Tournament: Lexington | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Sacred Heart AT | Judge: Devin Kasinki, Norberto Romero, Jason Zhou
Part one is the Symbolic Exchange

First is Appropriated Suffering: On March 26, 1993, Kevin Carter traveled to Sub-Saharan Africa to document, report and photograph the suffering caused by months of civil war and starvation. As part of his profession, he tried to capture the most horrific images of this atrocity so that people could understand the suffering of the African people. He came to a town, ravaged with hunger and violence, and found a young 4 year old girl collapsed from starvation. This was the picture he had been searching for. To make this picture even more profound, a vulture was pictured a few feet away.  Kleinman describes

(Arthur and Joan. “The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: Cultural appropriations of suffering in our times,” Daedalus. Winter 1996. Vol.125, Iss. 1;  pg. 1-24 pgs)

When the photograph first appeared, it accompanied a story of the famine that has once again resulted from political violence and the chaos of civil war in the southern Sudan.(7) The Times' selfcongratulatory account fails to adequately evoke the image's shocking effect. The child is hardly larger than an infant; she is naked; she appears bowed over in weakness and sickness, incapable, it would seem, of moving; she is unprotected. No mother, no family, no one is present to prevent her from being attacked by the vulture, or succumbing to starvation and then being eaten. The image suggests that she has been abandoned. Why? The reader again is led to imagine various scenarios of suffering: she has been lost in the chaos of forced uprooting; her family has died; she has been deserted near death in order for her mother to hold on to more viable children. The image's great success is that it causes the reader to want to know more. Why is this innocent victim of civil war and famine unprotected? The vulture embodies danger and evil, but the greater dangers and real forces of evil are not in the "natural world"; they are in the political world, including those nearby in army uniforms or in government offices in Khartoum. Famine has become a political strategy in the Sudan.(8) The photograph has been reprinted many times, and it has been duplicated in advertisements for a number of nongovernmental aid agencies that are raising funds to provide food to refugees. This is a classic instance of the use of moral sentiment to mobilize support for social action. One cannot look at this picture without wanting to do something to protect the child and drive the vulture away. Or, as one aid agency puts it, to prevent other children from succumbing in the same heartlessly inhuman way by giving a donation.

The story of Kevin Carter is not far from that of debate: We are always trying to find a way to frame our impacts with ethical theories in order to show why the resolution causes or solves for moral atrocities, it doesn’t matter if our evidence is describing events that took place a week, a month, even years ago.  Debate has become a symbolic exchange where we exchange images of suffering to get the ballot. Kleinman 2 Clarifies

(Arthur and Joan. “The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: Cultural appropriations of suffering in our times,” Daedalus. Winter 1996. Vol.125, Iss. 1;  pg. 1-24 pgs)

Those moral questions particular to Carter's relationship (or nonrelationship) to the dying child were only intensified when, on July 29, 1994, a few months after the Pulitzer Prize announcement, The New York Times ran an obituary for Kevin Carter, who had committed suicide at age thirty-three. That shocking notice of his death, written by Bill Keller, the Times' Johannesburg correspondent, as well as a longer article by Scott Mac Leod in Time magazine on September 12, reported Carter's clarifications about how he took the photograph and what followed9)...he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterwards he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. He was depressed afterward....He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter.(10) The Times' obituary ends with a section entitled "The Horror of the Work," in which Jimmy Carter, Kevin's father, observes that his son "Always carried around the horror of the work he did." Keller implies that it was the burden of this "horror" that may have driven Carter to suicide. The article by Scott Mac Leod in Time shows that Kevin Carter had lived a very troubled life, with drug abuse, a messy divorce, deep financial problems, brushes with the police, and was a manic-depressive. We also learn that he had spent much of his career photographing political repression and violence in South Africa, and that he had been deeply affected by the shooting of his best friend and coworker, Ken Oosterbrock, for whom, he told friends, he "should have taken the bullet."(

Why are we not helping the girl?  Why do we not do something?  These questions are not meant to condemn debate, or saying we shouldn’t participate in the activity, rather it is to say that debate can be something more than a contest for suffering. But why doesn’t it become more? This practice is perpetuated through the way debaters through arguments that have become the norm of debate.
Spurlock and Spanos 1

