Tournament: UPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x

1. Alt won’t solve – rejection in this one case doesn’t spillover. Their cries of capitalism being everywhere and coopting everything give the system power and make any alt impossible. Graham 

Indeed, and this is the argument we wish to make in this book, the project of understanding the beast has itself produced a beast, or even a bestiary; and the process of producing knowledge in service to politics has estranged rather than united understanding and action. Bringing these together again, or allowing them to touch in different ways, is one of our motivating aspirations. “Capitalism” occupies a special and privileged place in the language of social representation. References to “capitalist society” are a common¬place of left and even mainstream social description, as are references — to the market, to the global economy, to postindustrial society — in which an unnamed capitalism is implicitly invoked as the defining and unifying moment of a complex economic and social formation. Just as the economic system in eastern Europe used confidently to be described as communist or socialist, so a general confidence in economic classification characterizes representations of an increasingly capitalist world system. But what might be seen as the grounds of this confidence, if we put aside notions of “reality” as the authentic origin of its representations? Why might it seem problematic to say that the United States is a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one, despite the widespread belief that Christianity and heterosexuality are dominant or majority practices in their respective domains, while at the same time it seems legitimate and indeed “accurate” to say that the US is a capitalist country?1 What is it about the former expressions, and their critical history, that makes them visible as “regulatory fictions,”2 ways of erasing or obscuring difference, while the latter is seen as accurate representation? Why, moreover, have embracing and holistic expressions for social struc¬ture like patriarchy fallen into relative disuse among feminist theorists (see Pringle 1995; Barrett and Phillips 1992) while similar concep¬tions of capitalism as a system or “structure of power” are still preva¬lent and resilient? These sorts of questions, by virtue of their scarcity and scant claims to legitimacy, have provided us a motive for this book.3 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) problematizes “capitalism”. as an economic and social descriptor.4 Scrutinizing what might be seen as throwaway uses of the term — passing references, for example, to the capitalist system or to global capitalism — as well as systematic and deliberate attempts to represent capitalism as a central and organizing feature of modern social experience, the book selectively traces the discursive origins of a widespread understanding: that capitalism is the hegemonic. or even the only, present form of economy and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future. It follows from this prevalent though not ubiquitous view that noncapitalist economic sites, if they exist at all, must inhabit the social margins; and, as a corollary, that deliberate attempts to develop noncapitalist economic practices and institutions must take place in the social interstices, in the realm of experiment, or in a visionary space of revolutionary social replacement. Representations of capitalism are a potent constituent of the anticapi¬talist imagination, providing images of what is to be resisted and changed as well as intimations of the strategies, techniques, and possibilities of changing it. For this reason, depictions of “capitalist hegemony” deserve a particularly skeptical reading. For in the vicinity of these representations, the very idea of a noncapitalist economy takes the shape of an unlikelihood or even an impossibility. It becomes difficult to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of noncapitalist economic forms, or of daily or partial replacements of capitalism by noncapitalist economic practices, or of capitalist retreats and reversals. In this sense, “capitalist hegemony” operates not only as a constituent of, but also as a brake upon, the anticapitalist imagination.5 What difference might it make to release that brake and allow an anticapitalist economic imaginary to develop unrestricted?6 If we were to dissolve the image that looms in the economic foreground, what shadowy economic forms might come forward? In these questions we can identify the broad outlines of our project: to discover or create a world of economic difference, and to populate that world with exotic creatures that become, upon inspection, quite local and familiar (not to mention familiar beings that are not what they seem).

2. TURN, ecological destruction is the consequence of the absence of capitalism – that's radical socialism. Lewis 

But as Theodore Hamerow’s (1990) masterful account of the “graying of the revolution” makes abundantly clear, the rise of the bureaucratic oligarchy may have been unintended but it was nonetheless inexorable. If eco-marxists were ever to gain power in the United States, we could expect history to recapitulate itself on this score.  Still, Marxist apologists will continue to inform us that communist leaders just made a few critical errors, and that if we were once again to begin building communism, this time we could get it right. This position might be reasonable had the world known only a single Marxist state, but the sad fact is that the experiment has been just as disastrous on every occasion and in every social environment in which it has been attempted. Scholars seeking real material and structural explanations in history would be forced to admit that marxism’s political failure has been rather more unavoidable than accidental. 

3.  Their impact story is empirically denied -- capitalism has empowered human rights with its concern for human worth. Berger  writes, 

“A third very important charge brought against capitalism is that it is supposedly linked with political oppression. The critiques of capitalism habitually contrast the political oppressiveness of capitalist systems with the alleged socialist linkage with liberation of one sort or another. The root facts again are very interesting. If one speaks of democracy as being distinguished from regimes of political oppression, there is not a single case in the world of a society which one could reasonably call socialist which is a democracy. There are no socialist democracies. All the democracies in the world are states that are part of the international capitalist system. There is a large number of capitalist non-democratic states. In other words, the distribution of facts have a certain formal analogy to the distribution of success stories noted above. What it suggests, at least hypothetically, is that capitalism, while clearly not a sufficient condition for economic success, seems to be a necessary condition. In the same way, just as capitalism clearly cannot be identified with democracy (otherwise one could not explain the cases of capitalist societies with no democracy), there seems to be a propensity of capitalist systems toward democracy. Socialism, on the other hand, shows a very clear propensity in the other direction. This is no great mystery, but can be systematically analyzed in terms of the political implication of economies that are largely allocative, as against market-oriented, in organization. This Is not to espouse the Wilsonian view, for I do not believe that democracy is the only morally acceptable form of government, although I would personally go to great lengths to defend it in my own country. In my view there are benevolent societies which are not democratic. Leaving aside democracy for a moment for purposes of analysis and looking simply at where one finds the grossest violations of human rights, and where one finds something approximating institutionalized respect for human rights, what one finds is a remarkable correlation between institutions that organize respect for human rights and democracy. Thus, the question of whether capitalism is or is not conducive to democracy is a question very much related to the question of human rights; and if one gives any moral stature to the question of human rights, one must take that correlation very seriously indeed.” 

  K., pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson (“The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy”, pg 2-5)
  Martin Lewis, environmental studies at Duke, 1992 (Green Delusions, p. 165-6) 

  Peter Berger, Corporations and the Common Good, 1986, 22-23

Tournament: berk | Round: Doubles | Opponent: The Walia Man | Judge: Shmikler, Fried, Fink
TURN -- Community based forestry kills indigenous solidarity. It leads to internal resistance through tree theft. Klooster   writes 

Community forestry is thought to diffuse the kind of tensions over access to resources that frequently make centralized forest management systems based on the principles of scientific forestry ineffective and conflictive. Centralized systems often create resistance, as communities whose vegetation management practices have been declared illegal by forest bureaucracies anonymously contest the restrictions imposed on them by ‘stealing’ trees and committing ‘arson’. These restrictions are intimately related to the requirements of scientific forestry, however, so co-management strategies relying on scientific forestry might also engender various forms of internal resistance, such as tree theft. Local interpretations of justice in access to resources, together with community social structures and the distribution of resources can result in internalized resistance, rendering community-based resource management ineffective. In a Mexican community case-study, scientific forestry and tree theft co-evolved during a period of concessions and continue under co-management. This system creates an arena where anonymous individual resistance like tree theft can give way to forms of protest more likely to result in legitimate and effective forest management systems.

You’re at a huge solvency deficit – the plan doesn’t even work unless actors outside the scope of the aff work. Jong 

Cornejo (2010), analysing local forestry support initiatives from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Co- lombia, found that these initiatives in general were duly designed with early involvement of the target beneficiaries, but varied with regard to the meth- ods and intensity used for consultations. The most common operation mode was to organise communal workshops where ideas were presented to target ben- eficiaries asked to provide opinions or suggestions. Even though several initiatives focused on rather new activities among the target beneficiaries, these activi- ties all fit well within the rural producers’ economic strategies. Thus, the new activities proposed by the initiatives did not demand excessive time allocation, consumed only minor amounts of time and thereby occupied a relatively small proportion of the family  labour pools. The activities all focused on manag- ing local biodiversity, while complying to the extent possible with the existing regulations. This implied necessarily the introduction of new management practices and new forms of organisation among ru- ral producers. All the cases reviewed by Cornejo (2010) had in common that some kind of intervention by external agents had taken place. Interventions were typically related to a development projects led by a NGO, though government support was also present in sev- eral cases. Despite the fact that important resources had been invested in technical assistance and train- ing, and efforts had been made to define phase-out strategies, an overall result was that few of the in- novations continued after the project finished. One of the reasons was that the initiatives failed to pay sufficient attention to the importance of smallholder business organisation and related capacity-building, and to product value-chain development.

Empirically failed in the Amazon and turns your impacts, communities kept doing what they were doing so theres no reason to do the plan --  Jong 2

In contrast to some successful examples from Mexico and Central America, where communal business organisations could be built on existing struc- tures for community and political-legal organisation (Stoian 2005), Amazonian forestry producers had little former integration in market structures and were confronted with entirely new forms of organisation. So, Amazonian forest managers did become only in very few cases direct traders of the raw material or semi-finished products. Most of them continued to sell their products to local intermediaries with little influence on price formation. In fact, they hardly ever succeeded in establishing trust relationships with non-local market participants and therefore did not manage to receive more attractive prices for their products. Findings of a global review of ru- ral community enterprises suggest that the start-up phase necessary to establish viable business struc- tures would take at least between 10–20 years, fol- lowed by a consolidation phase of a similar duration (Donovan et al. 2008).

Community Forestry and Tree Theft in Mexico: Resistance or Complicity in Conservation?. Dan Klooster. 2002. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-7660.00155/abstract

16 Opportunities and Challenges for Community forestry: Lessons from Tropical America Convening lead author: Wil de Jong Lead authors: Carlos Cornejo, Pablo Pacheco, Benno Pokorny and Dietmar Stoian Contributing authors: Cesar Sabogal and Bastiaan Louman RegIOnAL exAmpLes Of fOResT ReLATed ChALLenges And OppORTunITIes

Tournament: stanford | Round: 9 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
A. Interpretation: Debaters must adhere to the truth-testing paradigm, i.e. Affirmative must prove the resolution true and the negative must prove it false.
B. Violation: The aff frames the resolution as a question of policy -- they want me to defend an alternate world where resource extraction comes first.
C. Standards:

1. Arbitrary Limiting of Ground:
   2. Diversity of argumentation:
   3. Argument quality:
   4. Philosophical Education:

Tournament: berk | Round: Triples | Opponent: Bellarmine CP HS | Judge: McNally, Mills, Bower
Their blame of neoliberalism is a non sequitor.
Larrivee, 10 – PF Economics at Mount St. Mary’s University – Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and PhD in economics from Wisconsin, 2010 (John, A Framework for the Moral Analysis of Markets, 10/1, http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/larrivee-paper-1.pdf)
The Second Focal Point: Moral, Social, and Cultural Issues of Capitalism Logical errors abound in critical commentary on capitalism. Some critics observe a problem and conclude: “I see X in our society. We have a capitalist economy. Therefore capitalism causes X.” They draw their conclusion by looking at a phenomenon as it appears only in one system. Others merely follow a host of popular theories according to which capitalism is particularly bad. 6 The solution to such flawed reasoning is to be comprehensive, to look at the good and bad, in market and non-market systems. Thus the following section considers a number of issues—greed, selfishness and human relationships, honesty and truth, alienation and work satisfaction, moral decay, and religious participation—that have often been associated with capitalism, but have also  been problematic in other systems and usually in more extreme form. I conclude with some evidence for the view that markets foster (at least some) virtues rather than undermining them. My purpose is not to smear communism or to make the simplistic argument that “capitalism isn’t so bad because other systems have problems too.” The critical point is that certain people thought various social ills resulted from capitalism, and on this basis they took action to establish alternative economic systems to solve the problems they had identified. That they failed to solve the problems, and in fact exacerbated them while also creating new problems, implies that capitalism itself wasn’t the cause of the problems in the first place, at least not to the degree theorized. 

