, just people around me … It just seems like it kind of makes it (rape culture) more acceptable, unfortunately,” she said. Peggy Lorah, director of Penn State’s Center for Women Students, said the election’s result places greater pressure on members of campus communities to look out for one another and said the focus is “holding people accountable for their behaviors” as well as providing resources for students. Lorah said the election also increases the pressure to sustain outreach to men on campus who will spend the next four years with Trump as their president. “Most men don’t think that the behavior we see in a rape culture is okay, and most men don’t engage in it, and so it really is a matter of making sure that all men know that’s true of most men,” Lorah said. “I think that that education has always been crucial and will continue to be crucial.” And Brockman said campus advocates need to be careful in how they treat the president-elect, saying too much focus could be counterproductive in educating people on sexual assault and rape culture. “It’s really easy for us, as a culture … to look at this one individual and to say ‘they are not representative of us,’ to ‘other’ them,” Brockman said. “That’s a false sense of comfort. The views and rhetoric expressed throughout this election cycle in regards to rape culture are a hundred percent representative of the views expressed across our culture and our community. … The bigger concern is that it’s so normalized that we don’t recognize it as being violence.”
Increased Trump rhetoric reinforces hypocrisy, fascism, and neo-nazism, which are thriving with Trump’s new swamp in the White House created through his cabinet picks – it’s a testament and harbinger to American society’s catastrophic failure in politics - causes endless structural violence and increases militarism – this also functionally turns the opponent’s case as militarism becomes far worse with the 1AC
Street ‘16: Paul Street writes in “The Empire Has No Clothes: Trump’s Class War Cabinet, the F-Word, and the Coming Resistance” for Counterpunch on December 14th, 2016. Paul Street will speak in Chicago at the Open University of the Left on Saturday December 17th (Lincoln Park Public Library, 1150 West Fullerton, 2:30 pm) on “The Resistance: Why Trump Won and What We Must Now Do.”  Street will examine the sources of Donald Trump’s remarkable victory in the U.S. presidential election, the dangers posed by Trump/Trumpism, the resistance that is now required, and the special role of the Left in leading that resistance. Street will examine the sources of Donald Trump’s victory, the dangers posed by Trump/Trumpism, the resistance that is now required, and the special role of the Left in leading that resistance.
Anyone who thought Donald Trump was going to live up to his populist-sounding rhetoric and stand up for the “forgotten working people of America” against the evil-doers on Wall Street has been served notice that his campaign oratory was a deceptive public relations act meant to get a selfish billionaire and a team of parasitic super-capitalists installed in the White House. Working Class Heroes A longstanding Washington maxim holds that personnel is policy. Look at Trump’s appointments. They include Steve Mnuchin, a filthy rich former Goldman Sachs partner and hedge-fund capitalist as Secretary of the Treasurer. Another and wealthier hedge fund vulture, Wilbur Ross, is Trump’s choice as Commerce Secretary. Both Mnuchin and Ross have feathered their uber-opulent nests by buying distressed properties and selling them for a profit – turning others’ losses into personal gain. Mnuchin co-founded a bank (OneWest) that foreclosed on thousands of homeowners during the 2008 financial crisis. He made millions after that. At one point, his bank foreclosed on a 90-year old woman after she made a 27-cent payment error. The Donald’s choice for Education Secretary is Betsy DeVos, a billionaire “neo-Calvinist” advocate of Big Business-run charter schools. She is a fierce and dedicated enemy of teachers’ unions and public education. Trump’s Labor Department pick is Andrew Puzder, a fast-food CEO who opposes unions, worker protections, and an increase in the federal minimum wage. Curiously enough considering candidate Trump’s nativist immigrant-bashing, Puzder is a fan of cheap migrant labor. Candidate Trump inveighed against a “financial elite” that bribes politicians in a “broken” system that leaves “millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” So what? His top economic adviser will be Gary Cohn, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Every month, CNN reports, President Trump will consult with a group of top U.S. business executives convened by Steven Schwartzman, CEO of the infamous “alternative investment” firm the Blackstone Group. The group includes a “who’s who” of current and former Fortune 25 CEOs, featuring (so far) GM’s Mary Barra, JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, GE’s former CEO Jack Welch, Disney’s Bob Iger, and Walmart’s Doug McMillon. Quite a gathering of working class heroes! Trump’s top White House political advisor and strategist, Steve Bannon, is a fascist at worst and a vicious white nationalist at best. He is also a Goldman Sachs veteran – a former investment banker in that firm’s Merger and Acquisitions Department. Trump himself will be the richest U.S. president ever. He owes no small part of his fortune to the systematic long-term cheating of workers and consumers. War Cabinet One way to think of the coming Trump team is as a ruling class domestic and global War Cabinet. Mnuchin, Ross, Cohn, Puzder, and other leading Trump economic appointments (including multi-millionaire Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts as Under-Secretary of Commerce) represent top down class war on the American middle, working, and lower classes. DeVos stands for a related business class war on public education and teachers. It isn’t just about class, of course. Trump’s coming majority-tipping Supreme Court appointment will wage war on women by attacking their right to control their own bodies and reproductive health. Trump’s picks for Attorney General (former right-wing Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions), Housing and Urban Development (the hapless Black neocon Dr. Ben Carson), and Homeland Security (retired U.S. Marines General John Kelly) complement top- down class war with related white-supremacist war on civil rights and liberties, Black Lives Matter, “illegal immigrants,” Latinos (naturalized and not), “radical” (and other) Muslims, and the Native American-led pipeline- and fossil fuel-fighters in North Dakota. Look for BLM and the Standing Rock heroes to be designated as domestic “terrorists” by Trump’s Justice and Homeland Security Departments. Expect neo-McCarthyite harassment and persecution of Left dissidents to be encouraged by the new right-wing federal government. The white-supremacist “Blues Lives Matter” gendarme class in and atop the nation’s ever-expanding militarized police state is eagerly anticipating the Inauguration of a new “law and order” champion in the White House. They and their private corporate security comrades can look forward among other things to being deployed in the enforcement of Trumpian schemes to privatize oil and gas-rich Native American reservations. Expect a terrible onslaught of reactionary federal court appointments to deepen the war on basic civil rights and liberties. Defense attorneys have reason to dread Trump’s coming judicial picks. Trump’s “national security” and “defense” appointments – Marines General Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis as Secretary of Defense and former military intelligence General Michael Flynn – are all about waging war on the Islamic world, especially Iran. They also have China in their imperial crosshairs. Yes, the likelihood of war with Russia has faded for now. But Trump can be expected to fan the flames of aggressive, hyper-masculinist militarism like no U.S. president in recent memory. He has made insanely reckless statements about nuclear weapons and promises a significant military build-up – this as the U.S. already accounts for nearly half of all global military spending. We are still waiting to see what place the blood-soaked neo-con warmonger and Muslim hater John Bolton will occupy in Herr Trump’s foreign policy team. Bolton’s name has been floated for Under-Secretary of State. The arch war-criminal Bolton has as much business serving in a diplomatic agency as George Zimmerman has serving in a high school racial diversity and healing program. Eco-Cidal Death Knell And then there’s the business class war on the natural environment. Trump’s most alarming appointment may be the selection of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, an open climate change-denier and enemy of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to head…well, the EPA. This is an open declaration of war on livable ecology. It is a green light to the full-bore Greenhouse Gassing-to death of life on Earth – a transgression that will make the Nazis look like amateur criminals. It could well be “a death knell for the species” (Noam Chomsky). Even more eco-cidally insane, perhaps, is Trump’s appointment (just announced) of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as U.S. Secretary of State. Tillerson is one of the greatest War-on-Livable Ecology Criminals alive today. He was a leading force behind Exxon’s disastrous campaign against climate science, including the dire findings and warnings of his own company’s top research scientists in the late 1970s and 1980s. Like most of Trump’s top cabinet appointees. Tillerson has never headed a government agency. “T-Rex” (as the not-so Adorable Deplorable Sarah Palin once nicknamed Tillerson) atop the State Department is global petro-capitalist insanity on steroids. It likely means that Trump will be bringing back the Keystone XL Pipeline (beyond his promise to “move forward” with the Dakota Access Pipeline of Standing Rock shame). And that the Trump means to put the control of foreign oil at the heart of its coming imperial adventures. (Remember one of Trump’s key criticisms of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq: “he didn’t even get the oil.”) “What good is it to save the planet,” Tillerson asked ExxonMobil shareholders three and a half years ago, “if humanity suffers?” By human suffering, Tillerson meant reduced profits and employment in the fossil fuels sector. And now we have just learned that the openly moronic climate changer denier and fossil fuels super-fan Rick Perry – the former Republican Governor of oil-drenched Texas – is Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary. “During a televised debate in 2011, when he was seeking the Republican nomination,” the New York Times reports,” Mr. Perry intended to list the Department of Energy among agencies he wanted to eliminate, but he could not remember its name.”

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
CP Text: The United States Federal Government should withdraw the entirety of the armed forces.
The military sustains imperialism and militarism – abolishing it solves the aff while avoiding all the disads and turns to the aff.
Shupak ‘15: Greg Shupak writes in “Abolish the Military: On Veterans Day, we should honor those killed and injured in past US wars by stopping future ones.” Jacobin Magazine. Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches over 20,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of 1,000,000 a month. Greg Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph in Canada. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/veterans-day-american-military-iraq-war-libya-vietnam/; AB
Lisa Simpson had the right idea. In a 2002 episode of The Simpsons, the elementary school student tries to impress two college kids by putting a sticker on her bike that says “US Out of Everywhere.” It is a slogan that should be ubiquitous on the Left. With the string of disastrous military interventions across the world in recent years, it’s even more apparent that US crimes aren’t isolated — there’s an underlying structure that produces them. Tackling that underlying structure, though daunting, also fosters opportunities for unity. Because of the sheer destructiveness of US militarism, and its vital role in maintaining global capitalism, a reinvigorated antiwar movement could bring together leftists with a broad range of concerns. So on Veterans Day, here’s how US militarism stands in the way of a just world — and why the Left should come together to bring it to its knees. 1. US imperialism breeds racism. For starters, the main victims of the US military have been people of color. Just since World War II, there are the millions slaughtered in Korea and Indochina, the over one million killed in Iraq, and the tens of thousands in Afghanistan — all of which have then been affixed with dehumanizing labels to rationalize the murdering sprees. The bigotry doesn’t stay overseas. Using racist language to legitimize attacking Arabs or Southeast Asians contributes to the dissemination of racism against minorities in the United States. There’s also the long-running presence of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis in the American forces and the tacit acceptance of their presence by officials. As Reuters’ Daniel Trotta reported in 2012, white supremacist groups encourage their followers who join the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow the “Zionist Occupation Government” that they think is running America and to prepare for the race war that they see as imminent. Former service members such as Wade Page and James Burmeister have carried out racist murders on US soil, and a 2008 report commissioned by the Justice Department found that half of all right-wing extremists in the United States had military experience. 2. The military is anti-feminist. US military actions also need to be thought of as exercises in mass violence against women. Millions of women in the Global South have been killed, maimed, assaulted, or traumatized by the United States military. In just one horrifying example, a set of documents declassified in 2006 shows recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units . . . They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Similarly, activist and scholar Kozue Akibayashi notes that in Okinawa, Japan a “problem caused by the US military presence is sexual or gender-based violence by US soldiers,” including “hundreds of cases of sexual assaults against women and children of all ages.” The same problem exists in Colombia where, according to an April 2015 report, US military soldiers and contractors sexually abused at least fifty-four children between 2003 and 2007 — and were never held accountable because American military personnel are protected by diplomatic immunity agreements between the two countries. Still more women around the world have been widowed and left to raise children, or have been burdened by physically or mentally scarred spouses and family members. Sexual assault is also widespread within the military’s own ranks. The Journal of International Affairs recently reported that, “according to the US government, in 2012, there were 26,000 sexual assaults in the US military.” But “only 3,374 were reported” because a “culture of impunity” prevails. In the US military, it is overwhelmingly women who are subject to sexual violence. A 2010 examination of veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and of Operation Iraqi Freedom found that “of 125,729 veterans who received Veterans Health Administration primary care or mental health services, 15.1 percent of the women and 0.7 percent of the men reported military sexual trauma when screened” — though these are likely conservative estimates because sexual violence tends to be underreported. Many male soldiers, moreover, return from the trauma of war to abuse their families. Veterans are responsible for nearly 21 percent of domestic violence in the United States, and these instances are statistically more likely to result in death than those perpetrated by non-veterans. Their ability to function is also compromised, which often forces their wives to provide for the family and take on a greater share of household tasks. 3. US militarism is bad for American workers and for the planet. US imperialism should be a major concern for labor organizers if for no other reason than that it’s the US poor and working class whose lives, bodies, and minds are usually put on the line by and for capitalists. Yet there are further ways in which the US war machine harms American workers. Extraordinary amounts of resources that could be used to improve people’s lives in the US and elsewhere are instead diverted to the military. In 2013, the total US military expenditure was $640 billion, over $400 billion more than second-place China. During the Cold War, overly optimistic liberals and social democrats looked forward to a “peace dividend” that the American population could enjoy in the event of a permanent thaw in relations with the Soviet Union or its dissolution. Their mistake was to assume that the existence of the USSR was the main reason for the US’s obscenely large military budget. However, the US military doesn’t consume the volume of resources it does because of external threats, but because it is a co-dependent of American capitalism. The US military is itself a site of accumulation and a force for the protection and expansion of American capital’s interests worldwide. At times, organized labor has supported weapons manufacturing on the grounds that it provides Americans with a source of employment that cannot easily be outsourced. It is better, however, to understand the demilitarization of US society as an opportunity for workers. Productive capacities could be shifted from bomb-making to the creation of socially necessary goods. Rather than building instruments of death and environmental degradation, resources could be used to construct the infrastructure needed to save the planet and provide badly needed social services. America’s wars also defoliate, pollute bodies of water, corrupt soil, destroy ecosystems, and kill huge numbers of animals. The Iraq War alone “added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than 60 percent of the world’s nations,” scholar Bruce Johansen reports. An antiwar movement that advocates redirecting resources from the military toward serving human and ecological needs can be a site at which organized labor and environmentalists forge alliances. 4. The US military is global capitalism’s police. Some ostensibly concerned with class politics contend that the military provides workers’ families with decent jobs and opportunities for personal advancement. But this is incredibly myopic. Building movements that confront capital is far more effective at improving the lot of the working class. And challenging capitalism necessitates challenging US imperialism. Capitalism needs certain political conditions in order to operate, such as stable, enforceable property rights across national borders. Yet, as Perry Anderson points out, international legal regimes for ensuring these are weak, and “the general task of coordination” of the capitalist system “can be satisfactorily resolved only by the existence of a superordinate power, capable of imposing discipline on the system as a whole.” That superordinate power is the United States, and its military is global capitalism’s police force. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue, in managing global capitalism, the American state rules through other states, and turning them all into “effective” states for global capitalism is no easy matter. It is the attempt by the American state to address these problems, especially vis-à-vis what it calls “rogue states” in the third world, that leads American imperialism today to present itself in an increasingly unconcealed manner. To be sure, the military is not the only way that the US oversees global capitalism. But because US imperialism is an essential feature of contemporary global capitalism, any blow to one is a blow to the other. Anticapitalists of all stripes are doomed to failure if they do not treat building a new antiwar movement as a foremost concern. 5. The military is no humanitarian force. In the post-Cold War era, few matters have caused as much friction on the Euro-Atlantic left as the question of whether American military might should be used in the name of human rights across the world. Despite its horrific record, some progressives persist in believing that the US military can be used to liberate women, build democracy, and protect human rights. NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya is just another example of the misguided tendency to view the United States military as the armed wing of Amnesty International. In Slouching Towards Sirte, Maximilian Forte writes of the US’s frustration at Qaddafi’s attempt to obstruct the building of Africa Command (AFRICOM) bases in Africa, which the US had hoped would help it extract resources throughout Africa. In 2008, American Vice Admiral Robert Moeller said that one of AFRICOM’s aims was to ensure “the free flow of resources from Africa to the global market,” and in 2010 he said that one of AFRICOM’s purposes is “to promote American interests.” Similarly, Horace Campbell’s examination of Wikileaks cables finds that in 2007–08, Western oil companies such as the American firm Occidental were “compelled to sign new deals with Libya’s National Oil Company, on significantly less favorable terms than they had previously enjoyed.” A January 2010 cable shows that oil companies and the American government were frightened by the Qaddafi government’s “rhetoric in early 2009 involving the possible nationalization of the oil sector.” There is no doubt that Qaddafi’s government violated human rights, but the professed humanitarian concerns were only a pretext for American involvement. We must resist the misconception that the American armed forces can play a neutral role on the world stage to protect victims of rights violations or to end tyranny. The US military’s purpose is to pursue and protect the interests of the American ruling class. As Doug Stokes explains, since the end of World War II American foreign policy has been focused on “the maintenance and defense of an economically open international system conducive to capital penetration and circulation” — and a global strategy to halt any social or political force that challenges, even mildly, this system. We’ve seen this in in the US military assaults on Cuba, Vietnam, and Grenada, to say nothing of the innumerable covert or proxy attacks carried out against left-leaning forces around the world for nearly a century. The US maintains eight hundred military bases outside of its borders — an example of the kind of geopolitical posturing that allows for US political and economic hegemony across the globe. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, where the United States is able to safeguard its commercial interests and enhance its economic opportunities by threatening to quash any social disturbance that may disrupt the flow of oil or the circulation of petrodollars. Even partially weakening the US war machine would afford the socialist initiatives outside the US — particularly those in the Global South — the room to flourish. And if the Left can peel back the humanitarian veneer of American intervention, it will be harder for imperialism to sell its wars to the domestic population. As distant as it may seem, we can construct real bonds of internationalism rooted in solidarity. Immobilizing the US war machine would be immensely beneficial to virtually every cause with which leftists are concerned. A reinvigorated anti-imperialist, antiwar movement is thus an ideal site for leftists with disparate priorities to converge in ways that can strengthen us all. We overlook this opportunity at our own peril.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it.
Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
And the fear of death causes psychological damage – rejection of this fear causes greater appreciation of life.
Van Nuys ‘8: Dr. David Van Nuys writes in “AN INTERVIEW WITH IRVIN YALOM, MD ON DEATH ANXIETY” under the Psychotherapy section, February 20th. Dr. Irvin Yalom is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University and the author of several highly acclaimed textbooks, including Existential Psychotherapy and The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. He is also the author of stories and novels related to psychotherapy, including Love's Executioner, When Nietzsche Wept, Lying on the Couch, Momma and the Meaning of Life, and The Schopenhauer Cure. His latest non-fiction book is Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=docandid=28821; AB
Though death cannot be avoided, confronting the fact that you will die has rewards, namely that people who are able to do it tend to become calmer, more centered and aware and more able to ignore distractions and anxieties and focus on what is truly important (e.g., loving relationships). Confronting death makes life more poinient and meaningful in essence. You appreciate life more if you treat each day as your last. This is illustrated quite well by Dicken's classic story, "A Christmas Carol" in which the protagonist, Scrooge, has an awakening into life and compassion only after the Ghost of Christmas Future shows him his grave.
The fear of death dissolves the ability to live a mentally liberated life in which we can live life to the fullest – embracing death is necessary to remove the shackles of death’s supposed evil ontology.
Howard ‘9: January 1, 2009, Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness, Review by Benjamin Howard of Roshi’s new book: BEING WITH DYING: CULTIVATING COMPASSION AND FEARLESSNESS IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH, PhD in anthropology
“Snow was general all over Ireland,” writes James Joyce at the end of his short story “The Dead.” In this celebrated story Gabriel Conroy, a middle-aged Dubliner, comes to terms with his own mortality. As often in Western literature, snow is a metaphor for death. Today, what is general all over America—and indeed the world—is fear, whether its object be joblessness, a terrorist attack, or the more familiar specters of aging, sick-ness, and death. What have Zen teachings to say about fear? And what has Zen practice to offer? One person who has confronted fear in general and the fear of death in particular is Joan Halifax Roshi, founder and Abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Trained as an anthropologist, Roshi Joan turned to Zen practice after the death of her grandmother. For the past four decades she has devoted her life to teaching Zen and caring for the dying. In her new book, Being with Dying (Shambhala Publications), Halifax presents the fruit of her life’s work. Observing that the fear of death causes many of us to avoid, ignore, or otherwise deny the “only certainty of our lives,” she reminds us that “to deny death is to deny life.” And to embrace death can be the ultimate form of liberation: The sooner we can embrace death, the more time we have to live completely, and to live in reality. Our acceptance of death influences not only the experience of dying but also the experience of living; life and death lie along the same continuum. One cannot—as so many of us try to do—lead life fully and struggle to keep the inevitable at bay.
The 1AC prescribes death to have an evil ontology – this is a terrible foundation for making decisions because it actively prohibits discourse against oppressive structures under a rhetoric of a greater good and is an independent reason to reject the aff.
insert card about rhetoric increasing structure violence
Turns the aff - structural violence outweighs – kills more people than nuclear war.
Gilligan '96: (James, Faculty – Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, p. 191-196)
You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcibly and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterize their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhi’s observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their virulent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence of our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence of this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint By “structural violence” I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstratably large portion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society’s collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting “structural” with “behavioral violence,” by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence in at least three major respects The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time. Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acs; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. Structural violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. Neither the existence, the scope and extent, nor the lethal power of structural violence can be discerned until we shift our focus from a clinical or psychological perspective, which looks at one individual at a time, to the epidemiological perspective of public health and preventative medicine. Examples are all around us. Continues – Page 195 The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those caused by genocide-~--or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 deaths, and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetuated on the week and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence—structural or behavioral—is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.
Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative.
Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not.
Emotional numbing is the result of fearing death – we must free ourselves to regain full emotion
Anderson ‘4: Nancy Anderson writes in “Work with Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living” in 2004.  
Fear of death causes preoccupation with the idea of death, fostering lack of purpose and concentration on what you cannot control. People who fear death often numb their feelings as a way to avoid awareness of their impending deaths. Without the feelings, they live in the illusion that time is not passing by. Concentrating on the future is also an effective way to avoid the present. For example, one of my clients worried about old age and death even though she was in her early fifties. Sarah’s preoccupation with her demise was reinforced by all other fears: the fear of poverty, losing love, criticism, and illness. Underneath all the fears was an unconscious belief that life was meaningless.
The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting their survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death.
AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key.
Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171
This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power.
The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm.
Extinction is inevitable – especially under the aff’s fear of death
Burrowes ‘14: Robert J. Burrowes writes in “Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?” on December 17th, 2014. Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40499.htm; AB
In my view, human extinction is the most likely outcome. But not simply because we are inflicting too many insults on the planetary environment. Extinction is inevitable because of human fear and, specifically, unconscious fear: The fear in ourselves and others that is not experienced consciously but which often drives three capacities that are vitally important in any context: the focus of our attention, our capacity to adequately analyse the evidence (if we get our attention focused on it) and our behaviour in response to this analysis. For example, if you do not know that your fear is making you screen out unpalatable information, then you won't even notice that you have turned your attention elsewhere and have now forgotten what you just read. Or your fear might prevent you adequately analysing the evidence and/or responding intelligently to it.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Individual agents are only responsible for things that they have control over.
Levi ‘5: Neil Levy writes in “The Good, The Bad, and The Blameworthy,” Journal of ethics and social philosophy June 2005
Whereas an act is attributable to an agent if it is expressive of who she is, agents are accountable for actions only if they had a reasonable opportunity directly or indirectly to avoid infringing the standards for the violation of which they are held responsible (Watson, 2004b: 276). Agents are able directly to avoid such an infringement if they are able to conform their acts to the relevant standard; they are able indirectly to avoid infringement if they were able to avoid being held to that standard at all. Thus, agents can be responsible for their failed actions in the absence of a capacity to conform to the relevant standard just in case they could have avoided the requirement in the first place--for instance, someone who accepts the role of a doctor, knowing what kinds of skills are required to occupy it competently, is not excused responsibility for harming her patients on the grounds that she lacked the skill to do better, so long as she had the opportunity to avoid accepting the role.
This model of responsibility is volitionism, where agents are morally responsible for actions they had control over. Individual agents cannot be held responsible for their actions. No one knows whether there was malicious action for absolutely sure.
Levi ‘5: Neil Levy writes in “The Good, The Bad, and The Blameworthy,” Journal of ethics and social philosophy June 2005
Scanlon's might reply that assessments of responsibility must bottom out somewhere, and that the most plausible final court of appeal is in the character of the agent. But why should we think that? Why not say, instead, that responsibility bottoms out with acts of choice? Perhaps Scanlon thinks that that way an infinite regress lies; acts of choice could only ground our responsibility if we were responsible for our ability to choose, and such a demand is in principle unsatisfiable. On this view, only an ens causa sui could be responsible. But it certainly does not follow, from the fact that we cannot have chosen to possess the capacity to make choices, that our responsibility does not bottom out in our acts of choice. Suppose, with Wolf, that responsibility requires normative competence. Whether or not agents possess that competence is, typically, not up to them. Instead it is a matter of luck: Good upbringing,native capacity and so on, is required, and none of these is within the control of the agent. The fact that agents are not responsible for their normative competence does not however prevent us from asking whether they are responsible for their actions. On the volitionist form asking whether they are responsible for their actions. On the volitionist view, I may not be responsible for whether I am in the responsibility ballpark, but I am responsible for what I do when I find myself there.
AND suing police municipalities is barred by the supreme court case Thompson v. Connick
Chemerinsky ‘14: ERWIN CHEMERINSKY AUGUST 26, 2014 How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/opinion/how-the-supreme-court-protects-bad-cops.html?hpandaction=clickandpgtype=Homepageandmodule=c-column-top-span-regionandregion=c-column-top-span-regionandWT.nav=c-column-top-span-regionand_r=1
The court has also weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the city’s or county’s own policy violated the Constitution. In almost every other area of law, an employer can be held liable if its employees, in the scope of their duties, injure others, even negligently. This encourages employers to control the conduct of their employees and ensures that those injured will be compensated. A 2011 case, Connick v. Thompson, illustrates how difficult the Supreme Court has made it to prove municipal liability. John Thompson was convicted of an armed robbery and a murder and spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Two days before Mr. Thompson’s trial began in New Orleans, the assistant district attorney received the crime lab’s report, which stated that the perpetrator of the armed robbery had a blood type that did not match Mr. Thompson’s. The defense was not told this crucial information. Through a series of coincidences, Mr. Thompson’s lawyer discovered the blood evidence soon before the scheduled execution. New testing was done and again the blood of the perpetrator didn’t match Mr. Thompson’s DNA or even his blood type. His conviction was overturned, and he was eventually acquitted of all charges. The district attorney’s office, which had a notorious history of not turning over exculpatory evidence to defendants, conceded that it had violated its constitutional obligation. Mr. Thompson sued the City of New Orleans, which employed the prosecutors, and was awarded $14 million But the Supreme Court reversed that decision, in a 5-to-4 vote, and held that the local government was not liable for the prosecutorial misconduct. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that New Orleans could not be held liable because it could not be proved that its own policies had violated the Constitution. The fact that it's prosecutor blatantly violated the Constitution was not enough to make the city liable.
Thus Counter-Plan: The Supreme Court of the United States ought to set new precedent that overturns Connick v. Thomas, so that government municipalities may be held responsible in civil court for the actions of their employees.
The net benefit of the CP is the volitional responsibility of officers.
The AC assumes that the ones responsible for constitutional tort is the officer, but this assumes that the officer is maliciously choosing to violate rights. Although This does happens it falls outside the scope of qualified immunity. The truth is that police officers are ill equipped to make the kinds of decisions they make.
King ‘16: Shaun King July 25, 2016 KING: To help fix police brutality, cops can no longer have less training than the average cosmetologist
Speaking with the Daily News, former police officer Randy Shrewsberry said, "On average, state basic police training is 622 hours with no required apprenticeship. Of course there is some time with a Field Training Officer — which is not mandated in most states and is fully subjective to the employing department. "Conversely, the basic training requirements for cosmetologists is 1,570 hours, with an average of 1,080 mandated apprenticeship hours with a total of 2,650 required hours — and that's just the average. Additional research shows that there is little to no requirement of continued education for police officers. Those states that do mandate continued education it is usually in the ballpark of 40 hours per year." Right away, Whittingham discovered police officers in Nordic countries are required to receive at least two full years of nonstop, university-style classroom training before they become officers. In California, police are required to complete 833 hours (that's 21 weeks) of training. That's on the longer side for most states in America, but wouldn't even equal a single semester of the 104 weeks required in Norway. Furthermore, entire police departments in places like Sweden and Norway can often go several years without firing a single bullet. Yet, in spite of the reality that they use lethal force exponentially less than America police, they are still trained exponentially more. Because so little classroom time is required of American police officers, much of what they learn is on-the-job training. Theoretically, this may not sound harmful, but if police departments already have bad practices in place, and officers are learning more on the job than they are in the classroom, what they learn from their colleagues will reign supreme. If we are to change the culture of American policing and create safer environments for police and citizens, the length of training they receive must drastically increase.
The training that police receive plays a large part into why they can act incompetently, the true blame for their actions falls on the institution that sanctioned untrained force, rather than on the officer that thought it was OK.

Tournament: Central Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
First is Framing
The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
First, the aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.

Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t.  