William V. Spanos 2011 Kdebate.com Interview,William V. Spanos is a highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and well known in the competitive world of high school and intercollegiate academic debate.. William V. Spanos: An Interested Debate Inquiry An interview with Christopher Spurlock, http://kdebate.com/spanos.html
The reason I asked you that question is because I've always thought that the debate system is a rigged process, by which I mean, in your terms, it's framed to exclude anything that the frame can't contain and domesticate. To frame also means to "prearrange" so that a particular outcome is assured," which also means the what's outside of the frame doesn't stand a chance: it is "framed" from the beginning. It was, above all, the great neo-Marxist Louis Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" - the perspective or frame of reference fundamental to knowledge production in democratic-capitalist societies -- that enabled me to see what the so called distinterestness of empirical inquiry is blind to or, more accurately willfully represses in its Panglossian pursuit of the truth. Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" is too complicated to be explained in a few words. (Anyone interested will find his extended explanation in his introduction --"From Capital* to Marx's Philosophy" -- to his and Etienne Balibar's book *Reading Capital*. It will suffice here to say that we in the modern West have been *inscribed* by our culture --"ideological state apparatuses (educational institutions, media, and so on)-- by a system of knowledge production that goes by the name of "disinterested inquiry," but in reality the "truth" at which it arrives is a construct, a fiction, and thus ideological. And this is precisely because, in distancing itself from earthly being --the transience of time --this system of knowledge production privileges the panoptic eye in the pursuit of knowledge. This is what Althusser means by the "problematic": a frame that allows the perceiver to see only what it wants to see. Everything that is outside the frame doesn't exist to the perceiver. He /she is blind to it. It's nothing or, at the site of humanity, it's nobody. Put alternatively, the problematic -- this frame, as the very word itself suggests, *spatializes* or *reifies* time -- reduces what is a living, problematic force and not a thing into a picture or thing so that it can be comprehended (taken hold of, managed), appropriated, administered, and exploited by the disinterested inquirer. All that I've just said should suggest what I meant when, long ago, in response to someone in the debate world who seemed puzzled by the strong reservations I expressed on being informed that the debate community in the U.S. was appropriating my work on Heidegger, higher education, and American imperialism. I said then -- and I repeat here to you -- that the traditional form of the debate, that is, the hegemonic frame that rigidly determines its protocols-- is unworldly in an ideological way. It willfully separates the debaters from the world as it actually is-- by which I mean as it has been produced by the dominant democratic I capitalist culture --and it displaces them to a free-floating zone, a no place, as it were, where all things, nor matter how different the authority they command in the real world, are equal. But in *this* real world produced by the combination of Protestant Christianity and democratic capitalism things -- and therefore their value --are never equal. They are framed into a system of binaries-Identity/ difference, Civilization/barbarism I Men/woman, Whites/blacks, Sedentary/ nomadic, Occidental/ oriental, Chosen I preterit (passed over), Self-reliance I dependent (communal), Democracy I communism, Protestant Christian I Muslim, and so on -- in which the first term is not only privileged over the second term, but, in thus being privileged, is also empowered to demonize the second. Insofar as the debate world frames argument as if every position has equal authority (the debater can take either side) it obscures and eventually effaces awareness of the degrading imbalance of power in the real world and the terrible injustices it perpetrates. Thus framed, debate gives the false impression that it is a truly democratic institution, whereas in reality it is complicitous with the dehumanized and dehumanizing system of power that produced it. It is no accident, in my mind, that this fraudulent form of debate goes back to the founding of the U.S. as a capitalist republic and that it has produced what I call the "political class" to indicate not only the basic sameness between the Democratic and Republican parties but also its fundamental indifference to the plight of those who don't count in a system where what counts is determined by those who are the heirs of this quantitative system of binaries. 