Neo-lib decreases incentive for war
Gat ‘13 (AZAR GAT, DPhil in History (University of Oxford, 1986); Ezer Weitzman Professor of National Security, Political Science Department, Tel Aviv University; recent books: War in Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2006); Victorious and Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How It Is Still Imperiled (Hoover Institution, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Is war declining – and why? Azar Gat Department of Political Science, University of Tel Aviv azargat@post.tau.ac.il , March 19th 2013)
When quite a number of scholars simultaneously and independently of one another arrive at very similar conclusions on an issue of cardinal theoretical and practical significance, their thesis deserves, and has received, great attention. The thesis is that war and violence in general have progressively decreased in recent times, during the modern era, and even throughout history. Of course, despite their unanimity, all these scholars could still be wrong. Indeed, each of them tells a similar story of people’s disbelief at their findings, most notably that we live in the most peaceful period in human history. Some of them even explain the general incredulity by the findings of evolutionary psychology according to which we tend to be overly optimistic about ourselves but overly pessimistic about the world at large. Having myself written about the marked decrease in deadly human violence (Gat, 2006), I agree with the authors’ general thesis. However, their unanimity falters over, and they are less clear about, the historical trajectory of and the reasons for the decline in violence and war, questions that are as important as the general thesis itself. Previous Section Next Section Hobbes was right, and Rousseau wrong, about the state of nature Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) towers above all the other books surveyed here in size, scope, boldness, and scholarly excellence. It has deservedly attracted great public attention and has become a best-seller. Massively documented, this 800-page volume is lavishly furnished with statistics, charts, and diagrams, which are one of the book’s most effective features. The book, spanning the whole human past as far back as our aboriginal condition, points to two major steps in the decline of violence. The first is the sharp decline in violent mortality which resulted from the rise of the state-Leviathan from around 5,000 years ago. This conclusion is based on the most comprehensive studies of the subject published over the past 15 years (Keeley, 1996; LeBlanc, 2003; Gat, 2006), which demonstrate on the basis of anthropological and archaeological evidence that Hobbes’s picture of the anarchic state of nature as a very violent one was fundamentally true. Pinker rightly summarizes that violent mortality with the rise of states dropped from a staggering estimated 15 of the population, 25 of the men, in pre-state societies, to about 1–5. The main reason for this drop is the enforcement of internal peace by the Leviathan, but also, less noted by Pinker, lower mobilization rates and a smaller exposure of the civilian population to war than with tribal groups, as will be explained shortly. This conclusion regarding the dramatic drop in violent mortality with the transition to the state is at odds with the claim made by Jack Levy and William Thompson in their book, The Arc of War (2011). As the book’s title implies, Levy and Thompson posit a great increase in warfare during history, before a decrease during the past two centuries. Thus, the book claims that mortality in fighting greatly increased, ‘accelerated’ in the authors’ language, with the transition to the state. They reach this conclusion by making several mistaken assumptions. First, although professing ignorance about the distant past because of the lack of evidence on the behavior of hunter-gatherer societies before the adoption of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, they cite and are heavily influenced by the old Rousseauite anthropology of the generation after the 1960s, which recent studies have refuted. Obviously, one does not have to accept the above findings regarding the pervasiveness and great lethality of prehistoric warfare. But Levy and Thompson simply do not engage with them. They accept as true the Rousseauite premise that sparse human population could not possibly have had that much to fight about. However, recently extant hunter-gatherer societies prove the opposite. Australia is our best laboratory of hunter-gatherer societies, because that vast continent was entirely populated by them and ‘unpolluted’ by agriculturalists, pastoralists or states until the arrival of the Europeans in 1788. And the evidence shows that the Australian tribes fought incessantly with one another. Even in the Central Australian Desert, whose population density was as low as one person per 35 square miles, among the lowest there is, conflict and deadly fighting were the rule. Much of that fighting centered on the water-holes vital for survival in this area, with the violent death rate there reckoned to have been several times higher than in any state society. In most other places, hunting territories were monopolized and fiercely defended by hunter-gatherers because they were quickly depleted. Even among the Inuit of Arctic Canada, who were so sparse as to experience no resource competition, fighting to kidnap women was pervasive, resulting in a violent death rate 10 times higher than the USA’s peak rate of 1990, itself the highest in the developed world. In more hospitable and densely populated environments casualties averaged, as already mentioned, 15 of the population and 25 of the men, and the surviving men were covered with scars (Gat, 2006: chs 2, 6). We are not dealing here with a piece of exotic curiosity. Ninety-five percent of the history of our species Homo sapiens sapiens – people who are like us – was spent as hunter-gatherers. The transition to agriculture and the state is very recent, the tip of the iceberg, in human history. Furthermore, the human state of nature turns out to be no different than the state of nature in general. Here too, science has made a complete turnabout. During the 1960s people believed that animals did not kill each other within the same species, which made humans appear like a murderous exception and fed speculations that warfare emerged only with civilization. Since then, however, it has been found that animals kill each other extensively within species, a point pressed on every viewer of television nature documentaries. There is nothing special about humans in this regard. Thus, lethal human fighting did not ‘emerge’ at some point in history, as Levy and Thompson posit. Previous Section Next Section Violent death sharply decreased with the rise of the Leviathan As mentioned earlier and as Pinker well realizes, violent mortality actually dropped steeply with the emergence of the state-Leviathan. Here is where Levy and Thompson make a second mistake. For measuring the lethality of warfare they use evidence of battle mortality, but this is highly misleading for various reasons. First, pre-state tribes’ main fighting modes were not the battle but the raid and the ambush – capturing the enemy by surprise and often annihilating entire sleeping camps: men, women, and children. Second, the size of battles merely indicates the size of the states and their armies, which are obviously larger than tribal groups in absolute terms. Yet the main question is relative casualties, what percentage of the population died violently. And here the fact is that while states and their armies grew by a factor of tens, hundreds, and thousands, giving a spectacular impression of large-scale fighting, relative casualties actually decreased under the state, and not only because of internal peace. Indeed, casualties decreased precisely because states grew large. Take Egypt, for example, part of the ‘acceleration’ of war with the emergence of states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China, according to Levy and Thompson. The size of the Egyptian army with which Pharaoh Ramses II fought the Hittite empire at the Battle of Kadesh (commonly dated 1274 BCE) was 20,000–25,000 soldiers. This was a very large army by the standards of the time. Yet the total population of Egypt was about 2–3 million, so the army constituted 1 of the population at most. This was very much the standard in large states and empires throughout history because of the great financial and logistical problems of maintaining large armies for long periods at great distances from home. Thus, in comparison to the high military participation rates of small-scale tribal societies, participation rates, and hence war casualties, in large states’ armies were much lower. Moreover, in contrast to the great vulnerability of women and children in small-scale tribal warfare, the civilian population of Egypt was sheltered by distance from the theaters of military operations and not often exposed to the horrors of war. Such relative security, interrupted only by large-scale invasions, is one of the main reasons why societies experienced great demographic growth after the emergence of the state. It is also the reason why civil war, when the war rages within the country, tends to be the most lethal form of war, as Hobbes very well realized. Warfare and feuds in the pre- and early-modern eras Levy and Thompson further posit that between the 14th and early 19th centuries, Europe was the scene of a second ‘acceleration’ in the historical trajectory of violence. This is very much in line with the prevailing perceptions regarding early modern European history, but these perceptions are most probably wrong, and for the same reason as before: Levy and Thompson count absolute battle casualties, and obviously states became more centralized during this period and armies grew in number, so battles also grew in size. Yet it was the anarchy and feudal fragmentation in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and 1200 that were responsible for the pervasive insecurity and endemic violence that characterized the Dark Ages and resulted in, among other things, a sharp demographic decline. Again, small-scale usually meant more, not less, violent mortality. The focus on early modern Europe is misleading also in another way: in the late Middle Ages the Mongol conquests inflicted on the societies of China, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe casualties and destruction that were among the highest ever suffered during historical times. Estimates of the sharp decline experienced by the populations of China and Russia, for example, vary widely. Still, even by the lowest estimates they were at least as great, and in China almost definitely much greater, than the Soviet Union’s horrific rate in World War II of about 15. The receding of medieval anarchy in the face of the growing European state-Leviathans was the first step towards a steep decline in the continent’s violent mortality rate beginning in early modernity and continuing to the present day. The studies and data cited by Pinker with respect to the domestic aspect of this trend are strikingly paralleled by those of Robert Muchembled’s History of Violence (2012). The work of a historian, the book meticulously documents, on the basis of French legal records, a 20-fold decrease in homicide rates between the 13th and 20th centuries. Earlier studies of other parts of Europe, starting with Gurr (1981), have come up with similar findings. Like Pinker, Muchembled attributes the steep decline to the state’s growing authority, as its justice system effectively replaced and deterred ‘private justice’, vendetta, and pervasive violence, all of them endemic in unruly societies. Correspondingly, again like Pinker, Muchembled invokes Norbert Elias’s (2000) ‘civilizing process’, whereby the defense of honor by sword and knife, a social norm and imperative in most traditional societies, is gradually given up among both the nobility and the general populace. The civilizing process is partly a function of the growing authority of the state’s rule and justice system. But there were other factors involved, which Pinker excels in identifying and weaving together. Although he is not a historian, his historical synthesis is exemplarily rich and nuanced. He specifies the growing humanitarian sensibilities in Europe of the Enlightenment, which he traces to, among other things, the gradual improvement in living conditions, growing commercial spirit and, above all, the print revolution with the attendant values and habits of reasoning, introspection, and empathy that it inculcated among the reading elites. As Pinker points out, not only did homicide rates decline but also other previously common forms of violence, such as judicial disembowelment and torture, were becoming unacceptable by the 18th century. This was the beginning of a continuous process which during the following centuries would bring about, among other things, the abolition of slavery and the decline of capital punishment, tyranny, and political violence in the developed world – most notably in the areas where the values of Enlightenment humanitarianism triumphed. Both Pinker and Muchembled identify a change in the trend towards increased violence and homicide rates in the United States and Europe from the 1960s on. They attribute this change (Pinker is particularly elaborative here) to the erosion of public authority and some reversal of the ‘civilizing process’ with the cults of youth culture, defiance of authority, radical ideologies of violence by the ‘oppressed’, and the fragmentation of the stable family structure. Pinker identifies a return to a downward trend in violence from about 1990 on, which he attributes to an ebbing of much of the above through reasserted state action and changes in the public mood. A last point worth mentioning in this context: Muchembled reveals that throughout the steep decline in homicide rates, from medieval times to the present, 90 or more of all cases have been perpetrated by men, especially between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. As Daly and Wilson (1988: 145–149) have shown, this ratio is found in each and every society studied around the globe, from hunter-gatherers to agricultural and industrial societies, irrespective of the vastly different homicide rates among them. Previous Section Next Section The decline of war and the three `Long Peaces' after 1815 We now move to the decline of war, which is our main concern here. Most people are surprised to learn that the occurrence of war and overall mortality in war sharply decreased after 1815, most notably in the developed world. The ‘Long Peace’ among the great powers after 1945 is more recognized and is widely attributed to the nuclear factor, a decisive factor to be sure, which concentrated the minds of all the protagonists wonderfully. The (inter-)democratic peace has been equally recognized. But in actuality, the decrease in war had been very marked before the nuclear era and encompassed both democracies and non-democracies. In the century after 1815, wars among economically advanced countries declined in their frequency to about one-third of what they had been in the previous centuries, an unprecedented change. Indeed, the Long Peace after 1945 was preceded by the second longest peace among the great powers, between 1871 and 1914, and by the third longest peace, between 1815 and 1854 (Gat, 2006: 536–537, 608). Thus, the three longest periods of peace by far in the modern great powers system all occurred after 1815. Clearly, one needs to explain the entire trend, while also accounting for the glaring divergence from it: the two World Wars. Previous Section Next Section Is modern war more lethal and destructive than before? In his earlier works, Levy (1983) was among the first to document the much-reduced frequency of war after 1815. But what brought about this change? Levy and Thompson assume – this is perhaps the most natural hypothesis – that wars declined in frequency because they became too lethal, destructive, and expensive. Supposedly, a trade-off of sorts was created between the intensity and frequency of warfare: fewer, larger wars supplanting many smaller ones. This hypothesis barely holds, however, because, again, relative to population and wealth wars have not become more lethal and costly than earlier in history. Furthermore, as Levy and Thompson rightly document, the wars of the 19th century – the most peaceful century in European history – were particularly light, in comparative terms, so there is no trade-off here. True, the World Wars, especially World War II, were certainly on the upper scale of the range in terms of casualties. Yet, as already noted, they were far from being exceptional in history. Once more, we need to look at relative casualties, general human mortality in any number of wars that happen to rage around the world, rather than at the aggregate created by the fact that many states participated in the World Wars. I have already mentioned the Mongol invasions, but other examples abound. In the first three years of the Second Punic War, 218–16 BCE, Rome lost some 50,000 citizens of the ages of 17–46, out of a total of about 200,000 in that age demographic (Brunt, 1971). This was roughly 25 of the military-age cohorts in only three years, the same range as the Russian and higher than the German rates in World War II. This, and the devastation of Rome’s free peasantry during the Second Punic War, did not reduce Rome’s propensity for war thereafter. During the Thirty Years War (1618–48) population loss in Germany is estimated at between one-fifth and one-third – either way higher than the German casualties in World War I and World War II combined. People often assume that more developed military technology during modernity means greater lethality and destruction, but in fact it also means greater protective power, as with mechanized armor, mechanized speed and agility, and defensive electronic measures. Offensive and defensive advances generally rise in tandem. In addition, it is all too often forgotten that the vast majority of the many millions of non-combatants killed by Germany during World War II – Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet civilians – fell victim to intentional starvation, exposure to the elements, and mass executions rather than to any sophisticated military technology. Instances of genocide in general during the 20th century, much as earlier in history, were carried out with the simplest of technologies, as the Rwanda genocide horrifically reminded us. Nor have wars during the past two centuries been economically more costly than they were earlier in history, again relative to overall wealth. War has always involved massive economic exertion and has been the single most expensive item of state spending (e.g. massively documented, Bonney, 1999). Examples are countless, and it will suffice to mention that both 16th- and 17th-century Spain and 18th-century France were economically ruined by war and staggering war debts, which in the French case brought about the Revolution. Furthermore, death by starvation in premodern wars was widespread. Previous Section Next Section Is it peace that has become more profitable? So if wars have not become more costly and destructive during the past two centuries then why have they receded, particularly in the developed world? The answer is the advent of the industrial–commercial revolution after 1815, the most profound transformation of human society since the Neolithic adoption of agriculture. The correlation between the decline of war in the developed world and the process of modernization, both unfolding since 1815, is surely not accidental, and the causation is not difficult to locate. In the first place, given explosive growth in per capita wealth, about 30- to 50-fold thus far, the Malthusian trap has been broken. Wealth no longer constitutes a fundamentally finite quantity, and wealth acquisition progressively shifted away from a zero-sum game. Secondly, economies are no longer overwhelmingly autarkic, instead having become increasingly interconnected by specialization, scale, and exchange. Consequently, foreign devastation potentially depressed the entire system and was thus detrimental to a state’s own wellbeing. This reality, already noted by Mill (1848/1961: 582), starkly manifested itself after World War I, as Keynes (1920) had anticipated in his criticism of the reparations imposed on Germany. Thirdly, greater economic openness has decreased the likelihood of war by disassociating economic access from the confines of political borders and sovereignty. It is no longer necessary to politically possess a territory in order benefit from it. Of the above three factors, the second one – commercial interdependence – has attracted most of the attention in the literature. But the other two factors have been no less significant. Thus, the greater the yield of competitive economic cooperation, the more counterproductive and less attractive conflict becomes. Rather than war becoming more costly, as is widely believed, it is in fact peace that has been growing more profitable. Referring to my argument in this regard, Levy and Thompson (2011: 72–75) excused themselves from deciding on the issue on the grounds of insufficient information regarding the cost of premodern war. But as already noted, the information on the subject is quite clear.

Latin America proves anti-neoliberal movements need specific political proposals – the plan alone is doomed to failure because it doesn’t engage the political sphere
Sader, 8 – PhD Poli Sci Univ of Sau Paolo  (Emir, THE WEAKEST LINK? Neoliberalism in Latin America  New Left Review 52, July-August 2008 http://newleftreview.org/II/52/emir-sader-the-weakest-link-neoliberalism-in-latin-america)
The entire framework of political and ideological struggle in Latin America has thus been remodelled under neoliberal hegemony. The radical reversal of the balance of power imposed by the dictatorships of the preceding decades was further reinforced by the new world order. The abandonment of popular forces by former nationalist or social-democratic allies, together with the harsh social consequences of free-market economics, have propelled social movements into the forefront of the resistance to neoliberalism—the third and latest strategy from below. The Zapatistas, the landless peasant movement (MST) in Brazil, the indigenist movements of Bolivia and Ecuador, the piqueteros or unemployed workers’ activists in Argentina—these are just some of the groups that have pioneered the new militancy. They have resisted to the best of their ability while neoliberalism stripped the state of its functions, pushed through the wholesale privatization of public enterprises and expropriated rt to formal employment, health and education. Opposition to NAFTA was the central plank of the Zapatista platform unveiled in 1994. Landless peasants in Brazil have taken action against sell-offs, and the resistance to water privatization in Cochabamba in 2000 was the starting point for a remarkable new phase in the history of the Bolivian left. Something similar took place in Ecuador, where indigenist movements demonstrated their power of veto against two neoliberal administrations—under Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2001—forcing both presidents from office. Later mobilizations, this time led by urban movements formed to defend citizens’ rights, overthrew a third government, that of Lucio Gutiérrez, in 2005. The difficulties experienced by the neoliberal model itself in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, combined with the pressure of popular resistance to it, opened the door to a new phase, in which the left camp formulated urgent alternatives in the context of the crisis of hegemony across the continent. This posed dilemmas to which some movements responded positively, whereas others held back. A common position among the latter was to use their critiques of the traditional left, the neoliberal state and standard political practices to justify a sweeping repudiation of parties, state and politics in general, taking refuge in what they called ‘the autonomy of social movements’. At a time when neoliberalism was sharpening its assault on the state, in favour of the market; on politics, in favour of economics; and on political parties, in favour of corporations, a certain ambiguity crept into the distinction between movements that championed the ‘social’ dimension to the detriment of politics, parties and states, and those same neoliberal arguments. A new tendency arose within the left or the overall resistance to neoliberalism, embodied in social movements and NGOs, and articulated around the dichotomy of ‘state versus civil society’. The World Social Forum reinforced this tendency by welcoming social movements and NGOs but remaining closed to political parties, arguing that this space belonged to civil society. There are two main problems with this position. Firstly, it blurs the boundaries with neoliberal discourse, since as we pointed out above, the latter likewise regards the state and party politics as its great enemies. Secondly, given that neoliberalism is characterized by the wholesale expropriation of rights, it can only be overcome in the political sphere: through the universalization of rights enacted by the governing authority of the state. Otherwise, the struggle against neoliberalism would remain perpetually on the defensive, having discarded the political instruments necessary for its own realization. Some movements have remained trapped in this paradox, ostensibly embodying hubs of resistance yet unable to move forward into challenging neoliberal hegemony, via a fresh articulation of the social with the political. Their critique of the state is subordinated to the terms of the theoretical discourse of neoliberalism, structured around the polarization of state versus private. This polarity is designed to demonize the state, take control of the private sphere (in which market relations are embedded) and abolish the indispensable framework for the democratization and defeat of neoliberalism: the public sphere. The real polarization is between the public sphere and the market sphere, in that the neoliberal project is committed to the infinite extension of market relations, whereas the state is not so much a pole as a space of hegemonic dispute between the two spheres. The construction of an anti-neoliberal alternative must begin with the reorganization or recasting of the state in favour of the public sphere, universalizing citizens’ rights while divorcing the state and general social relationships from the market. To democratize means to de-marketize, to recuperate for the terrain of people’s rights that which neoliberalism has delivered into the hands of the market. Limiting the field of action to the ‘social’ as opposed to the ‘political’, proclaiming the autonomy of social movements as a principle, means condemning oneself to impotence, and ultimately to defeat. The cases of Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina provide instructive examples of these alternatives.