Second is the Substance
The aff’s use of civil suits focuses on punishing individual perpetrators of violence – this obscures the endemic violence of police forces
Feldman 15 (Leonard Feldman, Hunter College, CUNY) “Police Violence and the Legal Temporalities of Immunity” LADI
On the same day the Department of Justice declined to prosecute Ferguson Missouri Officer Darren Wilson for civil rights violations in the shooting death of Michael Brown, it issued a scathing report as part of a “Pattern and Practice” investigation of the entire police force. Concerning the former—the decision not to prosecute—while this paper has focused on the legal grey hole of civil litigation for civil rights violations, it is possible to detect similar forms of legal immunity in the high thresholds for prosecution established by 18 U.S.C. § 242. The legal reasoning overlaps 25 with that in civil litigation because in the criminal cases the courts use the same standard of “objective reasonableness” developed in the civil cases (Graham, Garner, and Scott) to establish that a rights violation occurred. While there is no qualified immunity defense (according to the Supreme Court in Pearson) there is a higher willfulness standard (and “specific intent” requirement) for proving a violation that similarly works to shield police.55 (Campaign Zero, discussed below, recommends eliminating the willfulness standard for Federal Civil Rights prosecutions of police officers.56) Perhaps the Court felt less compelled to erect barriers to criminal prosecutions (as opposed to civil litigation) since it assumed that federal prosecutors’ discretion would accomplish the very same objective. Concerning the latter—the Department of Justice’s report on the entire police force of Ferguson, as well as the complicity of judges and city officials—it offers the promise of constraining police use of force by using the threat of litigation to address broader and deeper policies and practices. As Coates argues, “the focus on the deeds of alleged individual perpetrators, on perceived bad actors, obscures the broad systemic corruption which is really at the root.”57 Similarly, Madar writes, “far more useful are the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s root-and-branch interventions into violently dysfunctional police forces, triggered by ‘patterns and practices’ of systematic rights violations rather than any one particular incident.”58 Moving beyond both law and sovereignty narrowly construed, enables attention to what Harmon describes as the “problem of regulation” and the role of “other institutions and sources of law in regulating the police.”59 As Harmon shows, police use of force is embedded in a dense but also permissive regulatory environment running the gamut from administrative rules to employment and collective 26 bargaining law to state level licensing regulations. Consent decrees, Memoranda of Understanding and Collaborative Agreements all emerge out of or in the shadow of Department of Justice “pattern or practice” investigations, aiming to change policies and practices at the department level. Furthermore, even tools such as quantitative benchmarking can be deployed in the service of structural reform: A DOJ study cited by Rushin of the Washington D.C. police force contrasted what they discovered to be 15 rate of excessive force incidents as compared to a benchmark “‘well-managed and supervised police department’ that should only expect about 1 or 2 percent of all incidents to involve excessive use of force.”60 And in Cincinnati, Shatmeier describes successful police department reform in the wake of a Department of Justice “pattern or practice” investigation through consent agreements that relied on “experimentalist regulation.”61
Using the law to solve the law is contradictory. The aff assumes the police violence can be addressed by bringing it under the control of law – in fact, the law is the apparatus legitimating police violence. Civil suits only identify “operational errors” committed by the police, fail to convict police, and excuse and reinforce the violence of the policing apparatus itself.
Simon Behrman 11 (Simon Behrman, ) Police killings and the law – International Socialism, 1-4-2011 LADI
Ever since the late 1970s some on the left have declared that Britain is either in or on the cusp of a police state.5 Yet even after the miners’ strike, various pieces of draconian anti-terrorist legislation and other attacks on civil liberties, the British state remains very much a capitalist democracy. Nevertheless, during this period the use of firearms has become ever more widespread in the police force. It was little noticed, for example, that during the 1990s police forces up and down the country began regularly deploying Armed Response Vehicles (ARV), equipped with a huge stock of firepower.6 The impetus for this began when the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland. Indeed, the weaponry introduced including live firearms, plastic bullets and CS gas were all road-tested first in Northern Ireland. The point is that just as these developments in police practice have outlived the Irish “emergency”, so too a state of emergency appears to be becoming a more permanent feature of policing policy which has in turn led to a justification for retaining and expanding the right of the police to use lethal force. Examples where “unprecedented” circumstances have been claimed as justification for the use of police-state tactics are mass detentions of anti-capitalist protesters and the threat of suicide bombers. It is very likely that as social instability caused by the economic crisis develops this too will be claimed as justification for the continued use of “emergency” powers. Of course, Marx and Engels argued that capitalist democracy was a major advance over feudalism and offered to the working class a far better terrain on which to fight than other, more authoritarian, forms of capitalist rule. Yet throughout his writings, from “On the Jewish Question” in 1843 right through to the Critique of the Gotha Programme over 30 years later, Marx highlighted two crucial aspects of capitalist democracy. First, democracy and equality in the political sphere mask the massive inequalities that exist in the economic domain where capital operates a dictatorship over labour. Second, as Lenin put it, capitalist democracy provided “the best possible political shell of capitalism”.7 Because the working class poses such a potentially powerful threat to the dictatorship of capital, relying on rule by consent rather than by violence is always the preferred tactic of bourgeois rule. But, and this is the key point, the monopoly on the use of violence that the dictatorship of capital exercises through its state means that killings by the police, along with other forms of state terror, can be accommodated without violating the norms of capitalist democracy. This is achieved via the rule of law, specifically the legal form that, as the Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis argued, shares the same structure as the commodity form. My argument here is that certain police-state tactics such as extra-judicial killings have become possible without the loss of legitimacy and rule by consent conferred by governing under the rule of law. Instead law itself has become a perfect vehicle for such tactics. In short, police violence must be understood not as a departure from capitalist democracy but as a function of it. From policing by terror to policing by consent In spite of the shocking nature of recent killings by the police, it is important to recognise that throughout their history the police have frequently used extreme violence against suspects, bystanders, demonstrators and workers on strike. The violence deployed by the modern police is in fact far less than that of their predecessors of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Douglas Hay has described how the British ruling class of that period imposed their authority through state terror.8 From 1688 until 1820 the death penalty was extended from about 50 offences to over 200, most involving crimes against property.9 Executions were bloody public spectacles intended to instil fear into the lower classes. An additional element of this strategy involved armed members of the local gentry, the yeomanry and special constables. If those ad hoc forces failed to keep order they were reinforced by the deployment of the military around the country. This became increasingly necessary with the intensification of riots in the countryside as the effects of the birth of modern capitalism began to bite. Following in the wake of this brute force, judges would be sent into the affected areas to dispense summary justice. The causes of the riots and the need for the ruling class to impose terror on the populace were rooted in a massive transformation of economic relations during the 18th century. This represented a concerted shift from the remnants of feudalism towards capitalism. Brutal methods were necessary for the ruling class during a period that saw a massive theft from the poor in a process described by Marx as the “primitive accumulation of capital”.10 The new bourgeoisie seized common lands through successive Enclosure Acts, thus impoverishing and starving the local peasantry who relied on these to support and feed themselves. Enclosure had two effects—forcing the rural poor to resort to poaching and scavenging on the estates of the rich, and pushing increased numbers of them from the land into the cities to seek work. The uprooting of communities in the countryside and the chaos of expanding cities with a lack of housing and work for the new arrivals led to social instability fed by anger and desperation from those who had been dispossessed. This period of transition saw the ruling class deploy a combination of forms of rule inherited from the feudal period, and new forms that better suited a capitalist society. An inheritance from feudalism was the use of terror tempered by mercy. The huge increase in crimes punishable by the death penalty was in fact accompanied by a comparative reduction in its actual use. More often those sentenced to death were encouraged to seek clemency from either the king or the property owner against whom they had committed the offence. Assuming they demonstrated a suitable amount of humility, they would be shown mercy and their sentence commuted. Note that in this arrangement law and socio-economic relations appear in one and the same guise. The same person who held a higher social position to you could also at their discretion prosecute you. Following conviction they could accept or reduce the punishment. Sometimes the property owner would negotiate with the convict terms for doing work on their land in exchange for dropping the prosecution. In effect, this was not the rule of law but instead naked class power adorned with some of the rituals of law. In like manner, the application of physical force was not governed by law, but rather by expediency. Once a riot broke out the armed forces of the state were permitted to use whatever force was necessary to restore the king’s peace. This worked up to a point when dealing with the rural poor. For the landed gentry, the debilitating injuries and killing of the local peasants did not disturb their lives or livelihoods on their increasingly large estates. Moreover, the only weapon the peasantry could deploy against the force of the state was their own ability to organise and fight. But face to face against a much better armed and organised military force, they were invariably beaten. With the growth of the working class in the cities the balance of class forces changed. The urban working class living closer together in built up areas were better able to organise and defend themselves. At the 1819 “Peterloo” massacre in Manchester, for example, the crowd numbered possibly up to 150,000, larger than any riot or uprising since the English Revolution almost two centuries earlier. In addition, many of the protesters had been carrying out practice drills for weeks in advance. With just 1,000 troops and 400 constables, the authorities would only be able to break up the protest through the use of extreme violence, and so it was. Men, women and children were stampeded by horses, sabred and whipped relentlessly through the streets of Manchester. The attack that began shortly before 2pm lasted well into the evening, at the end of which at least 11 were dead and about 500 injured. Peterloo exposed the limits of the strategy of terror deployed against the working class. Such concentrated violence caused a major scandal that shocked even sections of the middle classes and the establishment. Moreover, the violence failed to subdue the emerging movement for political and civil rights. Instead it led to a growing number of demonstrations, riots and strikes culminating in the great Chartist movement for manhood suffrage. The Chartists were responsible for, among other things, organising in 1842 the first general strike in history. This new form of resistance was not as easy to deal with as a riot. After all one cannot literally beat a mass of workers back to work. Also, if too many are incapacitated by police and military violence, the capitalists will suffer in the immediate term through fewer workers being able to work. Indeed, the level of violence was far less than in previous uprisings such as Peterloo and at Merthyr in previous decades. The sentences handed out to Chartists were minimal compared with earlier reckonings by the ruling class. No one was sentenced to death and most convictions for rioting or other crimes were punished with terms of imprisonment of a few months up to a few years, although the leading agitators were treated more harshly, many of them sentenced to transportation or much longer jail terms. The fear of the power of the working class also led the government to concede a number of reforms such as the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which led initially to lower food prices, and the Factory Act 1847 limiting working hours. This was in contrast to the pattern during the 18th century where the ruling class was able to steal wealth from the poor at an ever increasing rate. It was also during this period that the military began to be replaced by the police as the primary tool for enforcing public order. The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 established the force in the capital. In response to the first Chartist agitation, the 1839 County Police Act was enacted allowing the formation of regional police forces. The fear of disorder from demobilised soldiers returning from the Crimean War led to the 1856 County and Borough Act which established police forces across the whole of the country. This period during the mid-19th century represents British capitalism maturing from the more brutalist primitive accumulation of capital into a settled capitalist democracy. Central to this process was the development of the rule of law as the primary method of enforcing order. Legally regulated state violence was replacing naked class terror. The police force was founded on the principle of “citizens in uniform”. In other words, they were bound by the same laws as anyone else. They were also made structurally independent from the control of either politicians or individual members of the ruling class. Thus they were also bound by law in a manner unlike that of the yeomanry or other military forces, whose authority came directly from the Crown and the socio-economic power exercised in localities by the landed gentry and aristocracy. The establishment of the police was part and parcel of a move away from a form of class rule which saw little separation between economic and juridical power. Within decades the state assumed a monopoly on the application of criminal law and, with the police, a monopoly over the use of violence. This accruing of power by the state at first alarmed sections of the ruling class, which is why many of them initially opposed the setting up of a police force. But it quickly became clear that the use of physical force by the capitalist state would not be deployed against property rights, but against labour and the poor. In his classic work on the birth of the prison, Michel Foucault shows convincingly how the move from the application of the power of the king to the power of law provided a more efficient and less risky form of social control. The messy system in force during the later feudal period could lead to: the fear of the uproar, shouting and cheering that the people usually indulge in, the fear that there would be disorder, violence, and outbursts against the parties, or even against the judges… Before the justice of the sovereign, all voices must be still.11 The final word uttered by an apparently neutral and rational law was far more effective in silencing the oppressed. The police became legitimised as “embodiments of impersonal, rational authority”, as opposed to the naked class power of the yeomanry.12 What Foucault glosses over is the fact that this change was a direct result of a set of new economic relationships. The feudal order rested on an ideology of a class born to rule; thus their authority and their right to dispense “justice” was unquestionable. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, rule on the basis of a series of contractual relations. Economic exploitation is rooted in the payment of wages for labour power. This has the effect of normalising exploitative relations such as in the expression: “A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” Equally, the rule of law is predicated on notions of fairness, reasonableness and equivalence. Phrases such a “paying the price” for committing a crime, or “let the punishment fit the crime” illuminate this aspect of law. This is quite distinct from feudalism when punishment was a demonstration of the “majesty” and power of the monarch, the nobility or the church. The contractual nature specific to capitalist exploitation finds its equivalent in legal relations. Phil Cohen identifies the police as the first branch of the British state to develop an ideological as well as a purely repressive function…to protect the institutions of private property, and to enforce statutory norms of public order primarily designed to ensure the free circulation of commodities, including the commodity of labour power.13 At first the urban working class had to be disciplined into accepting these norms. Violence between police and local working class communities, defending what they considered as their own territory, was a common feature right up to World War One. But over time there was a “gradual ideological penetration of ‘The Law’ into the basic conditions of working class life”.14 Cohen explains this as a result of social changes in the composition of the working class. While there may be some truth in that, referring to the police as “The Law” also illustrates something else. Unlike their predecessors, the police were not just deployed to put down riots and other major disturbances, but also assigned to manage everyday order in the community. Criminologists sometimes describe this as a dual role involving “parking tickets and class repression”.15 As a result the law and “The Law” gradually came to be seen as indispensable to a well-ordered society, irrespective of class, politics or economics. In short, an ideology of “police fetishism” developed.16 I would argue that this is a direct result of two other fetishes closely linked together—that of law and commodities. Pashukanis In his 1924 book, Law and Marxism, Pashukanis developed what has become known as the “commodity form” theory of law. In it he sought to explain the legal form as one inherently tied to the commodity form. He begins his analysis using the same methodology as Marx does in Capital: “In as much as the wealth of capitalist society appears as ‘an immense collection of commodities’, so this society itself appears as an endless chain of legal relations”.17 What these two sets of relationships—commodity exchange and legal relations—have in common is the notion of the autonomous egoistic individual. When commodity owners go to market to engage in trade, they must each recognise in the others their exclusive right of ownership over their commodities; otherwise they cannot expect their own rights to be so recognised. Thus the basic principle of commodity exchange, the freedom of every seller freely to dispose of their property, gives rise to the concept of universal and equal rights, which is an ideological misrepresentation of capitalist relations as a whole, but one that accurately reflects the actual material conditions in which subjects under capitalism find themselves. The claim of one commodity owner on all others to recognise his own rights as such creates a subjective, and thus seemingly natural, desire to recognise those same rights in others. From this starting point Pashukanis is able to make the following analogy with law: “The legal subject as representative and addressee of every possible claim, the succession of subjects linked together by claims on each other, is the fundamental legal fabric which corresponds to the economic fabric”.18 Thus just as we have the market in which every buyer and seller comes metaphorically brandishing their commodities to exchange, so the law is a regulated market of legal subjects haggling over their respective bundles of rights. The rule of capital is thus also necessarily the rule of law. In “On the Jewish Question” Marx argued that the bourgeoisie emancipated the state from economics and religion by placing it (the state) above society, and thus giving it the appearance of being independent and above the classes.19 As Pashukanis expresses it: By appearing as a guarantor, authority becomes social and public, an authority representing the impersonal interest of the system… Thus there arises, besides direct unmediated class rule, indirect reflected rule in the shape of official state power as a distinct authority, detached from society.20 This provides a theoretical underpinning for the transition from naked class rule to rule by law that I discussed earlier. Commodities and legal relations did, of course, exist in many pre-capitalist societies. But in the same way that a society where free alienation of property raises the commodity to its highest and most generalised level, where exploitation becomes mediated via the legal contract, ie where the exploited worker “figures as a legal subject disposing of his labour power as a commodity”, so also legal relations reach their highest form under conditions of generalised commodity exchange: “The legal form attains universal significance, legal ideology becomes the ideology par excellence, and defending the class interest of the exploiters appears with ever increasing success as the defence of the abstract principle of legal subjectivity”.21 The crucial import of Pashukanis’s analysis is that he is able to reveal how the specific form of social regulation under capitalism, that is rights-based law, is able successfully to transform the subjective needs of the ruling class into an objective set of relationships for society as a whole, by means of which the coercive role of law is then in turn subjectivised (internalised) by the rest of us. The dispersal of responsibilities At first blush it may seem counter-intuitive to apply a theory of law that identifies the logic of equivalence and autonomous egoistic individualism to the application of lethal force by the state against unarmed individuals. However, if we take at look at how the police are able to justify their actions in law, the relevance of Pashukanis will become apparent. There was no disputing the fact that de Menezes was neither armed when he was shot, nor was he a terrorist. How could this wilful and unnecessary taking of life not result in any legal sanction? Crucially, the failure to bring any individual or group of police officers to justice over the de Menezes killing was a result of the dispersal of responsibilities created by law.22 This process rests upon the principle of the autonomous egoistic individual who functions as the commodity owner and legal subject par excellence. In much the same way that the market economy appears as an impersonal and naturalistic process involving an endless chain of buyers and sellers, so law functions in a similar way as each individual stands in relation to all others owing certain duties and possessing certain rights. One of the aspects of the operation which was highlighted in the inquest into de Menezes’s death was the police’s bronze, silver, gold structure used for firearms, and other emergency operations. This structure was developed by the Metropolitan Police in order to develop clear command, following the, from their point of view, catastrophic failure of organisation during the Broadwater Farm riots in 1985.23 One aspect of this system highlighted in the de Menezes inquest was that it removed many crucial strategic and tactical decisions from the officers on the ground and placed them instead in the hands of commanding officers situated miles away in a room in New Scotland Yard. This led to several crucial mistakes in the operation that meant that police officers on the ground missed several opportunities safely to stop de Menezes before he entered the Tube. But it also reinforced the dispersal of responsibilities in such a way that none of the commanding officers, nor any of the officers on the ground could be held criminally liable for the decisions made. This is one reason why the Metropolitan Police as a corporate entity could be successfully prosecuted under health and safety legislation, but that no individual officer was answerable in law for the mistakes made and the decisions taken. A similar conclusion was reached in the Police Ombudsman’s report into the 2003 killing of Neil McConville, a teenage joy-rider in Northern Ireland.24 According to the Ombudsman, the failure to appoint a Bronze Commander in charge on the ground was a critical factor leading to the death of McConville. Thus the officers who carried out the operation were exonerated from blame. On the other hand the senior officers who held the positions of Silver and Gold Commander respectively were merely reprimanded for bad management. Because they were not on the ground and did not fire any shots they were not culpable either. Several senior police officers testified during the de Menezes inquest that one of the concerns the Metropolitan Police had when developing the Kratos policy was that the armed police officer on the ground would be very hesitant in executing a suspect without warning without legal safeguards to protect themselves. During Kratos training members of the specialist firearms unit SO19, who would be assigned to carry out the executions, expressed fears that they would be held both morally and legally responsible, particularly should anything go wrong. It was for this reason that the role of the Designated Senior Officer (DSO) was created within the Kratos policy. The idea was that in a situation where police officers found themselves confronted by a suspected suicide bomber, the DSO, situated in New Scotland Yard, would be responsible for giving the order to shoot. This would take the pressure off the police officers who would actually have to carry out such an extreme and violent act. But surely this then places full legal responsibility on the DSO? Not so, according to the evidence presented to the de Menezes inquest. For the DSO, Commander Cressida Dick, did not give any such order; indeed, her last order to the SO19 officers before they descended into the Tube was ambiguous. The SO19 officers ended up using deliberately lethal force, due to what they claimed was a reasonable judgement based on de Menezes’s behaviour, and coupled with the reports they had received from surveillance officers, senior officers and the DSO during their briefings that morning and throughout the tracking of de Menezes. The responsibility for the killing was thus dispersed amongst the dozens of police officers involved in the operation. Not only does this dispersal of responsibilities create almost insurmountable problems in holding the police accountable, but it also reinforces the logic of capitalism in which bad things result from the market—unemployment, starvation, recessions etc—not because any individual capitalists are responsible but because that is just the way the system involving countless autonomous egoistic individuals operates. The Metropolitan Police declared eight months after the killing of de Menezes that Kratos remained “fit for purpose”; the Stockwell shooting had merely been a result of some operational errors.25 Equally, in the case of McConville, the Ombudsman’s recommendations stressed the importance of clear policies, training and command for operations involving potentially lethal force.26 The report reserved its concluding comment for criticising commanding officers for a lack of effective management.27 In both these cases the issue under consideration was not posed as one of an agent of the state walking up to a member of the public and, without warning, shooting them in the head, or one of a police officer using a semi-automatic rifle to deal with an alleged juvenile delinquent. Rather the issue was considered to be a lack of efficient organisation. It was to this logic of managing barbaric acts through law that Hannah Arendt was referring in her description of the “banality of evil”.28 The “reasonableness” of police killings Ever since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) the police have been recognised in law as possessing certain special powers, which the rest of us do not have, such as the right to stop and search and detain individuals. However, in terms of the use of force, in the eye of the law they remain neither more nor less than “citizens in uniform”. In other words legally they are to be held to account for taking another person’s life in much the same way as you or me. The law offers us two main defences for killing someone. The first is the common law of self-defence. The second is contained in Section 3 of the Criminal Law Act 1967, which states that “a person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large”. This obviously refers mainly to the police, but it also applies to any one of us confronted by someone committing a criminal act, eg a burglar in our home. The key term common to both this statutory provision and the defence of self-defence is “reasonableness”. In order to uphold a defence to a charge of murder or manslaughter, one needs to prove two things—that the force used was both necessary and proportionate. If someone attempts to grab my wallet, it will be necessary for me to use physical force to stop them. If someone merely threatens to steal my wallet tomorrow, it would not be necessary for me physically to attack or restrain them. Assuming that I am actually being mugged, the question then arises as to the level of force I can legitimately apply. If in this scenario I push the thief to the ground then that would probably be considered a proportionate degree of force. If I took out a knife and stabbed them in the chest, then that would almost certainly be considered disproportionate. However, if the thief produces a gun when robbing me, the use of a knife might be considered proportionate and legitimate. A key principle evident in the law here is that of balance and rational calculation. I may only do to you something that can be measured as equivalent to the danger posed by you. In each and every case where the police shoot a suspect dead, they always claim that they feared deadly and imminent danger from the victim. So the police officers who shot de Menezes “honestly believed” that he was an armed suicide bomber, and therefore shooting him in the head was a reasonable and proportionate response. In law, the fact that they were subsequently shown to be mistaken does not vitiate their claim as to what their subjective fear was at the time they shot him. It was on the same basis that the case against members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) charged with one of the shoot to kill incidents in 1982 was dismissed. The judge in that case, Lord Justice Gibson, argued that the police had reacted reasonably given the potential danger they faced from known members of the IRA. Indeed, notoriously, he went a step too far by commending the defendants for bringing the murdered IRA suspects to the “final court of justice”. Although, in an unprecedented move, he subsequently had to retract his remarks from the bench, the logic expressed fits perfectly the way in which the devaluation of the lives of suspects allows the police to justify the use of extreme violence against them. The jurisprudence has tended to judge what is reasonable from the subjective standpoint of the police officer who has applied lethal force.29 This then places a disproportionate emphasis on the testimony of the police officer concerned. Again Lord Justice Gibson makes the point crystal clear: The question whether there was the necessary criminal intention is not to be judged…by the standard of what one thinks one would have done or should have done had one been in that situation. The question is: has the Crown proved beyond any reasonable doubt what was the actual state of mind, belief and understanding of the accused police officers in the heat and anxiety of the moment, faced, as they understood it, with but a fleeting second to decide and to act…30 This justification was repeated in almost exactly the same terms more than two decades later to justify the murder of de Menezes morally and legally. When placed in the context of the potential threat from terrorists the criteria of what might be considered reasonable are widened considerably. Instead of the law acting as a restraint upon the police officer, the yardstick by which to measure the legitimate extent of lethal force applied by the police has instead been judged on the basis of the extent of the potential violence committed by the terrorist. The hyperbole that surrounds the “war on terror”, a war whose end cannot be envisaged in a world racked by imperialism, is largely responsible for investing in the concept of a reasonable use of force, a pre-emptive dimension based on quasi-apocalyptic expectations of what terrorists are capable of carrying out. An academic writing on the experience in Northern Ireland points out how the concept of proportionality became so fluid that it facilitated the use of lethal force by law enforcement agents for almost any crime even if it was only a vague notion of a terrorist crime… This has had the profound subsidiary effect that security forces were enabled to engage with supposed terrorists in situations that would enable them the full protec-tion of the law due to the elasticity and elusiveness of the concept of “reasonableness”. 31 It has sometimes been argued that the problem is simply one of English law being out of step with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which applies a more rigorous or objective test in judging the “honest belief” of the police officer.32 However, in a case from 2001 concerning yet another lethal shooting of an unarmed suspect by the police the same court held that “it is not for the court to substitute its own opinion of the situation for that of a police officer who was required to react in the heat of the moment”.33 As Clair de Than points out, this judgment has the effect of placing even greater emphasis on the subjective testimony of the police officer: “It does not have to be a reasonable mistake, merely an honest one”.34 The vague concepts of reasonableness and proportionality, which are integral to law, are given detail and weight by reference to the perceived enormity of the crime that may take place, in order to justify an extra-judicial policy of shoot to kill. In this way the context of what is considered reasonable is shifted towards more brutal policing methods. This paradigm shift, of which Kratos is a part, is born of an increased use of exceptional measures. This leads many to claim that what is needed is a return to a firmer rule of law in order to resist the tendency to resort to states of emergency to fight the “war on terror”. But this is a category mistake, for states of emergency are not departures from law, but are rooted within it. In a footnote, Pashukanis says that when it comes to times of heightened revolutionary struggle, we can observe how the official machinery of the bourgeois state apparatus retires into the background as compared with the volunteer corps of the fascists and others. This further substantiates the fact that, when the balance of society is upset, it seeks salvation not in the creation of a power standing above society, but in the maximal harnessing of all forces of the classes in conflict.35 This passage is problematic as it suggests that the ruling class can simply and consciously put aside the law for its own preservation. If this were so, then it would seem to negate his central point about law’s roots in the objective relations of capital, relations in which they themselves dominate. Mark Cowling identifies the problem as that of “the idea of equivalence and the idea of class terror coming into conflict with one another”.36 Pashukanis is right that at the most acute phases of class struggle, such as existed in Russia in 1917 or Italy a few years later, the ruling class does act in the way he describes. But in order to understand the ever closer and more permanent relationship between law and the state of exception, we must look beyond Pashukanis. What has become increasingly evident over the last century has been the fact that in most cases the ruling class is able to manage its way through crises not by abandoning law, but rather by extending its reach. The “state of exception” Giorgio Agamben argues that the “state of exception”, which has with increasing frequency been used to justify extreme departures from the liberal norms of the rule of law, is in fact a function of law itself.37 Here Agamben is drawing on the work of two critics of capitalist democracy; from the right Carl Schmitt who argued that the state of exception is the necessary foundation of sovereign power38 and from the left Walter Benjamin who posited that “’the state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”.39 Indeed, as long ago as 1851 Marx identified the apparent anomaly of states of exception being written into law in his critique of the liberal-democratic French Constitution of November 1848.40 There are many problems in Agamben’s work, particularly his ahistorical attempt to explain the state of exception as a feature of all human civilisations stretching back to antiquity and beyond. Indeed, in this he departs from all his key influences—Schmitt, Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault—by ignoring the specificity of how power is exercised in modernity. Nonetheless, his work offers some very useful insights by developing the relationship between law and the state of exception that is merely hinted at in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. In doing this Agamben provides a necessary corrective to the idealised celebration of the rule of law that exists amongst the liberal left and indeed among a significant portion of the Marxist left.41 It has become a feature of modern capitalist democracies to call in aid tactics which violate the norms of the rule of law, yet which are justified on the basis of defending the rule of law against existential threats, real or imagined. After almost a decade of the “war on terror” examples are familiar and numerous—Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, water-boarding, control orders, etc. This argument has, of course, also been used by the police when they claim that they are facing “unprecedented circumstances” which necessitate the deployment of more brutal tactics. The danger in this approach was recognised more than 30 years ago by the ECtHR, when the court ruled that there were limits to the use of national security in justifying extreme methods, even, or perhaps especially, legal ones: The Court, being aware of the danger such a law poses of undermining or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it, affirms that the Contracting States may not, in the name of the struggle against terrorism, adopt whatever measures they deem appropriate.42 And, in words that brought a cheer from every civil libertarian, Lord Hoffman famously declared in a case which struck down New Labour’s policy of detention without trial of terrorist suspects that “the real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these”.43 However, the decision of the House of Lords in that case was not that it was illegal for the government to detain without trial per se, but that the policy was discriminatory, as it did not apply to British citizens, thus breaching the principle of equivalence. The government responded with control orders, which to date stand in law. In mainstream discussions of the problem of the state of exception, it is presented as a contradiction which exposes the gap between the self-identity of liberal democratic societies and the abuses committed by certain governments or state agencies. For Agamben, on the other hand, the state of exception is in fact a latent yet integral function of sovereignty, embodied as much in capitalist democracy as in fascist and other authoritarian political systems. Agamben argues that the claim by the state of the need to protect itself, and wider society, against perceived threats requires it to regularly impose sanctions which fall outside the rule of law. The contradiction thus emerges in that the rule of law can only be protected by regularly going outside the rule of law. Agamben gives as an example the Nazi state, which throughout its existence did not abolish the liberal Weimar constitution, but merely suspended it at regular intervals.44 Thus, legally, the “lawlessness” of the Nazis was in fact rooted in the liberal constitutional Weimar Republic. And in a perverse piece of legal formality, just prior to being sent to the death camps German Jews were stripped of their citizenship, precisely so that they would not be covered by the normal legal rights of other citizens.45 In a like manner, although at a far lower level of barbarism, in Britian shoot to kill has evolved from an unofficial and ad hoc tactic into a policy of extra-judicial killing in the form of the Kratos policy. The ability of the police to act beyond the bounds of the rule of law has, paradoxically, become written into law. This creates a space around the suspected suicide bomber, where the norms of criminal law and police practice are suspended. Yet its status as an official policy, implemented without violating the norms of governmental procedure, grounds this extra-legal policy within the framework of the law. One police officer has attempted to justify Kratos on the basis that it authorises not shoot to kill but the right to take action which, “in order to save life, may have to take life”.46 Echoes here of the infamous comment made by a senior US Army officer during the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” This barbaric contradiction in terms recurs throughout the arguments used to justify draconian anti-terrorist measures. The rule of law must be suspended in order to preserve the rule of law. The situations in which the police adopt lethal force are often described as “unprecedented”, with suspects as “dangerous”, “desperate”, “won’t be taken alive”, etc. In striking the balance between the reasonable use of force and the perceived danger posed by the suspect, the mean point gets moved to an extremity. A senior member of the security forces explained how the language of necessity was used to justify lethal force in Northern Ireland: “Was it a decision to kill those people? I don’t think it would have been phrased like that. Somebody would have said, ‘How far do we go to remove this group of terrorists?’ and the answer would have been, ‘As far as necessary’.”47 Similar arguments were used by the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes in the cause of maintaining stability and the security of the state. Indeed, it was this logic that led Schmitt from a critical defender of the Weimar Republic into a supporter and theorist for the Nazis. In the conflict between human rights and security, the latter must always trump the former, for without security there cannot be a social framework strong enough to support human rights. This is but a concrete expression of Agamben’s point that It is as if the judicial order contained an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be filled only by means of the state of exception, that is, by creating a zone in which application is suspended, but the law, as such, remains in force.48 Agamben allows us to grasp the interrelationship between law and the state of exception, and thus fill the gap left in Pashukanis’s formulation. In attempting to answer the question as to why the evolution of an official shoot to kill policy has met with relatively little outcry compared to the scandal that followed the killings by the RUC in the early 1980s, Agamben’s work illuminates the essential role of law in grounding and thus normalising exceptional and brutal police tactics. The retreat of the organised working class and the concomitant decay in politics have left a gap that has been occupied by law. Benjamin’s injunction that we confront “states of emergency” with a real state of emergency is a call to reject the confines of the rule of law when faced with state violence. The failure to do so leads one into accepting the legal form on which the legitimacy of state violence rests. This is precisely the mistake made by EP Thompson and his followers who argue that the rule of law is a “universal good” which supposedly transcends capitalism.49 A crucial aspect missing from Agamben’s analysis is an understanding of what grounds law and the state of exception, as well as what makes these concepts evolve over time. Instead he points to a highly obscure figure in early Roman law, homo sacer (sacred man), as a recurring figure in Western societies.50 The homo sacer refers to someone who “may be killed, but not sacrificed.” In other words, this person has no value—their life may be taken away without legal sanction. Thus, Agamben argues, the homo sacer is representative of those targeted by the law under a state of exception as being beyond the protection of the law. But Agamben is not able to explain why certain groups or individuals are capable of becoming homo sacer and others not. Indeed, he goes so far at one point as to suggest that today we may all be homines sacri.51 He appears to argue (Agamben is obscure at the best of times) that anyone who poses a threat to the state, or whom the state merely perceives as a threat is liable to become the homo sacer. If this is so it raises the question of why the working class as a whole or even significant sections of it have not been subjected to this process. The reason why this is so is because the always present, if hidden, power of the working class cannot be legislated or terrorised away. Working class organisation can be smashed, but the latent power of the working class is impossible to eliminate. To place any powerful group in society within the category of the homo sacer would fundamentally destabilise the rule of capital. Thus Nazi terror on the streets was necessary politically to break the power of the organised left and the trade unions before those sections of the working class could be made the homo sacer. Nonetheless, even under fascism capital cannot escape the logic of the legal form that, as Pashukanis convincingly argues, is the necessary guarantor of commodity exchange. Thus the fetish of legal formalities that pervaded Nazi rule is not the anomaly it at first appears. The racist content of Nazi law was, of course, qualitatively different than that which exists under capitalist democracy, and all the gains achieved by the working class such as collective bargaining rights were abolished. Yet the basic legal form remained because the economic base of capitalism remained. Not only did the Nazis keep to the legal niceties of the constitutional state, but the working class continued to sell their labour power on the basis of a contractual exchange with employers. For this reason when the demand for labour exceeded supply during the late 1930s, particularly in the construction industry, wages went up in some cases by 30 percent.52 So while the homo sacer is flawed as an analysis of the generalised form of capitalist rule, as a metaphor it does provide a very useful way of understanding how the police, in the example under discussion here, are able to kill without being legally culpable. Indeed, it would seem to reinforce Pashukanis’s theory by identifying the extent to which legal rights are co-determinate with the measuring of value. Subjects who are from the point of view of the state expendable or individually dangerous can be made into homines sacri, at the mercy of the state’s monopoly of violence. This can certainly apply to, for example, refugees, terrorist suspects or other “subversives”. The process by which such lives are devalued, and the way in which the law colludes in this is discussed next. Suspect Communities Contrary to the claims made by the Metropolitan Police following the killing of de Menezes that terrorist attacks on the Tube were unprecedented, the very first bombing of the London Underground took place more than a century earlier in 1883. At first the Irish were blamed, although later it transpired that the bomb had been the work of anarchists. As a result, the police and the press began targeting the Jewish community, which was identified as a hotbed of anarchist refugees from Eastern Europe. The barrister Richard Harvey has drawn the obvious analogy with Harry Stanley, Diarmuid O’Neill, Neil McConville and Jean Charles de Menezes. What all had in common was membership, or perceived membership, of communities which had been viewed as and thus targeted as suspect. Once it was Jewish communities who were perceived as a breeding ground for anarchist violence, followed by the Irish community harbouring Republican terrorists; today it is Muslim communities supposedly encompassing Al Qaida sympathisers that fulfil the role of a suspect community.53 In this demonisation of minority communities lie the origins of the elite police squads tasked with the use of lethal force. The Special Irish Branch was set up to fight the Irish Republican Fenian movement in the 1880s. This has since changed its name to the less offensive sounding, though no less offensive in deed, Special Branch. It was officers from SO19 of the Special Branch that carried out the killings of O’Neill, Stanley and de Menezes. Paddy Hillyard coined the term “suspect community” to describe a sub-group of the population that is singled out for state attention as being “problematic”. Specifically in terms of policing, individuals may be targeted, not necessarily as a result of suspected wrong doing, but simply because of their presumed membership of that sub-group. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, language, accent, dress, political ideology or any combination of these factors may serve to delineate the sub-group.54 Muslims, as a suspect community, are often portrayed as anti-Enlightenment and thus anti human rights, threatening a “civilised” way of life.55 But, as the authors of a recent study at London Metropolitan University argue, it is also symptomatic of a discourse of “anti-rationality” of the suspect community as fanatical and immune to reason or argument.56 In the case of Neil McConville, shot dead in April 2003 by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the justification for his death was created after the event, by suggestions fed by the PSNI that he was variously linked to paramilitaries or drug gangs. In the days following the killing of McConville headlines in the press included allegations of involvement in these criminal activities, all of which were completely untrue. The same thing happened with Harry Stanley, when a list of his previous, spent criminal convictions was read out to the inquest into his death despite their complete irrelevance to the circumstances surrounding the shooting. Again, with de Menezes, the police circulated smears in the media about alleged drug use and his immigration status. Of course none of these allegations were intended to justify the police’s actions per se; their aim was to associate the victims with certain groups who would be considered of lesser value—criminals, drug dealers/users, illegal immigrants—thus devaluing their claim to a legal right not to be murdered by the state. As Hillyard points out: Once dehumanised, people can be viewed with ethical indifference and moral questions are of no concern to the police carrying out their tasks. The police are only doing their job. As violence has become increasingly concentrated under state control, moral responsibility is replaced by a technical responsibility.57 De Menezes was neither Muslim nor from the Middle East. What set off the chain of events which led to his death was the misidentification of him by the police surveillance team as a “North African male”. Likewise, Harry Stanley was shot dead by armed police to whom it had been reported that he had an Irish accent when in fact he was Scottish. What these two examples show is the way in which the suspect community is defined by appearances, by superficial attributes.58 This reverses the normal modus operandi of policing whereby evidence or hard intelligence is the prerequisite for the use of force. Moreover, the fact that in both these cases the victim was misidentified simply points up the extent to which perceived membership of the suspect community is sufficient to give rise to an “honest belief” by police that lethal use of force is necessary and proportionate. Had Stanley not had an “Irish” accent or de Menezes a darkish skin, both would probably still be alive today. And as we saw above, “honest belief” forms the basis for the legal defence of police officers who kill unarmed or innocent suspects. In this insidious manner racist and cultural stereotypes become legal justifications for the taking of life by state agents. Hillyard has pointed out how the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 (PTA) effectively introduced a “dual system of criminal justice”, one system operating under the PTA and the other under ordinary criminal law. As a result a dichotomy developed between terrorist suspects and “ordinary decent criminals”.59 Today we face a similar separation between those subjected to recent anti-terrorist legislation as distinct from regular criminal law.60 This distinction functions within both law and a broader social context, with one reinforcing the other. The threat from terrorists is exaggerated by politicians and media alike. This in turn creates a greater sense of fear of violence about the suspect community in general, and that small minority seeking to use violence in particular. This dynamic then provides a platform for the introduction of ever more draconian laws, and brutal police methods. The argument from the police and others is that the threat from Al Qaida is wholly Muslim just as the threat from the IRA was mostly Irish, and thus it is reasonable to target those communities. Yet we must not forget that this “dual system” is not one of completely distinct and hermetically sealed areas of law. The foundational principles of the rule of law do not permit such a thing. Norms, legal tests and police practice are constantly migrating between the two. Think, for example, of how anti-terror legislation has been used to detain protesters or to stop and search individuals suspected of petty crimes. The state of exception and its associated policing strategies become the norm. Hillyard’s detailed study on how violence targeted the Irish community comes to this conclusion: It is commonplace to counter-pose the rule of law to the abuse of power or acts of violence. Law, from this perspective, is seen as the antithesis of violence… But this dichotomy is false… Law is…an integral part of the repression and organisation of state violence.61 Conclusion In hindsight, the period lasting from the later half of the 19th century through to the 1960s saw the proliferation of various mechanisms that in a thousand strands bound the working class ideologically to capitalism. In Gramscian terms, hegemony was manifested in aspects of civil society such as education, culture, community identity, civic projects, etc. The police were successfully woven into this apparatus as a necessary, if not necessarily benign, method of preserving social cohesion. But, as Reiner puts it, “when neoliberalism unravelled this complex of subtle, hidden controls, the thin blue line turned out to be a Maginot line”.62 Thus, on the one hand, the role of the police in maintaining order within capitalist democracy has not altered fundamentally in the last 150 years or so. Yet, on the other hand, the retreat of the organised working class in the face of neoliberalism has revealed the violence that exists at the heart of policing and the rule of law. The problem has been that throughout this period the ideology of the rule of law has become ever stronger, and indeed has been taken up by sections of the left as the solution to the problem of police violence. My aim here has been to demonstrate, using Pashukanis’s commodity-form theory of law, Agamben’s work on the state of exception and Hillyard’s description of suspect communities, how the law as such (not merely particular laws or legal systems) is complicit in legitimising police violence, even at the extreme end involving the deliberate killing of innocent people.
The debate is about starting points - the AFF limits qualified immunity, which is simply a tool of the state from which it comes. THE AFF puts the cart before the horse. This requires re-orienting our methodological starting point. The alternative is to create spaces beyond the grasp of bureaucratic institutions – our utopian ethic is key to breaking out of normative legal thought in the present. This is a cultural critique to expand our understanding of state violence which is a necessary pre requisite and this means that state violence is not inevitable.
Newman 11 (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The affirmative’s choice to criminalize individuals is part of a neoliberal scapegoating scheme that demarcates groups of people understood as “unstable” or even “evil” as the cause of the problem. FYI, THE COURTS CREATED QUALIFIED IMMUNITY, NOT THE POLICE. Rather than examining institutional society and the state, they simply blame the individual cop to advance the AC agenda – this is a form of shutting out institutional discussion and a fatal misdiagnosis that prevents meaningful solutions and re-entrenches neoliberalism.