Second is the hyperreality: The problem doesn’t stop here. Debate has become an esoteric and even absurd forum that detracts from any useful dialogue in favor of technical showdowns that are hilariously vapid in any other context. Baldwin

Baldwin, Jason. “ Drinking from our own skulls: Rhetorical Inversion of Lincoln-Douglas Debate.” (2003)

Many readers will already have noticed some of the symptoms of perverted debate in LD:  First and most obviously, the quality of speaking has declined dramati-cally.  Many LD students now speak too quickly to be understood by normal educated listeners, and they speak in broken strings of ungrammatical pronouns, jargon, and generic debate phrases.  Little to none of the speech in a typical elimination round makes any clear claim about the truth of whatever resolution is being debated.  Some of the worst speakers and their fawning judges openly celebrate poor speaking as a mark of deep and nuanced thought, although I have never heard the connection between the two explained; my teachers, who have in-cluded at least a few (by my lights) deep and nuanced thinkers, have consistently criticized obscure or slovenly expression.A second symptom of LD’s decline is the increasingly suc-cessful appeal to topic-dodging arguments as the basis of deci-sions.  Winning has now become a matter of exploiting petty de-bate conventions or impugning the character of one’s opponent rather than offering straightforward reasons for or against the given resolution.  Some debaters spew out coach-written lists of trivial objections, hoping that one or another of them will be “dropped” by an opponent due to time limits.  Some debaters fabricate elabo-rate and abusive definitions and statements of burdens to distort the clear sense of a resolution to their own advantage.  Some de-baters quibble over their opponents’ diction for its lack of political or debate-culture correctness.  In many rounds, these extraneous considerations replace serious reasoning about the resolution be-ing debated; that is, a normal educated listener would say after hearing such a debate that neither speaker had offered good rea-sons to conclude that the resolution was true or false. To the extent that debaters do offer arguments about the resolution, they are often very poor arguments, little more than assertions claiming “bad impacts” to such hopelessly vague no-tions as “societal welfare,” “democratic legitimacy,” and “rights trivialization.” The prevalence and success of these sorts of argu-ments are a third symptom of LD’s woes.  Such phrases have be-come the unchallenged currency of LD, and their vacuity is dis-guised, in part, by the elaborate chains of asserted empirical causa-tion leading up to them.  That is, action-type A is asserted to cause effect B is asserted to cause effect C is asserted to cause effect D is asserted to cause a decrease in societal welfare.  By making these causal chains sufficiently long, convoluted, and numerous, speak-ers deflect the scrutiny that might properly attach to any given link in any given chain.  Speakers seem unaware that such arguments are often narrowly utilitarian, and they also seem unaware that there are powerful non-utilitarian arguments for this or that moral or political proposition, arguments which are often more intuitively plausible and less causally baroque than their utilitarian alterna-tives.  Speakers rarely support their ambitious empirical assertions with the detailed empirical evidence those assertions require.  Any evidence that is presented is reduced after its first hurried reading to the author’s last name (“extend the Bozo analysis”—some of the “best” LD judges now treat such empty commands as reasons for decision); its content and quality are rarely scrutinized.  Many students, coaches, and judges seem to believe that such argu-ments are just what LD is supposed to be about, and they debate, coach, and judge accordingly.A fourth symptom of LD’s deterioration is the increasing reliance, even by well-established teams, on mail-order evidence and arguments.  These briefs are generally of poor quality, but since many of the undergraduates who produce them were suc-cessful debaters, it is assumed that the briefs must contain material as good or better than what current LDers could generate for them-selves.  The result is the atrophy of research skills and the homog-enization of arguments made on a given resolution.  (Some people might also wonder if judging students who are using arguments one has sold them involves some conflict of interest, but several prominent LD judges apparently do just that.)  