Tournament: no clue | Round: 1 | Opponent: uhh | Judge: idk
A is the interpretation: Debaters must fiat new legislation for environmental protection that places guidelines for how individuals should act with respect to the environment. To clarify, this means they must actively advocate for why environmental protection is a good thing. They may not just argue that resource extraction is a bad thing.
B is the violation: The plan/AC just wants us to stop resource extraction, without actively proving why environmental protection would be a good thing.
C is the standards:

1. Ground
   2. Grammar

Tournament: ups | Round: 6 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Colonialism is epistemic domination –  precludes all AC offense. Alcoff
Quijano writes that the concept “coloniality of power” implies “the hegemony of Eurocentrism as epistemological perspective”(quoted in Mignolo 2000, 54). And for Dussel, transmodernity must be accompanied by what he calls a “liberating reason” as an alternative to the imperial, ego-logical reason of cartesian colonial modernity (see esp. 1995). But even more than these and other theorists of colonialism, it is Walter Mignolo who has focused on the epistemological effects of colonialism. Since the publication in 1995 of The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Mignolo’s central focus in his subsequent work, including the collection of essays Local Histories/Global Designs and in several essays that have appeared in journals and anthologies, has been on the subordination of non-European modes of knowing, conceptualization, and representation. Hegemony in Mignolo’s usage of the term is very much taken from the Gramscian idea of hegemony as the construction of mass consent. That is, End Page 84 hegemony is achieved through a project of persuasion that works principally through claims to truth. Such as Europe is ahead because Europe it is smarter and more reflective than the rest of the world; the United States has the right to hog the world’s resources because it knows best how to make use of them. Leading liberals like Arthur Schlesinger make the claim for Western epistemic supremacy without any embarrassment: Schlesinger claims not that Europe (and the U.S. as a European nation) has made no mistakes, but that Europe alone invented the scientific method, which gave it the capacity to critique its mistakes. Moreover, he claims that, although every culture “has done terrible things,” “whatever the particular crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source—the unique source—of those liberating ideas . . . to which most of the world today aspires. These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle eastern ideas, except by adoption”(Schlesinger 1992, 127; emphasis in original). The result of the wide acceptance of such hegemonic claims in the United States and in Europe is a broad-based consent to imperial war as the presumptive entitlement of the political vanguard of the human race; the result of the acceptance of such hegemonic claims in the colonized world includes such symptomatic effects as the ones Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz described when they said that Mexicans have an alienated relationship to their own temporal reality, and that they imagine the real present as occurring somewhere else than where they live. The temporal displacement or alienation of space, which causes the colonized person to be unable to experience their own time as the now and instead to see that “now” as occurring in another space, is the result of a Eurocentric organization of time in which time is measured by the developments in technologyical knowledge, the gadget porn of iPods and BlackBerrys, and the languages in which that technological knowledge is developed. Who is developing the latest gadgets? What language do they speak? These questions show us where the “now” resides, and thus, who is “behind.” In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), Hegel works through a phenomenology of subjectivity precisely by beginning with the reference points “here” and “now.” These are terms whose meaning cannot be elucidated without reference to a specific spatio-temporally located consciousness; we cannot judge either the justification or the meaning of a claim about “here” or about End Page 85 “now” without knowing its specific context of reference. From these common indexicals, Hegel meant to show that all knowledge is similarly indexed to a specific subject, place, and time, in the sense that knowledge is dependent on justificatory procedures, measuring instruments, theoretical and metaphysical framing concepts, and categories of analysis that are intelligible within a given located domain—a fact that should not lead us to skepticism, in his view, but to see that to understand the world we need first to understand ourselves. This explains why it is so important that the relationship between the colonized subject and its “here” and “now” is displaced by the colonial imaginary. If the knowing subject is the point of reference around which all knowledge claims revolve, what happens when that subject has only an indirect and long-distance relationship to its own “here” and “now,” or when it has what Ramos called an alienated account of its own reality (Ramos 1962)? The result is that it can no longer serve as the reference point for knowledge, or judge the adequacy of claims of justification. It no longer knows. For Ramos, Paz, Zea, Edouard Glissant, and the many others in this tradition who identified colonial alienation of consciousness, the solution to alienation is a positional shift to “our America” in which a philosophy reflective of its own Latin American reality might be developed. In his most recent work, The Idea of Latin America (2005), Mignolo expresses doubts about this alternative Latin America construction, predicated as it is on another exclusionary paradigm. Before we can go about the process of developing a new philosophy and new account of “our” reality, he argues, we need a more extensive period of epistemological reflection. We need to develop a decolonial critical theory that will be more thoroughly delinked from the contemporary variants of the modern imperial designs of the recent past. 

Buen Vivir destroys the value of indigenous life, creating a neo-imperial model that lies about its aims. Walsh 3
As such, my first response is to say that there is no relationship. Yet with the incorporation of buen vivir as the transversal axis of the Ecuadorian Constitution in 2008 and as the driving focus of the National Plan of Development in 2009 (also called the National Plan of Buen Vivir), a correlation buen vivir is beginning to emerge which is I find tension ridden and problematic. In its elaboration as a policy frame, human social development is based on two key principles: the individual and the quality of life. Human social development can best be described as a new strategy of colonial-imperial design. It is a strategy that portendings to insure inclusion and social cohesion and manage ethnic diversity (and its potential threat to state security); a strategy that serves well the interests and needs of the neo-liberal project, now in a more 'humanized' form. Buen vivir, in its most general sense, organizes and constructs a life-system based on the communion of beings (human and otherwise) and nature, on the intimate ties and harmonious co-existence among beings and nature, between the tangible and intangible, the organic and inorganic, the divine and the human; among knowledges, the earth, ancestors, and the cosmos. It points toward a correlation, complementariety and reciprocity with the rest in harmony, respect, dignity and continuous relation. In this sense, the individual as such has little significance. 

And its empirically proven in Ecuador, the lines between Buen Vivir and traditional imperialist development are blurring. Alcoff 2
What are the risks that Buen Vivir becomes another discursive tool and co-opted term which is functional to the State? Is there some indication that this is happening already? This in fact is the problem and concern. In the new Ecuadorean Constitution developed in a National Assembly with participation of all social sectors and overwhelmingly approved in a popular referendum in September 2008, buen vivir (or 'sumak kawsay' in the kichwa indigenous language), is the transversal axis. Here the motivation was to take distance from capitalism and the Western neo-liberal model and rationality of thought. In a nation self-defined as 'white-mestizo' which historically has looked to the West (the Global North) and not to indigenous communities for its models, the inclusion of buen vivir can be understood as a major advance. It is an important step forward in the new national project of 'interculturality'. The problem and concern emerges when buen vivir begins to be signified and applied in government policy as 'development'. Government policy -most clearly reflected in the National Plan of Development or Buen Vivir- assumes much of the same language, meaning, and focus as are present in human development. Throughout this Plan buen vivir and development are used as interchangeable terms which is problematic (particularly since the word 'development' does not exist in Andean indigenous cosmologies or languages). But of even more concern is the association of both with the State; buen vivir as development is the State, signified in technocratic, economistic, and humanistic terms. Thus it seems that what in reality is in force is the paradigm of human development. If such focus continues, buen vivir will become -and in fact is already becoming- a discursive tool and co-opted term.

Development discourse breeds imperialism and oppresses the third world, turns the AC; dooming environmental protection efforts. Berger 12 writes
This statement contains the essence of the less-recent history of colonized countries, but, more importantly, it presages current trends—driven by the forces of cultural colonialism—in what we now term “developing” countries such as India. Indeed, the remnants of imperialism now manifest in the dangerous and powerful discourse of development. Many contemporary scholars of anthropology argue that the use of the language of “development” in a post-colonial world has negatively affected non-Western countries—and exacerbated residual problems associated with colonialism—by leading indigenous people to view themselves as “underdeveloped” or “undeveloped,” that is, inferior to the “developed” Westerners. This perceived inequality is entrenched not only by international (Western) NGOs and Western governments, but it is also planted, reinforced, and spread by the very citizens and governments who are supposedly being “developed” by the first world. The discourse of development inextricably links what is seemingly positive, “development,” which connotes progress, growth, and advancement, with the ideals and lifestyles of the West. This language also, therefore, associates non-Western cultures, ideas, values, religions, and occupations with backwardness and stagnation: the antitheses of progress. It stigmatizes the poor and further empowers the rich. In pursuit of the idealized materialistic Western lifestyle, non-Western countries have experienced (despite their growing GDPs, a Western-defined measurement of wealth) have experienced more debilitating poverty and an ever-widening distance between the rich and the poor. Whereas pre-colonial India had a more symbiotic, less destructive relationship with the environment, the values underlying this coexistence have, in many ways, been replaced with a Western culture which exploits resources and the earth and prioritizes material wealth. Nowhere has the discourse of development had such a profound impact as in India. Despite the country’s enormous economic growth over the last two decades and its emergence as a global economic force, much of its population still faces and will continue to grapple with immense social challenges, all of which are rooted in inequality: malnutrition, poverty, lack of adequate shelter and sanitation, and disease. According to the World Health Organization, less than a third of India’s population has sustainable access to improved sanitation. The World Bank asserts that almost half of all girls and 45 of boys in India are underweight, and many more are deficient in at least one essential micronutrient. Perhaps the most telling figure is that the number of people living in slums in India has doubled in the past two decades, and continues to rise steadily. We align economic development with prosperity and progress for all, but can we say that life has really improved for India’s most disadvantaged? Along with its poorest and most marginalized people, India’s environment has also suffered as its economic growth outpaces its ability—and perhaps desire—to protect its air, water, land, biodiversity, and other natural resources. The Western notion of development, which many Indians have readily embraced, emphasizes distance rather than closeness to nature, as well as unrestrained exploitation of resources. 

Imperialism leads to unending violence and extinction Eckhardt
 ‘Dominance is probably the most important single element in the causation of major modern wars’ (p. 85). European empires were thrown up all over the world in this process of benefiting some at the expense of others, which was characterized by armed violence contributing to structural violence: ‘World-empire is built by conquest and maintained by force… Empires are primarily organizations of violence’ (pp. 965, 969). ‘The struggle for empire has greatly increased the disparity between states with respect to the political control of resources, since there can never be enough imperial territory to provide for all’ (p. 1190). This ‘disparity between states’, not to mention the disparity within states, both of which take the form of racial differences in life expectancies, has killed 15-20 times as many people in the 20th century as have wars and revolutions (Eckhardt and Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c). When this structural violence of ‘disparity between states’ created by civilization is taken into account, then the violent nature of civilization becomes much more apparent. Wright concluded that ‘Probably at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can be attributed directly or indirectly to war… The trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population… The proportion of the population dying as a direct consequence of battle has tended to increase’ (pp. 246, 247). So far as structural violence has constituted about one-third of all deaths in the 20th century (Eckhardt and Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c), and so far as structural violence was a function of armed violence, past and present, then Wright’s estimate was very conservative indeed. Assuming that war is some function of civilization, then civilization is responsible for one-third of 20th century deaths. This is surely self-destruction carried to a high level of efficiency. The structural situation has been improving throughout the 20th century, however, so that structural violence caused ‘only’ 20 of all deaths in 1980 (Eckhardt, 1983c). There is obviously room for more improvement. To be sure, armed violence in the form of revolution has been directed toward the reduction of structural violence, even as armed violence in the form of imperialism has been directed toward its maintenance. But imperial violence came first, in the sense of creating structural violence, before revolutionary violence emerged to reduce it. It is in this sense that structural violence was basically, fundamentally, and primarily a function of armed violence in its imperial form. The atomic age has ushered in the possibility, and some would say the probability, of killing not only some of us for the benefit of others, nor even of killing all of us to no one’s benefit, but of putting an end to life itself! 

The alternative is linguistic deconstruction since it's the only way we promote real change. That requires rejection of the aff’s epistemic frame. Kobayashi 94
) The development of ways of initiating 'unnatural discourse', using both language (as concept) and political practice in such a way that natural categories are challenged. A method of deconstruction, or disassembly, is needed to allow us to understand not just the explicit statements of belief about what is 'natural', but also those values that are so naturalized that they have not previously come under question. This project requires, in part, a recovery of the significant past, and of the mnemonic qualities that are invoked in every use of language to give it its naturalizing power. As geographers, we need to invoke ideology to uncover the terrain that is uncontested because it is deemed to be ruled by common sense.  These challenges are huge, and no pretence will be made to outline here all that is involved. Perhaps imagination is our greatest asset, since most of what is involved is not even on the academic agenda. We can begin to speculate, however, about some of the elements of the unnatural, and upon how the political strategies might be conceptualized if not put in place.  The appeal of unnatural discourses lies in their use of practices that would in the past have been designated as (if you will) witchcraft or voodoo, practices associated with the unnatural, and therefore evil because threatening, powers of women or people of colour. The unnatural, in other words, is anything that falls outside the parameters of the naturalized, safe and known world of rational man. Included within those parameters are all practices that involve the imposition of social order based on a notion of a 'natural state of man.' Such a position could exclude, for example, violence (viewed by some as a natural tendency of man) as a means of bringing about social change. More radical are possibilities that instead project social actions that are beyond the realm of current imagination, so far, perhaps, that they may even be construed as 'supernatural'.  'The unnaturalization of everyday language is an important aspect of this project. In language is codified the normative categories through which human relations are constructed, and communication provides the only means through which the conditions of change are expressed. The creation of 'race' is one such example of an effective means of unnaturalizing deeply held convictions; if that particular linguistic tool is now losing its efficacy so much the better, for it is an indication not that the term was inadequate, but that it provoked some of the changes that were sought. Linguistic strategies rely upon the imposition of conceptual disorder and ideological confounding against the power of naming as one of the most important means of imposing order and dominion. Using language as a force of the unnatural to deconstruct the power of words to create oppression is not to destroy the power of words to have meaning, and so create lives that are truly meaningless in a nihilistic void. Rather, we need to gain control of language in order to understand the ways in which discourses are constructed as ideological traditions that gain efficacy through repetition, inscription, and representation (Goodrich, 1990, Ch. 4). Such processes will go on, but hopefully at a higher level of competence.  

  (Linda, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University, "Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality", The New Centennial Review, Winter 2007, pp. 79-102)  (Linda, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University, "Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality", The New Centennial Review, Winter 2007, pp. 79-102)
  JAMIE BERGER, MAY 29, 2012, The Harmful Discourse of Development: A Look at India,http://intellectualyst.com/the-harmful-discourse-of-development-a-look-at-india-534/
  Eckhardt 1990 (William, Lentz Peace Research Laboratory of St. Louis, JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, February 1990, p. 15-16)
  Kobayashi 94 (Audrey, Direct. Institute of Women’s Studies @ Queen’s, Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 1, 2, p. 225, JM)

Tournament: stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
A. Interpretation – Aff must specify a specific plan of action and the implementation method for that plan of action to be undertaken by one specific governmental actor in a written down text in the 1AC that prioritizes environmental protection over resource extraction.
B. Violation – They have no implementation method and don't defend a specific country.
AND Buen Vivir isn’t a policy, it's a philosophy. Simply saying Plan Text: implement buen vivir isn’t good enough. Walsh 

'Human development' is a concept conceived in the Global North within a design of (international and national) social policy. Buen vivir, roughly translated in English as living well or collective well-being, comes from the cosmologies of the indigenous and African descendent peoples of the South. It is not a policy to be applied but a philosophy to be lived. As such, my first response is to say that there is no relationship. Yet with the incorporation of buen vivir as the transversal axis of the Ecuadorian Constitution in 2008 and as the driving focus of the National Plan of Development in 2009 (also called the National Plan of Buen Vivir), a correlation is beginning to emerge which is I find tension ridden and problematic. In its elaboration as a policy frame, human social development is based on two key principles: the individual and the quality of life. Human social development it can best be described as a new strategy of colonial-imperial design. It is a strategy that portends to insure inclusion and social cohesion and manage ethnic diversity (and its potential threat to state security); a strategy that serves well the interests and needs of the neo-liberal project, now in a more 'humanized' form. Buen vivir, in its most general sense, organizes and constructs a life-system based on the communion of beings (human and otherwise) and nature, 

C. Standards:
1) Stable advocacy- advocating a plan means they cant shift in the 1AR which would moot 7 minutes of NC. If they shift im screwed because then the 2N has to bring up new arguments, which kill any productive clash since we can never discuss one issue in depth. That’s key to education since discussion is necessary to learn about a position in debate. Stable advocacies key to fairness to ensure competitive equity since both sides are able to form a cogent strategy.
2) RWE – Plans require deciding specific policy actions based on specific situations. This is better for real world decision-making because legislators don’t make categorical determinations on broad topics; they talk about implementation of specific plans to decide whether to take the action. Real World education independently key to any education. That’s an independent voter since it has the greatest impact on us outside of round. Straight and Wallace , 

The ability to make decisions deriving from discussions, argumentation or debate, is the key skill. It is the one thing every single one of us will do every day of our lives besides breathing. Decision-making transcends boundaries between categories of learning like "policy education"' and "kririk education," it makes irrelevant considerations of whether we will eventually be policymakers, and it transcends questions of what substantive content a debate round should contain. The implication for this analysis is that the critical thinking and argumentative skills offered by real-world decision-making are comparatively greater than any educational disadvantage weighed against them

D. Voters – Drop the debater to deter abuse, people aren’t going to read positions they know are abusive. No RVI’s since it would deny the antecedent, which states if abusive vote them down but it doesn't follow that if not abusive vote them up, creating a non sequitor that precludes any RVIs good arguments since arguments have to make logical sense before we consider how they function in round. Use competing interps since IDK what you find reasonable. Vote on Education since it's the only lasting impact of debate AND Fairness since debates a competitive activity theres no point to doing it if one side cant win. 

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND BUEN VIVIR. INTERVIEW WITH CATHERINE WALSH BY DEVELOPMENTPLUS MAR 9, 2010

THE SCOPE OF NEGATIVE FIAT AND THE LOGIC OF DECISION MAKING; L. Pall! Sirait. George Mason University Brett Wallace. George Washington University

Tournament: CPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: X | Judge: X
I value Morality. There is no form of universal ethics that can guide action for individuals; Individuals are limited by their society and their subjective view.  Mackie: 

 J. L. Mackie John Leslie Mackie (1917-1981) was a philosopher, originally from Sydney, Australia. From 1967 until his death, he was a fellow of University College, Oxford. He was in 1974 elected a fellow of the British Academy., “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong” The Subjectivity of Values.

The argument from ... limited by subjectivity.

Morality is premised on contractual obligations that actors form with each other. Gauthier 1 :

Gauthier, David P. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Print.

Moral principles are ... in their affairs.

Thus, the standard is consistency with contractual agreements

1. Analytic

2. Developing countries mutually agree with resource extracting companies to allow them to extract resources within the countries because it fulfills the social contract of protecting individuals interests within the nation of allowing economic growth. Luheshi

(Natural Resource Extraction Contracts - What Difference Do They Make? Matt Luheshi    9:10, 18 October 2013)

The latest in ... oil and gas.