Smith ‘15: Robert C. Smith writes in “An Institution of Oppression or for Public Well-Being and Civil Rights? Reflections on the Institution of Police and a Radical Alternative” on May 4, 2015. R.C. Smith is a researcher in Philosophy of Science. Interested in “extensively broad cross-disciplinary research”, he is currently studying for a new degree in Natural Science, with a particular focus in Physics. The author of several books and over 100 academic articles, Robert is a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies. He is also the founder of Heathwood Institute and Press where he also presently serves as Executive Editor. http://www.heathwoodpress.com/an-institution-of-oppression-or-for-public-well-being-and-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-institution-of-police-and-a-radical-alternative-r-c-smith/; AB
Movements in response to recent events in the US have rightly put demands for police reform at the top of the agenda. But there is something of a myth around such belief in reform. To paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, when tackling the problem of the institution of police and the issue of “police authority” (not to mention “power”), the real problem is one of restoring democratic authority.12 To put it another way: “a reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.”13 One cannot meaningfully dismantle the racist and unjust institution of the police without, firstly, tackling the belief that all our social problems can be solved with force.14 Secondly, the question of modern political-economy and its principle mode of relations must also be brought into direct focus, especially considering the manner in which current social-economic conditions tend to foster deep alienation which, in turn, establishes a social world open to the reproduction of practical and institutional power, domination, and coercion. To this point, the American preference – as with much of the west in general – for considering the actions of ‘bad individuals’, as opposed to the function of ‘(bad) social systems’, represents a position of convenience. It deflects from the necessary course of difficult questions that need to be asked – a course that fundamentally challenges the status quo (Adorno). Regarding police brutality, is there an element of individual agency that we must recognize? Of course. If the modern institution of police represents a form of structural violence, as in the case of the almost daily murders of young black men and women, we must also bring into question the individual officer. Somewhere, at some point, the officer has a choice to stand-down, to drop the baton and shield, rip off the badge and refuse to partake in the violent repression of a citizen’s movement. On the side of structure, however, this choice is also defined within the context of economic coercion; ideological pressures to preserve status and economic benefits for one’s family; and twisted narratives of tribalism and of the positive values of a less-than-emancipatory system of law and order (what Sartre might have called “facticity”). In further considering this point, allow me to ask the following question. Can it be said that every police officer is racist or believes in the oppression of others? Is it possible that some believe in the role of policing as a community service, rather than as an oppressive institution? The question that each officer should ask themselves, as they stand together in their militarized lines, facing fellow citizens with their modern weaponry, is ‘what actually am I standing for?’ Does one stand for oppression? Does one stand for indifferent corporations? Or does one stand for community and the rights of each citizen? In case of the latter, the very institution, the validity or legitimacy of the very concept of modern policing, collapses under the weight of its own illegitimacy. If, as Luis Fernandez once said, asking the question ‘what are the alternatives to policing?’ is really to ask ‘what are the alternatives to capitalism?’, then the argument for or against the police boils down to either civil liberty or its opposite. And this is precisely the point or line of thought I would like to strike when reflecting on an alternative to police. In another way: it is along this line of thought that I think we might best formulate a structural critique of modern policing and an alternative, one that is for community, for the promotion of the “mediating subject”15 and mutual recognition16, and the protection of minority groups, civil rights and actual democracy. If modern policing is based on the regulation and control of a community, the alternative, which could no longer be called “policing”, would be largely non-hierarchical, in line, perhaps, with a progressive notion of restorative justice inclined toward defending civil rights and principles of actual democracy as opposed to undermining them. While this alternative would represent unarmed mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation in practice,17 it would also coincide with and mutually reinforce significant transformations across all norms of society: from the economic and political to health, education, food and so on. To be clear, what I am indicating is an alternative to police in the context of broader, holistic structural and systemic change across all social spheres or domains. Rather than superficial reforms that maintain the status quo (Adorno), which the 1 would surely lobby for, the transformation of law, of justice, of policing in line with a progressive notion of restorative justice would need to coincide with a greater transformative vision and social philosophy. This transformative vision and social philosophy would not only support decriminalization. Or disarmament. Or the community development of a supportive social apparatus (as opposed to police) comprised of support-workers, case-workers, teachers, mental-health professionals and therapists, drug counselors, guidance counselors – all working on the basis of a person-centred and humanistic approach. It would also represent the reorganisation of political-economy and the establishing of social-economic conditions that would foster and support direct and participatory democratic models, which are particularly vital to any notion of restorative justice, and therefore also a complete transformation of society – of a post-police, post-capitalist society. Due to the admittedly exploratory nature of this essay, what exactly this alternative to police would like in practice is not absolutely clear. Instead of “police”, the best descriptive term I can come up with at present is the notion of Community Safeguarding, Mediation and Conflict Resolution. Taking from existing practicing examples of restorative justice – including indigenous communities, a number of practicing community groups within major western cities, and organisations like the Australian PCYC – this notion of Community Safeguarding, Mediation and Conflict Resolution would centre mostly around social-therapeutic goals. Principled on a person-centred and humanistic approach (as opposed to the present instrumental, objectivistic and bureaucratic model), this alternative to police would be community-based and part of a general support network for individual and collective well-being. It may be extremely difficult within the society which we now live to imagine a world without police. If there is a truth here, it has not so much to do with the impossibility of organising a post-capitalist society without police. Fernandez is right, moreover, to suggest that many communities already function without police. The difficulty is that organising a post-police society would require a broader process of social transition, which will take some time, experimentation, and input from across all disciplines and fields of study. One complication I have been made aware of in talking with local social workers is how, for example, some sort of “response unit” would still need to be conceptualised in a post-police society – that is, some sort of “response unit” comprised of people trained in deescalating serious crises, such as in cases of the potential threat of suicide or domestic abuse, and so forth. In modern rural cities and towns of the UK, an illustration of what this could look like might be found. Community police officers in the rural UK are generally without firearms and already often play a similar supportive role in resolving domestic conflicts as described to me by different social workers. Often one hears of examples of these individuals undertaking more of a community service role, rather than a “policing” role. One example I heard of recently cited an elderly women who lives on her own. Apparently she heard ‘scary noises’ one night, likely the wind or something innocuous, and so a member of the local village police arrived and spent time with her, talked with her over some tea, and helped her feel that she was safe and not alone. Other examples include these members of community police assisting people with mental health issues or intervening and mediating in times of domestic arguments. In practice one can certainly see how these “community police” in rural parts of the UK could be reorganised and reconceptualised to perform the role of conflict resolution in instances that require immediate response. Consider the troubling example of child abuse, which is an extremely serious problem in my local city. A rapid response and intervention team could be employed to ensure the safety of the child – at times of necessary safeguarding – at the outset of a process of mediation, resolution and reconciliation in line with a model of restorative justice. However, it is clear that the right policies and organisation would be required, so that these individuals who practice frontline ‘conflict resolution’ or ‘immediate response’ would remain democratic and as non-hierarchical as possible. They would, of course, have some sort of authority – that is, a horizontal authority. But the question of power as well as the need for normative scrutiny against any potential abuse of power, would also need to be established and regularly (critically) surveyed. The “immediate response” team like the entire organisation of Community Safeguarding, Mediation and Conflict Resolution would need to be part of the social body, of the community, and independent from state or economic forces, much like frontline social-workers acting on behalf of certain non-profit organisations are today. This requirement isn’t such a black hole of impossibility, considering there are already examples within communities all over the world that can illustrate how we might start to develop such a foundational alternative. My own position would be that, in keeping rooted in the community, this alternative to police (i.e.,those trained in mediation and conflict resolution) would only play a supportive role to frontline social-work and care – the emphasis being on the latter.
Using the law to solve the law is contradictory. The aff assumes the police violence can be addressed by bringing it under the control of law – in fact, the law is the apparatus legitimating police violence. The police are the puppet victims of the neoliberal state – the police are forced to generate revenue for the state - thus the aff’s misdiagnosis masks neolib’s pervasiveness.
Lane ‘16: Alycee Lane writes in “Violence, Death, and our Neoliberal Police” on July 21st 2016 for Counterpoint. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/; AB
If we examine through the prism of neoliberalism the killing of Philando Castile – that is, if we think of the killing as a “moment when violence and neoliberalism coalesced” – then we are immediately confronted with the fact that, to a great extent, the current problem of policing is a problem of neoliberal policing. It is a problem of the production of police as officers whose enforcement of the law is guided by neoliberal policies and procedures, the violence of which no amount of body cameras or use of force training or diversity training can adequately address. Indeed, the fact of neoliberal policing requires from all of us a radically different response to policing and police killings, a response by which we directly confront policing, and our governments’ constitution of law enforcement, as neoliberal practice. So let’s talk about this moment when neoliberalism and violence converged: Over the course of fourteen years, Minnesota police initiated at least 52 encounters (a staggering number) with Philando Castile, citing him for minor offenses like driving without wearing a seat belt, speeding, and driving without a muffler. These encounters resulted in Philando being assessed a total of $6,588 in fines and fees. Given these circumstances, let’s assume (indeed, it is probably safe to assume) that St. Anthony Police Department – the police department that employs Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando – operates under a scheme similar to the one that was in place in Ferguson, Missouri when Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Under that scheme (as the U.S. Department of Justice found), City of Ferguson officials “routinely” urged its Chief of Police “to generate more revenue” for the City “through enforcement” and to meet specific revenue goals. In response, the Chief pressured his officers and created a culture in which officers competed with one another in generating revenue; created opportunities to issue citations in order to meet revenue goals; engaged primarily African American citizens as objects from which they could profit as well as subjected them to the department’s and City’s market discipline; and, measured their own value and success as police officers in market terms (the department looked favorably upon and rewarded officers who met their revenue demands). Through this scheme, the City in essence transformed the police into neoliberal police officers, into men and women who would enforce the law in ways that folded penal discipline into the “market-driven disciplinary logic” of neoliberalism, and whose policing became the expression of what Simon Springer calls neoliberalism’s “fundamental virtues”: “individualism, competitiveness and economic self-sufficiency.” As they sought out opportunities to generate revenue, officers also engaged in the kind of ‘Othering’ upon which neoliberalism depends. As Springer writes, neoliberalism not only “treats as enemies” those “who don’t fit the mold of a proper neoliberal subject” (e.g., possessive individualism, economic self-sufficiency); it also “actively facilitates the abandonment of ‘Others’ who fall outside of ‘neoliberal normativity’, a conceptual category that cuts across multiple categories of discrimination including class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, age and ability.” Ferguson’s neoliberal police officers (and city officials) regarded African Americans and poor people as those who don’t fit the mold. The latter were not the victims of neoliberal policies that had been embraced on a local, national and global scale. Instead, they were failures, people who were unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and remake themselves in the ways that the market demanded. Consequently, it was right to treat both as objects by which to profit and “as enemies” who needed to be disciplined and controlled. That the City’s scheme and the neoliberal logic behind it would create the circumstances that led to Michael Brown’s death is clear. Indeed, through that scheme Ferguson officials and the police department produced a “‘state of exception,’ wherein…exceptional violence” – i.e.., violence that shocks, that “elicits a deep emotional response” – was “transformed into exemplary violence,” into violence that “forms the rule,” and particularly for those excluded and abandoned. Without social media, Brown’s death would have merely been a part of the everyday violence that police directed at Ferguson’s African American community and poor people generally, violence made increasingly likely by the market driven imperative of the Ferguson police force. And of course Brown’s death took place against the backdrop of the invisible violence of the City’s neoliberal policies (creation of unequal and increasingly privatized schools, attraction of business that paid little taxes and employed workers at low wages, privatization of public services, etc.). If Officer Yanez worked under a governmental scheme similar to the one in Ferguson, then in that moment when he pulled the trigger (four or five times) he embodied, expressed and enacted the neoliberal principles and logic by which his department and his city operate. But let’s suppose that the St. Anthony Police Department is not a business enterprise disguised as a police department, made so at the behest of city officials. Does that change the conclusion? Hardly. We live in the context of a global neoliberal order. And to a frightening degree, “we have become entrepreneurs of our lives,” as Johanna Oksala writes, “competing in the free market called society.” Indeed, we “compete in an ever-expanding range of fields, and invest in ourselves by enhancing our abilities and appearance, by improving our strategies of life coaching and time management. Our life has become an enterprise that we must lead to success.” In other words, we are all neoliberals now, and as Springer argues, all of us are “implicated in the perpetuation of neoliberalised violence.” A few months ago, I complained to my partner that the preschool our three-year old attends had not yet taught her the alphabet and numbers – at least not in any way that in my mind reflected academic rigor. “How is she going to succeed?” I asked. “When she gets to kindergarten, all the other kids will be way ahead.” I was ready to pull her out and send her to a school with a more disciplined, focused program, one that would lead to her academic success and, eventually, her career success. Lurking in the back of my mind was the fate of black girls, who have very little the market recognizes as valuable. Let me repeat: my daughter is three. She attends a school in which learning happens outdoors – in a forest – where the kids discover things like rabbits and tadpoles and swarms of ladybugs and dead birds and, from those things, learn about habitats and camouflage and metamorphosis and death. Against a neoliberal, market-driven idea of education – one that permeates the public sphere and that has redefined the purpose of school and education – I measured this wide-open, wonderful way of learning and found it wanting. Without even thinking about it, I was ready to subject my three-year old to the disciplinary logic of a neoliberal education and thus to perform an act, the violence of which (to creativity, to learning) I could not see. Even if Officer Yanez had not performed his duty in accordance with the kind of policies that guided Ferguson’s police department, he nevertheless killed Philando within the context of a broader neoliberal framework that marked men like Philando as always already outside of neoliberal normativity (black male + broke ass car = enemy) and denied them any claim to the neoliberal virtues of economic self-sufficiency and possessive individualism. As to the latter, black people throughout United States history have been cast as anything but a collection of individuals. Instead, we are a monolith that can be used and disposed of at will (hence, Dallas police killer Micah Xavier Johnson is not Micah Xavier Johnson as such; instead, he is Black Lives Matter). Moreover, that broader neoliberal framework, which defines (in the words of Lester Spence) “freedom in market terms rather than political terms,” is a racial capitalist framework that defines African Americans as unfree Others in order to naturalize class hierarchies. Thus, when Officer Yanez encountered Philando, he encountered an unfree Other who – in spite of that mark – had the audacity to claim the status of a free person by openly carrying a gun. Officer Yanez encountered the enemy. My point in all of this is that Officer Yanez – like all of us, like me – was (is) immersed in neoliberalism and inevitably internalized as well as reproduced it in his employment life (and probably in his personal life as well). He was armed with it, so to speak, when he encountered and then killed Philando Castile, and I suspect this was true as well for Officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri. Finally, even if St. Anthony’s had not been blatantly transformed into a business enterprise, it nevertheless operates within a national and global paradigm of policing that aligns police with the interests of capital. As Oksala notes, governments throughout the world have adopted policies and practices designed to “intervene in the very being of society in order to make competition the dominant principle for guiding human behavior,” and to “give competition between enterprises and entrepreneurial conduct maximum range.” These policies and practices proceed from the understanding that maintaining these conditions for capital requires “objective, extensive and efficient state-violence,” i.e., “effective practices of policing.” They proceed from the understanding, in other words, that such violence is and must be “inherent to neoliberal governmentality.” When Officer Yanez approached and killed Philando, then, the police department for which he worked was hardly operating outside of this paradigm. If what we are witnessing in these violent encounters with police is neoliberalism in action, then we have to come up with an entirely different set of solutions to change policing. This is not to dismiss body cameras and training, which will no doubt save some lives. But they are technical fixes that do not address at all the neoliberal character of our police departments, the transformation of peace officers into neoliberal police, the policies that align policing with corporate power, and the violence that neoliberalism produces. In fact, these fixes amount to our use of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. After all, through neoliberal policies governments regularly take “outside of the realm of the political” the myriad problems that communities face and then render these problems “technical and actionable,” as Lester Spence has observed. So when we offer solutions like body cameras, we make fixing the police a technical matter rather than a political matter, and in so doing we legitimize and further entrench neoliberal policies and practices that enact invisible, spectacular, and ultimately normalized violence on those who don’t fit the mold. The consequence is that we’ll continue to receive tweets and Facebook feeds of police killings. But we’ll also see more retaliatory killings of police officers – like the killings that occurred recently in Dallas and Baton Rouge – as more people realize that neoliberal policing, and the violence it enacts, is exactly the kind of policing our governments intend. Such counter-violence, however, is extraordinarily ironic, for individuals who engage in retaliatory killings – individuals who are, and will likely continue to be, primarily men – ultimately express just how deeply they have internalized the ideals that constitute the Virtuous Neoliberal Citizen: self-reliance or rugged individualism, personal responsibility, distrust of government, efficiency, cruelty. With an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45 mm rifle or some other AK-style weapon in tow, they alone will fix the problem of police violence, and in so doing, they will precisely, and finally, fit the neoliberal mode. Repairing the police and our system of policing, then, clearly demands that we end not only neoliberal policing, but also the transformation of men and women into neoliberal police. To do this, we must relentlessly break down these moments of violence between officers and the community in order to unearth the neoliberal politics they express and enact, and that our government officials (local, state, national) continue to impose upon us at our expense (and for the benefit of the wealthy), but most especially at the expense of our abandoned, disposed children, women and men. It is through this kind of work, in fact, that we can begin to upend an order that neoliberal proponents present as the only alternative and that appears all-powerful and all-encompassing. By doing this work, we’ll discover just how much neoliberalism and the violence it produces is, as Oksala makes clear, a “specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing” – including the hiring, oversight, and training of police – that we absolutely have the power to change.
And neolib fractures unity between oppressed groups – it functions to prevent cooperative discourse against it.
LeVenia ‘15: Peter A. LaVenia PhD in Political Science from the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the Secretary of the NY State Green Party and manages Matt Funiciello’s campaign for Congress. JANUARY 16, 2015 “Police Behavior and Neoliberalism” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/16/police-behavior-and-neoliberalism/
The cause of impotence on the part of elected officials even in the face of public intransigence by their own police forces lies rather within the socio-political landscape of declining US hegemony in the world-system and its byproduct, neoliberalism. The latter is too often a catch all explanation for Marxists and leftists trying to explain the current era, but here it makes sense. Policing in post-1980 America, roughly the beginnings of neoliberalism, are predicated on the “broken windows” theory first put into practice by NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton: crack down on working class behaviors now designated as unwanted or illegal, use the fines and fees from enforcing the criminalization of working class life to prop up municipal budgets gutted by tax cuts, offshoring, and underconsumption caused by wage stagnation. Interestingly the NYC police have essentially admitted as such during their slowdown and refusal to issue quality-of-life tickets over the past few weeks.¶ In conjunction with this politicians like de Blasio, assuming he actually would want to reform police behavior, find a distinct lack of allies in their own class (and parties) on this issue. Broken windows policing is popular with the financial elites and the ruling class because the money collected and produced by it means more progressive taxation that would otherwise fill the budget gaps of municipalities and states is avoided. It also has the consequence of splitting working people who might otherwise band together to demand – in a class conscious way – better living conditions, wages, and political power. Whites learn to be fearful of minority communities alternatively seen as both enemy and victim of circumstances, all the while needing the police and state to protect them. Of course maintaining this is crucial to legitimizing capitalism and preventing concerted resistance – that’s what the buildup of irrational attitudes of submission to authority do (to quote Chomsky) on the one hand, and on the other the racism inherent in the splitting of the US working class into white and minority groups.¶ There is, then, an implicit understanding by these mayors that their only allies in restraining the police would be working class Americans, and that to begin to do so would mean to put forward a broadly pro-worker agenda of higher wages, progressive taxation, restoring once-gutted social programs, and expanding the political power of the average worker. Quality-of-life problems will only be eliminated when their cause – ultimately capitalism – is, but by beginning to lift millions out of poverty and rebuilding communities the rationale for broken windows policing would begin to disappear. In another era, one with a faction of big business and finance capital willing to compromise on issues of wages and taxation, Mayor de Blasio and his peers would have found allies in the establishment. Now, the stark choice for the mayors and local pols on police behavior is to either acquiesce in one way or another or to throw in your lot with what would rapidly take on the characteristics of a working class political movement.¶ Nothing is likely to happen without protests and organization by labor and working Americans who demand not just an end to broken windows policing but the conditions that supposedly necessitated it in the first place. Crumbling infrastructure, decaying housing, bad schools, crappy jobs and low wages, lack of real health care, gutted social programs: these so-called broken windows that have been used to justify police militarization are the symptom of a rotten system. It is very hopeful indeed that protests against police brutality have sprung up across the United States, and could evolve into a movement to reject the neoliberal consensus. Until then we are likely to see nothing but equivocation by local officials and big city mayors.
Neolib causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.  
Farbod ‘15: (Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.  
Thus, the alternative is to create spaces beyond the grasp of bureaucratic institutions – our utopian ethic is key to breaking out of normative legal thought in the present. This says SCREW YOU to the class fracturing of neoliberalism. The system wants us to be silent and complicit, but collective utopian discourse creates unity and functional pedagogy which works outside the neoliberal order, creating spaces for alternative thought. It’s not a competing policy; it’s a competing worldview. Rather than identifying violence as a legalistic problem requiring more laws, the alt requires a full-force assault on neolib for which the aff’s consequentialist and legalistic framing is incompatible. In order to have sustainable policy-making, the orientation must be correct. If you voe aff, you are voting on an illusion of helping minorities. The debate is about starting points - the AFF limits qualified immunity, which is simply a tool of the state from which it comes. We need to re-orient our methodological starting point. Neolib is not inevitable if we pursue discursive change.
Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3)
At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations.
AND the role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
The role of the ballot is to vote for debater who best deconstructs the state.
Our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making – only once discourse is ethical can policy actions be pursued.
Jones ‘99: Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, ‘99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a counterhegemony and thus undermine the prevailing patterns of discourse and interaction that make up the currently dominant hegemony. This task is accomplished through educational activity, because, as Gramsci argues, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350). Discussing the relationship of the “philosophy of praxis” to political practice, Gramsci claims: It the theory does not tend to leave the “simple” in their primitive philosophy of common sense, but rather to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it affirms the need for contact between intellectuals and “simple” it is not in order to restrict scientific activity and preserve unity at the low level of the masses, but precisely in order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups. (Gramsci 1971: 332-333). According to Gramsci, this attempt to construct an alternative “intellectual-moral bloc” should take place under the auspices of the Communist Party – a body he described as the “modern prince.” Just as Niccolo Machiavelli hoped to see a prince unite Italy, rid the country of foreign barbarians, and create a virtu-ous state, Gramsci believed that the modern price could lead the working class on its journey toward its revolutionary destiny of an emancipated society (Gramsci 1971: 125-205). Gramsci’s relative optimism about the possibility of progressive theorists playing a constructive role in emancipatory political practice was predicated on his belief in the existence of a universal class (a class whose emancipation would inevitably presage the emancipation of humanity itself) with revolutionary potential. It was a gradual loss of faith in this axiom that led Horkheimer and Adorno to their extremely pessimistic prognosis about the possibilities of progressive social change. But does a loss of faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat necessarily lead to the kind of quietism ultimately embraced by the first generation of the Frankfurt School? The conflict that erupted in the 1960s between them and their more radical students suggests not. Indeed, contemporary critical theorists claim that the deprivileging of the role of the proletariat in the struggle for emancipation is actually a positive move. Class remains a very important axis of domination in society, but it is not the only such axis (Fraser 1995). Nor is it valid to reduce all other forms of domination – for example, in the case of gender – to class relations, as orthodox Marxists tend to do. To recognize these points is not only a first step toward the development of an analysis of forms of exploitation and exclusion within society that is more attuned to social reality; it is also a realization that there are other forms of emancipatory politics than those associated with class conflict.1 This in turn suggests new possibilities and problems for emancipatory theory. Furthermore, the abandonment of faith in revolutionary parties is also a positive development. The history of the European left during the twentieth century provides myriad examples of the ways in which the fetishization of party organizations has led to bureaucratic immobility and the confusion of means with ends (see, for example, Salvadori 1990). The failure of the Bolshevik experiment illustrates how disciplined, vanguard parties are an ideal vehicle for totalitarian domination (Serge 1984). Faith in the “infallible party” has obviously been the source of strength and comfort to many in this period and, as the experience of the southern Wales coalfield demonstrates, has inspired brave and progressive behavior (see, for example, the account of support for the Spanish Republic in Francis 1984). But such parties have so often been the enemies of emancipation that they should be treated with the utmost caution. Parties are necessary, but their fetishization is potentially disastrous. History furnishes examples of progressive developments that have been positively influenced by organic intellectuals operating outside the bounds of a particular party structure (G. Williams 1984). Some of these developments have occurred in the particularly intractable realm of security. These examples may be considered as “resources of hope” for critical security studies (R. Williams 1989). They illustrate that ideas are important or, more correctly, that change is the product of the dialectical interaction of ideas and material reality. One clear security-related example of the role of critical thinking and critical thinkers in aiding and abetting progressive social change is the experience of the peace movement of the 1980s. At that time the ideas of dissident defense intellectuals (the “alternative defense” school) encouraged and drew strength from peace activism. Together they had an effect not only on short-term policy but on the dominant discourses of strategy and security, a far more important result in the long run. The synergy between critical security intellectuals and critical social movements and the potential influence of both working in tandem can be witnessed particularly clearly in the fate of common security. As Thomas Risse-Kappen points out, the term “common security” originated in the contribution of peace researchers to the German security debate of the 1970s (Risse-Kappen 1994: 186ff.); it was subsequently popularized by the Palme Commission report (Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues 1982). Initially, mainstream defense intellectuals dismissed the concept as hopelessly idealistic; it certainly had no place in their allegedly hardheaded and realist view of the world. However, notions of common security were taken up by a number of different intellectuals communities, including the liberal arms control community in the United States, Western European peace researchers, security specialists in the center-left political parties of Western Europe, and Soviet “institutchiks” – members of the influential policy institutes in the Soviet Union such as the United States of America and Canada Institute (Landau 1996: 52-54; Risse-Kappen 1994: 196-200; Kaldor 1995; Spencer 1995). These communities were subsequently able to take advantage of public pressure exerted through social movements in order to gain broader acceptance for common security. In Germany, for example, “in response to social movement pressure, German social organizations such as churches and trade unions quickly supported the ideas promoted by peace researchers and the SPD” (Risse-Kappen 1994: 207). Similar pressures even had an effect on the Reagan administration. As Risse-Kappen notes: When the Reagan administration brought hard-liners into power, the US arms control community was removed from policy influence. It was the American peace movement and what became known as the “freeze campaign” that revived the arms control process together with pressure from the European allies. (Risse-Kappen 1994: 205; also Cortright 1993: 90-110). Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that the combination of critical movements and intellectuals persuaded the Reagan government to adopt the rhetoric and substance of common security in its entirety, it is clear that it did at least have a substantial impact on ameliorating U.S. behavior. The most dramatic and certainly the most unexpected impact of alternative defense ideas was felt in the Soviet Union. Through various East-West links, which included arms control institutions, Pugwash conferences, interparty contacts, and even direct personal links, a coterie of Soviet policy analysts and advisers were drawn toward common security and such attendant notions as “nonoffensive defense” (these links are detailed in Evangelista 1995; Kaldor 1995; Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Landau 1996 and Spencer 1995 concentrate on the role of the Pugwash conferences). This group, including Palme Commission member Georgii Arbatov, Pugwash attendee Andrei Kokoshin , and Sergei Karaganov, a senior adviser who was in regular contact with the Western peace researchers Anders Boserup and Lutz Unterseher (Risse-Kappen 1994: 203), then influenced Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s subsequent championing of common security may be attributed to several factors. It is clear, for example, that new Soviet leadership had a strong interest in alleviating tensions in East-West relations in order to facilitate much-needed domestic reforms (“the interaction of ideas and material reality”). But what is significant is that the Soviets’ commitment to common security led to significant changes in force sizes and postures. These in turn aided in the winding down of the Cold War, the end of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, and even the collapse of Russian control over much of the territory of the former Soviet Union. At the present time, in marked contrast to the situation in the early 1980s, common security is part of the common sense of security discourse. As MccGwire points out, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (a common defense pact) is using the rhetoric of common security in order to justify its expansion into Eastern Europe (MccGwire 1997). This points to an interesting and potentially important aspect of the impact of ideas on politics. As concepts such as common security, and collective security before it (Claude 1984: 223-260), are adopted by governments and military services, they inevitably become somewhat debased. The hope is that enough of the residual meaning can survive to shift the parameters of the debate in a potentially progressive direction. Moreover, the adoption of the concept of common security by official circles provides critics with a useful tool for (immanently) critiquing aspects of security policy (as MccGwire 1997 demonsrates in relation to NATO expansion). The example of common security is highly instructive. First, it indicates that critical intellectuals can be politically engaged and play a role – a significant one at that – in making the world a better and safer place. Second, it points to potential future addressees for critical international theory in general, and critical security studies in particular. Third, it also underlines the role of ideas in the evolution in society. CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES AND THE THEORY-PRACTICE NEXUS Although most proponents of critical security studies reject aspects of Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals, in particular his exclusive concentration on class and his emphasis on the guiding role of the party, the desire for engagement and relevance must remain at the heart of their project. The example of the peace movement suggests that critical theorists can still play the role of organic intellectuals and that this organic relationship need not confine itself to a single class; it can involve alignment with different coalitions of social movements that campaign on an issue or a series of issues pertinent to the struggle for emancipation (Shaw 1994b; R. Walker 1994). Edward Said captures this broader orientation when he suggests that critical intellectuals “are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless” (Said 1994: 84). In the specific case of critical security studies, this means placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security at the center of the agenda and making suffering humanity rather than raison d’etat the prism through which problems are viewed. Here the project stands full-square within the critical theory tradition. If “all theory is for someone and for some purpose,” then critical security studies is for “the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,” and its purpose is their emancipation. The theoretical implications of this orientation have already been discussed in the previous chapters. They involve a fundamental reconceptualization of security with a shift in referent object and a broadening of the range of issues considered as a legitimate part of the discourse. They also involve a reconceptualization of strategy within this expanded notion of security. But the question remains at the conceptual level of how these alternative types of theorizing – even if they are self-consciously aligned to the practices of critical or new social movements, such as peace activism, the struggle for human rights, and the survival of minority cultures – can become “a force for the direction of action.” Again, Gramsci’s work is insightful. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci advances a sophisticated analysis of how dominant discourses play a vital role in upholding particular political and economic orders, or, in Gramsci’s terminology, “historic blocs” (Gramsci 1971: 323-377). Gramsci adopted Machiavelli’s view of power as a centaur, ahlf man, half beast: a mixture of consent and coercion. Consent is produced and reproduced by a ruling hegemony that holds sway through civil society and takes on the status of common sense; it becomes subconsciously accepted and even regarded as beyond question. Obviously, for Gramsci, there is nothing immutable about the values that permeate society; they can and do change. In the social realm, ideas and institutions that were once seen as natural and beyond question (i.e., commonsensical) in the West, such as feudalism and slavery, are now seen as anachronistic, unjust, and unacceptable. In Marx’s well-worn phrase, “All that is solid melts into the air.” Gramsci’s intention is to harness this potential for change and ensure that it moves in the direction of emancipation. To do this he suggests a strategy of a “war of position” (Gramsci 1971: 229-239). Gramsci argues that in states with developed civil societies, such as those in Western liberal democracies, any successful attempt at progressive social change requires a slow, incremental, even molecular, struggle to break down the prevailing hegemony and construct an alternative counterhegemony to take its place. Organic intellectuals have a crucial role to play in this process by helping to undermine the “natural,” “commonsense,” internalized nature of the status quo. This in turn helps create political space within which alternative conceptions of politics can be developed and new historic blocs created. I contend that Gramsci’s strategy of a war of position suggests an appropriate model for proponents of critical security studies to adopt in relating their theorizing to political practice. THE TASKS OF CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES If the project of critical security studies is conceived in terms of war of position, then the main task of those intellectuals who align themselves with the enterprise is to attempt to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse. This may be accomplished by utilizing specialist information and expertise to engage in an immanent critique of the prevailing security regimes, that is, comparing the justifications of those regimes with actual outcomes. When this is attempted in the security field, the prevailing structures and regimes are found to fail grievously on their own terms. Such an approach also involves challenging the pronouncements of those intellectuals, traditional or organic, whose views serve to legitimate, and hence reproduce, the prevailing world order. This challenge entails teasing out the often subconscious and certainly unexamined assumptions that underlie their arguments while drawing attention to the normative viewpoints that are smuggled into mainstream thinking about security behind its positivist façade. In this sense, proponents of critical security studies approximate to Foucault’s notion of “specific intellectuals” who use their expert knowledge to challenge the prevailing “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980: 132). However, critical theorists might wish to reformulate this sentiment along more familiar Quaker lines of “speaking truth to power” (this sentiment is also central to Said 1994) or even along the eisteddfod lines of speaking “truth against the world.” Of course, traditional strategists can, and indeed do, sometimes claim a similar role. Colin S. Gray, for example, states that “strategists must be prepared to ‘speak truth to power’” (Gray 1982a: 193). But the difference between Gray and proponents of critical security studies is that, whereas the former seeks to influence policymakers in particular directions without questioning the basis of their power, the latter aim at a thoroughgoing critique of all that traditional security studies has taken for granted. Furthermore, critical theorists base their critique on the presupposition, elegantly stated by Adorno, that “the need to lend suffering a voice is the precondition of all truth” (cited in Jameson 1990: 66). The aim of critical security studies in attempting to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy is ultimately educational. As Gramsci notes, “every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily a pedagogic relationship” (Gramsci 1971: 350; see also the discussion of critical pedagogy in Neufeld 1995: 116-121). Thus, by criticizing the hegemonic discourse and advancing alternative conceptions of security based on different understandings of human potentialities, the approach is simultaneously playing apart in eroding the legitimacy of the ruling historic bloc and contributing to the development of a counterhegemonic position. There are a number of avenues of avenues open to critical security specialists in pursuing this educational strategy. As teachers, they can try to foster and encourage skepticism toward accepted wisdom and open minds to other possibilities. They can also take advantage of the seemingly unquenchable thirst of the media for instant pundistry to forward alternative views onto a broader stage. Nancy Fraser argues: “As teachers, we try to foster an emergent pedagogical counterculture …. As critical public intellectuals we try to inject our perspectives into whatever cultural or political public spheres we have access to” (Fraser 1989: 11). Perhaps significantly, support for this type of emancipatory strategy can even be found in the work of the ultrapessimistic Adorno, who argues: In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when delusions were healed not by focused propaganda, but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what lay at the root of the delusion. (cited in Kellner 1992: vii) Such “unobtrusive yet insistent work” does not in itself create the social change to which Adorno alludes. The conceptual and the practical dangers of collapsing practice into theory must be guarded against. Rather, through their educational activities, proponent of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements. That said, the role of theorists is not to direct and instruct those movements with which they are aligned; instead, the relationship is reciprocal. The experience of the European, North American, and Antipodean peace movements of the 1980s shows how influential social movements can become when their efforts are harnessed to the intellectual and educational activity of critical thinkers. For example, in his account of New Zealand’s antinuclear stance in the 1980s, Michael C. Pugh cites the importance of the visits of critical intellectuals such as Helen Caldicott and Richard Falk in changing the country’s political climate and encouraging the growth of the antinuclear movement (Pugh 1989: 108; see also COrtright 1993: 5-13). In the 1980s peace movements and critical intellectuals interested in issues of security and strategy drew strength and succor from each other’s efforts. If such critical social movements do not exist, then this creates obvious difficulties for the critical theorist. But even under these circumstances, the theorist need not abandon all hope of an eventual orientation toward practice. Once again, the peace movement of the 1980s provides evidence of the possibilities. At that time, the movement benefited from the intellectual work undertaken in the lean years of the peace movement in the late 1970s. Some of the theories and concepts developed then, such as common security and nonoffensive defense, were eventually taken up even in the Kremlin and played a significant role in defusing the second Cold War. Those ideas developed in the 1970s can be seen in Adornian terms of the a “message in a bottle,” but in this case, contra Adorno’s expectations, they were picked up and used to support a program of emancipatory political practice. Obviously, one would be naïve to understate the difficulties facing those attempting to develop alternative critical approaches within academia. Some of these problems have been alluded to already and involve the structural constraints of academic life itself. Said argues that many problems are caused by what he describes as the growing “professionalisation” of academic life (Said 1994: 49-62). Academics are now so constrained by the requirements of job security and marketability that they are extremely risk-averse. It pays – in all senses – to stick with the crowd and avoid the exposed limb by following the prevalent disciplinary preoccupations, publish in certain prescribed journals, and so on. The result is the navel gazing so prevalent in the study of international relations and the seeming inability of security specialists to deal with the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War (Kristensen 1997 highlights the search of U.S. nuclear planners for “new targets for old weapons”). And, of course, the pressures for conformism are heightened in the field of security studies when governments have a very real interest in marginalizing dissent. Nevertheless, opportunities for critical thinking do exist, and this thinking can connect with the practices of social movements and become a “force for the direction of action.” The experience of the 1980s, when, in the depths of the second Cold War, critical thinkers risked demonization and in some countries far worse in order to challenge received wisdom, thus arguably playing a crucial role in the very survival of the human race, should act as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
AND, the knowledge claims of the AC are the starting points for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their diagnosis of the issue is wrong, you must drop them.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Interpretation: The affirmative must defend limiting qualified immunity for POLICE officers.
Police Officer is defined by…
Merriam Webster ‘16: Merriam Webster’s Dictionary (“Police Officer” available online at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/police20officer; AB
a person whose job is to enforce laws, investigate crimes, and make arrests
This means a police officer is for initial arrests and investigation– before the alleged criminal gets sentenced by courts. It’s a PRE-SENTENCING duty.
This is different from a correctional officer. A correctional officer is a DURING-SENTENCING or POST-SENTENCING duty, outside the duty of police officers.
Jeff Roberts of Rasmussen College writes: Jeff Roberts writes in “Patrol Officer vs. Sheriff's Deputy vs. Correctional Officer: Which Entry-Level Law Enforcement Job is Right for You?” for Rasmussen College on 5/24/2013. Jeff is the Content Marketing Editor at Collegis Education. He oversees all of the blog and newsletter content for Rasmussen College. As a writer, he creates articles that educate, encourage and motivate current and future students. http://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/justice-studies/blog/police-officer-vs-sheriff-vs-corrections-entry-level-jobs/; AB
Correctional officers – often referred to as “COs” – represent an entirely different side of law enforcement as compared to their counterparts in police departments and sheriff’s offices. COs are responsible for enforcing rules and regulations inside a state or federal prison, jail or rehabilitative or correctional facility. They supervise inmates during meals, recreation, work and other daily activities. Both COs and deputy sheriffs are tasked with transporting prisoners between correctional facilities and state or federal courthouses. Duties specific to COs include inspecting correctional facilities – locks, window bars, grills, doors and gates – to ensure security and prevent escape. While sheriff’s deputies and police officers carry handguns on a routine basis, COs use firearms only in emergency situations.
Violation: The aff limits QI for public CORRECTIONAL OFFICERS
Standards:
1) Limits – they explode limits by opening the topic to any government officials – that can include correction officers, district attorneys, the military, and otherwise. That generates distinct literature bases that are completely distinct from police – prisons are different than the general population, military is distinct from civilian – which makes neg prep burdens incredibly high. Limits key to fairness because it controls our ability to engage.
2) Ground – we can't go police CPs, court clog, or disadvantages, or topic counterplans because they don't defend police officers which our links are contingent on. Ground is key to fairness because it demarcates our ability to engage.
3) Answering the resolution – if they’re not defending POLICE officers, they’re not affirming the RESOLUTION.
Voter: Fairness is the voter because this is a competitive activity. Judges and the win-loss system mean that debate is a competitive activity that requires all competitors to have an equal chance to win. Procedural checks on debaters are key or else a competitor could just sign the ballot themselves. DROP THE DEBATER ON T – THEY DO NOT ANSWER THE RESOLUTION.
AND DEFAULT TO COMPETING INTERPS
A reasonability paradigm only justifies competing interpretations because there is no metric for what is reasonable without comparing interpretations against one another.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Nuclear phase-out in Armenia causes Armenia to become dependent on Russian oil – causes regional conflict and energy crash
Sahakyan ‘16: Armine Sahakyan writes for the Huffington Post on 04/27/2016 12:36 pm ET| Updated Apr 27, 2016. Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia. A columnist with the Kyiv Post and a blogger with The Huffington Post, she writes on human rights and democracy in Russia and the former Soviet Union. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/armenia-continues-to-gamb_b_9788186.html; AB
Some nuclear experts agree, but some don’t. Even Armenians who worry about the plant’s safety don’t want to return to the days between 1989 and 1995 when it was shut down after a 1988 earthquake in Gyumri, 48 miles from Metsamor. The quake devastated Armenia’s second-largest city, killing 25,000 and leaving half a million homeless. Although the plant came through the 1988 quake without a hitch, it is located in an active seismic zone — and many Armenian nuclear officials feared a catastrophe if the next temblor involved a direct hit on Metsamor. At the time they recommended closing it, Armenia was able to obtain oil and gas from Russia and Turkmenistan for its thermal power plants. The government decided to increase its purchase of those supplies to produce additional power from thermal plants to cover the loss of electricity from the nuclear plant. The war between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which had long been Azerbaijani territory, dashed the thermal-plant plans, however. That’s because the oil and gas that Russia and Turkmenistan were sending to Armenia came through Azerbaijan, which refused to transport the fuel once the conflict started. With the nuclear plant shut down and thermal plants unable to be ramped up, Armenians went through the Dark Ages for several years. Power was available only one hour a day, bringing industry to a standstill and making life at home miserable. “You can imagine—it was as cold in the apartment as it was in the street” in winter, journalist Ara Tadevosyan recalled. Although a truce in the war was negotiated in 1994, Armenia was still unable to get oil and gas from Russia and Turkmenistan. Azerbaijan demanded nothing less than the return of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Increased dependence on Russian energy increases Russian arctic energy expansion – leads to armed conflict escalation.