What can we attribute these trends to? In attempts to lend meaning to their arguments, debaters are forced to conform to a pattern the judge can recognize. Cases always need a framework and shells need an interp, violation, standards and voters. Judges expect the debaters in front of them to conform to the familiar structural paradigm to which evaluate debates. Judges endlessly reproduce themselves as debaters and give the ballot to the debater who best replicates the structure of debate that they themselves used. The struggle is not how to solve an issue, but how to best conform to the structures of debate. We graciously accept new trends like AFC and presumption and it becomes obvious what has happened: we have entered the hyperreal.  Baudrillard 1

Jean Baudrillard, French alcoholic, Simulacrum and Simulation

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. In fact, even inverted, Borges's fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control - and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself - such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth is sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

Thus, our role of the ballot is to endorse the debater who better disrupts the current debate space. The role of the ballot is critical because it is the only way to escape the echo chamber of ideologies that the entire AC is critiquing. This is the worst harm because the simulation gets replicated in the real world. Spurlock and Spanos 2

William V. Spanos 2011 Kdebate.com Interview,William V. Spanos is a highly acclaimed author, World War II Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and well known in the competitive world of high school and intercollegiate academic debate.. William V. Spanos: An Interested Debate Inquiry An interview with Christopher Spurlock, http://kdebate.com/spanos.html

The danger of being a total insider is that the eye of such a person becomes blind to alternative possibilities. The extreme manifestation of this being at one with the system, of remaining inside the frame, as it were, is, as Hannah Arendt, decisively demonstrated long ago, Adolph Eichmann. That's why she and Said, among many poststructuralists, believed that to be an authentic intellectual --to see what disinterested inquiry can't see-- one has to be an exile (or a pariah) from a homeland-- one who is both apart of and apart from the dominant culture. Unlike Socrates, for example, Hippias, Socrates' interlocutor in the dialogue "Hippias Major" (he is, for Arendt, the model for Eichmann), is at one with himself. When he goes home at night "he remains one." He is, in other words, incapable of thinking. When Socrates, the exilic consciousness, goes home, on the other hand, he is not alone; he is "by himself." He is two-in-one. He has to face this other self. He has to think. Insofar as its logic is faithfully pursued, the framework of the debate system, to use your quite appropriate initial language, does, indeed, produce horrifically thoughtless Eichmanns, which is to say, a political class whose thinking, whether it's called Republican or Democratic, is thoughtless in that it is totally separated from and indifferent to the existential realities of the world it is representing. It's no accident, in my mind, that those who govern us in America --our alleged representatives, whether Republican, Neo-Con, or Democrat-- constitute such a "political class." This governing class has, in large part, their origins, in a preparatoary relay consisting of the high school and college debate circuit, political science departments, and the law profession. The moral of this story is that the debate world needs more outsiders -- or, rather, inside outsiders -- if its ultimate purpose is to prepare young people to change the world rather than to reproduce it.

And now, part two is the eruption: Our alternative is a symbolic act of terrorism against the debate space. We have suicide bombed an opportunity to run a topical aff in order to bring to light problems with the debate space that make a topical discussion meaningless. We completely collapse the underpinnings of how debate currently works as a method to create a rupture in the hyperreality of debate. Only grand scale changes and events like this can have a chance of breaking us from our echo chamber of the traditional debate arguments. Baudrillard 2

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 2001.