3. Analytic

Tournament: stanford and berkeley | Round: 2 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
A is Trivialization. Debating about death causes an aesthetic fascination with the spectacle of death. This turns debate into a death cult and denies the choice to avoid death impacts. Baudrillard, ‘93 

Pursued and censured everywhere, death springs up everywhere again. No longer as apocalyptic folklore, such as might have haunted the living imagination in certain epochs; but voided precisely of any imaginary substance, it passes into the most banal reality, and for us takes on the mask of the very principle of rationality that dominates our lives. Death is when everything functions and serves something else, it is the absolute, signing, cybernetic functionality of the urban environment as in Jacques Tati’s film Play-Time. Man is absolutely indexed on his function, as in Kafka: the age of the civil servant is the age of a culture of death. This is the phantasm of total programming, increased predictability and accuracy, finality not only in material things, but in fulfilling desires. In a word, death is confused with the law of value – and strangely with the structural law of value by which everything is arrested as a coded difference in a universal nexus of relations. This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of the faultless, objective, ultra-rapid connection of all the terms in a system. Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder: our societies’ true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the world’s sterilized memories are frozen. Only the dead remember everything in something like an immediate eternity of knowledge, a quintessence of the world that today we dream of burying in the form of microfilm and archives, making the entire world into an archive in order that it be discovered by some future civilization. The cryogenic freezing of all knowledge so that it can be resurrected; knowledge passes into immortality as sign-value. Against our dream of losing and forgetting everything, we set up an opposing great wall of relations, connections and information, a dense and inextricable artificial memory, and we bury ourselves alive in the fossilized hope of one day being rediscovered. Computers are the transistorized death to which we submit in the hope of survival. Museums are already there to survive all civilizations, in order to bear testimony. But to what? It is of little importance. The mere fact that they exist testifies that we are in a culture which no longer possesses any meaning for itself and which can now only dream of having meaning for someone else from a later time. Thus everything becomes an environment of death as soon as it is no longer a sign that can be transistorized in a gigantic whole, just as money reaches the point of no return when it is nothing more than a system of writing. Basically, political economy is only constructed (at the cost of untold sacrifices) or designed so as to be recognized as immortal by a future civilization, or as an instance of truth. As for religion, this is unimaginable other than in the Last Judgment, where God recognizes his own. But the Last Judgment is there already, realized: it is the definitive spectacle of our crystallized death. The spectacle is, it must be said, grandiose. From the hieroglyphic schemes of the Defense Department or the World Trade Center to the great informational schemes of the media, from siderurgical complexes to grand political apparatuses, from the megapolises with their senseless control of the slightest and most everyday acts: humanity, as Benjamin says, has everywhere become an object of contemplation to itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations tr. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, London: Jonathan Cape: 1970, p. 244) For Benjamin, this was the very form of fascism, that is to say, a certain exacerbated form of ideology, an aesthetic perversion of politics, pushing the acceptance of a culture of death to the point of jubilation. And it is true that today the whole system of political economy has become the finality without end and the aesthetic vertigo of productivity to us, and this is only the contrasting vertigo of death. This is exactly why art is dead: at the point of saturation and sophistication, all this jubilation has passed into the spectacle of complexity itself, and all aesthetic fascination has been monopolized by the system as it grows into its own double (what else would it do with its gigantic towers, its satellites, its giant computers, if not double itself as signs?). We are all victims of production become spectacle, of the aesthetic enjoyment jouisseance, of delirious production and reproduction, and we are not about to turn our backs on it, for in every spectacle there is the immanence of the catastrophe. Today, we have made the vertigo of politics that Benjamin denounces in fascism, its perverse aesthetic enjoyment, into the experience of production at the level of the general system. We produce the experience of a de-politicised, de-ideologised vertigo of the rational administration of things, of endlessly exploding finalities. 

B is Body Counts. Death debating reduces peoples’ lives to mere numbers for debaters to consume in their game. Baudrillard 93 

More importantly, that everyone should have a right to their life (habeas corpus – habeas vitam) extends social jurisdiction over death. Death is socialized like everything else, and can no longer be anything but natural, since every other death is a social scandal: we have not done what is necessary. Is this social progress? No, it is rather the progress of the social, which even annexes death to itself. Everyone is dispossessed of their death, and will no longer be able to die as it is now understood. One will no longer be free to live as long as possible. Amongst other things, this signifies the ban on consuming one’s life without taking limits into account. In short, the principle of natural death is equivalent to the neutralization of life. 28 The same goes for the question of equality in death: life must be reduced to quantity (and death therefore to nothing) in order to adjust it to democracy and the law of equivalences. The same objective that is inscribed in the monopoly of institutional violence is accomplished as easily by forced survival as it is by death: a forced ‘life for life’s sake’ (kidney machines, malformed children on life-support machines, agony prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.). All these procedures are equivalent to disposing of death and imposing life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely this is just scientific paranoia, unrelated to any human objective. Is profit the aim? No: society swallows huge amounts of profit This 'therapeutic heroism is characterised by soaring costs and 'decreasing benefits': they manufacture unproductive survivors_ Even if social security can still be analysed as 'compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital, this argument has no purchase here_ Nevertheless: the system is facing the same contradiction here as with the death penalty. it overspends on the prolongation of life because this system of values is essential to the strategic equilibrium of the whole; economically: however, this overspending unbalances the whole_ What is to be done? An economic choice becomes necessary, where we can see the outline of euthanasia as a semi-official doctrine or practice_ We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics in France alive (36 per cent in the USA!). Euthanasia is already everywhere, and the ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the 'freedom' to abortion) is striking: it is inscribed in the middle to long term logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an increase in social control. For there is a clear objective behind all these apparent contradictions: to ensure control over the entire range of life and death. From birth control to death control, whether we execute people or compel their survival (the prohibition of dying is the caricature, but also the logical form of progressive tolerance), the essential thing is that the decision is withdrawn from them: that their life and their death are never freely theirs, but that they live or die according to a social visa. It is even intolerable that their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still a type of freedom. Just as morality commanded you shall not kill', today it commands: 'You shall not die', not in any old way. anyhow, and only if the law and medicine permit. And if your death is conceded you, it will still be by order. In short: death proper has been abolished to make room for death control and euthanasia strictly speaking, it is no longer even death, but something completely neutralised that comes to be inscribed in the rules and calculations of equivalence: rewriting-planning-programming-system. It must be possible to operate death as a social service, integrate it like health and disease under the sign of the Plan and Social Security. This is the store of 'motel-suicides' in the USA, where, for a comfortable sum, one can purchase one's death under the most agreeable conditions (like any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has been foreseen, even trainers who give you back your appetite for life, after which they kindly and conscientiously send the gas into your room, without torment and without meeting any apposition. A service operates these motel-suicides, quite rightly paid (eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not become a social service when: like everything else: it is functionalised as individual and computable consumption in social input and output?

Their use of death imagery is meant to sustain an irrational fear—Death is a fantasy. Biology means we cannot truly “die” or cease to be, rather we enter a new form of becoming: becoming earth.  Becoming decomposition.  Even if we are all wiped from the face of the earth in a hailstorm of nuclear bombs the process of life goes on even at the micro level.  There is no unique warrant for why the biological construct of human deserves a place higher than the construct of atoms.  This desire to be secure from death is the most personal level of microfascism that negates our ability to live life to its fullest and breeds resentment. That means the K comes before theory – hatred of life and obsession with death far outweighs the rules of a high school debate round. Its not about what you find fair anymore, now its about your obsession with mortality. Deleuze and Guattari 72 

But it seems that things are becoming very obscure, for what is this distinction between the experience of death and the model of death? Here again, is it a death desire? A being-far-death? Or rather an investment of death, even if speculative? None of the above. The experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within itself the zero intensity starting from which it is produced, in one moment, as that which grows or diminishes according to an infinity of degrees (as Klossowski noted, "an afflux is necessary merely to signify the absence of intensity"). We have attempted to show in this respect how the relations of attraction and repulsion produced such states, sensations, and emotions, which imply a new energetic conversion and form the third kind of synthesis, the synthesis of conjunction. One might say that the unconscious as a real subject has scattered an apparent residual and nomadic subject around the entire compass of its cycle, a subject that passes by way of all the becomings corresponding to the included disjunctions: the last part of the desiring-machine, the adjacent part. These intense becomings and feelings, these intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hallucinations. But in themselves, these intensive emotions are closest to the matter whose zero degree they invest in itself. They control the unconscious experience of death, insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming-in the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc., forming zones of intensity on the body without organs. Every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it. And it is doubtless the case that every intensity is extinguished at the end, that every becoming itself becomes a becoming-death! Death, then, does actually happen. Maurice Blanchot distinguishes this twofold nature dearly, these two irreducible aspects of death; the one, according to which the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a One·-"one never stops and never has done with dying"; and the other, according to which this same subject, fixed as I, actually dies-which is to say it finally ceases to die since it ends up dying, in the reality of a last instant that fixes it in this way as an I, all the while undoing the intensity, carrying it back to the zero that envelops it. From one aspect to the other, there is not at all a personal deepening, but something quite different: there is a return from the experience of death to the model of death, in the cycle of the desiring-machines. The cycle is closed. For a new departure, since this I is another? The experience of death must have given us exactly enough broadened experience, in order to live and know that the desiring-machines do not die. And that the subject as an adjacent part is always a "one" who conducts the experience, not an I who receives the model. For the model itself is not the I either, but the body without organs. And I does not rejoin the model without the model starting out again in the direction of another experience. Always going from the model to the experience, and starting out again, returning from the model to the experience, is what schizophrenizing death amounts to, the exercise of the desiring-machines (which is their very secret, well understood by the terrifying authors). The machines tell us this, and make us live it, feel it, deeper than delirium and further than hallucination: yes, the return to repulsion will condition other attractions, other functionings, the setting in motion of other working parts on the body without organs, the putting to work of other adjacent parts on the periphery that have as much a right to say One as we ourselves do. "Let him die in his leaping through unheard-of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin on the horizons where the other collapsed !"29 The Eternal Return as experience, and as the deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire. How odd the psychoanalytic venture is. Psychoanalysis ought to be a song of life, or else be worth nothing at all. It ought, practically, to teach us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad .song of death emanates from it: eiapopeia. From the start, and because of his stubborn dualism of the drives, Freud never stopped trying to limit the discovery of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when the dualism passed into a death instinct against Eros, this was no longer a simple limitation, it was a liquidation of the libido. Reich did not go wrong here, and was perhaps the only one to maintain that the product of analysis should be a free and joyous person, a carrier of the life flows, capable of carrying them all the way into the desert and decoding them-even if this idea necessarily took on the appearance of a crazy idea, given what had become of analysis. He demonstrated that Freud, no less than lung and Adler, had repudiated the sexual position: the fixing of the death instinct in fact deprives sexuality of its generative role on at least one essential point, which is the genesis of anxiety, since this genesis becomes the autonomous cause of sexual repression instead of its result; it follows that sexuality as desire no longer animates a social critique of civilization, but that civilization on the contrary finds itself sanctified as the sale agency capable of opposing the death desire. And how. does. it do this? By in principle turning death against death, by making this turned-back death (la mort ret aurneev into a force of desire by putting it in the service of a pseudo life through an entire culture of guilt feeling. There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants very much to leave us with - a sublime resignation. As Reich says, when psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole world breathed a sigh of relief': one knew what this meant, and that everything was going to unfold within a mortified life, since Thanatos was now the partner of Eros, for worse but also for better. Psychoanalysis becomes the training ground of a new kind of priest, the director of bad conscience: bad conscience has made us sick, but that is what will cure us! Freud did not hide what was really at issue with the introduction of the death instinct: it is not a question of any fact whatever, but merely of a principle, a question of principle. The death instinct is pure silence, pure transcendence, not givable and not given in experience. This very point IS remarkable: It IS because death, according to Freud, has neither a model nor an experience, that he makes of it a transcendent principle."! So that the psychoanalysts who refused the death instinct did so for the same reasons as those who accepted it: some said that there was no death instinct since there was no model or experience in the unconscious; others, that there was a death instinct precisely because there was no model or experience. We say, to the contrary, that there is no death instinct because there is both the model and the experience of death in the unconscious. Death then is a part of the desiring-machine, a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle. If Freud needs death as a principle, this is by virtue of the requirements of the dualism that maintains a qualitative opposition between the drives (you will not escape the conflict): once the dualism of the sexual drives and the ego drives has only a topological scope, the qualitative or dynamic dualism passes between Eros and Thanatos. But the same enterprise is continued and reinforced-eliminating the machinic element of desire, the desiring-machines. It is a matter of eliminating the libido, insofar as it implies the possibility of energetic conversions in the machine (Libido-Nurnen-Voluptas). It is a matter of imposing the idea of an energetic duality rendering the machinic transformations impossible, with everything obliged to pass by way of an indifferent neutral energy, that energy emanating from Oedipus and capable of being added to either of the two irreducible forms neutralizing, mortifying life.* The purpose of the topological and dynamic dualities is to thrust aside the point of view of functional multiplicity that alone is economic. (Szondi situates the problem clearly: why two kinds of drives qualified as molar, functioning mysteriously, which is to say Oedipally, rather than n genes of drives-eight molecular genes, for example-functioning machinically") If one looks in this direction for the ultimate reason why Freud erects a transcendent death instinct as a principle, the reason will be found in Freud's practice itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with the facts, it has a lot to do with the psychoanalyst's conception of psychoanalytic practice, a conception the psychoanalyst wishes to impose. Freud made the most profound discovery of the abstract subjective essence of desire-Libido. But since he re-alienated this essence, reinvesting it in a subjective system of representation of the ego, and since he receded this essence on the residual territoriality of Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration, he could no longer conceive the essence of life except in a form turned back against itself, in the form of death itself. And this neutralization, this turning against life, is also the last way in which a depressive and exhausted libido can go on surviving, and dream that it is surviving: "The ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life ... even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destructing-the very wound itself compels him to live. . . ."32 It is Oedipus, the marshy earth, that gives off a powerful odor of decay and death; and it is castration, the pious ascetic wound, the signifier, that makes of this death a conservatory for the Oedipal life 

I advocate that we embrace the violence of the 1AC to affirm life. We need to break the cycle of resentment and overcome a crumbling world. Only through this can we achieve greatness. Faulkner 8 