Russia’s ambitions are to fundamentally alter the existing European security structure, to marginalize or sideline NATO, and to diminish the U.S. role in European security. In all these areas, Russia’s national interests fundamentally diverge from those of the U.S.; or, more precisely, the Russian leadership does not share Western interests or threat perceptions.4 To affirm its national interests, the Medvedev administration has released three major policy documents: the Foreign Policy Concept in July 2008, the Foreign and Security Policy Principles in August 2008, and the National Security Strategy in May 2009.5 The Foreign Policy Concept claims that Russia is a resurgent great power, exerting substantial influence over international affairs and determined to defend the interests of Russian citizens wherever they reside. According to the Foreign and Security Policy Principles, Moscow follows five key principles: the primacy of international law, multipolarity to replace U.S.-dominated unipolarity, the avoidance of Russian isolationism, the protection of Russians wherever they reside, and Russia’s privileged interests in regions adjacent to Russia. Russia’s National Security Strategy, which replaced the previous National Security Concepts, repeats some of the formulations in the other two documents and depicts NATO expansion and its expanded global role as a major threat to Russia’s national interests and to international security. The document asserts that Russia seeks to overcome its domestic problems and emerge as an economic powerhouse. Much attention was also devoted to the potential risk of future energy wars over regions such as the Arctic, where Russia would obviously defend its access to hydrocarbon resources. The document also envisages mounting competition over energy sources escalating into armed conflicts near Russia’s borders. Among the customary list of threats to Russia’s security, the National Security Strategy includes alleged falsifications of Russian history.6 The Kremlin is engaged in an extensive historical revisionist campaign in which it seeks to depict Russia’s Tsarist and Soviet empires as benevolent and civilizing missions pursued in neighboring countries. Systematized state-sponsored historical distortions have profound contemporary repercussions. Interpretations of the past are important for legitimizing the current government, which is committed to demonstrating Russia’s alleged greatness and re-establishing its privileged interests over former satellites.
Arctic war globalizes and goes nuclear.
Dhanapala ‘13: Jayantha Dhanapala writes in “The Arctic as a bridge” for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on 4 February 2013. Dhanapala is a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors and president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Formerly, he was United Nations under-secretary-general for Disarmament Affairs (1998-2003) and ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United States (1995-7). http://thebulletin.org/arctic-bridge; AB
No country owns the North Pole or the expanse of the Arctic Ocean surrounding it. The Arctic region has a population of about 4 million, including more than 30 distinct groups of indigenous people using dozens of languages; they have lived there for more than 10,000 years. The area also has a unique and diverse ecosystem that includes fish, marine mammals, birds, land animals, and a thriving web of bacteria, viruses, algae, worms, and crustaceans that live in sea ice. The natural resources are vast and largely untapped. The US Geological Survey has estimated that 22 percent of the world's undiscovered energy resources lie in the Arctic zone -- especially in the submerged plateau, between the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea known as the Chukchi Cap. The Arctic has been vital to humanity's development, and history has a strange way of repeating itself. What is now the Bering Strait was once a land bridge, across which humans migrated from Asia to the Americas. It promises today to be a maritime conduit for increased global commerce through the Arctic as human-induced climate change causes ice to melt and shipping lanes to open. This development has the potential to bring nations and peoples together for peace and development -- or to spawn dispute and conflict. There are in fact many reasons that the international community -- and not just the countries with coastlines on the Arctic Ocean -- should focus on the Arctic. First, the world is increasingly interdependent, and the hard evidence of climate change proves that the felling of Amazon forests in Brazil and increased carbon dioxide emissions in China have a cumulative global impact, leading to the incipient disappearance of Tuvalu into the Pacific Ocean and the gradual sinking of the Maldives. In a literal sense, English poet John Donne's celebrated line -- "No man is an island, entire of itself" -- is truer today than ever before. The environment of the Arctic affects the world environment. Beyond its contribution to rising sea levels, the melting of the Arctic ice cap will facilitate the mining of resources, especially oil and gas, and lead to an increase in commercial shipping. The ownership of the resources and the sovereignty of Arctic areas, including the Northwest Passage, are already being contested. The applicability of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has to be more sharply defined, especially in those areas of the Arctic where claims overlap. And clearly, access to the resources of the Arctic north is of concern to the global south, where the "bottom billion" people of the world live in extreme poverty. Increasingly, science shows that those people are going to be hit hardest by climate change. Some of those people also see the area outside the territory claimed by the littoral states of the Arctic as part of the global commons and, therefore, the shared heritage of humankind. A global regime could thus be established over the Arctic to mitigate the effects of climate change and to provide for the equitable use of its resources outside the territory of the eight circumpolar countries. Third, as someone who has devoted most of his working life to the cause of disarmament, and especially nuclear disarmament, I am deeply concerned that two nuclear weapon states -- the United States and the Russian Federation, which together own 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world -- face one another across the Arctic and have competing claims. These claims -- not to mention those that could be made by North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway -- may lead to conflict that has the potential to escalate into the use of nuclear weapons. Thus the Arctic is ripe for conversion into a nuclear weapon free zone. I discussed a fourth reason the international community should focus on the Arctic with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (who has in fact visited the Arctic on an icebreaker) when I met him in New York last fall. The Arctic, I told him, is the one region in the world where the environment (and climate change in particular), the threat of nuclear weapons, the human rights of indigenous people, and the need to advance the rule of law converge as international issues. The Arctic, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to make international diplomacy work for the benefit of the entire international community. Security and interdependence. Security today is a concept that is much broader than military security alone. It encompasses international peace and security, human rights, and development. Twenty-first century security is also a cooperative and common security, in which one region's insecurity inevitably and negatively affects the security of other regions of the world. And so Arctic security is inextricably interwoven with global security, giving us all a role as stakeholders in the north. Geographer Jared Diamond's impressive book, Collapse, shows that not every society faced with environmental collapse has gone under like Norse Greenland or the Mayan civilization. The Inuits, for example, have done much better on Greenland than the Norse and are still with us. Diamond identifies a society's response to environmental problems as the most significant factor contributing to -- or forestalling -- its collapse. Long-term planning and a willingness to reconsider core values can stave off collapse, Diamond writes. This is the same lesson that British historian Arnold Toynbee provided in his A Study of History, with its descriptions of the challenges humankind has faced throughout history and the responses it has made. The point, of course, is that there are solutions to the problems of Arctic security, but they are solutions based on multidisciplinary and multilateral co-operation. States party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to the Kyoto Protocol met in late November and early December of 2012 in Doha, Qatar, in the midst of heightened concerns over climate change after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States. Even so, there was an unmistakable air of "business as usual" in the policies pursued at those meetings. And the subject of climate change was never even discussed in the recently concluded US presidential election. The developed world has contributed disproportionately to the carbon emissions that cause climate change. Developing countries -- notably China and India -- are poised to follow this bad example. The Arctic circumpolar countries, linked together in the Arctic Council, are developed countries, and they could set a major precedent by taking steps to achieve cooperative solutions to the problems of Arctic security across the entire gamut of political, economic, ecological, social, and cultural aspects. It would be an example welcomed by the rest of the global community. Observers from non-Arctic states, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations are included in the Arctic Council; China is applying for permanent observer status, presumably out of a strong interest in using the shorter shipping routes to Europe and the East Coast of North America via the Arctic Ocean, and in gaining access to resources in the region. A Chinese icebreaker conducted a three-month voyage through the Arctic in 2012; Chinese interest in mineral deposits has been evident. As Canadian international law and politics expert Michael Byers writes, "China and other non-Arctic countries are fully entitled to navigate freely beyond 12 miles from shore, to fish beyond 200 miles from shore, and to exploit seabed resources that lie beyond the continental shelf. … China is respecting international law and has legitimate interests in the Arctic. Its request for permanent observer status should be granted forthwith -- and Canada should make this a priority of its chairmanship of the Arctic Council." An all-encompassing Arctic Treaty, signed a half century after the Antarctic Treaty, would be a major achievement. To those skeptics who dismiss a wide-ranging agreement as unrealistic and impossible, let me quote the great Norwegian explorer, scientist, and Nobel Peace Prize-winning diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, who said, "The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes longer."
Nuke war causes extinction.
Germanos ‘13: Andrea Germanos writes in “Nuclear War Could Mean ‘Extinction of the Human Race” for Common Dreams on December 10th, 2013. Andrea Germanos is senior editor and a staff writer at Common Dreams. Common Dreams NewsCenter, often referred to simply as Common Dreams, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit U.S.-based progressive news website.1 Common Dreams publishes news stories, editorials and a newswire of current breaking news. Common Dreams also re-publishes relevant content from numerous other sources such as the Associated Press and writers such as Robert Reich and Molly Ivins. The website also provides links to other relevant columnists, periodicals, radio outlets, news services, and websites. http://www.commondreams.org/news/2013/12/10/nuclear-war-could-mean-extinction-human-race; AB
A war using even a small percentage of the world's nuclear weapons threatens the lives of two billion people, a new report warns. The findings in the report issued by International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) are based on studies by climate scientists that show how nuclear war would alter the climate and agriculture, thereby threatening one quarter of the world's population with famine. Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? offers an updated edition to the groups' April of 2012 report, which the groups say "may have seriously underestimated the consequences of a limited nuclear war." "A nuclear war using only a fraction of existing arsenals would produce massive casualties on a global scale—far more than we had previously believed," Dr. Ira Helfand, the report’s author and IPPNW co-president, said in a statement. As their previous report showed, years after even a limited nuclear war, production of corn in the U.S. and China's middle season rice production would severely decline, and fears over dwindling food supplies would lead to hoarding and increases in food prices, creating further food insecurity for those already reliant on food imports. The updated report adds that Chinese winter wheat production would plummet if such a war broke out. Based on information from new studies combining reductions in wheat, corn and rice, this new edition doubles the number of people they expect to be threatened by nuclear-war induced famine to over two billion. "The prospect of a decade of widespread hunger and intense social and economic instability in the world’s largest country has immense implications for the entire global community, as does the possibility that the huge declines in Chinese wheat production will be matched by similar declines in other wheat producing countries," Helfand stated. The crops would be impacted, the report explains, citing previous studies, because of the black carbon particles that would be released, causing widespread changes like cooling temperatures, decreased precipitation and decline in solar radiation. In this scenario of famine, epidemics of infectious diseases would be likely, the report states, and could lead to armed conflict. From the report: Within nations where famine is widespread, there would almost certainly be food riots, and competition for limited food resources might well exacerbate ethnic and regional animosities. Among nations, armed conflict would be a very real possibility as states dependent on imports attempted to maintain access to food supplies. While a limited nuclear war would bring dire circumstances, the impacts if the world's biggest nuclear arms holders were involved would be even worse. "With a large war between the United States and Russia, we are talking about the possible —not certain, but possible—extinction of the human race," Helfand told Agence-France Presse. "In this kind of war, biologically there are going to be people surviving somewhere on the planet but the chaos that would result from this will dwarf anything we've ever seen," Helfand told the news agency. As Helfand writes, the data cited in the report "raises a giant red flag about the threat to humanity posed." Yet, as Dr. Peter Wilk, former national executive director of PSR writes in an op-ed today, the "threat is of our own creation." As a joint statement by 124 states delivered to the United Nations General Assembly in October stated: "It is in the interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances." "Countries around the world—those who are nuclear-armed and those who are not—must work together to eliminate the threat and consequences of nuclear war," Helfand said. “In order to eliminate this threat, we must eliminate nuclear weapons.”