This is the spirit of terrorism. Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an equal or superior death. (Terrorism) challenges the system by a gift that the latter can reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse. The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density,  freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death. This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a few individuals. One must recognize the birth of a new terrorism, a new form of action that enters the game and appropriate its rules, the better to confuse it. Not only do these people not fight with equal arms, as they produce their own deaths, to which there is no possible response ("they are cowards"), but they appropriate all the arms of dominant power. Money and financial speculation, information technologies and aeronautics, the production of spectacle and media networks: they have assimilated all of modernity and globalization, while maintaining their aim to destroy it. Most cunningly, they have even used the banality of American everyday life as a mask and double game. Sleeping in their suburbs, reading and studying within families, before waking up suddenly like delayed explosive devices. The perfect mastery of this secretiveness is almost as terrorist as the spectacular action of the 11 September. For it makes one suspect: any inoffensive individual can be a potential terrorist! If those terrorists could pass unnoticed, then anyone of us is an unnoticed criminal (each plane is suspect too), and ultimately, it might even be true. This might well correspond to an unconscious form of potential criminality, masked, carefully repressed, but always liable, if not to surge, at least to secretly vibrate with the spectacle of Evil. Thus, the event spreads out in its minutiae, the source of an even more subtle psychological (mental) terrorism. The radical difference is that terrorists, while having at their disposal all the arms of the system, have also another fatal weapon: their own death. If they limited themselves to fighting the system with its own weapons, they would be immediately eliminated. If they did not oppose the system with their own death, they would disappear as  quickly as a useless sacrifice; this has almost always been the fate of terrorism until now (thus the Palestinian suicidal attacks) and the reason why it could not but fail. Everything changed as soon as they allied all available modern means to this highly symbolic weapon. The latter infinitely multiplies their destructive potential. It is the multiplication of these two factors (which seem to us so irreconcilable) that gives them such superiority. Conversely, the strategy of zero death, of a technological, 'clean' war, precisely misses this transfiguration of 'real' power by symbolic power. The prodigious success of such an attack poses a problem, and to understand it, one must tear oneself away from our Western perspective, to apprehend what happens in terrorists' minds and organization. Such efficacy, for us, would mean maximal calculation and rationality, something we have difficulties imagining in others. And even then, with us, there would always be, as in any rational organization or secret service, leaks and errors. Thus, the secret of such success is elsewhere. The difference, with them, is that there is no work contract, but a pact and an obligation of sacrifice. Such obligation is secure from defection and corruption. The miracle is the adaptation to a global network, to technical protocols without any loss of this complicity for life and to the death. Contrary to the contract, the pact does not link individuals -- even their 'suicide' is not individual heroism, it is a collective, sacrificial act, sealed by demanding ideals (I'm a bit free here but I feel it corresponds better to what is meant by 'exigence ideale'). And it is the conjunction of these two mechanisms, born of an operational structure and of a symbolic pact, which makes possible such an excessive action. We have no idea anymore of what is such a symbolic calculation, as in poker or potlatch, with minimal stakes and maximal result. That is, exactly what terrorists obtained in the attack on Manhattan, and which would be a good metaphor for chaos theory: an initial shock, provoking incalculable consequences, while American gigantic deployment ("Desert Storm") obtained only derisory effects -- the storm ending so to speak in the flutter of butterfly wings. Suicidal terrorism was the terrorism of the poor; this is the terrorism of the rich. And that is what specially frighten us: they have become rich (they have every means) without ceasing to want to eradicate us. Certainly, according to our value system, they cheat: staking (gambling?) one's own death is cheating. But they could not care less, and the new rules of the game are not ours.

The act of the affirmative is an unexplainable and chaotic act of symbolic destruction, any attempt to logically reduce our argument or label it inauthentic or unfair all begs the question that the current model of debate is good which is what the 1AC is criticizing. Baudrillard 3

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 2001.

We try everything to discredit their actions. Thus, we call them "suicidal" and "martyrs". To add immediately that such martyrdom does not prove anything, that it has nothing to do with truth and even (quoting Nietzsche) that it is the enemy of truth. Certainly, their death does not prove anything, but there is nothing to prove in a system where truth itself is elusive -- or are we pretending to own it? Besides, such a moral argument can be reversed. If the voluntary martyrdom of the kamikazes proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims cannot prove anything either, and there is something obscene in making it a moral argument (the above is not to negate their suffering and their death). Another bad faith argument: these terrorists exchange their death for a place in Paradise. Their act is not gratuitous, thus it is not authentic. It would be gratuitous only if they did not believe in God, if their death was without hope, as is ours (yet Christian martyrs assumed just such sublime exchange). Thus, again, they do not fight with equal weapons if they have the right to a salvation we can no longer hope for. We have to lose everything by our death while they can pledge it for the highest stakes. Ultimately, all that -- causes, proofs, truth, rewards, means and ends -- belongs to typically Western calculation. We even put a value to death in terms of interest rates, and quality/price ratio. Such economic calculations are the calculation of those poor who no longer have even the courage to pay (the price of death?). What can happen, apart from war, which is no more than a conventional protection screen? We talk of bio-terrorism, bacteriological war or nuclear terrorism. But none of that belongs to the domain of symbolic challenge, rather it belongs to an annihilation without speech, without glory, without risk -- that is, to the domain of the final solution. And to see in terrorist action a purely destructive logic is nonsense. It seems to me that their own death is inseparable from their action ( it is precisely what makes it a symbolic action), and not at all the impersonal elimination of the Other. Everything resides in the challenge and the duel, that is still in a personal, dual relation with the adversary. It is the power of the adversary that has humbled you, it is this power which must be humbled. And not simply exterminated... One must make (the adversary) lose face. And this cannot be obtained by pure force and by the suppression of the other. 