Most significantly, for the purposes of this essay, we can perhaps see now how for Nietzsche agency is compatible with innocence. Indeed, innocence— regarded as what is unsullied by moral thinking—is integral to the skillful exercise of agency. Understood in these terms, innocence is neither a precious ideal to be protected from the forces of chance nor a moralistic instrument for the meting of punishment to those who threaten society. Rather, innocence is conceived as a style of existence that becomes active by claiming to itself what chance throws up before it. Innocence would here suggest a resistance to passivity and victimhood and a choice to take part in the inevitability of the moment—even if this agency ultimately extinguishes the subject through which it is performed. Perhaps at this point, then, we might attempt a return to the acts of the 9/11 jumpers, who in the light of the above can be understood as agents of their own demise but in a manner that nonetheless does not compromise their innocence. The visions of falling bodies from the Twin Towers do not sit well with orthodox imagery surrounding 9/11 because they invoke an uncomfortable ambiguity with respect to their victim status. In their final moments of animation and on the precipice of death, these bodies occupy a middle space between life and death that renders us uncomfortable in our own mortality. But they also mark a cleavage between innocence and guilt: their decision to seize the opportunity to escape confinement within their smoky “tombs” signals a confusing complicity with the terrorists who had perpetrated the attacks. In the terms that Nietzsche (and Spinoza) set out above, the jumpers took an active part in the causes that led to their deaths—causes that originate in a terrorist plot against America. And in the eyes of some, this exposed them as irresolute, and even disloyal, in the face of what later emerged to be a monumental national threat. In theological terms also—and keeping in mind the religious frame through which many in the United States view global politics—Drew’s photograph, especially, resonates with a near-godly defiance of death: the subject’s fall can be read as the taking of a liberty against God, who claims a privilege with respect to determining who lives or dies. The image may thus evoke to the viewing public humanity’s primal scene and the original sin that it demonstrates: the taking of the fruit of knowledge that marks a new beginning for humanity. Even the photograph’s title would seem to suggest a proximity to the guilt through which humanity is engendered, by means of its irreparable separation from innocence. Likewise, its subject is separated from the other victims of the attacks who (more appropriately) awaited divine sanction on their lives and have thus continued to be redeemed (drawn back into the community’s fold) by means of the various ceremonies and purification rites since performed at Ground Zero. The resigned posture of the subject of “The Falling Man” surely gives the viewer pause: it looks like a suicide attempt, and the suicide cannot be connected to a redemptive innocence. Yet, according to Nietzsche’s refiguring of agency, the decision to die can be reconciled with innocence: and moreover, innocence comes to be the very condition of an agency—as opposed to (fictitious) free will—an agency that, rather, refuses the moralizing economy of guilt and punishment. The decision to jump hundreds of meters to one’s death from a burning building might seem a limited, and somewhat undesirable, instance of agency. Clearly, it is a choice these people would not have made on any other morning and in any other circumstance. In the light of Nietzsche’s account of agency as conditioned by context and circumstance, however, it is possible to count the jumpers among the innocents lost to 9/11—and to do so in full recognition of their specific choice to take their lives into their own hands. In the context of Nietzsche’s innocence of becoming, we may understand innocence as a suspension of moral judgment rather than as prior to (and separate from) social existence. Nietzschean innocence emerges from within existence and gives rise to an agency that responds to the chance necessities life occasions. Likewise, the innocence of becoming is not grounded in opposition to guilt but, rather, undercuts the understanding of social relations in terms of guilt and debt. For this reason, Nietzsche’s innocence of becoming furnishes the jumpers’ decision with a sense that would be otherwise unavailable, at least within the narrow parameters according to which moral action and worth are conventionally adjudged. In the absence of an acknowledgment of the jumpers’ choice (and of the possibility of making a decision to die in one’s own way, where the choice to live is unavailable), we will continue to misunderstand their relationship to these events and thus to limit their political agency. In the context of the 9/11 attacks, the innocent—understood through the vista of Judeo-Christian moral tradition—has become an eternally aggrieved icon of national identity: a perennially threatened and victimized creature of ressentiment who “in order to exist first needs a hostile external world” ( GM I:10). 32 Although it is important to acknowledge the suffering of those affected, and this may indeed include the nation as a whole, what Nietzsche’s innocence of becoming reveals is that the relationship to one’s suffering is far from straightforward. If we subscribe too readily to the status of innocent-to-be-protected—thus recoiling from suffering and requiring that the debts of enemies be paid in full—then we also deny the possibility of freedom opened by the affirmation of becoming. And such a predicament is all too well reflected in the erosion of civil liberties that is ongoing since the end of 2001 in the United States and elsewhere. But were we to allow ourselves to imagine being trapped within those buildings and to contemplate the possibility that one might still make a choice, perhaps identification with the falling man might open the citizen to a new kind of agency in relation to government and nationhood. Remembering that the imagination furnishes us with knowledge of our situation—by means of the traces of interactions impressed upon memory—then we are able to develop a capacity for agency by using our imaginations to understand the decisions of those who have lived through what we have not. Through the rubric offered by the jumper’s predicament, we might then imagine a mode of resistance against attack, wherein strength is reappropriated from the enemy—even in death. Our reinterpretation of the falling man as innocent thus allows for a conception of freedom with respect to the chance events that constrain action. But moreover, it also allows us to develop a resistance to governments’ attempts to render us passive subjects by means of the moral mantle of innocence by which we are both idealized and contained. Such a modest and situated exercise of agency would involve attentiveness to the diffuse and unexpected opportunities that arise in one’s locality, to actively participate in the causes of change. For instance, one could organize a demonstration, write letters to political representatives and newspapers, meet with others who share one’s values, walk to work, or recycle. Each of these activities, however humble or ambitious, contributes to the determination of life and prevents one being the mere passive object of external causes—disempowered and separated from agency. Such attunement to one’s situation, however, requires above all engaging one’s imagination: the site of ethical understanding—of what empowers the body and what the body should avoid. In this vein, we might reimagine the falling man as a figure of the active resistance that Nietzsche’s innocence of becoming teaches. And we can understand his final act of agency as such, without casting him out of the sanctum of human virtue. With respect to this reinterpretation of innocence, as a sensitivity to the specific opportunities that life grants, I will leave the last word to one who, mourning the loss of his wife, finds it within himself to understand her final decision: “Whether she jumped, I don’t know. I hoped that she had succumbed to the smoke but it doesn’t seem likely. In some ways it might just be the last element of control, that everything around you is happening and you can’t stop it, but this is something you can do. 

  Jean Baudrillard, ‘93 (Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, p. 185-7)
  Jean Baudrillard, ‘93 (Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, p. 185-7)
  Deleuze and Guattari 1972, Anti-Oedipus, 330-39, Murray
  Faulkner, 8 Joanne Faulkner, ARC Research Fellow in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Spring/Autumn 2008, “The Innocence of Victimhood Versus the “Innocence of Becoming”: Nietzsche, 9/11, and the “Falling Man””, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Project MUSE, umn-rks

Tournament: CPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: X | Judge: X
Presume Neg
Skep Affirms

If determinism is true, moral claims can't exist. 

First, the universe is causally closed which rules out free will. Papineau: 

David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007.

In the middle ... those physical antecedents.

Second, either actions are pre-determined or they’re pure chance chance. Ayer: 

Ayer, A.J. “Freedom and Necessity.” In Free Will, ed. Watson, 1982.

But now we ... back to determinism.

Third, Bohmian QM prescribes an additional equation to determine all particle movements, rendering everything predetermined. This theory is 100 verifiable. Hoefer: 

Carl Hoefer ICREA Research Professor, Barcelona, SEP entry on causal determinism, 2010.

In 1952 David ... and references therein.

Fourth, its contradictory to say that an agent ought to do something they’re not in control of so the only ought that rational deliberation could allow is what happens. Streumer :

Streumer, Bart. Reasons and Impossibility, 2004

The argument from ... having such results.36

Thus, I contend that developing countries prioritize resource extraction right now. 

Analytic contention

Tournament: Direct Payments CP | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
CP Text: Aff actors will extract natural resources and distribute the revenue gained from selling them in the form of direct payments to citizens.

Its competitive --

I extract resources
AND
Net benefits

C. Solvency:
Taxation and incentives for accountability will reduce corruption. Moss :
After giving cash to its citizens, the state would treat it like normal income  and tax it accordingly—thus forcing the state to collect tax revenues and build tax  administration, rather than simply bypassing the taxpayers by relying solely on rents. Although this initially sounds like an unnecessary step (why give something away that you are going to  partly take back?), creating incentives for tax collection and administration is perhaps the most important potential benefit of this scheme (Devarajan, Le, and Raballand 2010). Because the  government must tax the oil revenue to recover some of it for public spending, the social  contract is strengthened rather than broken by natural resource revenues.5  Governments will  be forced to depend on the citizens for income, and consequently, citizens will have increased leverage and incentives to exert pressure on public policy. 2. Incentives for accountability. Cash transfers from natural resource revenues would give citizens strong incentives to carefully monitor the incoming revenue, management of the resources, and how it is distributed. Because citizens would now have a direct personal stake in the resource, cash transfers would likely create an intense constituency for responsible management and demands for accountability. It is one thing to stand by quietly as oil reserves are mismanaged when the oil rents are kept in an offshore bank account or are distributed as patronage to a select few. It is quite another thing when the mismanagement of those oil fields threatens a direct source of income. This was the primary purpose of the Alaska plan: to limits government waste by creating greater incentives for citizens to hold their governments  accountable (Fasano 2000). 

Even small cash transfers are ridiculously good at reducing poverty. Moss 2:
4. Good for the poor. Importantly, cash transfers would have immediate and significant  economic benefits for poor households—and ultimately for development. Even a small amount of extra regular income can make a huge difference to the world’s poorest by enabling increased investment in nutrition, health, education and even microenterprise (Case 2001; Yanez-Pagans 2008). Providing some income security, even if the payments are modest, would allow poor households to avoid negative coping mechanisms like asset stripping. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any public services that would deliver an immediate income benefit of, say 10, to the poor other than cash transfers.

The resource curse is not inevitable and resources can be enormously beneficial if managed properly. Greenstein
But resources do not automatically lead to poor outcomes. For instance, North America produces more oil than Africa, but it has the lowest resource rents as a share of GDP and has good governance ratings. Canada remains among the top ten world oil producers, according to the US Department of Energy, but has one of the least corrupt governments in the world, also according to the World Bank. Norway is one of the top ten exporters of crude oil in the world, while maintaining its stature as a perennial leader of the United Nations Human Development Index. The resource curse is avoidable. Africa could be prosperous if it practised good governance: transparency in its dealings with mining, oil and gas companies; stronger disclosure and anti-corruption rules; and economic policies that promote diversified economies and discourage dependence on resource rents. Transnational companies could be compelled to play a more important role, too, by enforcing and strengthening existing transparency rules.

  Moss 11 Todd Moss, senior fellow at Center for Global Development. "Oil to Cash: Fighting the Resource Curse through Cash Transfers." Center for Global Development Working Paper 237. January 2011. JY
  Greenstein and Remer 12 Terra Lawson-Remer, fellow at Council on Foreign Relations and Joshua Greenstein, econ PhD candidate at New School for Social Research. "Beating the Resource Curse- a global effort." Good Governance Africa. August 1, 2012.

Tournament: UPS | Round: 1 | Opponent: X | Judge: X
IDK if I'm going to read this, but just in case. 

A is the interpretation: Debaters must disclose their affirmative cases and plan texts with the first and last three words of each card and taglines, on the NDCA LD wiki at hsld.debatecoaches.org or put contact information on the wiki so debaters can contact them during the tournament to obtain citations for those positions. The disclosure must occur at least 30 minutes before the round.

Tournament: berk | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
First is the CP Text: Aff actors will implement the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative or EITI to increase corporate and government accountability in resource extractive industries. 

It competes
A) Through net benefits
B) It prioritizes resource extraction so its mutually exclusive since any perm is a severance from the parts of the advocacy that stop resource extraction.

The EITI brings transparency to resource extraction and solves the aff. Kelley
In general, three interconnecting factors can be addressed to encourage appropriate use of resource revenues: (1) transpar- ency, (2) accountable governance, and (3) economic and political policies which take proper account of horizontal and vertical divisions of power in the society.128 Even as the Rio Declaration has called for further transparency,129 new global initiatives have brought transparency in the extractive industries to the forefront of development. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative “EITI” “aims to strengthen governance by improving transparency and accountability in the extractives sector.”130 It does so by monitoring and reconciling company payments and government revenues at the level of individual countries; to be deemed “EITI compliant,” each country needs to implement EITI compliant regula- tions and establish a multi-stakeholder group of civil society, government, and private industry representatives to oversee implementation.131 Under ideal conditions, EITI would be a benefit for all parties involved: governments would benefit from transparency and an anti-corruption stance which would lead to improvements in tax revenue and “enhanced trust and stability in a volatile sector;” companies would benefit from a level playing field where all companies must disclose the same information; civil society benefits from receiving reliable information from the government and companies; and the energy sector would see increased stability which encourages long-term investment.132 While it is empirically inconclusive whether EITI enhances a country’s development potential, there are many positive signs which have encouraged countries to begin the compliance process.133 To date, twenty-one African nations have completed or are in the process of obtaining EITI compliance status.134 One recent case study suggests that, even in the most pervasively corrupt countries, EITI initiatives can shed light on the issues of governance and accountability, even if it offers no certain answers.135 Chinese companies working in an EITI compliant country are following the reporting framework established by that country and, to date, Chinese companies have reported in Gabon, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Nigeria.136 China has expressed its support for the EITI “in several international fora,” including the UN General Assembly and the G20.137 China could benefit from further support of EITI as it would provide more political stability when challenging operational environments and would allow Chinese companies to compete at an equal level with Western companies.138 Because EITI “affirms that management of natural resource wealth for the benefit of a country’s citizens is in the domain of sovereign governments to be exercised in the interest of their national development,” China need not worry about moving from its “non-interference” foreign policy.139 Instead, since EITI is implemented and monitored domestically, Chinese companies are merely complying with domestic law and that law offers benefits for compliance.140 Transparency, however, will not solve the problem entirely. A government must be accountable to its citizen if disclosure of potential corruption is to have any effect.141 Effective anti- corruption initiatives are based upon “mass mobilization” and hold leaders politically accountable for the misuse of state funds.142 Of course, a multi-party democracy is the most obvi- ous form of accountable governance.143 However, even in a dictatorship, mass protest to the misuse of resources may impose pressure to reduce corruption. In order to secure accountability, any development ini- tiative must take into account a country’s horizontal and vertical power relationships.144 This is especially true in multi- ethnic and divided societies; because trust is a powerful factor in governance and corruption, development programs must work to establish institutional and economic ties between horizontally fractured power structures.145

Kelley, Jeremy. "China in Africa: Curing the Resource Curse with Infrastructure and Modernization." Sustainable Development Law and Policy 12, no. 3 (2012): 35-41, 57-60.

Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
A. Interpetation: Aff must specify an enforcement mechanism to enforce their proposed plan or advocacy and deter actors from violating their proposed plan or advocacy in their plan or advocacy text. Implementation processes are intrinsic to policy decision and analysis. Elmore  

The emergence of implementation as a subject for policy analysis coincides closely with the discovery by policy analysts that decisions are not self- executing. Analysis of policy choices matters very little if the mechanism for implementing those choices is poorly understood. In answering the question, "What percentage of the work of achieving a desired governmental action is done when the preferred analytic alternative has been identified?" Allison estimated that, in the normal case, it was about 10 percent, leaving the remaining 90 percent in the realm of implementation

Additionally its key to environmental policies since actors have to pay for when they violate environmental legislation. Marshall 

Environmental policies may be are implemented by schemes designed either to reduce pollution from current levels by directly regulating the amount discharged, or to shift the cost of pollution from society to the polluter himself by requiring him to pay for the environmental damage that he causes. The most desirable systems will tend to accomplish both goals. 

B. Violation
C. Standards

1. Ground
   2. Real World applicability

  Elmore 80?Richard F. Elmore (prof. of political science at UWashington) Political Science Quarterly; 1980; p. 605

  Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review Volume 4 | Issue 2 Article 6 1-1-1975 Environmental Protection and the Role of the Civil Money Penalty: Some Practical and Legal Considerations David W. Marshall

Tournament: anything jan feb | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I value morality since should means ought which implies a moral obligation (Dictionary.com) Ethical disagreement plagues objectivist systems of morality since there’s no way to resolve differences.  McGrath , 

In some ways, moral disagreement seems to parallels the diversity of opinion as color to which shade of green is unique green. Unique green is that shade of green that is neither bluish nor yellowish. When asked to select the a particular shade shade which is unique green, different subjects with normal color vision will select different shades. As in the case of our controversial moral views, opinion about which shade is unique green not only fails to be unanimous, but is substantially divided. Perhaps if there were relatively widespread agreement as to which shade is unique green, then the dissenting judgments of a few who possessed otherwise normal color vision could be dismissed. But the fact that the actual division of opinion is substantial suggests that human beings are not reliable detectors of the relevant property. That relevantly similar creatures—since creatures with the same type of visual system—arrive at different verdicts when similarly situated seems to show that that kind of creature is simply not well equipped to detect the presence or absence of the property in question. That human beings are not, as a species, reliable detectors of unique green seems to tell against crediting any individual with knowledge that a certain shade is unique green, particularly if the individual knows of this general lack of reliability and has no good reason to think that he is exceptional in this respect. Note that although questions about which shade of green is unique green are hard questions for human beings, such questions do not present themselves to us as difficult ones. In fact, most subjects are quite confident of their initial judgments; each person’s view strikes her as obviously correct. This seems That’s parallel to the morality case: in the moral case too, many find that their own views about controversial moral questions strike them as obviously correct. 

The only way to derive an objective “ought” is to consider the agent’s function. Macintyre 

.A.N. Prior’s counter-example to this illustrates its breakdown adequately; from the premise ‘He is a sea captain’; the conclusion may be validly inferred that ‘He ought to do whatever a sea-captain ought to do’. This counter-example not only shows that there is no general principle of the type alleged; but it itself shows what is at least a grammatical truth—an ‘is’ premise can on occasion entail an ‘ought’ conclusion.  From such factual premises as ‘This watch is grossly inaccurate and irregular in time-keeping’ and ‘This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably’, the evaluative conclusion validly follows that ‘This is a bad watch’. From such factual premises as ‘He gets a better yield for this crop per acre than any farmer in the district’, ‘He has the most effective programme of soil renewal yet known’ and ‘His dairy herd wins all the first prizes at the agricultural shows’, the evaluative conclusion validly follows that ‘He is a good farmer’. Both of these arguments are valid because of the special character of the concepts of a watch and of a farmer. Such concepts are functional concepts; that is to say, we define both ‘watch’ and ‘farmer’ in terms of purpose of function which a watch or a farmer are characteristically expected to serve. It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer independently of that of a good farmer; and that the criterion of something’s being a watch and the criterion of something’s being a good watch.

Thus, the standard is consistency with the function of developing countries

Util impacts don't link -- Extinction might be bad, but developing countries are solely concerned with developing and are not responsible for other concerns.

Prefer the standard since

1. Institutions aren’t inherent in the universe and don’t have a natural value but rather the functions we give them.  Thus we can only evaluate institutions on the basis of function since its what they were made for.
   2. Institutions are evaluated based on how effective they are; the only reason why we subscribe to a government is because it is easier for a collective body to make decisions. Mactinyre says effectiveness is judged relative to purpose, i.e. since a watch is supposed to tell time, a bad watch doesn’t. 