Increased dependence on Russian energy increases Russian arctic expansion – leads to armed conflict escalation.
Axe ‘15: David Axe wrote in “Russia and America prep forces for Arctic War” on October 5th, 2015. “As a freelance and staff writer for many publications I have covered local, national and international politics, crime, the arts and war. I have reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Japan, East Timor, Kenya, Somalia, Chad, Congo and the U.K. My work has appeared in Wired, Esquire, The Washington Times, The Village Voice, Popular Science, Fast Company, Cosmopolitan and many others. I have also shot video for C-SPAN and Voice of America. I have written several books and graphic novels. In 2013 I began editing the national security collection at Medium.com.” – From his LinkedIn. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/10/04/russia-and-america-prep-forces-for-arctic-war/; AB
President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Alaska helped draw attention to global climate change — and to the national-security tensions that could result from a warming Arctic region. Surveyors believe that the seabed under Arctic waters could contain hundreds of billions of barrels of untapped oil. As the North Pole becomes more accessible, and so more valuable, Arctic countries — each with its own and in some cases overlapping territorial claims — are getting ready for some serious competition. The United States and Russia are geopolitical rivals and uneasy Arctic neighbors. More and more Russian and U.S. military forces are deploying on and under the Arctic Ocean. But Washington and Moscow are approaching their Arctic build-ups quite differently. The Kremlin holds the advantage on the ocean’s surface; the Pentagon dominates beneath the waves. Though Russia and the United States both train Arctic ground troops, Washington is also building a northern strike force of high-tech stealth warplanes. These different approaches are the results of military policies and priorities going back decades. Moscow chose to invest in icebreakers to work along its vast Arctic frontier, while Washington spent its money on submarines and warplanes that are equally useful outside the polar regions. While Obama was in Alaska, the White House announced that the administration would push for more and better icebreakers. After decades of neglect, the U.S. Coast Guard, which operates all U.S. icebreakers, possesses just three of the tough, ice-shattering vessels, and American companies own another two. These five ships must divide their time between the north and south poles, plowing paths through sea ice so other vessels can safely navigate frigid waters. “The administration will propose,” the White House explained on its official website, “to accelerate acquisition of a replacement heavy icebreaker to 2020 from 2022, begin planning for construction of additional icebreakers and call on Congress to work with the administration to provide sufficient resources to fund these critical investments.” But even after adding a few icebreakers, Washington will still be far behind Moscow in this category of Arctic weaponry. The Russian government owns 22 icebreakers; Russian industry possesses another 19 of the specialized vessels. Moscow has another 11 icebreakers under construction or in planning. To be fair, Russia’s Arctic coastline is many hundreds of miles longer than that of the United States. In theory, Russia’s icebreakers are spread out over a wider area during routine, peacetime operations. In wartime, however, the Kremlin could quickly concentrate its icebreakers, which could carve channels for Russian warships far more quickly than the Pentagon could do for its own ships. But the United States’ Arctic strategy depends less on surface ships than Russia’s strategy does. Instead, the U.S. military is betting on submarines to exert its influence in the far north. “The submarine is the best platform to operate in the Arctic,” Commander Jeff Bierley, skipper of the U.S. Navy submarine Seawolf, told Reuters, “because it can spend the majority of its time under the ice.” The U.S. fleet operates 41 nuclear-powered attack subs with equipment for sailing under — and punching through — Arctic ice. Russia’s ice-capable attack-submarine force numbers just 25 vessels. These U.S. subs likely deploy more regularly than Russia’s do. Amid economic volatility, the Kremlin has struggled to consistently fund naval deployments. Meanwhile, every two years the U.S. Navy sends a pair of attack subs into the Arctic Circle on a training and scientific mission. In the years between these ice experiments, Seawolf-class subs based in Washington state sail through the Bering Strait and under the ice cap, crossing over the top of the world and traveling from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic and then back. The Navy designed Seawolf and her two sister ships specifically for Arctic operations. The vessels have ice-scanning sonar and equipment to help the subs force their way through the ice cap to reach the surface during emergencies. On the ice, the two countries are at near-parity. The U.S. Army oversees three combat brigades in Alaska, each composed of roughly 3,000 soldiers. One brigade features paratroopers, another is in Stryker armored vehicles and a third is made up of reconnaissance troops. The paratroopers regularly practice parachuting onto the Arctic ice. During one February 2015 training exercise, called Spartan Pegasus, two C-17 and two C-130 transport planes based in Alaska dropped 180 paratroopers plus two vehicles and supplies onto a training range north of the Arctic Circle, where temperatures hover around 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “The purpose of Spartan Pegasus,” the Army stated on its website, “was to validate soldier mobility across frozen terrain, a key fundamental of U.S. Army Alaska’s capacity as the Army’s northernmost command.” The Strykers are less mobile. A C-17 — the U.S. Air Force keeps eight of the four-engine cargo planes in Alaska — can carry several Strykers, which weigh roughly 25 tons each, but the Air Force doesn’t often practice landings on Arctic runways. The Canadian air force does, however. It staged its own C-17s landings and take-offs from Arctic villages in temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. So in theory the U.S. Air Force could move the Army’s Alaska-based Stryker brigade to Arctic battlegrounds. A C-17 can also drop Strykers via parachute, though the Air Force has only done this in tests. The Russian army’s Arctic command is smaller. It controls just two brigades with armored vehicles. But combat units from outside the command regularly head north for training, in particular, paratroopers and the transport planes that ferry them. One Arctic exercise in March reportedly involved 80,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen plus more than 200 aircraft. An official photo from the war game depicts an An-72 transport plane and white-clad infantry on an airfield carved in the snow. Russia has proved it can patrol the airspace over the Arctic. The U.S. Air Force, however, holds the northern advantage. In addition to C-17 and C-130 transports, the American air arm maintains E-3 radar planes and three fighter squadrons in Alaska — two with 20 high-tech F-22 stealth fighters each and one with 18 older F-16s. In coming years, up to two squadrons of new F-35 stealth fighters will join the F-16s at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, which will increase the Alaskan fighter fleet by at least a third. In February, the Air Force wrapped up cold-weather testing of the F-35 that proved the new radar-evading warplane can function in the Arctic climate. “We’re pushing the F-35 to its environmental limits,” said Billie Flynn, an F-35 test pilot, “ranging from 120 degrees Fahrenheit to negative 40 degrees, and every possible weather condition in between.” In a kind of literal Cold War, Russian forces will continue to dominate the surface of the Arctic Ocean while the American military preserves its edge below and above the ice. Meanwhile, both countries are training thousands of ground troops for Arctic ops — just in case the Cold War turns hot in the thawing polar region.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Counter-Plan: Countries except China should prohibit the production of nuclear power.
Fossil fuel emissions are driving air pollution in China.
Jianxiang ‘15: (Yang Jianxiang: Writer for Xinhua News, official press agency of the People's Republic of China, “Wind power helps clean China's air,” 10/7/15, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-10/07/c_134688843.htm)
The use of fossil-fuelled energies is the major culprit in smog. Research by the Chinese Academy of Sciences found fossil fuels contribute almost 70 percent of the pollutants that cause the extraordinarily high ratio of PM2.5 (particulate matter that is two and a half microns or less in width) in the air, which becomes smog.¶ PM2.5 is a health hazard. In the last three decades, the number of lung cancer cases in China has quadrupled. "This might be to do with the increase in smoggy days, as the country's smoking rate declined in the same period," Dr. Zhong Nanshan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a national hero in the battle against the 2003 SARS epidemic, said at a public forum.¶
Air pollution is driving environmental protests that are on the brink of collapsing the CCP.
Duggan ‘15: (Jennifer Duggan is a writer for Al Jazeera and the Gaurdian with an MA in international relations from Dublin City University, Take Part, 10/9/15, “Green China: Why Beijing Fears a Nascent Environmental Protest Movement”, http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/10/09/china-environmental-protes)
China's leaders appear fearful that the many, small localized bands of discontented citizens like Hu will coalesce into a larger movement; it China now spends more money on internal security, which includes managing and suppressing these protests, than it does on its military. The unification of what are now disconnected grassroots actions against specific pollution sources into a national environmental movement is perceived as a threat to the rule of the Communist Party. The Internet, used by activists and protesters as a tool for sharing information, is often quickly scrubbed of evidence of any protest actions or criticism of the government. Earlier this year, a documentary film on China's environmental ills received hundreds of millions of hits in just one week before being taken down by government censors, presumably out of fear that it could become China's Silent Spring moment, sparking a nationwide outcry. At the same time, citizens are fearful too—of the rash of toxins that threaten their lives, and of the government that has shown it is willing to punish those who dare complain about the threat. Nevertheless, complaining they are, in increasing numbers and with increasing boldness—and impact. Over a traditional lunch of shared dishes, Hu explains her motivation. “Our main disagreement is that the government believes the pollution can be under control, but we don’t,” she says, getting animated and waving her chopsticks. “The government said they could control the pollution in the landfill, but the stinky air is constantly there. I’m told the landfills in the U.S. don’t have any smell at all. Golf courses, parks, and cafés are right around them. But our government doesn’t have good management ability. It’s actually a public trust issue.” Such fears seemed to be confirmed on the night of Aug. 12, when a series of explosions at a chemical warehouse rocked the port city of Tianjin, 75 miles from Beijing. Cell-phone video broadcast around the world recorded a fiery red ball exploding from a building, a flash, and then a massive bang as a second, even bigger fireball engulfed the sky. More than 150 people were killed. Criticism and anger have since been expressed across China, with users on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to Twitter, questioning how hazardous chemicals could be stored so close to residential areas in violation of national safety standards; facilities with hazardous chemicals are forbidden from operating less than one kilometer from residential and public buildings, though it’s not clear whether the warehouse owner will face fines or criminal penalties. Residents whose homes were destroyed in the blast also took part in protests, demanding compensation. The warehouse that exploded was found to have been holding 40 types of chemicals, which according to state media included 700 tons of sodium cyanide, 800 tons of ammonium nitrate (the fertilizer used in the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995), and 500 tons of potassium nitrate. Residents fear pollution in the area since the explosion, and reports surfaced of chemical rain falling afterward and thousands of dead fish washing up nearby. The outrage expressed around the Tianjin disaster reflects significant and growing concern about the state of the environment and pollution caused by the country’s coal-fired power plants and industrial operations. According to a Pew Research Center poll published in September, air pollution and water pollution are Nos. 2 and 3 on the list of Chinese citizens’ top concerns. (No. 1—corruption—is itself linked to pollution, as those in a position to do something about it have connections to industry, and if air and water pollution are counted together they dwarf corruption as the chief concern). Air pollution is a visible and highly publicized problem, and the burgeoning middle classes, well-educated and with newfound leisure time, are becoming increasingly upset and outspoken about toxic water and soil. Last year, almost 90 percent of China’s biggest cities failed to meet air-quality standards, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection (even as emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide fell slightly, the ministry reported in September). Despite gaining worldwide attention for its “airpocalypses,” when pollution levels have reached 755 on a scale of 500, Beijing isn’t even in the top 10 of China’s most polluted cities. While emissions from coal-fired power stations cause choking air above, polluting factories leak chemical-laden wastewater, poisoning rivers and farms. Only recently did the full scale of China’s environmental degradation come to light: After years of keeping the results of a soil pollution survey a state secret, the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2014 admitted that almost 20 percent of the country’s farmland is polluted, mostly with toxic heavy metals from heavy industry and petrochemicals from intensive agriculture. Nearly 60 percent of groundwater is polluted. A study published in the scientific journal PLOS One in August estimated that air pollution contributes to the deaths of as many as 1.6 million people in China each year. People are now making their voices heard in the form of protests, mostly against site-specific issues such as incinerators or chemical plants. Hu has written to authorities expressing concern about the Asuwei incinerator and in September 2009 took part with around 100 of her neighbors in a protest against it. Hu is smartly dressed, with jewelry and fashionable dark-rimmed glasses. She was at the vanguard of a new class of protesters—well-informed citizens concerned for their health and their families’ future. When construction plans were delayed soon after they first protested, some thought their actions may have had an effect, Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2014 admitted that almost 20 percent of the country’s farmland is polluted, Maya Wang, a researcher on China at Human Rights Watch, says that although these protests focus on local issues, they are connected to the bigger environmental problems facing the nation. “Chinese people in general are more concerned about pollution. In big cities in particular there have been large scale protests, often because the environmental pollution in China has increased quite dramatically,” she says. Protests have been growing in number and size over the past decade. According to Yang Zhaofei, vice-chair of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, a Beijing-based NGO, the number of environmental protests has increased by an average of 29 percent every year since 1996; in 2011 the number of major demonstrations rose 120 percent. Lu Yuyu runs a website that tracks protests in China using search engines and information gathered from social media and also sees the number of environmental protests rising drastically. Lu tracks all types of demonstrations, but, he says, “protests about environment and pollution are increasing not only in number but also in scale. Environmental protests are seen across the country in every province, in both cities and the remote countryside.” The government appears worried. The first year China spent more on internal security than on military defense was 2011; the gap widened over the next two years, and in 2014 Beijing stopped reporting the numbers separately. Official figures put the number of “mass incidents”—protests over corruption, abuse of power, pollution, and other issues—as having risen more than tenfold between 1993 and 2010. Beijing has also since stopped reporting those figures. Lu says one thing he’s noticed over years of tracking public protests and demonstrations is that environmental protests “are usually by far the largest.” They’re also the ones that see the most violent crackdowns. “Pollution is something that affects everyone,” he says. “It can easily gather the whole village, town, or city onto the streets.” Hu is cautious when discussing the protest she took part in, outside the Agricultural Exhibition Center in the center of Beijing, where she and her fellow demonstrators unfurled banners calling for the incinerator project to be scrapped. Such acts are controversial in society and therefore a sensitive topic for Chinese. She says local authorities and the Beijing government opposed the action—a polite way of saying there was retribution. According to media reports at the time, the protest was deemed illegal and broken up by police; five protesters were arrested and detained. Incinerators are a particular flash point of public opposition. So are chemical plants, particularly those producing paraxylene (PX), which is used in the manufacturing of plastic and polyester. People living nearby worry about cancer, asthma, and local water and soil quality—doubtful, as Hu is, that the facilities will be run properly and that potentially toxic emissions will be kept within safe limits. In June, a series of large-scale protests took place in Jinshan, a suburb of Shanghai, just on the rumor that a PX plant was to open in the vicinity. The local government issued assurances that there would be no such plant, but according to Chen Liwen, an environmental activist, few people believe such statements. “The local government tell the people there are plans for a park or a temple and after they get the land they change the land use,” she says. Thousands took to the streets. Protests continued for more than a week; many came out several days in a row. Local and national media, controlled by the state, are thought to have been ordered not to report on the protests, as few news stories about them surfaced in China—only the local government’s official statements—and a camera operator for an international news outlet was blocked by police from filming. However, photos and video circulated widely on social media before they were deleted, presumably by censors. Photos showed protesters filling four lanes of a highway. Some wore symbolic face masks; others carried banners reading, “Give us back our Jinshan,” “No to PX,” and “Protect the environment.” Around 40,000 people took part, according to one report. A small number of protesters managed to get to the municipal government offices in the center of Shanghai but were hauled away after scuffles with police. One protester, who did not want to be named, said by WeChat, a messaging app popular in China, that a number of chemical plants are already in Jinshan, and many feel the emissions are a problem. She said locals are worried about their health, as a lot of people in the area suffer from cancer. “Our main request in this protest is asking the government to stop building new chemical factories; do not expand the chemical area in Jinshan,” she said. “The chemical factories are swallowing our living space and emit poisonous air.” One statistic widely circulated in China puts the rise in lung cancer deaths over the past 30 years at 465 percent. “People are concerned about their health, particularly from heavy metals and dioxins from emissions,” says Chen. Hu says she has suffered respiratory illnesses a few times a year ever since the chemical sprays began. “It starts with a cough, then fever,” she says, touching her throat. “One time I was in the hospital for several days. The doctors asked me if I do some kind of job that exposes me to dust.” Hu can’t prove her illnesses are linked to the landfill and the deodorizing chemicals but says many others in the area have also fallen ill. “The landfill has had a great impact on nearby residents’ health,” she says. “Most of the diseases are related to air or water pollution. With the incinerator there will be two pollution sources.” For many years, the focus for China’s citizens has been to increase wages and living standards. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, but the country’s industrialization has taken a tremendous toll on the environment. Ironically, the huge increase in disposable income has expanded health consciousness and spurred a growing awareness of those ecological ills. In big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, sales of air purifiers and face masks are booming, as are sales of organic and imported food and bottled water as people try to ensure safe food and water and clean air for their families. These worries were both confirmed and animated earlier this year when the documentary film Under the Dome, researched and presented by a popular former television news anchor, Chai Jing, went viral and gave encouragement to environmentalists and momentum to their cause. Chai, who lives in Beijing, took a stark look at air pollution’s sources and effects. She tells the story of how her daughter was born with a benign tumor. While she doesn’t link her daughter’s condition with air pollution, she says the experience made her aware and “afraid” of pollution, reflecting the fears of parents in cities throughout the country. In one scene, Chai asks a young girl in Shaanxi province, China’s coal heartland, if she has ever seen stars. “No,” the girl replies. Chai asks if she has seen blue sky. “Slightly blue sky” is the answer. Chai asks if the girl has ever seen white clouds; the girl says, “No.” The minister of environmental protection, Chen Jining, initially praised the documentary, and within days it had been viewed and shared online hundreds of millions of times, blowing up on social media and messaging apps like WeChat. Ma Jun, China’s best-known environmentalist, described the documentary as “one of the most important pieces of public awareness of all time by the Chinese media.” But Under the Dome proved to be a little too popular, and just over a week after its release it was removed from Chinese websites. Protests like the ones in Jinshan are almost always focused on a particular plant or project. Though significant because the concerns are real and direct—a persistent cough, a daughter’s asthma, a river that no longer produces fish—they are essentially NIMBYish in nature. There is no organized network attempting to address environmental policy at a national level. Protesters to this point, says Daniel K. Gardner, professor of history at Smith College, “are not saying, ‘Down with the government.’ They are saying there has been no environmental assessment or consultation with the public, and the government promised that. And they want the government to do something about it.” Under the Dome may have changed that. Gardner, who is writing a book on environmental pollution in China, says that while the government admits that pollution is a real problem—state media reported in August that legislators concerned about water pollution “grilled” members of the cabinet, who promised to address it—the popularity of Chai’s film made officials nervous. “Now there was the possibility of some sort of organized movement,” he says. “Chai Jing galvanized what is already an awareness, and that is what the government is afraid of, this galvanization of the public.” China's environmental ills are now high on Beijing’s agenda, with Premier Li Keqiang, in March, going as far as to say the government was “declaring war on pollution.” He further declared the government was “determined” to tackle smog and environmental pollution, admitting that the progress made so far “falls far short of the expectation of the people.” The government knows that a widespread environmental movement could lead to the development of an organized civil society and sees this as a threat to the power of the Communist Party. “If you look at some of the former republics of the Soviet Union or countries in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or other countries in Asia,” says Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, “you find that in a number of cases, an environmental issue was the trigger or a contributing factor to the social discontent in large-scale protests and the eventual overthrow of the government. The Chinese government is well aware that the environment can be part of a broader social movement for change.”
Regime collapse causes nuclear lash-out.
Rexing ‘5: (San – Epoch Times International – August 3rd -- http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-8-3/30931.html)
Since the Party’s life is “above all else,” it would not be surprising if the CCP resorts to the use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in its attempt to postpone its life. The CCP, that disregards human life, would not hesitate to kill two hundred million Americans, coupled with seven or eight hundred million Chinese, to achieve its ends. The “speech,” free of all disguises, lets the public see the CCP for what it really is: with evil filling its every cell, the CCP intends to fight all of mankind in its desperate attempt to cling to life. And that is the theme of the “speech.”   The theme is murderous and utterly evil. We did witness in China beggars who demanded money from people by threatening to stab themselves with knives or prick their throats on long nails. But we have never, until now, seen a rogue who blackmails the world to die with it by wielding biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Anyhow, the bloody confession affirmed the CCP’s bloodiness: a monstrous murderer, who has killed 80 million Chinese people, now plans to hold one billion people hostage and gamble with their lives.
China’s expanding thorium nuclear program will solve air pollution – but the aff prevents that.
Duggan ‘14: (Jennifer Duggan is a writer for Al Jazeera and the Guardian with an MA in international relations from Dublin City University; "China working on uranium-free nuclear plants in attempt to combat smog"; 3-19-2014; Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/china-uranium-nuclear-plants-smog-thorium)
China is developing a new design of nuclear power plant in an attempt to reduce its reliance on coal and to cut air pollution. In an effort to reduce the number of coal-fired plants, the Chinese government has brought forward by 15 years the deadline to develop a nuclear power plant using the radioactive element thorium instead of uranium. A team of researchers in Shanghai has now been told it has 10 instead of 25 years to develop the world's first such plant. "In the past, the government was interested in nuclear power because of the energy shortage. Now, they are more interested because of smog," Professor Li Zhong, a scientist working on the project, told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. An advanced research centre was set up in January by the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the aim of developing an industrial reactor using thorium molten salt technology, the newspaper reported. According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), China has 20 nuclear plants in operation and another 28 under construction, all uranium-fuelled reactors. China has been importing large quantities of uranium as it attempts to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. However, according to the WNA, thorium is much more abundant. The researchers on the project said they had come under considerable pressure from the government for it to be successful. Li said nuclear power was the "only solution" to replace coal, and thorium "carries much hope". "The problem of coal has become clear," he said: "if the average energy consumption per person doubles, this country will be choked to death by polluted air." "China has an ambitious nuclear-generation programme. It plans to have almost 60 gigawatts of nuclear energy by 2020 and up to 150gw by 2030, so the Chinese have plans to get a significant amount of nuclear into the energy mix," said Jonathan Cobb of the WNA.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
-FOR COUNTRY SPECIFIC PLANS-
The plan gets circumvented—Countries will just import from neighboring countries.
Harrell ‘11: Eben; 5-31-2011; "Germany Bans Nuclear Power," TIME, http://science.time.com/2011/05/31/germany-bans-nuclear-power/Premier
But other countries—the U.S., U.K., and Poland to name but a few—will proceed with nuclear power despite Fukushima, as will many developing countries. And it’s even questionable whether Germany—with it’s booming, heavy industries—will manage to meet its energy demands without nuclear power. Areva’s CEO Anne Lauvergeon told the Wall Street Journal that Germany would likely have to go the route of Austria, which has opposed nuclear power plants inside its own borders even as it imports nuclear energy from neighboring countries. Of course, Lauvergeon would say this, as it’s French nuclear energy that Germany would likely turn to in the future. But there’s no doubt that, in Germany and elsewhere, meeting increasing energy demands while also tackling climate change will make it difficult to shun any low-carbon energy sources, no matter how troubling. Remember Pacala and Socolow‘s seven “stabilizing wedges,” each of which represents a technology that grows enough to avoid the emission of one billion tons a year of carbon by 2050? To make nuclear power one of these wedges would require tripling the world’s current nuclear power generating capacity by replacing all the world’s reactors and building some 25 reactors (of current average size) every year around the world until 2050.¹ That’s how big these “wedges” need to be: and some even estimate they need to be larger than Pacala and Socolow envisaged. It’s no wonder that some countries feel that nuclear—as a proven, low-carbon source—is worth the risk. Some anti-nuclear campaigners say that the growth required in nuclear generating capacity to even make a dent in the fight against climate change is unattainable—no new reactors were connected to the grid anywhere in the world in 2008 and only two were in connected in 2009. Regulatory hurdles and complicated construction means it takes at least a decade to bring new plants on-line–and possibly more if regulations tighten following Fukushima. But saying the threat of climate change is too large or too urgent for nuclear power seems illogical—we’re going to need as much help as we can get.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
CP Text: countries should should increase production of nuclear power by financing the development and production of fast reactors
First it is net beneficially competitive through the DA and it’s also completely mutually exclusive- you can’t prohibit the production of nuclear power and also allow the technological development and research funding the CP advocates for.
Fast reactors are really great because countries will be able to reuse nuclear waste and produce large amounts of energy- Britain’s nuclear dumping ground can be cleared within five years.
Pearce 12 http://e360.yale.edu/feature/are_fast-breeder_reactors_a_nuclear_power_panacea/2557/, Are Fast-Breeder Reactors A Nuclear Power Panacea?, July 30, 2012, Fred Pearce.
Plutonium is the nuclear nightmare. A by-product of conventional power-station reactors, it is the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. And even when not made into bombs, it is a million-year radioactive waste legacy that is already costing the world billions of dollars a year to contain. And yet, some scientists say, we have the technology to burn plutonium in a new generation of “fast” reactors. That could dispose of the waste problem, reduce ing the threat of radiation and nuclear proliferation, and at the same time generate vast amounts of low-carbon energy. It sounds too good to be true. So are the techno-optimists right — or should the conventional environmental revulsion at all things nuclear still hold? Fast-breeder technology is almost as old as nuclear power. But after almost two decades in the wilderness, it could be poised to take off. The U.S. corporationGE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) is promoting a reactor design called the PRISM (for Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular) that its chief consulting engineer and fast-breeder guru, Eric Loewen, says which is a safe and secure way to power the world using yesterday’s nuclear waste. The company wants to try out the idea for the first time on the northwest coast of England, at the notorious nuclear dumping ground at Sellafield, which holds the world’s largest stock of civilian plutonium. At close to 120 tons, it stores more plutonium from reactors than the U.S. and Russia combined. While most of the world’s civilian plutonium waste is still trapped inside highly radioactive spent fuel, much of that British plutonium is in the form of plutonium dioxide powder. It has been extracted from spent fuel with the intention of using it to power an earlier generation of fast reactors that were never built. This makes it is much more vulnerable to theft and use in nuclear weapons than plutonium still held inside spent fuel, as most of the U.S. stockpile is. The Royal Society, Britain’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences, reported last year that the plutonium powder, which is stored in drums, Spent fuel, while less of an immediate proliferation risk, remains a major radiological hazard for thousands of years. The plutonium — the most ubiquitous and troublesome radioactive material inside spent fuel from nuclear reactors — has a half-life of 24,100 years. A typical 1,000-megawatt reactor produces 27 tons of spent fuel a year. None of it yet has a home. If not used as a fuel, it will need to be kept isolated for thousands of years to protect humans and wildlife. Burial deep underground seems the obvious solution, but nobody has yet built a geological repository. Public opposition is high — as successive U.S. governments have discovered whenever the burial ground at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is discussed — and the cost of construction will be huge. So the idea of building fast reactors to eat up this waste is attractive — especially in Britain, but also elsewhere. Theoretically at least, fast reactors can keep recycling their own fuel until all the plutonium is gone, generating electricity all the while. Britain’s huge plutonium stockpile makes it a vast energy resource. David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, recently said British plutonium contains enough energy to run the country’s electricity grid for 500 years. Fast reactors can be run in different ways, either to destroy plutonium, to maximise energy production, or to produce new plutonium. Under the PRISM proposal now being considered at Sellafield, plutonium destruction would be the priority. “We could deal with the plutonium stockpile in Britain in five years,” says Loewen. But equally, he says, it could generate energy, too. The proposed plant has a theoretical generating capacity of 600 megawatts. Fast reactors could do the same for the U.S. Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. launched a Global Nuclear Energy Partnershipaimed at developing technologies to consume plutonium in spent fuel. But President Obama drastically cut the partnership’s funding, while also halting work on the planned Yucca Mountain geological repository. “We are left with a million-year problem,” says Loewen. “Right now there isn’t a policy framework in the U.S. for solving this issue.” He thinks Britain’s unique problem with its stockpile of purified plutonium dioxide could break the logjam. “The UK is our best opportunity,” he told me. “We need someone with the technical confidence to do this.” The PRISM fast reactor is attracting friends among environmentalists formerly opposed to nuclear power. They include leading thinkers such asStewart Brand and British columnist George Monbiot. And, despite the cold shoulder from the Obama administration, some U.S. government officials seem quietly keen to help the British experiment get under way. They have approved the export of the PRISM technology to Britain and the release of secret technical information from the old research program. And the U.S. Export-Import Bank is reportedly ready to provide financing. Britain has not made up its mind yet, however. Having decided to try and re-use its stockpile of plutonium dioxide, its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has embarked on a study to determine which re-use option to support. There is no firm date, but the decision, which will require government approval, should be reached within two years. Apart from a fast-breeder reactor, the main alternative is to blend the plutonium with other fuel to create a mixed-oxide fuel (mox) that will burn in conventional nuclear power plants. Britain has a history of embarrassing failures with mox, including the closure last year of a $2 billion blending plant that spent 10 years producing a scant amount of fuel. And critics say that, even if it works properly, mox fuel is an expensive way of generating not much energy, while leaving most of the plutonium intact, albeit in a less dangerous form. Only fast reactors can consume the plutonium. Many think that will ultimately be the UK choice. If so, the PRISM plant would take five years to license, five years to build, and and could destroy probablythe world’s most dangerous stockpile of plutonium by the end of the 2020s. GEH has not publicly put a cost on building the plant, but it says it will foot the bill, with the British government only paying by results, as the plutonium is destroyed. The idea of fast breeders as the ultimate goal of nuclear power engineering goes back to the 1950s, when experts predicted that fast-breeders would generate all Britain’s electricity by the 1970s. But the Clinton administration eventually shut down the U.S.’s research program in 1994. Britain followed soon after, shutting its Dounreay fast-breeder reactor on the north coast of Scotland in 1995. Other countries have continued with fast-breeder research programs, including France, China, Japan, India, South Korea, and Russia, which has been running a plant at Sverdlovsk for 32 years. But now climate change, with its urgency to reduce fossil fuel use, and growing plutonium stockpiles have changed perspectives once again. The researchers’ blueprints are being dusted off. The PRISM design is based on the Experimental Breeder Reactor No 2, which was switched on at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in 1965 and ran for three decades.
Fast reactors solve for the aff and are safe, solving for warming.
Pearce 12 http://e360.yale.edu/feature/are_fast-breeder_reactors_a_nuclear_power_panacea/2557/, Are Fast-Breeder Reactors A Nuclear Power Panacea?, July 30, 2012, Fred Pearce.
Here is how conventional and fast reactors differ. Conventional nuclear reactors bombard atoms of uranium fuel with neutrons. Under this bombardment, the atoms split, creating more neutrons and energy. The neutrons head off to split more atoms, creating a chain reaction. Meanwhile, the energy heats a coolant passing through the reactor, such as water, which then generates electricity in conventional turbines. The problem is that in this process only around 1 percent of the potential energy in the uranium fuel is turned into electricity. The rest remains locked up in the fuel, much of it in the form of plutonium, the chief by-product of the once-through cycle. The idea of fast reactors is to grab more of this energy from the spent fuel of the conventional reactor. And it can do this by repeatedly recycling the fuel through the reactor. The second difference is that in a conventional reactor, the speed of the neutrons has to be slowed down to ensure the chain reactions occur. In a typical pressurized-water reactor, the water itself acts as this moderator. But in a fast reactor, as the name suggests, the best results for generating energy from the plutonium fuel are achieved by bombarding the neutrons much faster. This is done by substituting the water moderator with a liquid metal such as sodium. Proponents of fast reactors see them as the nuclear application of one of the totems of environmentalism: recycling. But many technologists, and most environmentalists, are more skeptical. The skeptics include Adrian Simper, the strategy director of the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which will be among those organizations deciding whether to back the PRISM plan. Simper warned last November in an internal memorandum that fast reactors were “not credible” as a solution to Britain’s plutonium problem because they had “still to be demonstrated commercially” and could not be deployed within 25 years. The technical challenges include the fact that it would require converting the plutonium powder into a metal alloy, with uranium and zirconium. This would be a large-scale industrial activity on its own that would create “a likely large amount of plutonium-contaminated salt waste,” Simper said. Simper is also concerned that the plutonium metal, once prepared for the reactor, would be even more vulnerable to theft for making bombs than the powdered oxide. This view is shared by the Union of Concerned Scientists in the U.S., which argues that plutonium liberated from spent fuel in preparation for recycling “would be dangerously vulnerable to theft or misuse.” GEH says Simper is mistaken and that the technology is largely proven. That view seems to be shared by MacKay, who oversees the activities of the decommissioning authority. The argument about proliferation risk boils down to timescales. In the long term, burning up the plutonium obviously eliminates the risk. But in the short term, there would probably be greatersecurity risks. Another criticism is the more general one that the nuclear industry has a track record of delivering late and wildly over budget — and often not delivering at all. John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, and Paul Dorfman, British nuclear policy analyst at the University of Warwick, England, argued recently that this made all nuclear options a poor alternative to renewables in delivering low-carbon energy. “Even if these latest plans could be made to work, PRISM reactors do nothing to solve the main problems with nuclear: the industry’s repeated failure to build reactors on time and to budget,” they wrote in a letter to the Guardian newspaper. “We are being asked to wait while an industry that has a track record for very costly failures researches yet another much-hyped but still theoretical new technology.” But this approach has two problems. First, climate change. Besides hydroelectricity, which has its own serious environmental problems, nuclear power is the only source of truly large-scale concentrated low-carbon energy currently available. However good renewables turn out to be, can we really afford to give up on nukes? Second, we are where we are with nuclear power. The plutonium stockpiles have to be dealt with. The only viable alternative to re-use is burial, which carries its own risks, and continued storage, with vast expense and unknowable security hazards to present and countless future generations. For me, whatever my qualms about the nuclear industry, the case for nuclear power as a component of a drive toward a low-carbon, climate-friendly economy is compelling. A few months ago, I signed a letter with Monbiot and others to British Prime Minister David Cameron, arguing that environmentalists were dressing up their doctrinaire technophobic opposition to all things nuclear behind scaremongering and often threadbare arguments about cost. I stand by that view. Those who continue to oppose nuclear power have to explain how they would deal with those dangerous stockpiles of plutonium, whether in spent fuel or drums of plutonium dioxide. They have half-lives measured in tens of thousands of years. Ignoring them is not an option.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
-extemp text-
Generation IV nuclear power prevents meltdowns and remediates nuclear waste—investment is the key barrier to development
Robock 16 Zachary Robock, JD, associate at Jones Day, where his practice focuses on corporate and energy matters, “Economic Solutions to Nuclear Energy's Financial Challenges”, 2016, http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053andcontext=mjeal
Gen IV reactors are not some far-off theoretical technology; several have been successfully operated, accumulating approximately 400 total reactor-years of experience,35 and there is increasing domestic and international momentum in advanced nuclear energy. In 2011, thirteen countries, including the United States, extended an agreement to focus their research and development efforts on six Gen IV reactor designs: Gas Cooled Fast Reactor; Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor; Molten Salt Reactor; Supercritical Water- Cooled Reactor; Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor; and Very High Temperature Reactor.36 The first fleet of commercial Gen IV reactors are expected in 2030–2040.37∂ Companies in the United States are actively pursuing advanced nuclear technologies. For example, FLiBe Energy is based in Alabama and headed by Kirk Sorenson, a former NASA scientist and the former Chief Nuclear Technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. FLiBe is developing a thorium-fueled molten salt reactor.38 TerraPower is chaired by Bill Gates (of Microsoft), and is developing a standing wave reactor—a version of a sodium-cooled fast reactor—designed by Pavel Hejzlar, who previously worked as the principal research scientist and program director for the Advanced Reactor Technology Program and Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at MIT.39 Transatomic Power, based in Boston, was founded by recent MIT PhD graduates to develop a molten salt reactor specifically intended to consume existing nuclear reactor waste, without re-enrichment.40 A team involving University of Michigan nuclear engineers recently developed a mechanism to simulate reactor materials’ integrity under the stresses of molten salt fast reactions, which should help drive critical RandD.41 Finally, among other initiatives, the Obama administration recently committed $40 million to two companies involved in advanced nuclear re- search, X-energy and Southern Company.42∂ Internationally, India, which has substantial reserves of thorium, an alternative to uranium fuel, has been aggressively developing its nuclear power industry with a long-term plan toward advanced nuclear reactors, including a Gen IV prototype expected to come online in 2016.43 France has historically generated most of its power from nuclear energy and is pursuing three Gen IV technologies.44 China is similarly increasing its nuclear power resources while developing advanced nuclear to meet future needs.45∂ On the other hand, the technology still has hurdles to overcome. More research and testing are needed to confirm the long-term integrity of materials used to contain the reaction.46 For example, some proposed salts can react poorly with water (sodium is flammable in contact with water), but others, such as FLiBe (a mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium), are more stable.47 Notably, many of the technological hurdles to commercialization can be studied and addressed simultaneously, rather than needing to go sequentially.48 Therefore, more upfront funding can accelerate the timeline for development.∂ A. Safety Improvements∂ Next generation nuclear technologies offer several inherent safety advantages over older reactor designs, including low-pressure operation and passive cooling that eliminates the need for battery or diesel backups. Existing nuclear technology is akin to a car with the accelerator stuck at full throttle that must be actively contained. Advanced nuclear is the inverse. The reaction must be actively encouraged; if power is lost, the reaction will fizzle out due to its natural thermodynamic properties.49 This is both a challenge and a benefit to the technology.∂ Gen II and III light water reactors (LWRs) use water as both a coolant and heat transfer medium. LWRs must be highly pressurized in order to keep the water liquid. LWRs operate most efficiently at 500 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit, yet water boils at 212 degrees.50 To keep the water liquid at these high temperatures, the reactor must be pressurized to 1,000 to 2,000 pounds per square inch (for reference, a moose weighs about 1,000 pounds51), or 75- to 150-times normal atmospheric pressure.52 This pressure makes for a fairly tenuous situation.53 Any water that escapes will flash instantly to steam (often radioactive steam), building pressure in the containment vessel. If there is a loss of coolant—as occurred in different ways at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—backup systems run by batteries and diesel generators are supposed to keep coolant circulating around the reactor.54 These failed tragically in Fukushima due to the intensity of the earthquake and tsunami, which dislodged and flooded diesel generators.55 The batteries worked for a time, but didn’t last.56∂ One new safety feature of Gen III reactors is to store emergency water above or nearby the reactor to deploy automatically and without the need for power in the event of a power loss or other loss of coolant.57 This is an improvement over Gen II, but is hardly a fundamental fix. The water storage could become dislodged by the same event (e.g., earthquake, tsunami, or explosion) that caused the primary coolant or power loss in the first place. Moreover, many passive safety systems rely on intricate fail-safe mechanisms—sensitive valves to detect changes in core pressure, or complex condensation and pressurization systems,58 which could be dislodged during an earthquake, explosion, tsunami, or other physically disruptive event. In short, regardless of the particular backup system, the high operating pressures and natural tendency for coolant to flash to steam make for an unavoidably tenuous situation, even with passive backup systems.59∂ In comparison, many Gen IV reactors will use molten salts, lead, or sodium (referred to collectively as “salts” for simplicity) for cooling and heat transfer, rather than water.60 Salts naturally become molten at the high temperatures necessary to run nuclear reactors efficiently, so they need not be highly pressurized. These salts also do not vaporize until extremely high temperatures—sodium boils at roughly 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit61 and certain fluoride salts boil at roughly 3,000 degrees.62∂ The ability to operate at low pressure enables molten salt reactors to employ a passive emergency cooling mechanism in the event of power loss. During normal operation, the reaction occurs in the reactor core, which has a drain at the bottom, like a sink, as shown in Figure 1.63 The drain is normally plugged with a stopper comprised of the same salt used as a coolant in the reaction.64 The salt stopper is actively cooled, keeping the stopper solid.65 If there is a power loss, the stopper would cease to be cooled and would melt.66 The reactor contents (molten salt + nuclear fuel) would drain into a reinforced drainage tank designed to passively cool the contents.67 Unlike water, the salt coolant would not boil away, but would remain in the drain tank and continue to cool the fuel.68 Moreover, many Gen IV technologies have a strong negative temperature coefficient, meaning that the reaction slows as the temperature rises, thereby naturally cooling the reactor contents in the event of an emergency drainage scenario and substantially reducing the possibility of a meltdown scenario.69 ∂ B. Reduction in Nuclear Waste∂ Advanced nuclear technologies can also dramatically reduce both the volume and lifespan of radioactive waste, which is one of the critical environmental challenges in nuclear power. Different Gen IV designs reduce nuclear waste in different ways. In order to achieve more complete burnup, some Gen IV designs operate as “fast” reactors,70 while others utilize innovative fuel mixes and processes.71 As shown in Figure 2, below, a nuclear reaction occurs when a neutron “bullet” strikes a uranium (or thorium or plutonium) atom, fissioning the atom and releasing: (a) energy/heat; (b) more neutrons; and (c) nuclides, which are the resultant atoms from the splitting of the uranium atom.72 Nuclides are a substantial component of the nuclear waste ultimately generated by nuclear reactions.73∂ Gen II and III reactors are all LWR, which operate as thermal, or slow, reactors.74 The water in these reactors acts as a “moderator,” slowing the neutron bullets down in order to maximize the likelihood of a neutron bullet striking another uranium atom.75 Moderating (slowing) these neutrons reduces their velocity and hence their energy.76 Lower energy neutrons result in less burnup of the fuel, resulting in substantial amounts of long-lived nuclear waste.77 In contrast, fast reactors do not moderate neutrons, resulting in fast (high-energy) neutrons, which are capable of more complete burnup (including the nuclides).78 “Fast reactors hold a unique role in the actinide i.e., nuclide management mission because they operate with high energy neutrons that are more effective at fissioning actinides nuclides.”79 By more completely consuming the fuel and nuclides, fast reactors substantially reduce the volume of nuclear waste generated.∂ Importantly, the waste that is generated will decay to safe levels in approximately 300 years, compared with the 300,000 years it will take for nuclear waste from today’s thermal reactors to decay to safe levels.80 Fast reactors can even be used to consume existing nuclear “waste” as a beneficial power source.81 The ability to utilize existing nuclear waste can eliminate or reduce the need to mine for uranium, thereby reducing environmental damage from mining and from long-term waste disposal.82∂ Fast reactors are not the only way that Gen IV reactors aim to substantially reduce long-lived nuclear waste. Molten salt reactors operate as thermal, not fast, reactors, but are able to achieve almost complete burnup of the uranium fuel by using uranium dissolved in liquid salt, rather than solid uranium pellets surrounded by water.83 This allows for (1) filtration of the uranium-salt mixture, thereby removing certain fission products that would otherwise slow the reaction down; and (2) the continuous addition of fuel.84 With proper filtration, the liquid fuel can remain in the reactor for decades, enabling much more complete burnup. This process can also utilize existing nuclear waste as fuel, thereby not only minimizing future nuclear waste, but actually reducing the current stockpile.85∂ III. WHAT IS HOLDING ADVANCED NUCLEAR BACK? OVERVIEW OF COSTS∂ What is holding nuclear power back from the “jet age”? Simply put, “costs remain the biggest hurdle for the nuclear industry.”86 Once operational, a nuclear plant can produce electricity at a marginal cost below that of electricity from fossil fuels.87 However, high start-up costs (and the associated cost of capital), long repayment periods, and regulatory uncertainty put nuclear power at an investment disadvantage.88 Advanced nuclear should prove even more operationally efficient than existing plants, but entails even higher upfront costs, given the research and development necessary to safely commercialize the technology.89