Problems with any type of methodology are inevitable, absent a counter methodology you should default to the affirmatives. Bryant
Levi Bryant November 11, 2012, Underpants Gnomes: A Critique of the Academic Left, larvalsubjects, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/
But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie.  Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2.  We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail.  How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals?  We live on a planet of 6 billion people.  These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption.  That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals?  How will you meet these problems?  How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure?  Marx and Lenin had proposals.  Do you?  Have you even explored the cartography of the problem?  Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization.  Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles?  Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement).   At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically.  Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists.  We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell.  Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound.  How would he provide for the energy needs of that school?  How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way?  How would she provide food for the students?  What would be her plan for waste disposal?  And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students?  What is your plan?  What is your alternative?  I think there are alternatives.  I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam.  If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start.  Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans?  But we haven’t even gotten to that point.  Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives.  Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation.  We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems.  We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe.  We best every opponent with critique.  We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique.  But do we really do anything with critique?  What we need today, more than ever, iscomposition or carpentry.  Everyone knows something is wrong.  Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them.  Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory.  None of us, however, are proposing alternatives.  Instead we prefer to shout and denounce.  Good luck with that.

The ballot plays an expressive role in endorsing and rejecting ideologies represented in debate because if debaters are forced to defend the representations of their positions than they will be more inclined to choose one that is not flawed. Racist language proves. Snider 

Alfred C. Snider, Edwin Lawrence Assistant Professor of Forensics - University of Vermont, ‘04(http://debate.uvm.edu/ReplyFrank.doc, date from Archive.org, article also cites 2002 articles)

The challenges to the game of debate mentioned in my essay also directly address this. The critical move in debate, where debaters step outside of the traditional “box” to analyze the ethical issues of argumentative perspectives and to analyze the language employed in a debate belies this concern. Almost all American debaters know that making a racist or sexist comment in a debate is one of the easiest ways to lose a ballot, as the opposing team is likely to make that the only issue in the debate, and the judge will make an example of you. There is no time in debate history when falsification and fabrication of evidence has been better monitored or when the behavior of debaters as regards evidence has been better. This may be more due to the ability to check the evidence used by others, but it still is the case. This sort of ethical dimension of argument and presentation has been made an issue in the decision. Winning at all costs could cost you the win.

This means voting aff is an endorsement of our symbolic act of terrorism, arguments concerning solvency or being genuine are irrelevant unless tied to our explicit advocacy in this round.

The topic is dead. Debate is dead.  The round is dead.   I affirm.

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 5 | Opponent: Sacred Heart AT | Judge: Chris Castillo
developed countries screw over developing countries 

Nath, Vikas. "White Collar Invasion: developed country policies leading to environmental degradation in South." (2001).

Over-consumption ...are truly global. 

developing countries” to embrace the Latin American social movement of “Buen Vivir.”'

Giovannini, Michela, Social Enterprises for Buen Vivir in Chiapas: An Alternative to Development, June 28, 2013,http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BE6B5 /search/D23EF0647F3BCD28C1257B980034954C?OpenDocument

Unsatisfied by ... rhetoric and praxis. 

contention cards subject to change 

The role of the ballot is to endorse the debater who proposes the most effective method for “developing countries” to resist imperialism in the context of the resolution.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lexington JK | Judge: Tom Evnen
morality requires that rational actors be assigned absolute worth. Kant 1 

Now I say: ... of reason whatever.

Hypothetical imperatives cannot guide action. Kant 2 

In practical philosophy, ... a categorical imperative.

The state has an obligation to prevent violations of individual worth and preserve the ability for individuals to pursue their rational ends without coercion. Rauscher  

“There is only ... hindrance to actions. 

First, environmental protection is a material prerequisite to a system of equal freedom. Ataner  

Brackets in original. My second line ... a matter of Virtue). 