I contend that resource extraction is most consistent with a developing country’s function. Walter 13   

The discussion above of the factors underlying environmental policy raises a number of points with respect to the developing countries. First, it is reasonable to infer that the demand for environmental quality is income-sensitive. As real income per capita rises, so does the propensity to allocate scarce resources to reducing environmental damage (4). If this is correct, it implies that high-income countries will tend to have more rigorous environmental standards than poor countries. The latter, it is argued, have a variety of social priorities that take precedence-housing, transportation and communication facilities, health and nutrition, employment and industrialization, etc. Pollution control uses up productive resources which could be applied to greater social  advantage in one or more of these areas. Having attained advanced levels of performance in each of these areas, in contrast, the industrialized countries are in a much better position to support a major commitment to pollution control, and its social benefits are valued relatively more highly. Such differences in social priorities have been noted periodically by developing country spokesmen over the past decade. For example, the 1972United Nations Conference on the Human Environment heard a number of calls from developing countries like Brazil for the "privilege" of reaching pollution levels existing in the advanced countries, under the presumption that this would carry with it equally advanced levels of industrial development(5). The definition of "environment “that has been adopted by the United Nations Environmental Program(UNEP) reflects these same views. It is not limited to visual despoliation and environmental damage caused by air and water pollution and solid wastes, as it tends to be in the industrial countries. Rather, it is a much broader view which encompasses urban health and sanitation levels, housing, and similar elements which come much closer to the social priorities in developing countries. Again, it reflects the lower relative weight accorded conventional environmental problems by industrial-country definitions (6). Many developing countries feel they have little need to repair past environmental damage, concentrating instead on less drastic and expensive ways of preventing future damage. It is also argued that production in developing countries tends to be far less pollution-intensive-both for final products and for raw materials and intermediates- in part due to a greater degree of labor intensity. Another argument is that pollution control represents an inherently capital-intensive activity. Hence, strict environmental policies in the developing countries would absorb great amounts of precisely that factor of production in most scarce supply, and its costs would therefore be much higher, in relative terms, than in developed countries where capitalist relatively abundant and  cheap.

Sarah McGrath, Moral Disagreement and Moral Expertise,

Macintyre 81 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981

Environmental Policies in Developing Countries¶ Author(s): Ingo Walter and Judith L. Ugelow¶ Source: Ambio, Vol. 8, No. 2/3, Technology, Development and Environmental Impact (1979),¶ pp. 102-109¶ Published by: Springer on behalf of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences¶ Stable URL:

Tournament: stanford and berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
"My presence is a present" -- Yeezus

The Aff’s attempts at equality and justice gives indigenous populations the gift of inclusion and equality via environmental protection but this is really just a clever attempt at continuing discrimination and perpetuating power structures via narcissistic hegemony. Arrigo 1 

The impediments to establishing democratic justice in contemporary American society have caused a national paralysis; one that has recklessly spawned an aporetic1 existence for minorities. The entrenched ideological complexities afflicting under- and nonrepresented groups (e.g., poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, crime) at the hands of political, legal, cultural, and economic power elites have produced counterfeit, perhaps even fraudulent, efforts at reform: Discrimination and inequality in opportunity prevail (e.g., Lynch and Patterson, 1996). The misguided and futile initiatives of the state, in pursuit of transcending this public affairs crisis, have fostered a reification, that is, a reinforcement of divisiveness. This time, however, minority groups compete with one another for recognition, affirmation, and identity in the national collective psyche (Rosenfeld, 1993). What ensues by way of state effort, though, is a contemporaneous sense of equality for all and a near imperceptible endorsement of inequality; a silent conviction that the majority still retains power. The “gift” of equality, procured through state legislative enactments as an emblem of democratic justice, embodies true (legitimated) power that remains nervously secure in the hands of the majority. The ostensible empowerment of minority groups is a facade; it is the ruse of the majority gift. What exists, in fact, is a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981, 1983) of equality (and by extension, democratic justice): a pseudo-sign image (a hypertext or simulation) of real sociopolitical progress. For the future relationship between equality and the social to more fully embrace minority sensibilities, calculated legal reform efforts in the name of equality must be displaced and the rule and authority of the status quo must be decentered. Imaginable, calculable equality is self-limiting and self-referential. Ultimately, it is always (at least) one step removed from true equality and, therefore, true justice. The ruse of the majority gift currently operates under the assumption of a presumed empowerment, which it confers on minority populations. Yet, the presented power is itself circumscribed by the stifling horizons of majority rule with their effects. Thus, the gift can only be construed as falsely eudemonic: An avaricious, although insatiable, pursuit of narcissistic legitimacy supporting majority directives. The commission (bestowal) of power to minority groups or citizens through prevailing state reformatory efforts underscores a polemic with implications for public affairs and civic life. We contend that the avenir (i.e., the “to come”) of equality as an (in)calculable, (un)recognizable destination in search of democratic justice is needed. However, we argue that this displacement of equality is unattainable if prevailing juridico-ethicopolitical conditions (and societal consciousness pertaining to them) remain fixed, stagnant, and immutable. In this article, we will demonstrate how the gift of the majority is problematic, producing, as it must, a narcissistic hegemony, that is, a sustained empowering of the privileged, a constant relegitimation of the powerful.

Their horrifying accounts of the suffering indigenous populations undergo link explicitly. By trying to evoke a compassionate response the 1AC tries to get us to participate in its gift-giving regime in which he’s the benevolent carer. But The 1AC is not genuine caring. Rather its a fear and discomfort of feeling the oppressed’s conditions for ourselves. This reaffirms their narcissism. Arrigo 2 

The tension Nietzsche creates around the topic of pity or, alternately, assistance and altruism, is felt strongly in Daybreak, Zarathustra, as well as in his Genealogy of Morals.27 Indeed, Nietzsche advances several important arguments that challenge the logic of altruism; that is, of giving in reaction to pity.28 The first and most frequently occurring of these objections to pity recognizes the psychic ascription of human weakness to the one who receives pity. “To offer pity,” writes Nietzsche, “is as good as to offer contempt . . . ”29 Offering pity, then, is an acknowledgment of the insufficiency or inadequacy of those who receive such “charitable” sentiments. The danger lies in the possibility that “the pupil whose nose is too often wiped will not wipe her own nose, the child whose parents’ love is too smothering will not become a mature adult . . . ”30 When we pity or intervene on behalf of others, a Nietzschean assessment would require that we consider whether there are unconscious restrictions on the quality of our assistance. Indeed, following Nietzsche’s position on pity, we might ask ourselves whether our altruistic endeavors are affected (motivated) by a reluctance to undermine the self-sufficiency of the recipient of our gift or not? Another tension that Nietzsche reveals concerning pity is more akin to that developed by Hobbes. In this argument, Nietzsche identifies the egoistic nature of pity and, in so doing, repudiates the possibility of altruistic pity. Nietzsche provides an ethical or moral objection to altruistic assistance, one premised on the recognition that no act is free from self-interest or self-concern. As he describes it: Let us reflect seriously upon this question: why do we leap after someone who has fallen into the water in front of us, even though we feel no kind of affection for him? Out of pity: at that moment we are thinking only of the other person – thus says thoughtlessness . . . The truth is: in the feeling of pity – I mean that which is usually and misleadingly called pity – we are, to be sure, not consciously thinking of ourselves but are doing so very strongly unconsciously . . . an accident which happens to another offends us: it would make us aware of our impotence . . . Or an accident and suffering incurred by another constitutes a signpost to some danger to us . . . (emphasis added)31 Nietzsche makes two important points here: (1) that an act engaged out of pity is motivated by our contemplation of similar danger to ourselves rather than from pure compassion; and (2) that this and other egoistic concerns motivate largely from the level of the unconscious or, at least, from beneath or beyond the motives we are capable of experiencing on a conscious level. When we observe such suffering, we are reminded of the fragility of the human condition. To “repel” this kind of pain – this realization – we compensate through an act of pity, which “may contain a subtle self-defence;”32 namely, an affirmation of our own well-being, of the strength of our own capacity in light of the person we assist. Nietzsche indicates that we avoid sights of human suffering unless, we can “present ourselves as the more powerful and as a helper . . . if we want to feel how fortunate we are in contrast.”

Environmental protection is a lie that that only exacerbates the minority’s conditions.  Lazarus 

For example, with regard to the benefits of environmental protection, the 1 natural environments that are selected for protection may be less accessible, or otherwise less important, to minorities. This may be the result of priorities expressly established by statute, or by agency regulations or enforcement agenda. 2 Inequities in the ultimate distribution of environmental protection benefits may also result, paradoxically, from environmental improvement itself. 3 A cleaner physical environment may increase property values to such an extent that members of a racial minority with fewer economic resources so minorities can no longer afford to live in that community.3° Indeed, the exclusionary impact of environmental protection can be more than just an incidental effect; it can be the raison d'etre, with environmental quality acting as a socially acceptable facade for attitudes that cannot be broadcast.31 Minorities may at the same time incur a share of the burdens of environmental protection that are disproportionate to those benefits that they receive. 4 Higher product and service prices may be regressive, as may some taxes depending on their form.32 Although whites are poorer in greater absolute numbers than nonwhites, the latter group is disproportionately poorer in terms of population percentages. 5 Minorities may also more likely be the victims of reduced or eliminated job opportunities. Similarly, they may be less likely to enjoy the economic, educational, or personal positions necessary to exploit the new job opportunities  that environmental protection creates.3s Finally, 6 minorities may receive an unfair share of the environmental risks that are redistributed by environmental protection. 7 Elimination of the risks in one location may result in the creation or increase of risks in another location where the exposure to minorities is greater.

That makes the 1AC’s defiant call for change a tranquilizer, ensuring that the indigenous will never rise against them, entrapping them in their cycle of supposed altruism. The giver dominates the receiver resulting in endless violence as the receiver tries to perpetually repay the giver. Arrigo 3

To ground these observations about gift sending and receiving, the analo¬gous example of a loan may be helpful. Let us suppose that we have $100.00 and that you have $1.00. If we were to give you some of our money (less than $49 so as not to produce pecuniary equality), we would be subtlely engaged in a number of things. First, following Derrida (1997), we would be showing off our power (money) by exploiting the fact that we have so much more money than you do that we can give some away and remain in good fiscal standing. Second, And we would be expecting something in return—maybe not immediately, but eventually. This return could take several forms. Although we may not expect financial reciprocation, it would be enough knowing that you know that we helped have given currency to you. Thus, you are now indebted to us and forever grateful, realizing our good deed: our gift. Reciprocation on your part is impossible. Even if one day you are able to return our monetary favor twofold, we will always know that it was us who we first hosted you; extended to and entrusted in you an opportunity given your time of need. As the initiators of such a charity, we are always in a position of power, and you are always indebted to us. This is where the notion of egoism or conceit assumes a hegemonic role. By giving to you, a supposed act of gen¬erosity in the name of furthering your cause, we have not empowered you. Rather, we have empowered ourselves. We have less than subtlely let you know that we have more than you. We have so much more, in fact, that we can afford to give you some. Our giving becomes, not an act of beneficence, but a show of power, that is, narcissistic hegemony.

Arrigo, Bruce and Williams, Christopher (California School of Professional Psychology), 2000 “The (Im) Possibility of Democratic Justice and the "Gift" of the Majority.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice.
http://ccj.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/16/3/321

Arrigo, Bruce and Williams, Christopher (California School of Professional Psychology), 2000 “PHILOSOPHY OF THE GIFT AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADVOCACY: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON FORENSIC MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTION.” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 2000. Accessed July 7, 2009. http://www.springerlink.com/content/v083155n8l118j06/fulltext.pdf

Richard J. Lazarus “Pursuing "Environmental Justice": The Distributional Effects of Environmental Protection” Georgetown Law.

Tournament: ups | Round: 5 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
I know the movies were great, but the real things going to suck. An ice age is coming and WILL cause EXTINCTION. Chapman
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.¶ What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.¶ Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.¶ All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.¶ There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.¶ It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.¶ This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.¶ It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.¶ The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.¶ Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.¶ That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.¶ It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.¶ There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.¶ Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.¶ There is also another possibility, remote but much more serious. The Greenland and Antarctic ice cores and other evidence show that for the past several million years, severe glaciation has almost always afflicted our planet.¶ The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years.¶ The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.¶ The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.¶ By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.¶ Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.¶
Emissions solve. Science Daily
Future ice ages may be delayed by up to half a million years by our burning of fossil fuels. That is the implication of recent work by Dr Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.¶ Arguably, this work demonstrates the most far-reaching disruption of long-term planetary processes yet suggested for human activity.¶ Dr Tyrrell's team used a mathematical model to study what would happen to marine chemistry in a world with ever-increasing supplies of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.¶ The world's oceans are absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere but in doing so they are becoming more acidic. This in turn is dissolving the calcium carbonate in the shells produced by surface-dwelling marine organisms, adding even more carbon to the oceans. The outcome is elevated carbon dioxide for far longer than previously assumed.¶ Computer modelling in 2004 by a then oceanography undergraduate student at the University, Stephanie Castle, first interested Dr Tyrrell and colleague Professor John Shepherd in the problem. They subsequently developed a theoretical analysis to validate the plausibility of the phenomenon.¶ The work, which is part-funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, confirms earlier ideas of David Archer of the University of Chicago, who first estimated the impact rising CO2 levels would have on the timing of the next ice age.¶ Dr Tyrrell said: 'Our research shows why atmospheric CO2 will not return to pre-industrial levels after we stop burning fossil fuels. It shows that it if we use up all known fossil fuels it doesn't matter at what rate we burn them. The result would be the same if we burned them at present rates or at more moderate rates; we would still get the same eventual ice-age-prevention result.'¶ Ice ages occur around every 100,000 years as the pattern of Earth's orbit alters over time. Changes in the way the sun strikes the Earth allows for the growth of ice caps, plunging the Earth into an ice age. But it is not only variations in received sunlight that determine the descent into an ice age; levels of atmospheric CO2 are also important.¶ Humanity has to date burnt about 300 Gt C of fossil fuels. This work suggests that even if only 1000 Gt C (gigatonnes of carbon) are eventually burnt (out of total reserves of about 4000 Gt C) then it is likely that the next ice age will be skipped. Burning all recoverable fossil fuels could lead to avoidance of the next five ice ages.

The coming Ice Age outweighs any impacts. Singer
The climate event that deserves real concern is the next Big Ice Age. That is inevitably approaching, though it may still be thousands of years away. When it comes, temperatures may plummet 15 degrees Celsius, with the high latitudes getting up to 40 degrees colder. Humanity and food production will be forced closer to the equator, as huge ice sheets expand in Canada. Scandinavia. Russia, and Argentina. Even Ohio and Indiana may gradually be encased in mile-thick ice, while California and the Great Plains could suffer century-long drought. Keeping warm will become the critical issue, both night and day. Getting enough food for eight or nine billion people from the relatively small amount of arable land left unfrozen will be a potentially desperate effort. The broad, fertile plains of Alberta and the Ukraine will become sub-Arctic wastes. Wildlife species will be extremely challenged, even though they've survived such cold before-because this time there will be more humans competing for the ice-free land. That's when human knowledge and high-tech farming will be truly needed. In contrast, none of the scary scenarios posited by today's global warming advocates took place during the Earth's past warm periods     

  Chapman, geophysicist and astronautical engineer, ‘8  (Phil, April 23th 2008, The Australian, “Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh.”
  Science Daily, ‘7 (Aug. 30, 2007, ScienceDaily.com, “Next Ice Age Delayed By Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels”, accessed 7/12/2013, JA)
  Singer, distinguished research professor at George Mason and Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, ‘7 (Fred, “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years”, Page 13, JA)

Tournament: ups | Round: 6 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
A Interpretation: the Aff must only defend the prioritization of environmental protection over resource extraction
B Violation—Buen Vivir might take nature as its central point, but it also requires a bunch of policies that are above and beyond prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction. Walsh 2
Buen Vivir is based according to Eduardo Gudynas (2009) in the generation of new equilibriums including quality of life, democratization of the State, and attention to biocentric concerns. The grounds for this new model are evidenced in the triangular relationship that the Constitution constructs among the rights of nature, buen vivir, and what is referred to as the ‘regimen of development’. As the Political Charter states: ‘Nature or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and realized, has the right to the integral respect of its existence and the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes’ (Art.71). It also has the right to reparation or restoration (Art.72). Buen vivir, in addition to being the transversal axis, has its own ‘regimen’ with more than 75 articles that include water and food, nature, education, health, labour and social security, housing, culture, social communication, science, technology, ancestral knowledge, biodiversity, ecological systems, alternative energy, and individual and collective rights of historically unprotected groups, among other areas. What particularly stands out here is the social, economic, and epistemic significance given to buen vivir and the integral relation it constructs among beings, knowledge, and nature. Nature is broadly understood as the constitutive conditions and practices – sociocultural, territorial, spiritual, ancestral, ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic – of life itself. The third and final point of the triangle is the ‘Regimen of Development’, described in the Constitution as:The organized, sustainable and dynamic ensemble of economic, political, socio-cultural, and environmental systems that guarantee the realization of buen vivir, or sumak kawsay’. …Buen vivir requires that persons, indigenous nationalities and peoples, effectively enjoy their rights and exercise responsibilities in the frame of interculturality, respect for diversities, and harmonic co-existence with nature. (Art.275) Seven objectives organize this Regimen: improvement in the quality of life; a just, democratic, productive and solidarity-based economic system with equal distribution of development benefits and dignified and stable work; the promotion of participation and social control including equitable representation of diverse identities in all areas of public power; the recuperation and conservation of nature and the maintenance of a sane and sustainable environment guaranteeing equal access; the guarantee of national sovereignty and Latin American integration; the promotion of an equitable, balanced, and articulated territorial ordering; and the protection and promotion of cultural diversity, social memory, and cultural patrimony. The vision put forth in this Charter with regard to development is that of a new society based in equality, fraternity, solidarity, complementarity, equal access, participation, social control and responsibility. Its projection is towards a new social, political, economic, and nature-based mode of development that takes distance from capitalism and requires a major re-orienting from within. The design for the realization and application of this project is detailed in the new National Plan of Development referred to also as the National Plan for el Buen Vivir 2009–2013 developed by the National Secretariat of Planning and Development (SENPLADES) and recently approved in November 2009 by President Rafael Correa. According to the director of SENPLADES, this Plan is ‘the first step in constructing a National Descentralized System of Participatory Planning that has as its goal the decentralization and deconcentration of power and the construction of the Plurinational and Intercultural State’.6 Here Buen Vivir is described as:A wager for change from the demands for equality and social justice; from the recognition, validation, and dialogue of peoples and their cultures, knowledges, and modes of life. Buen vivirseeks to achieve the satisfaction of necessities, the attainment of the quality of life and a dignified death, to love and be loved, the healthy flourishing of all, in peace and harmony with nature and the indefinite prolongation of human cultures. … It recognizes the need for free time for contemplation and emancipation, and that real liberties, opportunities, capacities, and potentialities of individuals grow and flourish in the manner that they permit a simultaneous achievement of that which society, territories, diverse collective identities and each one –seen as both an individual and UNIVERSAL HUMAN BEING – value as the objective of a desirable life. It obliges us to reconstruct the public in order to recognize, understand, and value one another – as diverse but equals – with the goal of making possible reciprocity and mutual recognition, and with this, the self-realization and construction of a social and shared future.7

These are social democratic policies that have nothing to do with environmental protection

C is Predictable and Equitable Ground -- Allowing him to be extra topical means that he can moot all topical prep just by saying that he doesn't defend links to those disads. My interp is the only way to have any ground at all and then divide that ground equally since all ground in debate comes from the resolution which is the basis for all pre-round prep. That controls the internal link into education since since ground is the only way we ge tot make arguments and discuss issues and its key to fairness since equal ground creates equal access to the ballot. 