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
-extemp text-
CP Text: Indigenous communities should be able to decide whether or not they want the use of nuclear power. This means using a case-by-case tribal consent system, and a blanket statement claiming that Natives generally don’t want nuclear power is still a blanket assumption which re-inscribes oppressive colonialism.
Mutually exclusive with the aff since tribes that want nuclear power can continue to use it.
Gover and Walker ‘92: Kevin, and Jana L. Walker (Native American Attorneys at Gover, Stetson and Williams). "Escaping Environmental Paternalism: One Tribe's Approach to Developing a Commercial Waste Disposal Project in Indian Country." University of Colorado Law Review 63 (1992): 933.
The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environmental compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development.
Banning nuclear power is a form of imperial paternalism – it just re-inscribes colonialism by creating blanket policy decisions without case-by-case consent. Natives have their own energy and economic infrastructure to be concerned about.
Jefferies ‘8: Sierra M. Jefferies, J.D. candidate, “ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE SKULL VALLEY GOSHUTE INDIANS' PROPOSAL TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE,” Journal of Land, Resources and Environmental Law, 2008
Second, opposition to the Band’s attempt to make use of its land seems to imply that the Band does not have the ability to make to make informed decisions regarding the use of its land. In response to similar environmental opposition to tribal attempts at commercial waste development, Native American attorneys Keven Gover and Jana Walker criticized the paternalistic undertones of opposition, "Much of the environmental community seems to assume that, if an Indian community decides to accept such a project, it either does not understand the potential consequences or has been bamboozled by an unprincipled waste company. In either case, the clear implication is that Indians lack the intelligence to balance and protect adequately their own economic and environmental resources. 03 For the Skull Valley Goshutes, this was a rare opportunity to benefit financially from the undesirable land they have been granted. The surrounding toxic land uses, barren desert nature of the land and lack of other resources undoubtedly weighed heavily in their decision to move forward with the project. Leon Bear, tribal leader has stated, "We don’t have an energy source like oil or gas or coal, we feel that we're being prejudiced against as far as gaming."94 Interestingly, tribes that were not similarly restricted in land use options also participated in the federal selection process for the MRS and pursued private storage facilities. Among them was the Mescalero Apache tribe of New Mexico. Unlike the Goshutes, the Mescalero were not limited in opportunities to develop their land for profit. By contrast, at the time of the federally proposed MRS, the Mescalero were already operating several multi-million dollar businesses. 95 The Mescalero were not compelled by limited available uses for their land. Grace Thorpe, "a member of the Sac and Fox Tribe, an opponent of the MRS program, and President of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans" stated "Ithe Mescalero don't need this nuclear waste ... they have a five star resort, a casino, two ski lifts, forestry resources and a sawmill m98
Media and other outlets keeps distorting Native needs – assumptions need to STOP
Gover and Walker ‘92: (Kevin, Prof of Law ASU, Jana L, ESCAPING ENVIRONMENTAL PATERNALISM: ONE TRIBE'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL WASTE DISPOSAL PROJECT IN INDIAN COUNTRY http://faculty.virginia.edu/ejus/ESCAPE.htm)
We have been asked to address the issue of environmental racism in the context of commercial solid and hazardous waste projects on Indian reservations. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with those who believe that undesirable facilities-such as waste disposal facilities more likely to be found in a poor minority community than in a wealthy white one.' However, the environmental community must come to understand that not all such facilities are unwanted by the host community and that, in those cases where a community wishes to have such a facility, its decision is to be respected. As an example of such a host community located in Indian country, we will use our experience in helping the Campo Band of Mission Indians of California develop a solid waste project on its reservation. With respect to waste disposal, there are two issues facing Indian tribes today. First, how do tribes dispose of the solid waste generated on their reservations, and second, does a tribe want to use its land as a site for a commercial waste project as a form of economic development? Almost without exception, over the last year the media has focused its entire attention on the issue of commercial projects. We cannot count the number of articles in magazines and newspapers titled "Dances with Garbage."2 The media has created a steady drumbeat of stories about tribes all over the country building landfills and taking in hazardous waste, implying that the waste industry is marauding unchecked in Indian country, immune from any environmental regulation whatsoever. Is it true? In our experience over the last few years, this is just not the case, and we believe that much of the media attention has been misguided and uninformed. Even if we assume that some waste companies are targeting Indian country, tribes have almost always repelled these so-called attacks.3 In most cases, tribes are not even giving these companies an interview. Of the dozens of proposals that apparently have been made to tribes, only a small number remain under serious consideration.4 Tribal governments quite clearly have demonstrated that they are fully capable of deciding whether or not a project will serve their best interests. To set the record straight, the bigger problem is not that the waste industry is beating a path to the tribal door. Rather, it is the unauthorized and illegal dumping occurring on reservations. For most Indian communities the problem of open dumping on tribal lands is of much greater concern than the remote prospect that a commercial waste disposal facility may be sited on a reservation. Until 1986, Congress had left tribal governments completely out of the federal environmental scheme. In 1986, Congress enacted the first tribal amendments to federal environmental laws. Those amendments allowed tribes to be treated as states for program enforcement and grants under the Safe Drinking Water Act.5 Congress enacted similar amendments to Superfund in 1986,6 the Clean Water Act in 1987,7 and the Clean Air Act in 1990. 8 Unfortunately, Congress has not yet enacted tribal amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)9 authorizing tribes to assume primary enforcement authority for solid and hazardous waste programs.
American imperialism dominates society to destroy indigenous culture – turns case and outweighs.
Galeota ‘4: Julia Galeota placed first in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2004 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America. “Cultural Imperialism: An American Tradition.” 2004 Humanist Essay Contest Winner. Getrun.info. The Humanist. 2004. http://www.getrun.info/pdf/tradition/5.pdf
Travel almost anywhere in the world today and, whether you suffer from habitual Big Mac cravings or cringe at the thought of missing the newest episode of MTV’s The Real World, your American tastes can be satisfied practically everywhere. This proliferation of American products across the globe is more than mere accident. As a byproduct of globalization, it is part of a larger trend in the conscious dissemination of American attitudes and values that is often referred to as cultural imperialism. In his 1976 work Communication and Cultural Domination, Herbert Schiller defines cultural imperialism as: the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system, and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the values and structures of the dominant center of the system. Thus, cultural imperialism involves much more than simple consumer goods; it involves the dissemination of ostensibly American principles, such as freedom and democracy. Though this process might sound appealing on the surface, it masks a frightening truth: many cultures around the world are gradually disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of corporate and cultural America. The motivations behind American cultural imperialism parallel the justifications for U.S. imperialism throughout history: the desire for access to foreign markets and the belief in the superiority of American culture. Though the United States does boast the world’s largest, most powerful economy, no business is completely satisfied with controlling only the American market; American corporations want to control the other 95 percent of the world’s consumers as well. Many industries are incredibly successful in that venture. According to the Guardian, American films accounted for approximately 80 percent of global box office revenue in January 2003. And who can forget good old Micky D’s? With over 30,000 restaurants in over one hundred countries, the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonald’s are now, according to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, “more widely recognized than the Christian cross.” Such American domination inevitably hurts local markets, as the majority of foreign industries are unable to compete with the economic strength of U.S. industry. Because it serves American economic interests, corporations conveniently ignore the detrimental impact of American control of foreign markets. Corporations don’t harbor qualms about the detrimental effects of “Americanization” of foreign cultures, as most corporations have ostensibly convinced themselves that American culture is superior and therefore its influence is beneficial to other, “lesser” cultures. Unfortunately, this American belief in the superiority of U.S. culture is anything but new; it is as old as the culture itself. This attitude was manifest in the actions of settlers when they first arrived on this continent and massacred or assimilated essentially the entire “savage” Native American population. This attitude also reflects that of the late nineteenth-century age of imperialism, during which the jingoists attempted to fulfill what they believed to be the divinely ordained “manifest destiny” of American expansion. Jingoists strongly believe in the concept of social Darwinism: the stronger, “superior” cultures will overtake the weaker, “inferior” cultures in a “survival of the fittest.” It is this arrogant belief in the incomparability of American culture that characterizes many of our economic and political strategies today.
Natives have their reasons for continuing nuclear power – whether it be for economic or energy infrastructure, they ought to possess the autonomy to decide their OWN fates.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Text: Countries should prohibit nuclear power except for LFTR reactors AND invest heavily in LFTRs.
Competition:
 A Textual: the CPs prohibits less than the aff
 B Functional: aff bans LFTRs but the CP invests in them
LFTRs are way better than current PWRs.  
Follows 14 (8 May 2014.  Mike, the Royal Society of Chemistry.  Cut by Nueva AK. http://www.rsc.org/eic/2014/05/liquid-fluoride-thorium-nuclear-reactor)
The thorium fuel used by LFTRs is easier to come by than the uranium-235 used in PWRs. Thorium is present in the Earth’s crust at about four times the amount of uranium and is more easily extracted. Additionally, U-235 has a natural abundance of only 0.7, and requires expensive enrichment to 2.5 before it can be used in a PWR. A person observing many yellow waste barrels Radioactive waste from PWR reactors is stored underground for thousands of years © Thomas Imo / Alamy The LFTRs also do not waste any of their nuclear fuel, unlike PWRs. The solid uranium oxide used in PWRs is a poor thermal conductor and so the fuel rods become stressed by internal temperature differences and damaged by radiation. Fission products are also trapped within the fuel rods, acting as ‘poisons’ and compromising a sustained chain reaction by absorbing neutrons. This means that fuel rods need to be replaced when less than 5 of the available energy has been used, and the plant must be shut down every 18 months to allow one third of the rods to be removed and the remainder shuffled. This ‘spent’ fuel is intensely radioactive and is waste that needs to be managed. In contrast, all of the U-233 dissolved in the molten salt of the LFTR undergoes fission. This is because the U-233 atoms are circulating freely in solution so that every nucleus is equally available to absorb a neutron. Also, unlike solid fuel, liquid fluoride salts are impervious to radiation damage and not subject to structural stress. Poisons bubble out of solution in LFTRs or can be chemically removed. LFTRs work at atmospheric pressure, in contrast to the 150 to 160 times atmospheric pressures needed by PWRs. In PWRs, water is the coolant and there are two cooling stages or loops. In the primary loop, water is pumped under high pressure to the reactor core where it is heated by the energy generated by the fission process. This loop is kept under high pressure to allow the water to warm to up to 330°C. Heat from the primary coolant loop is then conducted through heat exchangers to the secondary loop where steam is generated to spin an electric generator. High pressure in a PWR increases efficiency but expensive piping and pressure vessels are required and, because steam occupies 1000 times the volume of liquid water, massive containment buildings are also needed. The salt in the core of the LFTR acts as its own coolant but is passed through a heat exchanger to maintain the temperature of the salt at 800°C and to transfer heat to an inert gas like carbon dioxide or helium. The thermal expansion of this gas drives a turbine to generate electricity In safe hands
LFTRs solve terrorism, waste, and meltdowns.
Follows 14 (8 May 2014.  Mike, the Royal Society of Chemistry.  Cut by Nueva AK. http://www.rsc.org/eic/2014/05/liquid-fluoride-thorium-nuclear-reactor)
While the LFTR initially lost out to the PWR because it does not generate as much plutonium waste product, today that is viewed as an advantage. Six more neutron absorptions are required to reach Pu-239 when starting from Th-232, compared to the U-238 which makes up 97.5 of the uranium in a PWR. This prevents fretting about whether Pu-239 is being diverted into a nuclear weapons programme. It also reduces the headache of waste management, as after 300 years the waste from thorium-fuelled reactors is about 10,000 times less toxic than that from uranium-fuelled reactors. The relatively small amount of radioactive waste produced in LFTRs requires a few hundred years of isolated storage versus the few hundred thousand years for the waste generated by PWRs. People in white overalls, gas masks and helmets Touring the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant © ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy The 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan was caused by a tsunami disabling the PWR’s cooling system. LFTRs cannot suffer meltdowns because their fuel is already molten. PWRs contain control rods that are designed to absorb neutrons. They are inserted into, and removed from, the core of the nuclear reactor as required to control the rate of fission. They are usually made of boron or cadmium and are suspended from the ceiling by electromagnets. If power failure occurs the control rods fall under gravity into their slots in the reactor core below. However, like applying brakes in a car, the reactor has thermal inertia and cannot stop producing thermal energy instantaneously. The core remains hot and fission continues among the daughter nuclei, which means that meltdown is unavoidable if the coolant stops circulating. In stark contrast, the LFTR needs power to prevent shutdown of the reactor. It has a ‘freeze plug’ at the bottom of the core – a plug of salt, cooled by a fan, to keep it below the freezing point of the salt. If the power turns off, the fan stops. This causes the plug to melt and the liquid fuel to flow, under gravity, into a catch basin below.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Counterplan: The United States Federal Government ought to increase the production of nuclear power through denatured molten salt reactors.
Williams ‘16: Stephen Williams writes in “How Molten Salt Reactors Might Spell a Nuclear Energy Revolution” on July 4th, 2016 for ZMEScience. Stephen Williams is a retired software engineer and former technical writer. Since retiring, Stephen has become preoccupied with the many issues surrounding energy use, such as climate change, ocean acidification, energy poverty, and pollution. http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/what-is-molten-salt-reactor-424343/; AB
Since former NASA engineer Kirk Sorensen revived forgotten molten salt reactor (MSR) technology in the 2000s, interest in MSR technology has been growing quickly. Since 2011, four separate companies in North America have announced plans for MSRs: Flibe Energy (started by Sorenson himself), Transatomic Power (started by two recent MIT graduates), Terrestrial Energy (based in Canada, which recently partnered with Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory), and Martingale, Inc., which recently made public its design for its ThorCon MSR. In addition, there is now renewed interest in MSRs in Japan, Russia, France and China, with China also announcing that MSR technology is one of its “five innovation centers that will unite the country’s leading talents for research in advanced science and technology fields, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.” Why this sudden interest in a nuclear technology that dates back to the 1950s? The answer lies in both the phenomenal safety of MSRs and their potential to help solve so many of today’s energy related problems, from climate change to energy poverty to the intermittency of wind and solar power. In fact, MSRs can operate so safely, they may alleviate public fears about nuclear energy.
MSRs don’t create radioactive waste and can actually get rid of current waste.
Williams ‘16: Stephen Williams writes in “How Molten Salt Reactors Might Spell a Nuclear Energy Revolution” on July 4th, 2016 for ZMEScience. Stephen Williams is a retired software engineer and former technical writer. Since retiring, Stephen has become preoccupied with the many issues surrounding energy use, such as climate change, ocean acidification, energy poverty, and pollution. http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/what-is-molten-salt-reactor-424343/; AB
Conventional reactors use solid ceramic fuel rods containing enriched uranium. The fission of uranium in the fuel releases gases, such as xenon, which causes the fuel rods to crack. This cracking, in turn, makes it necessary to remove and replace the fuel rods well before most of the actinides (elements that remain radioactive for thousands of years) such as uranium have fissioned. This is why nuclear waste is radioactive for a very long time. However, the actinides that remain in the cracked fuel rods is still an excellent source of fuel for reactors. France, for example, recycles the waste instead of burying it so that these actinides can be placed in new fuel rods and used to make more electricity.¶ Because MSRs use liquid fuel, the release of gases simply bubbles up, typically to an off-gas unit in the coolant loop (not shown in figure) where it can be removed. Since the liquid fuel is unaffected by the releases of gas, the fuel can be left in the reactor until almost all the actinides are fissioned, leaving only elements that are radioactive for a relatively short time (300 years or less). The result is that MSRs have no long term issue with regard to nuclear waste. Not only do MSRs not have a long term waste issue, they can be used to dispose of current stockpiles of nuclear waste by using those stockpiles as fuel. Even stockpiles of plutonium can be disposed of this way. In fact, conventional reactors typically use only 3-to-5 of the available energy in their fuel rods before the fuel rods must be replaced because of cracking. MSRs can use up most of the rest of the available fuel in these rods to make electricity.
Therefore, accidents and radiation are caused by rod cracking, which doesn’t happen with MSRS
AND MSRs don’t require crazy safety investment, which makes them cheap and easy to upscale.
Martin ‘16: Richard Martin writes in “Fail-Safe Nuclear Power” for MIT Technology Review. Richard Martin is the senior editor for energy at MIT Technology Review. My book Coal Wars: The Future of Energy and The Fate of the Planet was published in April 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602051/fail-safe-nuclear-power/
Given unprecedented access to the inner workings of China’s advanced nuclear RandD program, I was witnessing a new nuclear technology being born. Through the virtual reactor snaked an intricate system of pipes carrying the fluid that makes this system special: a molten salt that cools the reactor and carries heat to drive a turbine and make electricity. At least in theory, this type of reactor can’t suffer the kind of catastrophic failure that happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima, making unnecessary the expensive and redundant safety systems that have driven up the cost of conventional reactors. What’s more, the new plants should produce little waste and might even eat up existing nuclear waste. They could run on uranium, which powers 99 percent of the nuclear power plants in the world, or they could eventually run on thorium, which is cleaner and more abundant. The ultimate goal of the Shanghai Institute: to build a molten-salt reactor that could replace the 1970s-era technology in today’s nuclear power plants and help wean China off the coal that fouls the air of Shanghai and Beijing, ushering in an era of cheap, abundant, zero-carbon energy. Over the next two decades China hopes to build the world’s largest nuclear power industry. Plans include as many as 30 new conventional nuclear plants (in addition to the 34 reactors operating today) as well as a variety of next-generation reactors, including thorium molten-salt reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (which, like molten-salt reactors, are both highly efficient and inherently safe), and sodium-cooled fast reactors (which can consume spent fuel from conventional reactors to make electricity). Chinese planners want not only to dramatically expand the country’s domestic nuclear capacity but also to become the world’s leading supplier of nuclear reactors and components, a prospect that many Western observers find alarming.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
CP Text: Indigenous communities should be able to decide whether or not they want the use of nuclear power. This means using a case-by-case tribal consent system, and a blanket statement claiming that Natives generally don’t want nuclear power is still a blanket assumption which re-inscribes oppressive colonialism.
Mutually exclusive with the aff since tribes that want nuclear power can continue to use it.
Gover and Walker ‘92: Kevin, and Jana L. Walker (Native American Attorneys at Gover, Stetson and Williams). "Escaping Environmental Paternalism: One Tribe's Approach to Developing a Commercial Waste Disposal Project in Indian Country." University of Colorado Law Review 63 (1992): 933.
The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environmental compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development.
Banning nuclear power is a form of imperial paternalism – it just re-inscribes colonialism by creating blanket policy decisions without case-by-case consent. Natives have their own energy and economic infrastructure to be concerned about.
Jefferies ‘8: Sierra M. Jefferies, J.D. candidate, “ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE SKULL VALLEY GOSHUTE INDIANS' PROPOSAL TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE,” Journal of Land, Resources and Environmental Law, 2008
Second, opposition to the Band’s attempt to make use of its land seems to imply that the Band does not have the ability to make to make informed decisions regarding the use of its land. In response to similar environmental opposition to tribal attempts at commercial waste development, Native American attorneys Keven Gover and Jana Walker criticized the paternalistic undertones of opposition, "Much of the environmental community seems to assume that, if an Indian community decides to accept such a project, it either does not understand the potential consequences or has been bamboozled by an unprincipled waste company. In either case, the clear implication is that Indians lack the intelligence to balance and protect adequately their own economic and environmental resources. 03 For the Skull Valley Goshutes, this was a rare opportunity to benefit financially from the undesirable land they have been granted. The surrounding toxic land uses, barren desert nature of the land and lack of other resources undoubtedly weighed heavily in their decision to move forward with the project. Leon Bear, tribal leader has stated, "We don’t have an energy source like oil or gas or coal, we feel that we're being prejudiced against as far as gaming."94 Interestingly, tribes that were not similarly restricted in land use options also participated in the federal selection process for the MRS and pursued private storage facilities. Among them was the Mescalero Apache tribe of New Mexico. Unlike the Goshutes, the Mescalero were not limited in opportunities to develop their land for profit. By contrast, at the time of the federally proposed MRS, the Mescalero were already operating several multi-million dollar businesses. 95 The Mescalero were not compelled by limited available uses for their land. Grace Thorpe, "a member of the Sac and Fox Tribe, an opponent of the MRS program, and President of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans" stated "Ithe Mescalero don't need this nuclear waste ... they have a five star resort, a casino, two ski lifts, forestry resources and a sawmill m98
Media and other outlets keeps distorting Native needs – assumptions need to STOP
Gover and Walker ‘92: (Kevin, Prof of Law ASU, Jana L, ESCAPING ENVIRONMENTAL PATERNALISM: ONE TRIBE'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL WASTE DISPOSAL PROJECT IN INDIAN COUNTRY http://faculty.virginia.edu/ejus/ESCAPE.htm)
We have been asked to address the issue of environmental racism in the context of commercial solid and hazardous waste projects on Indian reservations. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with those who believe that undesirable facilities-such as waste disposal facilities more likely to be found in a poor minority community than in a wealthy white one.' However, the environmental community must come to understand that not all such facilities are unwanted by the host community and that, in those cases where a community wishes to have such a facility, its decision is to be respected. As an example of such a host community located in Indian country, we will use our experience in helping the Campo Band of Mission Indians of California develop a solid waste project on its reservation. With respect to waste disposal, there are two issues facing Indian tribes today. First, how do tribes dispose of the solid waste generated on their reservations, and second, does a tribe want to use its land as a site for a commercial waste project as a form of economic development? Almost without exception, over the last year the media has focused its entire attention on the issue of commercial projects. We cannot count the number of articles in magazines and newspapers titled "Dances with Garbage."2 The media has created a steady drumbeat of stories about tribes all over the country building landfills and taking in hazardous waste, implying that the waste industry is marauding unchecked in Indian country, immune from any environmental regulation whatsoever. Is it true? In our experience over the last few years, this is just not the case, and we believe that much of the media attention has been misguided and uninformed. Even if we assume that some waste companies are targeting Indian country, tribes have almost always repelled these so-called attacks.3 In most cases, tribes are not even giving these companies an interview. Of the dozens of proposals that apparently have been made to tribes, only a small number remain under serious consideration.4 Tribal governments quite clearly have demonstrated that they are fully capable of deciding whether or not a project will serve their best interests. To set the record straight, the bigger problem is not that the waste industry is beating a path to the tribal door. Rather, it is the unauthorized and illegal dumping occurring on reservations. For most Indian communities the problem of open dumping on tribal lands is of much greater concern than the remote prospect that a commercial waste disposal facility may be sited on a reservation. Until 1986, Congress had left tribal governments completely out of the federal environmental scheme. In 1986, Congress enacted the first tribal amendments to federal environmental laws. Those amendments allowed tribes to be treated as states for program enforcement and grants under the Safe Drinking Water Act.5 Congress enacted similar amendments to Superfund in 1986,6 the Clean Water Act in 1987,7 and the Clean Air Act in 1990. 8 Unfortunately, Congress has not yet enacted tribal amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)9 authorizing tribes to assume primary enforcement authority for solid and hazardous waste programs.
American imperialism dominates society to destroy indigenous culture – turns case and outweighs.
Galeota ‘4: Julia Galeota placed first in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2004 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America. “Cultural Imperialism: An American Tradition.” 2004 Humanist Essay Contest Winner. Getrun.info. The Humanist. 2004. http://www.getrun.info/pdf/tradition/5.pdf
Travel almost anywhere in the world today and, whether you suffer from habitual Big Mac cravings or cringe at the thought of missing the newest episode of MTV’s The Real World, your American tastes can be satisfied practically everywhere. This proliferation of American products across the globe is more than mere accident. As a byproduct of globalization, it is part of a larger trend in the conscious dissemination of American attitudes and values that is often referred to as cultural imperialism. In his 1976 work Communication and Cultural Domination, Herbert Schiller defines cultural imperialism as: the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system, and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the values and structures of the dominant center of the system. Thus, cultural imperialism involves much more than simple consumer goods; it involves the dissemination of ostensibly American principles, such as freedom and democracy. Though this process might sound appealing on the surface, it masks a frightening truth: many cultures around the world are gradually disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of corporate and cultural America. The motivations behind American cultural imperialism parallel the justifications for U.S. imperialism throughout history: the desire for access to foreign markets and the belief in the superiority of American culture. Though the United States does boast the world’s largest, most powerful economy, no business is completely satisfied with controlling only the American market; American corporations want to control the other 95 percent of the world’s consumers as well. Many industries are incredibly successful in that venture. According to the Guardian, American films accounted for approximately 80 percent of global box office revenue in January 2003. And who can forget good old Micky D’s? With over 30,000 restaurants in over one hundred countries, the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonald’s are now, according to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, “more widely recognized than the Christian cross.” Such American domination inevitably hurts local markets, as the majority of foreign industries are unable to compete with the economic strength of U.S. industry. Because it serves American economic interests, corporations conveniently ignore the detrimental impact of American control of foreign markets. Corporations don’t harbor qualms about the detrimental effects of “Americanization” of foreign cultures, as most corporations have ostensibly convinced themselves that American culture is superior and therefore its influence is beneficial to other, “lesser” cultures. Unfortunately, this American belief in the superiority of U.S. culture is anything but new; it is as old as the culture itself. This attitude was manifest in the actions of settlers when they first arrived on this continent and massacred or assimilated essentially the entire “savage” Native American population. This attitude also reflects that of the late nineteenth-century age of imperialism, during which the jingoists attempted to fulfill what they believed to be the divinely ordained “manifest destiny” of American expansion. Jingoists strongly believe in the concept of social Darwinism: the stronger, “superior” cultures will overtake the weaker, “inferior” cultures in a “survival of the fittest.” It is this arrogant belief in the incomparability of American culture that characterizes many of our economic and political strategies today.
Natives have their reasons for continuing nuclear power – whether it be for economic or energy infrastructure, they ought to possess the autonomy to decide their OWN fates.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Banning nuclear power is a form of imperial paternalism – it just re-inscribes colonialism by creating blanket policy decisions without case-by-case consent. Natives have their own energy and economic infrastructure to be concerned about.
Jefferies ‘8: Sierra M. Jefferies, J.D. candidate, “ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE SKULL VALLEY GOSHUTE INDIANS' PROPOSAL TO STORE NUCLEAR WASTE,” Journal of Land, Resources and Environmental Law, 2008
Second, opposition to the Band’s attempt to make use of its land seems to imply that the Band does not have the ability to make to make informed decisions regarding the use of its land. In response to similar environmental opposition to tribal attempts at commercial waste development, Native American attorneys Keven Gover and Jana Walker criticized the paternalistic undertones of opposition, "Much of the environmental community seems to assume that, if an Indian community decides to accept such a project, it either does not understand the potential consequences or has been bamboozled by an unprincipled waste company. In either case, the clear implication is that Indians lack the intelligence to balance and protect adequately their own economic and environmental resources. 03 For the Skull Valley Goshutes, this was a rare opportunity to benefit financially from the undesirable land they have been granted. The surrounding toxic land uses, barren desert nature of the land and lack of other resources undoubtedly weighed heavily in their decision to move forward with the project. Leon Bear, tribal leader has stated, "We don’t have an energy source like oil or gas or coal, we feel that we're being prejudiced against as far as gaming."94 Interestingly, tribes that were not similarly restricted in land use options also participated in the federal selection process for the MRS and pursued private storage facilities. Among them was the Mescalero Apache tribe of New Mexico. Unlike the Goshutes, the Mescalero were not limited in opportunities to develop their land for profit. By contrast, at the time of the federally proposed MRS, the Mescalero were already operating several multi-million dollar businesses. 95 The Mescalero were not compelled by limited available uses for their land. Grace Thorpe, "a member of the Sac and Fox Tribe, an opponent of the MRS program, and President of the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans" stated "Ithe Mescalero don't need this nuclear waste ... they have a five star resort, a casino, two ski lifts, forestry resources and a sawmill m98
Media and other outlets keeps distorting Native needs – assumptions need to STOP
Gover and Walker ‘92: (Kevin, Prof of Law ASU, Jana L, ESCAPING ENVIRONMENTAL PATERNALISM: ONE TRIBE'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL WASTE DISPOSAL PROJECT IN INDIAN COUNTRY http://faculty.virginia.edu/ejus/ESCAPE.htm)
We have been asked to address the issue of environmental racism in the context of commercial solid and hazardous waste projects on Indian reservations. Let us say at the outset that we have no quarrel with those who believe that undesirable facilities-such as waste disposal facilities more likely to be found in a poor minority community than in a wealthy white one.' However, the environmental community must come to understand that not all such facilities are unwanted by the host community and that, in those cases where a community wishes to have such a facility, its decision is to be respected. As an example of such a host community located in Indian country, we will use our experience in helping the Campo Band of Mission Indians of California develop a solid waste project on its reservation. With respect to waste disposal, there are two issues facing Indian tribes today. First, how do tribes dispose of the solid waste generated on their reservations, and second, does a tribe want to use its land as a site for a commercial waste project as a form of economic development? Almost without exception, over the last year the media has focused its entire attention on the issue of commercial projects. We cannot count the number of articles in magazines and newspapers titled "Dances with Garbage."2 The media has created a steady drumbeat of stories about tribes all over the country building landfills and taking in hazardous waste, implying that the waste industry is marauding unchecked in Indian country, immune from any environmental regulation whatsoever. Is it true? In our experience over the last few years, this is just not the case, and we believe that much of the media attention has been misguided and uninformed. Even if we assume that some waste companies are targeting Indian country, tribes have almost always repelled these so-called attacks.3 In most cases, tribes are not even giving these companies an interview. Of the dozens of proposals that apparently have been made to tribes, only a small number remain under serious consideration.4 Tribal governments quite clearly have demonstrated that they are fully capable of deciding whether or not a project will serve their best interests. To set the record straight, the bigger problem is not that the waste industry is beating a path to the tribal door. Rather, it is the unauthorized and illegal dumping occurring on reservations. For most Indian communities the problem of open dumping on tribal lands is of much greater concern than the remote prospect that a commercial waste disposal facility may be sited on a reservation. Until 1986, Congress had left tribal governments completely out of the federal environmental scheme. In 1986, Congress enacted the first tribal amendments to federal environmental laws. Those amendments allowed tribes to be treated as states for program enforcement and grants under the Safe Drinking Water Act.5 Congress enacted similar amendments to Superfund in 1986,6 the Clean Water Act in 1987,7 and the Clean Air Act in 1990. 8 Unfortunately, Congress has not yet enacted tribal amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)9 authorizing tribes to assume primary enforcement authority for solid and hazardous waste programs.
American imperialism dominates society to destroy indigenous culture – turns case and outweighs.
Galeota ‘4: Julia Galeota placed first in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2004 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America. “Cultural Imperialism: An American Tradition.” 2004 Humanist Essay Contest Winner. Getrun.info. The Humanist. 2004. http://www.getrun.info/pdf/tradition/5.pdf
Travel almost anywhere in the world today and, whether you suffer from habitual Big Mac cravings or cringe at the thought of missing the newest episode of MTV’s The Real World, your American tastes can be satisfied practically everywhere. This proliferation of American products across the globe is more than mere accident. As a byproduct of globalization, it is part of a larger trend in the conscious dissemination of American attitudes and values that is often referred to as cultural imperialism. In his 1976 work Communication and Cultural Domination, Herbert Schiller defines cultural imperialism as: the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system, and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the values and structures of the dominant center of the system. Thus, cultural imperialism involves much more than simple consumer goods; it involves the dissemination of ostensibly American principles, such as freedom and democracy. Though this process might sound appealing on the surface, it masks a frightening truth: many cultures around the world are gradually disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of corporate and cultural America. The motivations behind American cultural imperialism parallel the justifications for U.S. imperialism throughout history: the desire for access to foreign markets and the belief in the superiority of American culture. Though the United States does boast the world’s largest, most powerful economy, no business is completely satisfied with controlling only the American market; American corporations want to control the other 95 percent of the world’s consumers as well. Many industries are incredibly successful in that venture. According to the Guardian, American films accounted for approximately 80 percent of global box office revenue in January 2003. And who can forget good old Micky D’s? With over 30,000 restaurants in over one hundred countries, the ubiquitous golden arches of McDonald’s are now, according to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, “more widely recognized than the Christian cross.” Such American domination inevitably hurts local markets, as the majority of foreign industries are unable to compete with the economic strength of U.S. industry. Because it serves American economic interests, corporations conveniently ignore the detrimental impact of American control of foreign markets. Corporations don’t harbor qualms about the detrimental effects of “Americanization” of foreign cultures, as most corporations have ostensibly convinced themselves that American culture is superior and therefore its influence is beneficial to other, “lesser” cultures. Unfortunately, this American belief in the superiority of U.S. culture is anything but new; it is as old as the culture itself. This attitude was manifest in the actions of settlers when they first arrived on this continent and massacred or assimilated essentially the entire “savage” Native American population. This attitude also reflects that of the late nineteenth-century age of imperialism, during which the jingoists attempted to fulfill what they believed to be the divinely ordained “manifest destiny” of American expansion. Jingoists strongly believe in the concept of social Darwinism: the stronger, “superior” cultures will overtake the weaker, “inferior” cultures in a “survival of the fittest.” It is this arrogant belief in the incomparability of American culture that characterizes many of our economic and political strategies today.
The alternative is to allow indigenous communities to decide whether or not they want the use of nuclear power through a case-by-case basis; this means no blanket prohibition.
Claiming that Natives generally don’t want nuclear power is still a blanket assumption which re-inscribes oppressive colonialism because some tribes still may want nuclear.
Gover and Walker ‘92: Kevin, and Jana L. Walker (Native American Attorneys at Gover, Stetson and Williams). "Escaping Environmental Paternalism: One Tribe's Approach to Developing a Commercial Waste Disposal Project in Indian Country." University of Colorado Law Review 63 (1992): 933.
The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environmental compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development.
The alt best addresses historical injustice by allowing natives to control their own destinies and decide how to move forward – nuclear jurisdiction is a fundamental step.