Second, currently, in developing countries, corporations own most of the land that is being used for resource extraction. This coerces the individual freedom. Parenti 

North American and ... to an end. 

The state also can’t violate individual autonomy in the interest of a greater good. Nozick 

Side constraints express ... its citizens.  

In developing countries, mining-induced displacement occurs frequently. It iscaused by resource extraction. Terminski 1 

Asia and Pacific: ... the whole region”.

Displacement coerces the individual in multiple ways. Displacement commits multiple human rights violations. Terminski 2 

The domain of ... socio-economic development.

Imposing environmental constraints on corporations solves. Developed Countries prove. Terminski 3 

Recently, an expansion of mining can be observed in an increasing number of countries. This fact is exemplified in both the... India and China.

Kant, Immanuel; “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals;” (1792); Famous philosopher, Print.
  Kant, Immanuel, “Critique of Practical Reason” {BOOK_1|CHAPTER_1 ^paragraph 10}
  Rauscher, Fredrick; “Kant’s Social and Political Philosophy;” (Thursday, April 19th, 2012); Stanford University; The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-social-political/#FreBasSta
Ataner. Attila; “Kant on Freedom, Property Rights and Environmental Protection;” (October 2012); McMaster University, School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8612andcontext=opendissertations
  Parenti, Michael; “Against Empire;” (1995); Imperialism 101, City Light Books, Print; online: http://www.michaelparenti.org/Imperialism101.html
  Robert Nozick, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” 1974
  Terminski, Bogumil; “Applying the Concept of Human Security to Research on the Consequences of Mining-Induced Displacement and Resettlement;” (March 13th, 2012); University of Warsaw, Mining Displacement: PDF

Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Barrington ER | Judge: Noah Star
I value morality. The actor is the USFG because the resolution is a question of the prioritization of a branch of federal government’s policies which only a government can enact. Governments are obligated to maximize wellbeing because they must aggregate general potential consequences because they don’t have epistemic access to specifics. Goodin
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about public officials and their situations that make it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, they are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allows public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.
And, A priori moral reasoning is in accessible thus all moral theories collapse into an evaluation of end states. Harris,

Harris, Sam, “Hos Science can Determine Human Values”, New York Times Bestselling author, 

I believe that we will increasingly understand good and evil, right and wrong, in scientific terms, because moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and behaviors affect the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves. If there are facts to be known about the well-being of such creatures—and there are—then there must be right and wrong answers to moral questions. Students of philosophy will notice that this commits me to some form of moral realism (viz. moral claims can really be true or false) and some form of consequentialism (viz. the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the well-being of conscious creatures). While moral realism and consequentialism have both come under pressure in philosophical circles, they have the virtue of corresponding to many of our intuitions about how the world works. Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc. —all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures (whether actual or potential).I am unaware of any interesting exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious (in some sense) and cognizant of human behavior. It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values. 

Thus the standard is maximizing expected wellbeing. 

I advocate that truth seeking through a restorative justice system ought to take precedence over attorney client privilege.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor NY | Judge: Tyler Cook
SQUO means dissenters grouped with apathetic voters. Cym,
Cym, Effortless Flow, Not Voting as an Act of Protest, July 13th, 2012, http://effortlessflow.blogspot.com/2012/07/not-voting-as-act-of-protest.html
But the message ... change the options

CV solves. Weiner,
You Must Vote. Itand#39;s the Law. Australia requires citizens to vote. Should the U.S.? By Eric Weiner Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, at 7:19 AM http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_best_policy/2004/10/you_must_vote_its_the_law.html
In most elections ... to vote tomorrow

OW -- no other way to express
happens in SQUO

res is q of politics, politics not state, Ranciere,
Jacque Ranciere, French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris, DISSENSUS: On Politics and Aesthetics (Ten Theses on Politics), Continuum Publishing 2010, 36-37

The police is ... of the community

politics individual empowerment and open frames of reference, Ranciere 2
Jacque Ranciere, French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Wrong: Politics and Police), 1999, 39

Politics in general ... the playing field

democracy made to include those not visible. Ranciere 3,
Jacque Ranciere, French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris, DISSENSUS: On Politics and Aesthetics (Ten Theses on Politics), Continuum Publishing 2010, 31-32