Catherine Walsh 10,Senior Professor and Director of the Doctoral Programme in Latin American Cultural Studies, Universidad Andina Simon Boliva, "Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional Arrangements and (de)colonial entanglements), Development, 2010, 53 (1).

Tournament: lol | Round: 1 | Opponent: no | Judge: clue
A. Interpretation: The affirmative must defend an actor associated with the government of a developing country to carry out environmental protection. To clarify this means they may not fiat their advocacy through an organization.
B. Violation: Their actor is an organization
C. Standards 

1. Text:  
   2. Ground:
   3. Reciprocity:

D. 

Jurisdiction
Education
Fairness

Tournament: all of em | Round: 1 | Opponent: everyone | Judge: anyone
This wiki was probably the single greatest help to me throughout my high school career, so I'm trying to disclose everything I've ever read on Jan Feb full text. I guess it might help someone else.

Anyways, obviously I might forget something, so in case I do, let me know and I'll disclose whatever I forgot too.

Tournament: berkeley | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
A: Interpretation: If the affirmative defines the role of the ballot/judge as stopping neoliberalism/capitalism/oppression, then they must also specify two or more state actors and advocate for a specific plan of action fiatted through those federal actors, including the implementation method and specific kinds of environmental protection and resource extraction. 

B: Violation: they don't

C: Net Benefits

First is decision-making, a limited and specific discussion is key to making actual change in the debate space and fosters argumentative innovation. Steinberg

(David L. and Austin J., Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making p. 45)

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 treatv 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.

That controls the internal link into education since it dictates what we learn about, which in turn is another internal link into their role of the ballot arguments. Limiting the discussion to a specific governmental policy means that we can explore it more in depth and have a productive discussion that will spill over into the real world and create REAL change. 

Second is dialogue – debate is communication within a game space – unbridled affirmation outside that space destroys dialogue

Hanghoj
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf Thorkild Hanghøj, Copenhagen, 2008  Since this PhD project began in 2004, the present author has been affiliated with DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials), which is located at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Research visits have taken place at the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab Denmark at the School of Education, University of Aarhus, where I currently work as an assistant professor. 

Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of issues to be debated, educational goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday classroom instruction as debate scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine, interact and communicate within a domain-specific game space. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between “gaming” and “teaching” that tends to dominate discussions of educational games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and games represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of organisation (Gee, 2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these different domains and their interrelated knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a central assumption in Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all forms of communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981). A centripetal force is the drives to impose one version of the truth, while a centrifugal force involves a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and centrifugal forces: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear” (Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going negotiation of “truths” between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the dialogical space of debate games also embodies centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election scenario of The Power Game involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the rules and outcomes of the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure. Similarly, the open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and create virtually endless possibilities for researching, preparing, presenting, debating and evaluating a variety of key political issues. Consequently, the actual process of enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation between these centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students’ game activities. In this way, the enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student presentations) and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if there is too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game facilitation requires a balance between focusing too narrowly on the rules or “facts” of a game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too broadly on the contingent possibilities and interpretations of the game scenario (centrifugal orientation). For Bakhtin, the duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a dynamic between “monological” and “dialogical” forms of discourse. Bakhtin illustrates this point with the monological discourse of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns anything new from the students, despite Socrates’ ideological claims to the contrary (Bakhtin, 1984a). Thus, discourse becomes monologised when “someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error”, where “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated” by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin, 1984a: 81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that are able to expand upon students’ existing knowledge and collaborative construction of “truths” (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtin’s term “dialogic” is both a descriptive term (all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other utterances as parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as dialogue is an ideal to be worked for against the forces of “monologism” (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this project, I am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the same time, I agree with Wegerif that “one of the goals of education, perhaps the most important goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself” (Wegerif, 2006: 61). 

Dialogue is critical to affirming any value—shutting down deliberation devolves into totalitarianism and reinscribes oppression making dialogue an independent voter

Morson 4
http://www.flt.uae.ac.ma/elhirech/baktine/0521831059.pdf#page=331
Northwestern Professor,  Prof. Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary theory (especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary genres (especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers -- Chekhov, Gogol, and, above all, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to philosophy.

Bakhtin viewed the whole process of “ideological” (in the sense of ideas and values, however unsystematic) development as an endless dialogue. As teachers, we find it difficult to avoid a voice of authority, however much we may think of ours as the rebel’s voice, because our rebelliousness against society at large speaks in the authoritative voice of our subculture.We speak the language and thoughts of academic educators, even when we imagine we are speaking in no jargon at all, and that jargon, inaudible to us, sounds with all the overtones of authority to our students. We are so prone to think of ourselves as fighting oppression that it takes some work to realize that we ourselves may be felt as oppressive and overbearing, and that our own voice may provoke the same reactions that we feel when we hear an authoritative voice with which we disagree. So it is often helpful to think back on the great authoritative oppressors and reconstruct their self- helpful, but often painful. I remember, many years ago, when, as a recent student rebel and activist, I taught a course on “The Theme of the Rebel” and discovered, to my considerable chagrin, that many of the great rebels of history were the very same people as the great oppressors. There is a famous exchange between Erasmus and Luther, who hoped to bring the great Dutch humanist over to the Reformation, but Erasmus kept asking Luther how he could be so certain of so many doctrinal points. We must accept a few things to be Christians at all, Erasmus wrote, but surely beyond that there must be room for us highly fallible beings to disagree. Luther would have none of such tentativeness. He knew, he was sure. The Protestant rebels were, for a while, far more intolerant than their orthodox opponents. Often enough, the oppressors are the ones who present themselves and really think of themselves as liberators. Certainty that one knows the root cause of evil: isn’t that itself often the root cause? We know from Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s letters denouncing Prince Kurbsky, a general who escaped to Poland, that Ivan saw himself as someone who had been oppressed by noblemen as a child and pictured himself as the great rebel against traditional authority when he killed masses of people or destroyed whole towns. There is something in the nature of maximal rebellion against authority that produces ever greater intolerance, unless one is very careful. For the skills of fighting or refuting an oppressive power are not those of openness, self-skepticism, or real dialogue. In preparing for my course, I remember my dismay at reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf and discovering that his self-consciousness was precisely that of the rebel speaking in the name of oppressed Germans, and that much of his amazing appeal – otherwise so inexplicable – was to the German sense that they were rebelling victims. In our time, the Serbian Communist and nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic exploited much the same appeal. Bakhtin surely knew that Communist totalitarianism, the Gulag, and the unprecedented censorship were constructed by rebels who had come to power. His favorite writer, Dostoevsky, used to emphasize that the worst oppression comes from those who, with the rebellious psychology of “the insulted and humiliated,” have seized power – unless they have somehow cultivated the value of dialogue, as Lenin surely had not, but which Eva, in the essay by Knoeller about teaching The Autobiography of Malcolm X, surely had. Rebels often make the worst tyrants because their word, the voice they hear in their consciousness, has borrowed something crucial from the authoritative word it opposed, and perhaps exaggerated it: the aura of righteous authority. If one’s ideological becoming is understood as a struggle in which one has at last achieved the truth, one is likely to want to impose that truth with maximal authority; and rebels of the next generation may proceed in much the same way, in an ongoing spiral of intolerance.

That controls the internal link into their role of the ballot arguments, since dialogue and deliberation must be constrained by the rules of the game to have any impact on the outside world. Otherwise we deceive ourselves into thinking that we stop oppression but in reality only perpetuate it. 

D is the impact

Vote Neg to affirm the role of the ballot, they try to create an actual change but in doing so they turn themselves.

Tournament: ups | Round: 8 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The 1AC’s call for environmental protection is undermined by the weakness of our internal psychology. Eco-anxiety makes extinction inevitable and turns the environment. Psychoanalysis is a prior question to the ecopolitics of the aff. Dodds  
Why psychoanalysis? On the face of it, it seems frankly irrelevant. Surely it is the basic sciences of geology, ecology, biology, and climatology that we need, combined with various hi-tech engineering? Yes and no. The science informing us of the risks and possible technical solutions has run far ahead of our psychological state. We are not yet at the point emotionally of being able to clearly grasp the threat, and act accordingly. We need to ask why this issue, despite its current prominence, fails to ignite people's motivation for the major changes science tells us is necessary. This concerns not only the 'public' but the academy and the psychoanalytic community. In spite of the fact that Harold Searles was already writing in 1960 that psychoanalysts need to acknowledge the psychological importance of the non-human environment, until very recently his colleagues have almost entirely ignored him. In this section we explore some of the theories with which we may be able to construct a psychoanalysis of ecology. Fuller elaboration will involve incorporating approaches from the sciences of complexity and ecology, and Deleuze and Guattari's 'geophilosophy' or 'ecosophy', which itself emerged in critical dialogue with psychoanalysis and complexity theory. However, we first need to explore the ecological potential within psychoanalysis itself, as without the latter's methods and theories for unmasking hidden motivations and phantasies, this investigation will not be able to proceed. Renee Lertzman (2008), one of the first psychoanalytically informed social scientists to engage with the ecological crisis, describes a common surreal aspect of our everyday responses to 'eco-anxiety', the experience of flipping through a newspaper and being suddenly confronted with: the stop-dead-in-your-tracks, bone-chilling kind of ecological travesties taking place around our planet today ... declining honey bees, melting glaciers, plastics in the sea, or the rate of coal plants being built in China each second. But how many of us actually do stop dead in our tracks? Have we become numb? ... if so, how can we become more awake and engaged to what is happening? Environmental campaigners have become increasingly frustrated and pessimistic. Even as their messages spread further and further, and as scientists unite around their core concerns, there is an alarming gap between increasingly firm evidence and public response. The fact that oil companies donate millions to climate 'sceptic' groups doesn't help (Vidal 2010). Nor does the fact that eight European companies which are together responsible for 5-10 per cent of the emissions covered in the EU emissions trading system (Bayet, BASF, BP, GDF Suez, ArcelorMittal, Lafarge, E.ON, and Solvay) gave $306,100 to senatorial candidates in the 2010 United States midterm elections who either outright deny climate change ($107,200) or pledge they will block all climate change legislation ($240,200), with the most flagrant deniers getting the most funds (Goldenberg 2010; Climate Action Network 2010). These are the same companies that campaign against EU targets of 30 per cent reductions in emissions using current inaction in the United States as a justification, while claiming their official policy is that climate change is a major threat and they are committed to doing all they can to help in the common cause of dealing with the danger (for the full report see Climate Action Network 2010). Recent opinion polls show climate scepticism is on the rise in the UK as well. In February 2010 a BBC-commissioned poll by Populus (BBC 2010a, 2010b) of 1,001 adults found that 25 per cent didn't think global warming was happening, a rise of 8 per cent since a similar poll in November 2009. Belief that climate change was real fell from 83 per cent to 75 per cent, while only 26 per cent believed climate change was established as largely man-made compared with 41 per cent in November. A third of those agreeing climate change was real felt consequences had been exaggerated (up from a fifth) while the number of those who felt risks had been understated fell from 38 per cent to 25 per cent (see Figure 3). According to Populus director M. Simmonds, 'it is very unusual ... to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period ... The British public are sceptical about man's contribution to climate change and becoming more so' (BBC 2010a). Most remarkable here is the discrepancy between public and expert opinion. According to the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Robert Watson: 'Action is urgently needed ... We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low-carbon economy.' Why this shift? Whilst the poll took place with the background of heavy snow and blizzards in the UK, always a convenient backdrop to climate sceptic jokes, the BBC (2010a) article focused on a high-profile story concerning stolen emails alleging scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia (UEA). While this was a very serious accusation, no mainstream scientific body seriously imagines it changes in any real way the overall science, and yet this is not how the public perceived it. Subsequently, the UK Parliament's Commons Science and Technology Committee completed its investigation into the case (BBC 2010c). The MPs' committee concluded there was no evidence that UEA's Professor Phil Jones had manipulated data, or tried 'to subvert the peer review process' and that 'his reputation, and that of his climate research unit, remained intact' (BBC 2010c). The report noted that 'it is not standard practice in climate science to publish the raw data and the computer code in academic papers' and that 'much of the data that critics claimed Prof Jones has hidden, was in fact already publicly available' (BBC 2010c) but called strongly for a greater culture of transparency in science. The report concluded that it 'found no reason in this unfortunate episode to challenge the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is induced by human activity' (BBC 2010c). This story was followed closely by another in January 2010 when the IPCC admitted a mistake concerning the timetable of Himalayan glacial melting. In such a lengthy report of over 3 000 pages, produced from the combined efforts of the world scientific community on a topic with as many variables as climate change, it is unsurprising some estimates need revising. Undoubtably there will be more revisions in the future, some major. It is important to emphasize that for the world's scientists the overall picture has not been affected, but public perception is completely different, with triumphant claims of proof 'it is all made up'. No doubt many sceptics will use the Parliamentary committee's report as further evidence of an institutional cover-up. The important psychological point is that people are ready for such events, indeed eager for it - the psychosocial equivalent of a sandpile in a state of self-organized criticality (Palombo 1999; Bak 1994), when a single grain can cause a major avalanche cascading through the whole system. Understanding such subtle shifts, and the often unconscious motivations behind them, is where psychoanalysis perhaps more than any other discipline has a lot to offer. As Lertzman (2008) writes: What if the core issue is more about how humans respond to anxiety? ... Environmental problems ... conjure up anxieties that ... we are done for, and nothing can really be done ... To help me understand more, I turn to Freud ... because I have found few others who speak as eloquently, and sensitively about what humans do when faced with anxiety or anxiety-provoking news. Freud, civilization, nature and the dialectic of the Enlightenment Is Freud really relevant to understanding our current crisis? While he was very much engaged in relating psychology to social issues, from war to racism, group psychology and the discontents of civilization (Freud 1913a, 1915, 1921, 1927, 1930), he was writing during a period when the possibility that human activities could bring the Earth's ecosystems to the brink of collapse would have been hard to contemplate. Romanticism may have complained about 'unweaving rainbows' and industry's 'dark satanic mills', but by Freud's day this could be seen as Luddite anti-progress talk, especially for those working within the Weltangschung of science and the Enlightenment to which Freud (1933) pinned his psychoanalytic flag. However, much of our current bewildering situation can be understood as rooted in part in a world view that was at its zenith during Freud's day and, as Lertzman (2008) suggests, in our responses to anxiety. In addition, Freud did offer us some crucial reflections on our relationship with nature: The principle task of civilization, its actual raison d'etre, is to defend us against nature. We all know that in many ways civilization does this fairly well already, and clearly as time goes on it will do it much better. But no one is under the illusion that nature has already been vanquished; and few dare hope that she will ever be entirely subdued to man. (Freud 1927: 51) Here we can see an interesting ambivalence in Freud's rhetorical style, which perhaps unwittingly captures two crucial aspects of our civilization's relationship to 'Nature' and thus begins to open up a psychoanalytic approach to ecology. First, he depicts a series of binary oppositions typical for his era, and not so different in our own: human versus nature, man versus woman and (more implicitly) order versus chaos. Here we find the classic tropes of the Enlightenment, modernity, patriarchy, industrialism and capitalism, which Jungian ecopsychologist Mary-Jane Rust (2008) calls the myths we live by. The myths she is referring to in particular are the 'myth of progress' and the 'myth of the Fall'. She argues that in order to create a sustainable future, or indeed any future, we need to find other stories, other myths, through which to live our lives, to rethink how we have fallen and what it means to progress. Freud's work suggests that Western culture views civilization as a defence against nature, and against wildness, inner and outer, but as Rust (2008: 5) writes, at 'this critical point in human history we most urgently need a myth to live by which is about living with nature, rather than fighting it.' Thus, according to Rust, we find ourselves ... between stories (Berry 1999), in a transitional space ... of great turbulence, with little to hold onto save the ground of our own experience. Our therapeutic task ... is to understand how these myths still shape our internal worlds, our language, and our defences ... Somewhere in the midst of 'sustainability' ... lies an inspiring vision of transformation ... We need to dig deep, to re-read our own myths as well as find inspiration from the stories of others. (ibid.) The myth of progress enters the climate change debate in calls for geo-engineering and Utopian techno-fixes such as putting thousands of mirrors in space, and in the dismissal of even gentle questioning of current economic models of unlimited growth. We will later look at Harold Searles' (1972) approach to our fascination with technology and its role in the current crisis. Returning to Freud, however, there is, as always, another side, an implicit awareness that the feeling of mastery civilization gives us is in many ways a dangerous illusion. Behind our need for mastery lies our fear and trembling in the face of the awesome power of mother nature. There are the elements which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and drowns everything in turmoil; storms, which blow everything before them ... With these forces nature rises up against us, majestic, cruel and inexorable; she brings to our mind once more our weakness and helplessness, which we thought to escape through the work of civilization. (Freud 1927: 15-16) Here is the other side of Freud's writing on the relation between 'Nature' and 'Civilization', with humanity portrayed as a weak and helpless infant in awe and fear of a mighty and terrible mother. The lure and horror of matriarchy lie behind the defensive constructs of patriarchal civilization, just as Klein's paranoid-schizoid fears of fragmentation, engulfment, and annihilation lie behind later castration threats (Hinshelwood 1991). With each new earthquake or flood, nature erupts into culture -similar to Kristeva's (1982) description of the eruption of the 'semiotic' into the 'symbolic' - and we are thrown back into a state of terror. The 'illusion' in the title of Freud's 1927 essay The Future of an Illusion was meant to refer to how religion arose to deal with these anxieties. However, the structural function of the myth of progress, while undoubtably more successful in terms of practical benefits, can also be included here. In these words of Freud we have already a deep understanding, albeit largely implicit, of our own current crisis: a relationship to nature based on a master-slave system of absolute binaries, and an attempt to maintain an illusory autonomy and control in the face of chaos. There is often a tension in Freud, between the celebration of Enlightenment values found in works such as The Future of an Illusion (1927) and the more Romantic Freud who won the Goethe prize and constantly emphasized the elements Enlightenment rationality leaves out such as jokes, dreams, slips and psychological symptoms. Thus, as well as being a perfect example of the Enlightenment with its call to make the unconscious conscious and give the 'rational' ego greater power over the wilds of the id, psychoanalysis also provides a serious challenge to this way of thinking. There will always be something beyond our control. We are not, and never can be, masters in our own house, and the core of who we are is irrational, and often frightening. Marcuse (1998) touched on a similar tension when declaring Freud's (1930) Civilization and Its Discontents both the most radical critique of Western culture and its most trenchant defence. Psychoanalysis, as always, is exquisitely ambivalent. Ultimately, for Freud, both the natural world and our inner nature are untamable and the most we can hope for are temporary, fragile, anxious compromises between competing forces (Winter and Koger 2004). The chaos of nature we defend against is also the chaos of our inner nature, the wildness in the depths of our psyche. Civilization does not only domesticate livestock but also humanity itself (Freud and Einstein 1933: 214). However, attempts to eliminate the risk have in many ways dangerously backfired, comparable to the ways that the historical programmes aiming to eliminate forest fires in the United States have led to far bigger and more uncontrollable fires taking the place of previously smaller and more manageable ones (Diamond 2006: 43-47). The control promised by the Enlightenment, the power of the intellect to overcome chaos (environmental and emotional), is therefore at least partly a defensive and at times dangerous illusion. In our age of anxiety, with the destruction of civilization threatened by nuclear holocaust, ecosystemic collapse, bioweapons and dirty bombs, Freud's warning is more relevant than ever: Humens* have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man ... hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. (Freud 1930: 135) Freud's binaries 'masculine/Enlightenment/control/autonomy' versus 'feminine/nature/chaos/dependency' also lead us to consider what Gregory Bateson (2000: 95) called the 'bipolar characteristic' of Western thought, which even tries 'to impose a binary pattern upon phenomena which are not dual in nature: youth versus age, labor versus capital, mind versus matter - and, in general, lacks the organizational devices for handling triangular systems/ In such a culture, as with the child struggling to come to terms with the Oedipal situation, 'any "third" party is always regarded ... as a threat' (ibid.). Deleuze and Guattari describe such dualistic forms of thinking using the ecological metaphor of the tree with its fork-branch patterns (although they would not use the term metaphor): 'Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification ... an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths' (Deleuze and Guattari 2003a: 16). However, Freud's 'arborescent' system of binaries can also show us the way out, capturing the psychological bind we are now in. As Deleuze and Guattari (2003a: 277) write: 'The only way to get outside the dualisms is ... to pass between, the intermezzo.' Deconstructing these dualisms allows us to think about how our destructive urge to dominate and control is connected to our fear of acknowledging dependency on this largest of 'holding environments', the ultimate 'environment mother' (Winnicott 1999,1987). 