Segal ‘12: (Alice, URANIUM MINING AND THE NAVAJO NATION - LEGAL INJUSTICE Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice 21 S. Cal. Rev. L. and Social Justice 355)
As a result of this one-way relationship, courts were able to strip away Navajo children from their families. This injustice was not corrected until Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, which provided the Navajo with greater authority. n281 To compensate for historical injustices such as this, as well as to allow them to define for themselves their own people groups, the Navajo Nation should be granted greater authority over its land as a sovereign tribe. However, Congress has resisted efforts to increase Navajo authority because this would reduce the federal government's power. An optimal solution that would satisfy the interests of both Congress and the Navajo Nation would be to give the Navajo authority over uranium mining. Under the NRC's lax oversight, federal agencies have proven inept at regulating uranium mining and cleanup. Courts have deferred to the agencies' poor decisions, perpetuating inefficient and reckless mining. On the other hand, the Navajo government has both the interest and organizational capacity to regulate uranium mining because the Nation has a personal stake in protecting its people from further exposure to radioactive material. The interests of the Navajo suggest that, with congressional help, the Navajo government would work to resolve the unfair treatment of its people through careful management of uranium mining.
Mutually exclusive with the aff since tribes that want nuclear power can continue to use it.

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Affirming entails a shift towards more natural gas.
UCS ‘16: August 11, 2016. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/infographic-climate-change-risks-natural-gas.html#.V6wq5ZMrLs1.
Why is nuclear power projected to decline so dramatically? Nuclear power is expected to drop significantly over the coming decades as existing nuclear plants reach the ends of their lifetimes and are retired. Few new U.S. nuclear plants are expected to come online in the future, in large part because nuclear power is not currently economically competitive with other energy sources. Why is natural gas expected to provide the majority of U.S. electricity by 2050? Domestic supplies of natural gas have increased dramatically in recent years, due in large part to the development and expansion of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) drilling techniques. This increased supply – which is expected to continue for years – has lowered prices for natural gas, making it very cost-competitive compared to other energy sources.
Empirically, Germany proves.
Moslener ‘16: Ulf. “Natural Gas Expected to Replace Nuclear Energy in Germany.” Zew, August 11, 2016. http://www.zew.de/en/presse/pressearchiv/vor-allem-erdgas-soll-den-wegfall-von-atomstrom-in-deutschland-ersetzen/.
The "grey" scenario (i. e. the extension of coal and gas-fired power plants) is possibly based on the consideration that only today's economical technologies are believed capable of putting up with the immense capacity shortage resulting from the nuclear phase-out without threatening energy supply. The expectations of a "green" replacement scenario probably derive from the latest decisions on renewable energies and the nuclear phase-out. Assuming that the nuclear phase-out is to be completed by 2020, about 28 per cent of Germany's total electricity generation need be replaced until then. A major share of nuclear energy could be covered by expanding the use of renewable energies from today's 10 per cent to 20 per cent in 2020. This expansion is best combined with the construction of new gas power stations. Natural gas plays a key role in the energy policy debate because it is part of both, "grey" and "green" energy strategies and thus represents, at least to some extent, a consensus in energy policy. The EU and Germany, in particular, depend on energy imports. That is why changes to the energy mix, for example by significantly expanding gas-power plants as expected, will not remain without consequence. About 83 per cent of the experts assume that Germany's economic dependency on natural gas will rise over the next five years. By contrast, only 60 per cent expect this to be the case in the USA. A very different picture is painted in terms of crude oil. For Germany, approximately 47 per cent forecast rising and about 40 per cent stagnating economic dependency on oil. With regard to the USA, however, a clear majority of almost 73 per cent expects the dependency on crude oil to increase. German economic dependencies grow slower than those in the USA. This may reflect the expectations according to which German efforts to force back the dominance of oil are actually considered to have a certain chance of success.
Natural gas transition crushes renewables – dooms green tech.
Friedman ‘12: Thomas Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third Pulitzer for The New York Times. He became the paper’s foreign-affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. In 2005, Mr. Friedman was elected as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board (Thomas L. Friedman, NYT, 4 August 2012, “Get It Right on Gas,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/friedman-get-it-right-on-gas.html?_r=1)AB
That is the question — because natural gas is still a fossil fuel. The good news: It emits only half as much greenhouse gas as coal when combusted and, therefore, contributes only half as much to global warming. The better news: The recent glut has made it inexpensive to deploy. But there is a hidden, long-term, cost: A sustained gas glut could undermine new investments in wind, solar, nuclear and energy efficiency systems — which have zero emissions — and thus keep us addicted to fossil fuels for decades. That would be reckless. This year’s global extremes of droughts and floods are totally consistent with models of disruptive, nonlinear climate change. After record warm temperatures in the first half of this year, it was no surprise to find last week that the Department of Agriculture has now designated more than half of all U.S. counties — 1,584 in 32 states — as primary disaster areas where crops and grazing areas have been ravaged by drought. That is why on May 29 the British newspaper The Guardian quoted Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, as saying that “a golden age for gas is not necessarily a golden age for the climate” — if natural gas ends up sinking renewables. Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the I.E.A., urged governments to keep in place subsidies and regulations to encourage investments in wind, solar and other renewables “for years to come” so they remain competitive
Natural gas production drives warming.
Howarth and Ingraffea ‘11: Robert W. Howarth (David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell) Tony Ingraffea (the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell) and Renee Santoro (a research technician in ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell) April 2011 “Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations” http://www.sustainablefuture.cornell.edu/news/attachments/Howarth-EtAl-2011.pdf
We evaluate the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas obtained by highvolume hydraulic fracturing from shale formations, focusing on methane emissions. Natural gas is composed largely of methane, and 3.6 to 7.9 of the methane from shale-gas production escapes to the atmosphere in venting and leaks over the lifetime of a well. These methane emissions are at least 30 more than and perhaps more than twice as great as those from conventional gas. The higher emissions from shale gas occur at the time wells are hydraulically fractured—as methane escapes from flow-back return fluids—and during drill out following the fracturing. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential that is far greater than that of carbon dioxide, particularly over the time horizon of the first few decades following emission. Methane contributes substantially to the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas on shorter time scales, dominating it on a 20-year time horizon. The footprint for shale gas is greater than that for conventional gas or oil when viewed on any time horizon, but particularly so over 20 years. Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20 greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years.
Increases structural violence and legitimizes oppression
insert card here

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lake Highland | Judge: Arjun Tambe
First is Framing
The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan.
First, the aff advocacy takes the wrong approach – our role as intellectuals is not to offer prescriptive solutions, rather it is to offer analyses that expose harmful powers and expose them to light, this is a pre-req to policy making
Jones 99 Richard Wyn Jones, Professor International Politics @ Aberystwyth University, '99 (Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory, p. 155-163)
The central political task of the intellectuals is to aid in the construction of a
AND
as both an inspiration and a challenge to critical security studies.
 

Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven't.
 

Second is the Substance
These environmental justice movements only re-entrench neoliberalism because of the interests for transnational capital and therefore causes more structural violence
Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
Opal Tometi, BLM co-founder, has said that environmental issues are "
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justice movements. CX is binding and this a direct link to neoliberalism.  

And, this turns case because the neoliberal violence of the state further entrenches violence through co-optation and causes a struggle for black communities on a global scale
Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
Through my research and investigation I have come to the conclusion that environmental justice movement
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doing something to contribute to a new era of revolutionary struggle.
 

And, Cap causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt.
Farbod 15 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises
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and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.  
 

The debate is about starting points - the AFF begins with prohibiting nuclear power which puts the cart before the horse.  The alternative is a cultural, anti-neoliberal critique to expand our understanding of state violence which is a necessary pre requisite  and this means the neolib is not inevitable.
Cleere 16 (Cleere, Rickie. "Environmental Racism and the Movement for Black Lives: Grassroots Power in the 21st Century." Pomona College, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1153andcontext=pomona_theses.)
I was first introduced to the concept of environmental racism in college courses, but
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many lives as possible must challenge the root of the problem: neoliberalism.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
-extemp cp text-
Global water shortages coming now – nuclear desalination is key to prevent conflict and solve.
White ‘9: Gary White writes in “Can nuclear solve the global water crisis?” on Dec 20 2009. Gary is a Commodities Editor at the Telegraph, a UK based newspaper” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/6851983/Can-nuclear-solve-the-global-water-crisis.html; AB
As the global population expands, demand for water for agriculture and personal use will increase dramatically, but there could be a solution that will produce clean drinking water and help reduce carbon emissions as well. That process is nuclear desalination. Many areas of the world are suffering from a water crisis – and it's not just arid, developing countries that are suffering. The Western US is particularly vulnerable and its water crisis is getting more severe by the day. Las Vegas could be one of the first US cities to be hit by a serious water shortage, some are even questioning whether it can survive at all. The city gets 90pc of its water from Lake Mead, the body of water created by the Hoover Dam. The water in Lake Mead, and the Colorado River which feeds it, has been falling for some time. It is slowly running dry due to overuse. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography believes there is a 50pc chance that the lake will be completely dry by 2021 if climate change continues as expected and future water usage is not curtailed. Water is so important that, as a population grows and demand increases, there is a strong chance of conflict in the future. According to the World Water Council, 260 river basins are shared by two or more countries. "In the absence of strong institutions and agreements, changes within a basin can lead to transboundary tensions," the Council said. "When major projects proceed without regional collaboration, they can become a point of conflicts, heightening regional instability." The World Water Council cites the Parana La Plata in South America, the Aral Sea, the Jordan and the Danube as examples. It's not just tensions between countries that are a potential problem. Civil unrest caused by scarcity has already started. In India on December 3, one man was killed and dozens injured during a protest over water rationing in Mumbai following the country's poor Monsoon. The prospect of further water riots is very real. However, nuclear energy could help provide the solution for this thorny issue. Oil-rich Middle Eastern nations are rushing to build new nuclear plants. Anwar Gargash, a foreign affairs minister in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said last month that nuclear power was "best able" to meet future power demand in his country. Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2020. This followed comments from Saudi Arabia, which said it planned to generate up to a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power within the next 15 years. Everyone thinks the trend for oil-rich nations to move towards nuclear power generation is about limiting domestic consumption so they can boost oil exports. However, that's just part of the story. Saudi Arabia, for example, has very little water – and global warming is likely to make this situation much worse. This is a major problem because Saudi Arabia is about to see its population explode. The overwhelming majority of the Saudi people are young. Almost 40pc of its population is under the age of 14, with just 2.5pc being in the over 65 bracket. This means its population is growing at about 2pc per year – and as the young start to have families of their own, the rate of population growth will increase. In fact, many of the nations that are predicted to have the strongest growth in population over the next years are the areas where the water crisis is most acute. For example, the UAE has the largest growth rate of any nation in the world – at 3.69pc, according to data compiled by the US government. Nuclear reactors can be used to generate electricity – but they can also be used to desalinate water. Nuclear desalination is not a new idea – it's a proven technology, thanks to Kazakhstan. A single nuclear reactor at Aktau on the shore of the Caspian Sea successfully produced up to 135 megawatts of electricity and 80,000 cubic metres of potable water a day between 1972 and 1999, when it was closed at the end of the reactor's life. Water has also been desalinated using nuclear reactors in India and Japan. The problem with desalination is that it is very energy intensive. Most desalination today uses fossil fuels, contributing to carbon emissions. However, because nuclear power generation does not emit carbon, it is a clean and efficient way of producing the most important commodity around. For countries experiencing rapid population growth, it could be a lifesaver.
Offshore SMR’s are the only viable source of desalination.
Science Daily ‘7: Science News Source writes in “Could Nuclear Power Be The Answer To Fresh Water?” on Nov 20 2007 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071120082429.htm; AB
Scientists are working on new solutions to the ancient problem of maintaining a fresh water supply. With predictions that more than 3.5 billion people will live in areas facing severe water shortages by the year 2025, the challenge is to find an environmentally benign way to remove salt from seawater. Global climate change, desertification, and over-population are already taking their toll on fresh water supplies. In coming years, fresh water could become a rare and expensive commodity. Research results presented at the Trombay Symposium on Desalination and Water Reuse offer a new perspective on desalination and describe alternatives to the current expensive and inefficient methods. Pradip Tewari of the Desalination Division at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in Mumbai, India, discusses the increasing demand for water in India driven not only by growing population and expectancies rapid agricultural and industrial expansion. He suggests that a holistic approach is needed to cope with freshwater needs, which include primarily seawater desalination in coastal areas and brackish water desalination as well as rainwater harvesting, particularly during the monsoon season. "The contribution of seawater and brackish water desalination would play an important role in augmenting the freshwater needs of the country." Meenakshi Jain of CDM and Environmental Services and Positive Climate Care Pvt Ltd in Jaipur highlights the energy problem facing regions with little fresh water. "Desalination is an energy-intensive process. Over the long term, desalination with fossil energy sources would not be compatible with sustainable development; fossil fuel reserves are finite and must be conserved for other essential uses, whereas demands for desalted water would continue to increase." Jain emphasizes that a sustainable, non-polluting solution to water shortages is essential. Renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and wave power, may be used in conjunction to generate electricity and to carry out desalination, which could have a significant impact on reducing potential increased greenhouse gas emissions. "Nuclear energy seawater desalination has a tremendous potential for the production of freshwater," Jain adds. The development of a floating nuclear plant is one of the more surprising solutions to the desalination problem. S.S. Verma of the Department of Physics at SLIET in Punjab, points out that small floating nuclear power plants represent a way to produce electrical energy with minimal environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Such plants could be sited offshore anywhere there is dense coastal population and not only provide cheap electricity but be used to power a desalination plant with their excess heat. "Companies are already in the process of developing a special desalination platform for attachment to FNPPs helping the reactor to desalinate seawater," Verma points out. A. Raha and colleagues at the Desalination Division of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in Trombay, point out that Low-Temperature Evaporation (LTE) desalination technology utilizing low-quality waste heat in the form of hot water (as low as 50 Celsius) or low-pressure steam from a nuclear power plant has been developed to produce high-purity water directly from seawater. Safety, reliability, viable economics, have already been demonstrated. BARC itself has recently commissioned a 50 tons per day low-temperature desalination plant. Co-editor of the journal*, B.M. Misra, formerly head of BARC, suggests that solar, wind, and wave power, while seemingly cost effective approaches to desalination, are not viable for the kind of large-scale fresh water production that an increasingly industrial and growing population needs. India already has plans for the rapid expansion of its nuclear power industry. Misra suggests that large-scale desalination plants could readily be incorporated into those plans. "The development of advanced reactors providing heat for hydrogen production and large amount of waste heat will catalyze the large-scale seawater desalination for economic production of fresh water," he says.
Water crises cause escalating global conflict.
Rasmussen ‘11: (Erik, CEO, Monday Morning; Founder, Green Growth Leaders) “Prepare for the Next Conflict: Water Wars” Huffington Post 4/12
For years experts have set out warnings of how the earth will be affected by the water crises, with millions dying and increasing conflicts over dwindling resources. They have proclaimed -- in line with the report from the US Senate -- that the water scarcity is a security issue, and that it will yield political stress with a risk of international water wars. This has been reflected in the oft-repeated observation that water will likely replace oil as a future cause of war between nations. Today the first glimpses of the coming water wars are emerging. Many countries in the Middle East, Africa, Central and South Asia -- e.g. Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Kenya, Egypt, and India – are already feeling the direct consequences of the water scarcity – with the competition of water leading to social unrest, conflict and migration. This month the escalating concerns about the possibility of water wars triggered calls by Zafar Adeel, chair of UN-Water, for the UN to promote "hydro-diplomacy" in the Middle East and North Africa in order to avoid or at least manage emerging tensions over access to water. The gloomy outlook of our global fresh water resources points in the direction that the current conflicts and instability in these countries are only glimpses of the water wars expected to unfold in the future. Thus we need to address the water crisis that can quickly escalate and become a great humanitarian crisis and also a global safety problem. A revolution The current effort is nowhere near what is needed to deal with the water-challenge -- the world community has yet to find the solutions. Even though the 'water issue' is moving further up the agenda all over the globe: the US foreign assistance is investing massively in activities that promote water security, the European Commission is planning to present a "Blueprint for Safeguarding Europe's Water" in 2012 and the Chinese government plans to spend $600 billion over the next 10 years on measures to ensure adequate water supplies for the country. But it is not enough. The situation requires a response that goes far beyond regional and national initiatives -- we need a global water plan. With the current state of affairs, correcting measures still can be taken to avoid the crisis to be worsening. But it demands that we act now. We need a new way of thinking about water. We need to stop depleting our water resources, and urge water conservation on a global scale. This calls for a global awareness that water is a very scarce and valuable natural resource and that we need to initiate fundamental technological and management changes, and combine this with international solidarity and cooperation. In 2009, The International Water Management Institute called for a blue revolution as the only way to move forward: "We will need nothing less than a 'Blue Revolution', if we are to achieve food security and avert a serious water crisis in the future" said Dr. Colin Chartres, Director General of the International Water Management Institute. This meaning that we need to ensure more ‘crop per drop’: while many developing countries use precious water to grow 1 ton of rice per hectare, other countries produce 5 tons per hectare under similar social and water conditions, but with better technology and management. Thus, if we behave intelligently, and collaborate between neighbors, between neighboring countries, between North and South, and in the global trading system, we shall not 'run out of water'. If we do not, and “business as usual prevails” then water wars will accelerate.
That goes nuclear.
Zahoor ‘12: (Musharaf Zahoor, Researcher at Department of Nuclear Politics – National Defense University, “Water Crisis can Trigger Nuclear War in South Asia”)
Water is an ambient source, which unlike human beings does not respect boundaries. Water has been a permanent source of conflict between the tribes since biblical times and now between the states. The conflicts are much more likely among those states, which are mainly dependent on shared water sources. The likelihood of turning these conflicts into wars is increased when these countries or states are mainly arid or receive low precipitations. In this situation, the upper riparian states (situated on upper parts of a river basin) often try to maximize water utility by neglecting the needs of the lower riparian states (situated on low lying areas of a river basin). However, international law on distribution of trans-boundary river water and mutually agreed treaties by the states have helped to some extent in overcoming these conflicts. In the recent times, the climate change has also affected the water availability. The absence of water management and conservation mechanisms in some regions particularly in the third world countries have exacerbated the water crisis. These states have become prone to wars in future. South Asia is among one of those regions where water needs are growing disproportionately to its availability. The high increase in population besides large-scale cultivation has turned South Asia into a water scarce region. The two nuclear neighbors Pakistan and India share the waters of Indus Basin. All the major rivers stem from the Himalyan region and pass through Kashmir down to the planes of Punjab and Sindh empty into Arabic ocean. It is pertinent that the strategic importance of Kashmir, a source of all major rivers, for Pakistan and symbolic importance of Kashmir for India are maximum list positions. Both the countries have fought two major wars in 1948, 1965 and a limited war in Kargil specifically on the Kashmir dispute. Among other issues, the newly born states fell into water sharing dispute right after their partition. Initially under an agreed formula, Pakistan paid for the river waters to India, which is an upper riparian state. After a decade long negotiations, both the states signed Indus Water Treaty in 1960. Under the treaty, India was given an exclusive right of three eastern rivers Sutlej, Bias and Ravi while Pakistan was given the right of three Western Rivers, Indus, Chenab and Jhelum. The tributaries of these rivers are also considered their part under the treaty. It was assumed that the treaty had permanently resolved the water issue, which proved a nightmare in the latter course. India by exploiting the provisions of IWT started wanton construction of dams on Pakistani rivers thus scaling down the water availability to Pakistan (a lower riparian state). The treaty only allows run of the river hydropower projects and does not permit to construct such water reservoirs on Pakistani rivers, which may affect the water flow to the low lying areas. According to the statistics of Hydel power Development Corporation of Indian Occupied Kashmir, India has a plan to construct 310 small, medium and large dams in the territory. India has already started work on 62 dams in the first phase. The cumulative dead and live storage of these dams will be so great that India can easily manipulate the water of Pakistani rivers. India has set up a department called the Chenab Valley Power Projects to construct power plants on the Chenab River in occupied Kashmir. India is also constructing three major hydro-power projects on Indus River which include Nimoo Bazgo power project, Dumkhar project and Chutak project. On the other hand, it has started Kishan * hydropower project by diverting the waters of Neelum River, a tributary of the Jhelum, in sheer violation of the IWT. The gratuitous construction of dams by India has created serious water shortages in Pakistan. The construction of Kishan * dam will turn the Neelum valley, which is located in Azad Kashmir into a barren land. The water shortage will not only affect the cultivation but it has serious social, political and economic ramifications for Pakistan. The farmer associations have already started protests in Southern Punjab and Sindh against the non-availability of water. These protests are so far limited and under control. The reports of international organizations suggest that the water availability in Pakistan will reduce further in the coming years. If the situation remains unchanged, the violent mobs of villagers across the country will be a major law and order challenge for the government. The water shortage has also created mistrust among the federative units, which is evident from the fact that the President and the Prime Minister had to intervene for convincing Sindh and Punjab provinces on water sharing formula. The Indus River System Authority (IRSA) is responsible for distribution of water among the provinces but in the current situation it has also lost its credibility. The provinces often accuse each other of water theft. In the given circumstances, Pakistan desperately wants to talk on water issue with India. The meetings between Indus Water Commissioners of Pakistan and India have so far yielded no tangible results. The recent meeting in Lahore has also ended without concrete results. India is continuously using delaying tactics to under pressure Pakistan. The Indus Water Commissioners are supposed to resolve the issues bilaterally through talks. The success of their meetings can be measured from the fact that Pakistan has to knock at international court of arbitration for the settlement of Kishan * hydropower project. The recently held foreign minister level talks between both the countries ended inconclusively in Islamabad, which only resulted in heightening the mistrust and suspicions. The water stress in Pakistan is increasing day by day. The construction of dams will not only cause damage to the agriculture sector but India can manipulate the river water to create inundations in Pakistan. The rivers in Pakistan are also vital for defense during wartime. The control over the water will provide an edge to India during war with Pakistan. The failure of diplomacy, manipulation of IWT provisions by India and growing water scarcity in Pakistan and its social, political and economic repercussions for the country can lead both the countries toward a war. The existent asymmetry between the conventional forces of both the countries will compel the weaker side to use nuclear weapons to prevent the opponent from taking any advantage of the situation. Pakistan's nuclear programme is aimed at to create minimum credible deterrence. India has a declared nuclear doctrine which intends to retaliate massively in case of first strike by its' enemy. In 2003, India expanded the operational parameters for its nuclear doctrine. Under the new parameters, it will not only use nuclear weapons against a nuclear strike but will also use nuclear weapons against a nuclear strike on Indian forces anywhere. Pakistan has a draft nuclear doctrine, which consists on the statements of high ups. Describing the nuclear thresh-hold in January 2002, General Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan's Strategic Plans Division, in an interview to Landau Network, said that Pakistan will use nuclear weapons in case India occupies large parts of its territory, economic strangling by India, political disruption and if India destroys Pakistan's forces. The analysis of the ambitious nuclear doctrines of both the countries clearly points out that any military confrontation in the region can result in a nuclear catastrophe. The rivers flowing from Kashmir are Pakistan's lifeline, which are essential for the livelihood of 170 million people of the country and the cohesion of federative units. The failure of dialogue will leave no option but to achieve the ends through military means. The only way to discard the lurking fear of a nuclear cataclysm is to settle all the outstanding disputes amicably through dialogue. The international community has a special role in this regard. It should impress upon India to initiate meaningful talks to resolve the lingering Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and implement the water treaty in its letter and spirit. The Indian leadership should drive out its policy towards Pakistan from terrorism mantra to a solution-oriented dialogue process. Both the countries should adopt a joint mechanism to maximize the utility of river waters by implementing the 1960 treaty, Besides negotiations with India, Pakistan should start massive water conservation and management projects. The modern techniques in agriculture like i.e. drip irrigation, should be adopted. On the other hand, there is a dire need to gradually upgrade the obsolete irrigation system in Pakistan. The politicization of mega hydropower projects/dams is also a problem being faced by Pakistan, which can only be resolved through political will.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Russia’s economy is on the brink of collapse
Motyl ‘16: Motyl, Alexander. “Lights Out for the Putin Regime.” Foreign Affairs, January 27, 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2016-01-27/lights-out-putin-regime.
Russian President Vladimir Putin used to seem invincible. Today, he and his regime look enervated, confused, and desperate. Increasingly, both Russian and Western commentators suggest that Russia may be on the verge of deep instability, possibly even collapse. This perceptual shift is unsurprising. Last year, Russia was basking in the glow of its annexation of Crimea and aggression in the Donbas. The economy, although stagnant, seemed stable. Putin was running circles around Western policymakers and domestic critics. His popularity was sky-high. Now it is only Putin’s popularity that remains; everything else has turned for the worse. Crimea and the Donbas are economic hellholes and huge drains on Russian resources. The war with Ukraine has stalemated. Energy prices are collapsing, and the Russian economy is in recession. Putin’s punitive economic measures against Ukraine, Turkey, and the West have only harmed the Russian economy further. Meanwhile, the country’s intervention in Syria is poised to become a quagmire. Things are probably much worse for Russia than this cursory survey of negative trends suggests. The country is weathering three crises brought about by Putin’s rule—and Russia’s foreign-policy misadventures in Ukraine and Syria are only exacerbating them.

Next, Russian Nuclear Energy Industry will be able to revitalize Russia’s Economy
Khan ‘15: Taimoor Khan, 10-31-2015, "Russia Dominating Nuclear Energy Market," ValueWalk, http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/10/russia-dominating-nuclear-energy-market/
In short, Russian nuclear diplomacy has penetrated the international stage in such a manner that its nuclear energy provision capabilities are now in demand, and this demand will continue to grow as time progresses. It is also interesting to note that countries that have signed on to Rosatom nuclear agreements span across all corners of the globe except for North America and Australia. Moreover, every signatory is strategically placed, so there is definitely more than meets the eye to these deals. As of 2014, Russia had promised the construction of 29 reactors abroad, and Rosatom is confident that within a few years, the number will grow to around 80, which is not surprising to see considering how far ahead Russia is in nuclear energy provision. And although the likes of the United States and France have the right nuclear know-how to do exactly what Russia is doing, neither nation nor any entity outside of Russia has sought to really capitalize on the global demand for nuclear energy. Moreover, Russian dominance of the global nuclear energy sector has important geopolitical connotations, both in the medium and long term. Nuclear energy to revive its economy Russia’s success at maintaining pre-Fukushima nuclear power agreements means that it has been able to broaden its international NPP roll-out in a manner that has changed the notion of the supposed decline of nuclear energy that was much discussed following the Fukushima disaster. And Moscow’s success in securing several NPP contracts is a clear indicator that in the coming years, nuclear energy requirements will rise and match renewable energy requirements on an equal footing. Moreover, sending nuclear power to all corners of the globe gives Moscow plenty of economic gains. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Russia stands to gain around $740 billion in revenues through nuclear power technologies between now and 2025. Combined with the fact that Rosatom has no other comparable international competitor, it can make swaths of revenue for the Kremlin. Today, Russia’s otherwise-fractured economy is relying on oil and gas and now nuclear energy to hold things together.

Affirming prohibits Russia from exporting and producing nuclear energy, thus the aff will push Russia’s econ over the brink and cause collapse

Next, Russian economic downturn will disrupt the world economy and influence world oil prices
Cooper ‘8: (William, Congressional Research Service Specialist in International Trade and Finance Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division, “Russia’s Economic Performance and Policies and Their Implications for the United States,” May 30, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34512.pdf)
The greater importance of Russia’s economic policies and prospects to the United States lie in their indirect effect on the overall economic and political environment in which the United States and Russia operate. From this perspective, Russia’s continuing economic stability and growth can be considered positive for the United States. Because financial markets are interrelated, chaos in even some of the smaller economies can cause uncertainty throughout the rest of the world. Such was the case during Russia’s financial meltdown in 1998. Promotion of economic stability in Russia has been a basis for U.S. support for Russia’s membership in international economic organizations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). As a major oil producer and exporter, Russia influences world oil prices that affect U.S. consumers.

And, empirically econ collapse leads to food shortages and becomes a hopeless fight for the victim
Holodny ‘16: Elena Holodny, 6-20-2016, "87 of Venezuelans say they don't have money to buy enough food," Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-economic-crisis-leads-to-food-shortages-2016-6
Venezuela's economic collapse has led to mass hunger in the country. In a bombshell New York Times report, Nicholas Casey notes that, according to the most recent assessment of living standards by Simón Bolívar University, a whopping 87 of Venezuelans now say that they don't have money to buy enough food. Moreover, he reports that 72 of monthly wages are being allocated just to food, according to the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis. And these numbers are translating into action. Casey reports that, over the last two weeks, there have been over 50 food riots, protests, and mass lootings in the country. "During Carnival, we used to throw eggs at each other just to have some fun," 24-year-old Gabriel Márquez told The Times. "Now an egg is like gold." The Times report comes at a time when Venezuela continues to struggle with an economic crisis resulting from a deadly cocktail of a mismanaged economy and lower oil prices. Venezuela, an OPEC member and keeper of the largest oil reserves in the world, heavily relies on the commodity for its export revenues. Things went south after oil prices collapsed in 2014, especially because higher prices previously funded many of the government's social programs. Over the last few months, President Nicolás Maduro has tried out some unorthodox things in response to the economic catastrophe, including changing the time zone to make more favorable daylight hours, urging women to cut use of hair dryers to save electricity, and forcing holidays for state employees. He also declared a 60-day state of emergency in mid-May because of "what he called plots from Venezuela and the United States to subvert him," according to Reuters. Notably, Venezuela's economic future is not looking very bright. Central-bank data suggests that Venezuela's gross domestic product contracted by 5.7 in 2015, and International Monetary Fund figures forecast that it will shrink by 8 in 2016. Inflation is around 180.9 — the second highest in the world — and is expected to rise to a mind-blowing 720 in 2016, according to a January estimate from the IMF. Plus, RBC Capital Markets' Helima Croft previously noted that the country is also flirting with a potential debt crisis. "Perhaps no country in OPEC has suffered such a severe economic shock amid the collapse in oil prices as Venezuela," she wrote in February. "Political challenges and mounting debt continue to stress an already challenging situation and there appears to be no end in sight," she added later in May.

Next, Food Shortages increase structural violence
Colbert ‘14: Colbert, Edward. “Violence and The Global Food Economy: Food Sovereignty as a Precondition for Genuine Food Security.” University of Leeds, 2014. http://www.polis.leeds.ac.uk/assets/files/students/student-journal/Summer-2014/Colbert-Violence-global-food-economy.pdf.
This quote does not do justice to the force by which accumulation by dispossession occurs as it suggests that producers may choose to leave or sell their land, rather than facing forced evictions. Nonetheless its tone suggests that the reduction in production entitlements of the rural poor is an inevitable outcome of the continued growth of the global food economy. Although the FAO was cautious to commit to any certainty on agrarian questions it appears that at least some form of dispossession was planned. Escobar argues that ‘planning’, in the context of ‘progress’, “requires a degree of normalization and standardization of reality, which in turn entails injustice and the erasure of difference and diversity” (1992:147). Such thinking has become normalised as a result of the ideology of developmentalism imposed on countries in the Global South. This ideology is “exclusively concerned with the conversion of nature into a resource and the use of natural resources for commodity production and capital accumulation” and it “ignores the requirements of the huge numbers of people whose needs are not being satisfied through market mechanisms” (Shiva, 1992:239). Just as the English enclosure movement pushed people off the land as a planned means of controlling surplus people, this thinking informs current day food security policies and so continues to promote violence in the food system by disconnecting people from the land (Handy and Fehr 2010:45, 51). As the contemporary concept of food security has become ‘normalised’ during the latter half of the 20th century (Lang and Barling 2012:315), so too has the structural violence of the global food economy. Handy and Fehr put the point somewhat more bluntly in arguing that food securitisation, “confronts a crisis in food production by driving more producers from the land, addresses the fragility of the current system of agricultural production by advocating more of the same and combats rural poverty by turning the rural poor into even poorer urban dwellers!” (2010:45) The insistence that food security should be a matter of global rather than local concern is a further flaw in the fight against hunger. Global solutions for local problems reduce the genuine food security of people in different nations (Esteva and Prakash, 1997:280). Food security as a global policy encourages the growth of food for export (to feed the world) rather than domestic consumption and thus makes producers and consumers vulnerable to international price fluctuations. This policy favours large-scale producers and agribusinesses over indigenous people and small-scale farmers (Mittal and Krishnan, 1997:202). Food security is therefore concerned with the securitisation of exchange entitlements as a means to purchase food as a commodity. The fact that this commodity is of absolute necessity for life, yet access to it is dependent on adequate exchange entitlements, demonstrates the way in which ‘food security’ benefits winners at the expense of losers. In light of this paper’s definition of violence, food security can be seen to reduce life-sustaining processes by influencing the actions of individuals in a way that greatly diminishes their potential realisations (Galtung, 1969:168; Kim, 1984:181). Levels of exchange entitlements vary in different locations both domestically and globally. This means that an individual’s vulnerability to food insecurity is increased as a result of structural violence; however, this is not just a concern for the poorest populations of the Global South. The slow violence of food import dependencies across the Global North has shifted food policies away from encouraging production entitlements almost entirely towards a dependence on exchange entitlements. This reduction in the ability of a population to feed itself, coupled with the increased violence of the system towards producers of food in the Global South, hence creates vulnerability for future food shortages and thus greater violence. If food security supports the structural violence of the global food economy, and therefore promotes negative peace (Galtung, 1969), does food sovereignty offer an alternative for positive peace within the food supply chain?