Democracy is the ... no part in

vc: allowing for the disruption of the public frame of reference

underview:

CV creates more informed voters, Milazzo
Milazzo, Caitlin. and#34;Forced to Vote: The Impact of Compulsory Voting Laws on Political Discussionand#34; Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference, Palmer House Hotel, Hilton, Chicago, IL, Apr 03, 2008 Not Available. 2013-05-07http:citation.allacademic.com/meta/p267227_index.html

The model tested ... voting is mandatory

CV allows for more expression. Engelen,
Why Compulsory Voting Can Enhance Democracy¶ Bart Engelen¶ Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium), Centre for Economics¶ and Ethics – Institute of Philosophy (K.U.Leuven), Centre for Economics and¶ Ethics – K.U.Leuven, Naamsestraat 69, Leuven B – 3000, Belgium.¶ E-mail: bart.engelen@econ.kuleuven.be . Acta Politica, 2007, 42, (23–39)
r 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 0001-6810/07 $30.00 IADM 

Most opponents of ... which I may

CV increases turnout. Jaitman,
Jaitman, Laura, The Causal Effect of Compulsory Voting Laws on Turnout: Does Skill Matter? (May 13, 2012). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2057055 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2057055. MD

Modern societies are ... prone to promote.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Northland Christian DL | Judge: Bob Overing
Voter turn up down /econpolicies go up
 Younger, R. Ryan. "THE ELECTORAL CONSEQUENCES OF NEOLIBERAL REFORM EXPLAINING VOTER TURNOUT IN LATIN AMERICA'S DUAL TRANSITION ERA." INQUIRY 6 (2005).
Voter turnout has … and economic reform.
Econ makes neolib stronger. Justifies oppression
George Monbiot, 14 January 2013, “If you think we're done with neoliberalism, think again, The global application of a fraudulent economic theory brought the west to its knees. Yet for those in power, it offers riches.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Limited, DM
How they must … are counter-productive.
Compulsory voting increases voter turnout especially within unskilled
Jaitman, Laura, The Causal Effect of Compulsory Voting Laws on Turnout: Does Skill Matter? (May 13, 2012). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2057055 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2057055. MD

Modern societies are … (1995); Nagel (1988)).

compulsory voting laws will motivate people to become more politically aware.
Milazzo, Caitlin. "Forced to Vote: The Impact of Compulsory Voting Laws on Political Discussion" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference, Palmer House Hotel, Hilton, Chicago, IL, Apr 03, 2008 Not Available. 2013-05-07http:citation.allacademic.com/meta/p267227_index.html
The model tested …voting is mandatory
Stopping neolib a epistemological prereq
Brown, Wendy. "Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy." Theory and Event 7.1 (2003). Pg. 43-44
The extension of …actor, or rationale
all ethics will concede that there is value in moral dialogue. Oppression comes first under any moral theory.
Anti-Oppressive Ethics and Values in Social Work, Derek Clifford, and Beverley Burke. ,Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/1403905568.pdf
Our view of the … and culturally different. 

The status quo educational system functions to reproduce oppression.
Rosenberg, Seth. "Questioning assumptions about the role of education in American society: A review of schooling in capitalist America." AIP Conference Proceedings. Vol. 720. 2004.
The educational system, … place as appropriate. 

This knowledge reproduction is especially insidious in LD
Elijah J. Smith, 2013 cross examination debate association (ceda) and national debate tournament (ndt) champion, 9/4/13, A CONVERSATION IN RUINS: RACE AND BLACK PARTICIPATION IN LINCOLN DOUGLAS DEBATE, Victory Briefs, http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2013/9/a-conversation-in-ruins-race-and-black-participation-in-lincoln-douglas-debate
At every tournament … students cannot escape.
Change educational system to fight oppression
Polychroniou, CJ, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Higher Education: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, March 26, 2013, http://truth-out.org/news/item/15237-predatory-capitalism-and-the-attack-on-higher-education-an-interview-with-henry-a-giroux. DR.

Giroux: Higher education … a meaningful democracy.