Tournament: St Marks | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Text: The United States Federal Government should designate sub-seabed disposal for permanent nuclear waste disposal while continuing nuclear power.
Wilson ‘14: Alex Wilson writes in “Safe Storage of Nuclear Waste” in 2014. Founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. and executive editor of Environmental Building News, founded the Resilient Design Institute Alex, "Safe Storage of Nuclear Waste", Green Building Advisor, www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/energy-solutions/safe-storage-nuclear-waste; AB
The big question now is how long it will be until the plant can be decommissioned and what to do with the large quantities of radioactive waste that are being stored onsite. Terrorism risks with nuclear power My concern with nuclear power has always been more about terrorism than accidents during operation or storage. I continue to worry that terrorists could gain entry to nuclear plant operations and sabotage plants from the inside — disabling cooling systems and causing a meltdown. There is also a remote risk of unanticipated natural disasters causing meltdowns or radiation release, as we saw so vividly with the Fukushima Power Plant catastrophe in Japan in March, 2011. For more than 30 years, the nuclear industry in the U.S. and nuclear regulators have been going down the wrong path with waste storage — seeking a repository where waste could be buried deep in a mountain. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was the place of choice until… it wasn’t. Any time we choose to put highly dangerous waste in someone’s backyard, it’s bound to cause a lot of controversy, even in a sparsely populated, pro-resource-extraction place like Nevada. NIMBY opposition can be boosted by people in powerful places, and in the case of Yucca Mountain, Nevada senator Harry Reid has played such a role. (He has been the Senate Majority Leader since 2006 and served prior to that as the Minority Leader and Democratic Whip.) Aside from NIMBYism, the problem with burying nuclear waste in a mountain (like Yucca Mountain) or salt caverns (like New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns — an earlier option that was pursued for a while in the 1970s) is that the maximum safety is provided at Day One, and the margin of safety drops continually from there. The safety of such storage sites could be compromised over time due to seismic activity (Nevada ranks fourth among the most seismically active states), volcanism (the Yucca Mountain ridge is comprised mostly of volcanic tuff, emitted from past volcanic activity), erosion, migrating aquifers, and other natural geologic actions. A better storage option I believe a much better solution for long-term storage of high-level radioactive waste is to bury it deep under the seabed in a region free of seismic activity where sediment is being deposited and the seafloor getting thicker. In such a site, the level of protection would increase, rather than decrease, over time. In some areas of seabed, more than a centimeter of sediment is being deposited annually. Compacted over time, such sediment deposition could be several feet in a hundred years, and in the geologic time span over which radioactive waste is hazardous, hundreds to thousands of feet of protective sedimentary rock would be formed. The oil and gas industry — for better or worse — knows a lot about drilling deep holes beneath a mile or two of ocean. I suspect that the deep-sea drilling industry would love such a growth opportunity to move into seabed waste storage, and I believe the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or other agencies could do a good job regulating such work. The waste could be placed in wells extending thousands of feet below the seabed in sedimentary rock in geologically stable regions. Let's say a 3,000-foot well is drilled beneath the seabed two miles beneath the surface of the ocean. Waste could be inserted into that well to a depth of 1,000 feet, and the rest of the well capped with 2,000 feet of concrete or some other material. Hundreds of these deep-storage wells could be filled and capped, and such a sub-seabed storage field could be designated as forever off-limits. Industry or the Department of Energy would have to figure out how to package such waste for safe handling at sea, since the material is so dangerous, but I believe that is a surmountable challenge. For example, perhaps the radioactive waste could be vitrified (incorporated into molten glass-like material) to reduce leaching potential into seawater should an accident occur at sea, and that waste could be tagged with radio-frequency emitters so that any lost containers could be recovered with robotic submarines in the event of such accidents. While I’m not an expert in any of this, I’ve looked at how much money taxpayers and industry have already poured into Yucca Mountain — about $15 billion by the time the Obama Administration terminated federal funding for it in 2010, according to Bloomberg News — and the estimates for how much more it would take to get a working waste storage facility of that sort operational had risen to about $96 billion by 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Energy at the time. I believe that sub-seabed storage would be far less expensive.
This solves waste - SSD is able to isolate any radioactive nuclear waste from ALL humans and animals.
Bala ‘14: Amal Bala, Sub-Seabed Burial of Nuclear Waste: If the Disposal Method Could Succeed Technically, Could It Also Succeed Legally? 41 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 455 (2014)
In general, two related methods of underwater disposal of SNF exist: dumping containers of radioactive waste into the ocean, and sub-seabed disposal. 92 The purpose of underwater disposal of SNF is the same as any other type of SNF disposal, which is to isolate radioactive waste from human contact and the environment long enough for any release of radiation to become harmless.93 The potential advantages of certain types of underwater SNF disposal for the United States could include effective containment of the waste and avoiding the controversy of a land-based national repository, such as the failed project at Yucca Mountain. 94 Underwater disposal of SNF, specifically subseabed disposal, could occur far from the coast of any state or nation and could thereby avoid the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) syndrome, but this result is not guaranteed considering existing laws and a popular belief that Earth’s oceans are a global commons
This CP can’t be permed because the text explicitly states the continuation of nuclear power. The rest of the negative arguments go for nuclear power continuation, thus this CP just serves as a mechanism to solve nuclear waste during further nuclear production.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Counter-Plan: Countries ought to invest in high-level nuclear waste disposal space programs while continuing the production of nuclear power.
Coopersmith ‘99: Jonathan Coopersmith writes in “Disposal of High Level Nuclear Waste in Space,” Texas AandM University, College Station, Texas, SSI (Space Studies Institute), http://www.nss.org/settlement/manufacturing/SM12.111.DisposalOfHighLevelNuclearWasteInSpace.pdf
In the spirit of Jonathan Swift, let me offer a modest proposal: Let's put high-level radioactive waste where it belongs - out in space where it cannot endanger anyone on earth. The idea is not new -- NASA's Lewis Research Center concluded it was technically feasible in 1974 and the Space Systems Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics endorsed it in 1981, to name only two of many studies, but space disposal has never received strong institutional support from government or the private sector.6 Space disposal has two major benefits. First, it will permanently remove the burden and responsibility of high-level radioactive waste from future generations. Second, the infrastructure needed to dispose of radioactive waste safely will greatly reduce the cost of exploiting space. The tonnage currently launched into space is not that great. In 1998, rockets launched less than 200 tons of payloads into earth orbit and beyond (excluding the weight of the space shuttle). 7 The attraction for the aerospace community of waste disposal is the guarantee of large payloads for decades to come. What could engineers develop if asked to launch 10,000 tons annually? Space disposal will create the first market for launch systems that could truly provide the inexpensive access to space promised for decades. Disposal in space consists of three steps: - preparing and transporting the waste to the launch site - launching into low earth orbit - launching to a final destination. All three steps have been studied extensively over the last quarter century. I will focus on the last two steps, each of which offers a wide range of technological options. The 112 important criteria are safety, and technological and economic feasibility. The most visible technological choice is the launch system - or systems -- to provide a quantum increase in access to space. The two basic choices are conventional rockets carrying large cargoes or ground-based systems launching smaller vehicles. Most studies in the 1970s-80s assumed the use of the space shuttle, possible derivatives, other rockets like Ariane, and even surplus ICBMs.8 The next generation of rockets, such as the EEL V and even the proposed reusable launch vehicles (like the Kistler K-1) will reduce the cost of access by an order of magnitude at most and probably less. While these are major improvements on existing rockets, only more radical approaches may reduce costs by the one or two more orders of magnitude necessary to truly change the economic perceptions of space.
The target disposal site and mechanisms to conduct the launch of nuclear waste into space are effective and opens up doors to other space development
Coopersmith ‘99: Jonathan Coopersmith writes in “Disposal of High Level Nuclear Waste in Space,” Texas AandM University, College Station, Texas, SSI (Space Studies Institute), http://www.nss.org/settlement/manufacturing/SM12.111.DisposalOfHighLevelNuclearWasteInSpace.pdf
The key determinant in the final destination of the radioactive waste is the energy needed to transport it there. With the exception of proposals to expel charged particles of waste out of the solar system, all studies assume the physical movement of shielded capsules.l2 Some options, such as sending the capsules out of the solar system or into the sun, are very energy intensive, measured in terms of the velocity needed. Soft or hard landings on the moon are another possibility, as are very high earth orbits and the Earth-moon libration points.l3 Possibly more appealing would be a solar orbit inside Venus.l4 This is because future generations might find our radioactive wastes valuable, just as old mine tailings are now a useful source of precious metals. If so, placing the waste in a retrievable location far out of possible human and harm's way, such as a solar orbit, would be wise. Because time is not critical, propulsion systems with low speed - and low cost - will have the advantage over chemical rockets. Again, space disposal will offer opportunities for promising technologies like low-weight solar sails, electric rockets, mass drivers fueled by lunar material, or laser- or microwave-propelled systems. IS Less likely is a nuclear-powered system.l6 A space tug might collect a number of capsules, bind them together, attach the propulsion system, and launch the new spacecraft gently into an orbit around the Sun.
Aff cannot perm, the CP continues nuclear power production, instead of prohibiting it. The aff must defend prohibiting the production of nuclear energy, not its waste.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
US attack submarines are exclusively powered by nuclear energy – key to checking Russian expansion.
Schmitt ‘16: Eric Schmitt writes in “Russia Bolsters Its Submarine Fleet and Tensions With U.S. Rise” on April 20th, 2016. Eric P. Schmitt (born 1959) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist who writes for the New York Times. 1234567He has twice shared a Pulitzer Prize, 1 in 2009 with some of his New York Times colleagues for international reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/world/europe/russia-bolsters-submarine-fleet-and-tensions-with-us-rise.html?_r=2; AB
NAPLES, Italy — Russian attack submarines, the most in two decades, are prowling the coastlines of Scandinavia and Scotland, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic in what Western military officials say is a significantly increased presence aimed at contesting American and NATO undersea dominance. Adm. Mark Ferguson, the United States Navy’s top commander in Europe, said last fall that the intensity of Russian submarine patrols had risen by almost 50 percent over the past year, citing public remarks by the Russian Navy chief, Adm. Viktor Chirkov. Analysts say that tempo has not changed since then. The patrols are the most visible sign of a renewed interest in submarine warfare by President Vladimir V. Putin, whose government has spent billions of dollars for new classes of diesel and nuclear-powered attack submarines that are quieter, better armed and operated by more proficient crews than in the past. The tensions are part of an expanding rivalry and military buildup, with echoes of the Cold War, between the United States and Russia. Moscow is projecting force not only in the North Atlantic but also in Syria and Ukraine and building up its nuclear arsenal and cyberwarfare capacities in what American military officials say is an attempt to prove its relevance after years of economic decline and retrenchment. Independent American military analysts see the increased Russian submarine patrols as a legitimate challenge to the United States and NATO. Even short of tensions, there is the possibility of accidents and miscalculations. But whatever the threat, the Pentagon is also using the stepped-up Russian patrols as another argument for bigger budgets for submarines and anti-submarine warfare. American naval officials say that in the short term, the growing number of Russian submarines, with their ability to shadow Western vessels and European coastlines, will require more ships, planes and subs to monitor them. In the long term, the Defense Department has proposed $8.1 billion over the next five years for “undersea capabilities,” including nine new Virginia-class attack submarines that can carry up to 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles, more than triple the capacity now. “We’re back to the great powers competition,” Adm. John M. Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said in an interview. Last week, unarmed Russian warplanes repeatedly buzzed a Navy destroyer in the Baltic Sea and at one point came within 30 feet of the warship, American officials said. Last year some of Russia’s new diesel submarines launched four cruise missiles at targets in Syria. Mr. Putin’s military modernization program also includes new intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as aircraft, tanks and air defense systems. To be sure, there is hardly parity between the Russian and American submarine fleets. Russia has about 45 attack submarines — about two dozen are nuclear-powered and 20 are diesel — which are designed to sink other submarines or ships, collect intelligence and conduct patrols. But Western naval analysts say that only about half of those are able to deploy at any given time. Most stay closer to home and maintain an operational tempo far below a Cold War peak. The United States has 53 attack submarines, all nuclear-powered, as well as four other nuclear-powered submarines that carry cruise missiles and Special Operations forces. At any given time, roughly a third of America’s attack submarines are at sea, either on patrols or training, with the others undergoing maintenance. American Navy officials and Western analysts say that American attack submarines, which are made for speed, endurance and stealth to deploy far from American shores, remain superior to their Russian counterparts. The Pentagon is also developing sophisticated technology to monitor encrypted communications from Russian submarines and new kinds of remotely controlled or autonomous vessels.
US presence in the Pacific essential – nuclear submarines key.
Warden et al ‘13: Executive Director of the Working Group on U.S.-China Nuclear Dynamics @ CSIS (John K. Warden, Elbridge A. Colby, Abraham M. Denmark, “Nuclear Weapons and U.S. China Relations:  A Way Forward”, Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2013, Accessed 6-25-16, https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/publication/130307_Colby_USChinaNuclear_Web.pdf); AB
The Working Group believes the United States should strive to maintain, and in important respects strengthen, its extended deterrent structure in the Pacific. In particular, the Group commends the recent “rebalancing” effort toward the Asia-Pacific region, including its political, military, and economic aspects. Efforts such as the Extended Deterrence Dialogue and Extended Deterrence Policy Committee are commendable first steps that should be sustained and built upon. Especially important, however, will be the translation of admirable rhetoric about a restoration of U.S. attention to the Asia-Pacific region and promising first steps in the evolution of the U.S. regional force structure into sustained and concrete investments of resources, time, and energy. In the military realm, this means making significant investments in the kinds of capabilities that can maintain U.S. military advantages in the region, particularly conventional capabilities designed to counter anti-access/area-denial (A2/ AD) operations. ¶ Specifically, the United States should maintain an effective nuclear deterrent that can provide credible extended nuclear deterrence in the Western Pacific. Although the Working Group does not agree on every aspect of the appropriate U.S. nuclear or conventional modernization program, areas of agreement include the procurement of a fleet of next-generation strategic ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), a new heavy bomber capable of carrying nuclear ordnance, and a new nuclear cruise missile. In addition, there is support within the Working Group for updating the B-61 nuclear gravity bomb, although some members believe the program should be contingent on U.S. allies making very substantial financial contributions. With this proviso, the Group supports the maintenance of a globally deployable posture of nonstrategic weapons and dual-capable aircraft . On the conventional side, the United States should invest in particularly valuable individual programs and capabilities such as the Virginia-class submarine (including the use of its payload module for prompt or time-urgent regional strike missions), effective and cost-efficient tactical missile defenses, a penetrating bomber, and other such capabilities.
Strong navy de-escalates all conflict and deters great power war
Roughead ‘7: Admiral, US Navy, Chief of Naval Operations Gary, James Conway, General, US Marine Corps, and Thad Allen, Admiral, US Coast Guard, "A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower," Oct 2007, www.navy.mil/maritime/Maritimestrategy.pdf
This strategy reaffirms the use of seapower to influence actions and activities at sea and ashore. The expeditionary character and versatility of maritime forces provide the U.S. the asymmetric advantage of enlarging or contracting its military footprint in areas where access is denied or limited. Permanent or prolonged basing of our military forces overseas often has unintended economic, social or political repercussions. The sea is a vast maneuver space, where the presence of maritime forces can be adjusted as conditions dictate to enable flexible approaches to escalation, de-escalation and deterrence of conflicts. The speed, flexibility, agility and scalability of maritime forces provide joint or combined force commanders a range of options for responding to crises. Additionally, integrated maritime operations, either within formal alliance structures (such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or more informal arrangements (such as the Global Maritime Partnership initiative), send powerful messages to would-be aggressors that we will act with others to ensure collective security and prosperity. United States seapower will be globally postured to secure our homeland and citizens from direct attack and to advance our interests around the world. As our security and prosperity are inextricably linked with those of others, U.S. maritime forces will be deployed to protect and sustain the peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance. We will employ the global reach, persistent presence, and operational flexibility inherent in U.S. seapower to accomplish six key tasks, or strategic imperatives. Where tensions are high or where we wish to demonstrate to our friends and allies our commitment to security and stability, U.S. maritime forces will be characterized by regionally concentrated, forward-deployed task forces with the combat power to limit regional conflict, deter major power war, and should deterrence fail, win our Nation’s wars as part of a joint or combined campaign. In addition, persistent, mission-tailored maritime forces will be globally distributed in order to contribute to homeland defense-in-depth, foster and sustain cooperative relationships with an expanding set of international partners, and prevent or mitigate disruptions and crises. Credible combat power will be continuously postured in the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean to protect our vital interests, assure our friends and allies of our continuing commitment to regional security, and deter and dissuade potential adversaries and peer competitors. This combat power can be selectively and rapidly repositioned to meet contingencies that may arise elsewhere. These forces will be sized and postured to fulfill the following strategic imperatives: Limit regional conflict with forward deployed, decisive maritime power. Today regional conflict has ramifications far beyond the area of conflict. Humanitarian crises, violence spreading across borders, pandemics, and the interruption of vital resources are all possible when regional crises erupt. While this strategy advocates a wide dispersal of networked maritime forces, we cannot be everywhere, and we cannot act to mitigate all regional conflict. Where conflict threatens the global system and our national interests, maritime forces will be ready to respond alongside other elements of national and multi-national power, to give political leaders a range of options for deterrence, escalation and de-escalation. Maritime forces that are persistently present and combat-ready provide the Nation’s primary forcible entry option in an era of declining access, even as they provide the means for this Nation to respond quickly to other crises. Whether over the horizon or powerfully arrayed in plain sight, maritime forces can deter the ambitions of regional aggressors, assure friends and allies, gain and maintain access, and protect our citizens while working to sustain the global order. Critical to this notion is the maintenance of a powerful fleet—ships, aircraft, Marine forces, and shore-based fleet activities—capable of selectively controlling the seas, projecting power ashore, and protecting friendly forces and civilian populations from attack. Deter major power war. No other disruption is as potentially disastrous to global stability as war among major powers. Maintenance and extension of this Nation’s comparative seapower advantage is a key component of deterring major power war. While war with another great power strikes many as improbable, the near-certainty of its ruinous effects demands that it be actively deterred using all elements of national power. The expeditionary character of maritime forces—our lethality, global reach, speed, endurance, ability to overcome barriers to access, and operational agility—provide the joint commander with a range of deterrent options. We will pursue an approach to deterrence that includes a credible and scalable ability to retaliate against aggressors conventionally, unconventionally, and with nuclear forces.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Text: Countries ought to increases the production of Thorium nuclear power plants. Warmflash is the solvency advocate.
Net Benefits

1. Nuclear energy saves 300 times more lives than coal or fossil fuels, even when considering accidents – turns case - Schrope 13
   Schrope 13 Schrope, Mark. "Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes." CEN RSS. Chemical and Engineering News, 2 Apr. 2013. Web. 09 Aug. 2016. http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/web/2013/04/Nuclear-Power-Prevents-Deaths-Causes.html.
   Web Date: April 2, 2013 Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes Climate Change: Study estimates that nuclear energy leads to substantially fewer pollution-related deaths and greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil-fuel sources By Mark Schrope +Enlarge 20130402lnj1-crystalriver Nuclear Future The Crystal River nuclear power plant in Florida is scheduled for decommissioning, and there are no plans to replace it. Credit: Mark Schrope Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es3051197). In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, critics of nuclear power have questioned how heavily the world should rely on the energy source, due to possible risks it poses to the environment and human health. “I was very disturbed by all the negative and in many cases unfounded hysteria regarding nuclear power after the Fukushima accident,” says report coauthor Pushker A. Kharecha, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York. Working with Goddard’s James E. Hansen, Kharecha set out to explore the benefits of nuclear power. The pair specifically wanted to look at nuclear power’s advantages over fossil fuels in terms of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Kharecha was surprised to find no broad studies on preventable deaths that could be attributed to nuclear power’s pollution savings. But he did find data from a 2007 study on the average number of deaths per unit of energy generated with fossil fuels and nuclear power (Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7). These estimates include deaths related to all aspects of each energy source from mining the necessary natural resources to power generation. For example, the data took into account chronic bronchitis among coal miners and air pollution-related conditions among the public, including lung cancer. The NASA researchers combined this information with historical energy generation data to estimate how many deaths would have been caused if fossil-fuel burning was used instead of nuclear power generation from 1971 to 2009. They similarly estimated that the use of nuclear power over that time caused 5,000 or so deaths, such as cancer deaths from radiation fallout and worker accidents. Comparing those two estimates, Kharecha and Hansen came up with the 1.8 million figure. They next estimated the total number of deaths that could be prevented through nuclear power over the next four decades using available estimates of future nuclear use. Replacing all forecasted nuclear power use until 2050 with natural gas would cause an additional 420,000 deaths, whereas swapping it with coal, which produces significantly more pollution than gas, would mean about 7 million additional deaths. The study focused strictly on deaths, not long-term health issues that might shorten lives, and the authors did not attempt to estimate potential deaths tied to climate change. Finally the pair compared carbon emissions from nuclear power to fossil fuel sources. They calculated that if coal or natural gas power had replaced nuclear energy from 1971 to 2009, the equivalent of an additional 64 gigatons of carbon would have reached the atmosphere. Looking forward, switching out nuclear for coal or natural gas power would lead to the release of 80 to 240 gigatons of additional carbon by 2050.
   3. Thorium power production is particularly clean – recycles itself, less waste, less accidents, and more energy more easily. - Warmflash 15
   Warmflash 15 Warmflash, David. "Thorium Power Is the Safer Future of Nuclear Energy." The Crux. Discover Magazine, 16 Jan. 2015. Web. 12 Aug. 2016. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/01/16/thorium-future-nuclear-energy/#.V633yvkrLIU.
   Nuclear power has long been a contentious topic. It generates huge amounts of electricity with zero carbon emissions, and thus is held up as a solution to global energy woes. But it also entails several risks, including weapons development, meltdown, and the hazards of disposing of its waste products. But those risks and benefits all pertain to a very specific kind of nuclear energy: nuclear fission of uranium or plutonium isotopes. There’s another kind of nuclear energy that’s been waiting in the wings for decades – and it may just demand a recalibration of our thoughts on nuclear power. Nuclear fission using thorium is easily within our reach, and, compared with conventional nuclear energy, the risks are considerably lower. Thorium’s Story Ideas for using thorium have been around since the 1960s, and by 1973 there were proposals for serious, concerted research in the US. But that program fizzled to a halt only a few years later. Why? The answer is nuclear weapons. The 1960s and ’70s were the height of the Cold War and weaponization was the driving force for all nuclear research. Any nuclear research that did not support the US nuclear arsenal was simply not given priority. Conventional nuclear power using a fuel cycle involving uranium-235 and/or plutonium-239 was seen as killing two birds with one stone: reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil, and creating the fuel needed for nuclear bombs. Thorium power, on the other hand, didn’t have military potential. And by decreasing the need for conventional nuclear power, a potentially successful thorium program would have actually been seen as threatening to U.S. interests in the Cold War environment. Today, however, the situation is very different. Rather than wanting to make weapons, many global leaders are worried about proliferating nuclear technology. And that has led several nations to take a closer look at thorium power generation. How Thorium Reactors Work The isotope of thorium that’s being studied for power is called Th-232. Like uranium, Th-232 comes from rocks in the ground. A thorium reactor would work like this: Th-232 is placed in a reactor, where it is bombarded with a beam of neutrons. In accepting a neutron from the beam, Th-232 becomes Th-233, but this heavier isotope doesn’t last very long. The Th-233 decays to protactinium-233, which further decays into U-233. The U-233 remains in the reactor and, similar to current nuclear power plants, the fission of the uranium generates intense heat that can be converted to electricity. To keep the process going, the U-233 must be created continuously by keeping the neutron-generating accelerator turned on. By contrast the neutrons that trigger U-235 fission in a conventional reactor are generated from the fuel itself. The process continues in a chain reaction and can be controlled or stopped only by inserting rods of neutron-absorbing material into the reactor core. But these control rods aren’t foolproof: their operation can be affected during a reactor malfunction. This is the reason that a conventional fission reactor has the potential to start heating out of control and cause an accident. A thorium fuel cycle, by contrast, can be immediately shut down by turning off the supply of neutrons. Shutting down the fuel cycle means preventing the breeding of Th-232 into U-233. This doesn’t stop the heating in the reactor immediately, but it stops it from getting worse. The increased safety of thorium power does not end there. Unlike the U-235 and plutonium fuel cycles, the thorium reactors can be designed to operate in a liquid state. While a conventional reactor heading to meltdown has no way to jettison the fuel to stop the fission reactions, a thorium reactor design called LFTR features a plug at the bottom of the reactor that will melt if the temperature of the reacting fuel climbs too high. If that happens the hot liquid would all drain out and the reaction would stop. Powered Up Thorium power has other attractions, too. Its production of nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than conventional nuclear power, though experts disagree about exactly how much: Chinese researchers claim it’s three orders of magnitude (a thousandth the amount of waste or less), while U.S. researchers say a hundredth the amount of waste. Thorium would be easier to obtain than uranium. While uranium mines are enclosed underground and thus very dangerous for the miners, thorium is taken from open pits, and is estimated to be roughly three times as abundant as uranium in the Earth’s crust. But perhaps the most salient benefit of thorium power, in our geopolitically dicey world, is that the fuel is much harder to turn into a bomb. Thorium itself isn’t fissile. The thorium fuel cycle does produce fissile material, U-233, which theoretically could be used in a bomb. But thorium would not be a very practical route to making a weapon, especially with LFTR technology. Not only would the proliferator have to steal the fissile U-233 as hot liquid from inside the reactor; they’d also be exposed to an extremely dangerous isotope, U-232, unless they had a robot to carry out the task. Future Fuel China has announced that its researchers will produce a fully functional thorium reactor within the next 10 years. India, with one of the largest thorium reserves on the planet but not much uranium, is also charging ahead. Indian researchers are planning to have a prototype thorium reactor operational early next year, though the reactor’s output will be only about a quarter of the output of a typical new nuclear plant in the west. Norway is currently in the midst of a four-year test of using thorium fuel rods in existing nuclear reactors. Other nations with active thorium research programs include the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan, and Israel.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Nuclear is key to stability of warming and aff prevents this from happening
Waldman ‘15: - Susanne, PhD in Risk Communication at Carleton University (“Why we Need Nuclear Power to Save the Environment” http://energyforhumanity.org/climate-energy/need-nuclear-power-save-environment/)  
The idea we might need nuclear power to save the environment may have seen farfetched thirty years ago, at the height of the anti-nuclear movement. But it’s an idea that more and more scientists of all stripes as well as energy experts and even environmentalists are coming to share. Last month, 75 biodiversity scientists signed an open letter imploring the environmental and conservation communities to rethink “idealistic” opposition to nuclear energy, given the threats to global ecosystems set in motion by climate change. This open letter follows in the wake of another published a year ago in the New York Times by climate scientists with a similar message: “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.” These scientists who study the earth and the life on it are concerned it is too risky to rely solely on wind, solar and other so-called “green” power to replace fossil fuels, which are still the fastest growing energy sources by a long shot. As these scientists point out, renewable power sources would require enormous amounts of land, materials, and money to meet the world’s current and growing energy needs. Wind and solar power are especially problematic because they are intermittent and can’t be dispatched to match demand. While the quest is on for grid storage options, there has not yet been a significant storage breakthrough, and any contribution it ends up making may only be modest. In the meantime other power sources that can run full time are required to take up the slack. Options for doing so are limited to fossil fuels, biomass that is comparatively bulky and limited in scale, hydro power that is largely tapped out in some places, and nuclear power. The advantage of nuclear power is there is no shortage of suitable sites and it is the most low-footprint form of power generation, taking into account land use, materials, carbon footprint, and fuel density. History has shown the most effective way to replace fossil fuel power over a 15-year-period is to build up nuclear. Ontarians, who rely on nuclear plants to deliver roughly three-fifths of our power every day, and have become coal-free, know this. So do people in France, where nuclear energy supplies around three quarters of power needs. The problem is that as a complex form of technology, nuclear plants are relatively pricey to build. Few have been constructed of late in the Western world, during an era of cheap coal and gas, liberalized energy markets, cash-strapped governments, and hyped-up renewables. Experienced work forces who can put them up quickly have become hard to assemble on the fly. These patterns can alter, though, as people come to recognize that once nuclear plants are up they can churn out steady carbon-free power for over half a century. Moreover the power they provide is typically quite cheap and not sensitive to fuel price volatility.
Nuclear power counter-acts greenhouse emissions
Biello ‘13: David, writes for the scientific American, Internally Cites James Hansen, Professor at Columbia University (“How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nuclear-power-can-stop-global-warming/)
In addition to reducing the risk of nuclear war, U.S. reactors have also been staving off another global challenge: climate change. The low-carbon electricity produced by such reactors provides 20 percent of the nation's power and, by the estimates of climate scientist James Hansen of Columbia University, avoided 64 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution. They also avoided spewing soot and other air pollution like coal-fired power plants do and thus have saved some 1.8 million lives. And that's why Hansen, among others, such as former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, thinks that nuclear power is a key energy technology to fend off catastrophic climate change. "We can't burn all these fossil fuels," Hansen told a group of reporters on December 3, noting that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source they will continue to be burned. "Coal is almost half the global emissions. If you replace these power plants with modern, safe nuclear reactors you could do a lot of pollution reduction quickly." Indeed, he has evidence: the speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and ‘80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid "dangerous" climate change in the estimation of Hansen and his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One. "On a global scale, it's hard to see how we could conceivably accomplish this without nuclear," added economist and co-author Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where Hansen works
Prohibition is empirically verified to cause a shift back to fossil fuels.
Chameides ‘12, Bill (Dean of Nicholas School of the Environment 2007-2014, Professor Emeritus at Duke University). "The Nuclear Power Conundrum." Nicholas School of the Environment. Duke University, 5 July 2012. Web. http3A2F2Fblogs.nicholas.duke.edu2Fthegreengrok2Fnuke-conundrum2F
What to do when your favorite nuclear plant gets shut down? One the option would be to just do without. Another option, and the one that Japan and California have chosen, is to replace the lost nuclear power with another source. And what do you suppose the source of choice is? Fossil fuels of course. The shutdown of Japan’s nuclear power plants corresponded with a more than doubling in the consumption of fuel oil and crude oil (primarily for electrical generation) in January 2012 compared to January 2011. There was also a 27 percent increase in liquid natural gas usage, although coal usage went down by eight percent. This, despite the fact that overall energy usage in Japan dropped sharply since the disaster. Overall, Japan’s carbon dioxide emissions for 2011 increased by about 2.4 percent. The cost of all that extra fossil fuels has been huge. For the first time in decades Japan has experienced a trade deficit. The economic damage caused by the shutdown of Japan’s nuclear fleet is perhaps an explanation for why the prime minister has decided to take a baby step back toward nuclear power with the restarting of the Ohi plant. California’s experience with the loss of San Onofre is like a miniature version of Japan’s. Since the San Onofre shut down, two retired natural gas units at Huntington Beach have been called back into service. So what to do if you are uneasy about nuclear power and worried about climate change? Many experts opine that you would be foolish to think we could immediately do away with both — you’ve only got two options: choose nuclear or choose fossil fuels. As Per Peterson, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times: “We are really faced with a choice, at least in the next decade. Do we turn off nuclear plants first, or do we turn off coal plants first? You have to do one or the other.”
Fossil fuels increase CO2 emissions which are the strongest internal ink to warming.
NWF ‘15, National Wildlife Federation, 2015. “Global Warming is human caused”. National Wildlife Federation. https://www.nwf.org/Wildlife/Threats-to-Wildlife/Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Human-Caused.aspx. RW
Scientists have concluded that most of the observed warming is very likely due to the burning of coal, oil, and gas. This conclusion is based on a detailed understanding of the atmospheric greenhouse effect and how human activities have been tweaking it. At the same time, other reasonable explanations, most notably changes in the Sun, have been ruled out. The atmospheric greenhouse effect naturally keeps our planet warm enough to be livable. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere. Light-colored surfaces, such as clouds or ice caps, radiate some heat back into space. But most of the incoming heat warms the planet's surface. The Earth then radiates some heat back into the atmosphere. Some of that heat is trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide (CO2). Human activity--such as burning fossil fuels--causes more greenhouse gases to build up in the atmosphere. As the atmosphere "thickens" with more greenhouse gases, more heat is held in. Fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas are high in carbon and, when burned, produce major amounts of carbon dioxide or CO2. A single gallon of gasoline, when burned, puts 19 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The role of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in warming the Earth's surface was first demonstrated by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius more than 100 years ago. Scientific data have since established that, for hundreds of thousands of years, changes in temperature have closely tracked with atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Since the Industrial Revolution, the burning of coal, oil and natural gas has emitted roughly 500 billion tons of CO2, about half of which remains in the atmosphere. This CO2 is the biggest factor responsible for recent warming trends.
And, prohibiting nuclear leads to fossil fuels tradeoff, which is substantially worse.
Kharecha ’13: A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen. April 2013. “Fossil Fuels Do Far More Harm Than Nuclear Power”. Web. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2013/04/15/fossil-fuels-do-far-more-harm-than-nuclear-power/.
To compute potential future effects, we started with projected nuclear energy supply for 2010-2050 from an assessment by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency that takes into account the effects of the Fukushima accident. We assumed that all of this projected nuclear energy is canceled and replaced entirely by energy from either coal or natural gas. We calculated that this nuclear phaseout scenario would lead to an average of 420,000 to 7 million deaths and 80–240 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent net GHG emissions globally. This emissions range corresponds to 16-48 of the “allowable” cumulative CO2 emissions between 2012-2050 if the world chooses to aim for a target atmospheric CO2 concentration of 350 parts per million by around the end of this century. In other words, projected nuclear power could reduce the CO2 mitigation burden for meeting this target by as much as 16–48.
Thus, Warming causes multiple scenarios for extinction
Hansen ‘12: James Hansen, professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, “Game Over for the Climate,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegrateion of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk. That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels. If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground. The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change. We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.