What constitutes the modern subject is hardly green pastures and eternal bliss but rather the endless drive to fulfill our final desires.  This death drive is fed by the proliferation of the small quick fix promises like the plan. Signing a ballot doesn't get rid of our nightmares. PULP FICTION PROVES, YO.  Daly
Zizek affirms that psychoanalysis is the direct descendant of German idealism and that it articulates this dimension of self-relating negativity in terms of the idea of death drive (Zizek, 1999: 65-66). Death drive is the existential consequence of the very gap in the order of Being identified in German idealism. It is neither a cancellation nor any kind of physical death but is rather a certain excessive impulse that persists beyond mere existence or biological life. As Zizek argues: "Human life is never just life, it is always sustained by an excess of life" (Zizek, 2001b: 104). The human being is precisely that entity that is sustained by a "more than human". It is this "inhuman" excess - born of a fundamental alienation - which is the death drive and which is constitutive of humanity as such. Death drive is a constant impulse to resolve the gap, or heal the wound, in the order of Being; to overcome dislocation and establish the full presence of subjectivity by finding its ultimate name/place in the world. In this context - and against the grain of standard postmodern thinking - Zizek insists on the validity of the notion of subject (Zizek, 1999: 158-59). The subject is neither a positive entity nor an identifiable locus but is thoroughly de-substantialised - it is precisely "this empty nothing" of which Hegel speaks. This is why the Lacanian mark for the subject is $ (S-barred, the empty place or void that cannot be filled out in an ultimate sense). In the earlier works of Zizek, the subject is presented in terms of an inherent point of failure (the limit) in all forms of subjectivity - the bone stuck in the throat of signification - that shows the ontological gap of Being. The subject is the subject of the signifier precisely because of its status of void/impossibility that is the very condition of possibility for an infinitude of signification (Zizek, 1989: 175). Subject and subjectivity exist in a symbiotic and dynamic relationship. Subjectivity will be more or less stable according to context. Under the impact of a traumatic experience, however, we experience a certain "night of the world" where coherence and cohesion become radically undermined: that is, the condition of subject. In later works, Zizek gives an added twist to the notion of subject. Thus the subject is not simply the gap/void in the order of Being, it is also "the contingent-excessive gesture that constitutes the very universal order of Being" (1999: 160). As in Russell's paradoxical set of sets, the subject also functions as an excluded particularity that nonetheless generates the frame of universality as such. The frame of subjectivity is not constituted against an external force (the elimination of which would yield true subjectivity) but through an inherent blockage which is the subject (Zizek, 1999: 159). We might say that the subject gets caught in an impossible attempt to produce a framework of subjectivity (to find its name/place), but from depends which it is already ontologically excluded. In this sense, the subject marks the site where an irresolvable economy of lack and excess are played out. This economy is perhaps best illustrated by the relationship between subject and its objects a (objets petit a - objects small Other). Lacan's object a refers to the object-cause of desire: that which is in the object more than the object and which makes us desire it in the first place. It alludes to the originally lost object (the missing element that would resolve drive and "restore" fulfilment) and, at the same time, functions as an embodiment of lack; as a loss positivised (Zizek, 1997: 81; Zizek, 1999: 107). Object a bears witness to an empty structure of desire - a structure that can never be filled out. Desire is always elsewhere and alludes to an absence whose central reference is a fundamental void around which drive constantly circulates and constantly misses its target. It is in this sense that Zizek refers to object a in terms of a Kantian "negative magnitude": something that acts as a stand-in for Nothingness (Zizek, 1999: 107). There exists a metonymy of lack whereby any empirical object can act as this stand-in. Object a is doubly paradoxical in that it refers to an original "lost" object (of completion/unity) that never existed, and also in that its own existence on its very unattainability. The subject subsists in a kind of diabolical symmetry with its object(s) a wherein the latter (partially) embodies the lack designated by the former; a lack that constantly strives to be recognised/resolved in positive terms but which can never be fully achieved - subject and object never coincide. A well known e-mail circular is illustrative. A mock audit of staff morale is sent as an attachment in which the final exercise is one where you are asked to "click here" if you want a bigger salary, better conditions and so on. Of course, when you move your cursor to the relevant box, the "click here" simply moves and pops up somewhere else on the screen no matter how quickly or stealthily you try to approach it. In this sense, fulfilment (the satisfaction of desire) is always just a click away; a promise that is sustained by the very lack/impossibility of (total) fulfilment. The subject strives for a fullness in the object that it lacks. This accounts for the passionate attachment to certain objects and toward which people may risk everything. Q. Tarantino's film, Pulp Fiction, is illustrative. In the boxer's story, the Bruce Willis character refuses to take a dive in a fixed fight and as a result falls foul of a local gangster. Instead of leaving town immediately, however, Bruce returns to his apartment to pick up his (dead) father's watch - thereby risking his life. Why do this? The answer is that this particular watch represents object a: a partial embodiment of the lost parent-child unity. It is this watch, and no other, that holds the promise of an ultimate reconciliation (to restore "lost" unity) and, at the same time underscores the fact that such reconciliation is always lacking; always a "click" away. Every object a is a reminder/remainder of a kind of pre-big bang consummate unity that has never existed. It is here that both lack (subject) and excess (identifications) - every "pathological" gesture to positivise void - may be said to coincide (Zizek, 1999: 107). The "many" identifications and forms of collective objective life are made possible through the persistence of the "one" of radical negativity. The infinitude of signification is the result ultimately of the one true signified...void. For Zizek this is the starting point of a new approach to politics We are political animals not in the sense of Aristotle who understood by this a certain capacity to recognise a pre-existing order of the good, but the opposite. It is precisely because there is no pre-existing order that we are "condemned" to be political animals. Without an ecology of Being, we are confronted with what Zizek, in his discussion of Schelling (1997), calls an unbridgeable abyss of freedom; an abyss that is simultaneously the source of universal rights and ethnic cleansing.

The only way to deal with the political hijacking of environmental issues is to radically realign the symbolic coordinates within which we exist. Only by radically altering our symbolic coordinates can we break out of the post-political hold over liberal ideologies. Swyngedouw  
What post-politics tends to prevent is precisely this metaphoric universalization of particular demands: post-politics mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts, social workers, and so on, to reduce the overall demand (complaint) of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content – no wonder that this suffocating closure gives birth to ‘irrational’ outbursts of violence as the only way to give expression to the dimension beyond particularity” (Žižek 1999b: 204). In Europe and the US, in particular, such post-political arrangements are largely in place. Post-politics reject ideological divisions and the explicit universalisation of particular political demands. Instead, the post-political condition is one in which a consensus has been built around the inevitability of neo-liberal capitalism as an economic system, parliamentary democracy as the political ideal, humanitarianism and inclusive cosmopolitanism as a moral foundation. As Žižek (1999b: 198) puts it: “In post-politics, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties which compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists, public opinion specialists, …) and liberal multiculturalists; via the process of negotiation of interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. Post-politics thus emphasizes the need to leave old ideological visions behind and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that takes people’s concrete needs and demands into account” Post-politics is thus about the administration of social or ecological matters, and they remain of course fully within the realm of the possible, of existing socio-ecological relations. “The ultimate sign of post-politics in all Western countries”, Žižek (2002: 303) argues, “is the growth of a managerial approach to government: government is reconceived as a managerial function, deprived of its proper political dimension”. Post-politics refuses politicisation in the classical Greek sense, that is, as the metaphorical universalization of particular demands, which aims at “more” than negotiation of interests: “The political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within the framework of existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work …. Authentic politics … is the art of the impossible – it changes the very parameters of what is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation (emphasis in original)” (Žižek, 1999b: 199) A genuine politics, therefore, is “the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire socials space” (Žižek 1999b: 208). It is about the recognition of conflict as constitutive of the social condition, and the naming of the socio-ecological spaces that can become. The political becomes for Žižek and Rancière the space of litigation (Žižek, 1998), the space for those who are not-All, who are uncounted and unnamed, not part of the ‘police’ (symbolic or state) order. A true political space is always a space of contestation for those who have no name or no place. As Diken and Laustsen (2004: 9) put it: “Politics in this sense is the ability to debate, question and renew the fundament on which political struggle unfolds, the ability to radically criticise a given order and to fight for a new and better one. In a nutshell, then, politics necessitates accepting conflict”. A radical-progressive position “should insist on the unconditional primacy of the inherent antagonism as constitutive of the political”. (Žižek 1999a: 29). Post-political parliamentary rule, in contrast, permits the politicization of everything and anything, but only in a non-committal way and as non-conflict. Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away; politics becomes something one can do without making decisions that divide and separate (Thomson, 2003). A consensual post-politics arises thus, one that either eliminates fundamental conflict (i.e. we all agree that climate change is a real problem that requires urgent attention) or elevates it to antithetical ultra-politics.  Those who deny the realities of a dangerous climate change are blinded radicals that put themselves outside the legitimate social (symbolic) order. The same ‘fundamentalist’ label is of course also put on those who argue that dealing with climate change requires a fundamental reorganisation of the hegemonic neo-liberal-capitalist order. The consensual times we are currently living in have thus eliminated a genuine political space of disagreement. However, consensus does not equal peace or absence of fundamental conflict (Rancière, 2005a: 8). Under a post-political condition, “everything is politicised, can be discussed, but only in a non-committal way and as a non-conflict. Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away; politics becomes something one can do without making decisions that divide and separate. When pluralism becomes an end in itself, real politics is pushed to other arenas” (Diken and Laustsen, 2004: 7), in the present case to street rebellion and protest, and terrorist tactics (cfr animal lib movement in the UK).  Difficulties and problems, such as environmental concerns that are generally staged and accepted as problematic need to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical arrangement, and the production of consensus. “Consensus means that whatever your personal commitments, interests and values may be, you perceive the same things, you give them the same name. But there is no contest on what appears, on what is given in a situation and as a situation” (Rancière, 2003; §4). The key feature of consensus is “the annulment of dissensus ….. the ‘end of politics’” (Rancière, 2001; §32). The most utopian alternative to capitalism left to our disposal is to develop post-political alternatives to creating a more just and sustainable society, since it would not make any economic sense not to do so. Of course, this post-political world eludes choice and freedom (other than those tolerated by the consensus). And in the absence of real politicization of particulars, the only position of real dissent is that of either the traditionalist (those stuck in the past who refuse to accept the inevitability of the new global neo-liberal order) or the fundamentalist. The only way to deal with them is by sheer violence, by suspending their ‘humanitarian’ and ‘democratic’ rights. The post-political relies on either including all in a consensual pluralist order and on excluding radically those who posit themselves outside the consensus. For them, as Agamben (20005) argues, the law is suspended; they are literally put outside the law and treated as extremists and terrorists. The environment and debates over the environment and nature are not only perfect expressions of such a post-political order, but in fact, the mobilisation of environmental issues is one of the key arenas through which this post-political consensus becomes constructed, when “politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration” (Žižek, 2005: 117).  The fact that Bush does not want to play ball on the climate change theme is indeed seen by both the political elites in Europe and by the environmentalists as a serious threat to the post-political consensus. That is why both political elites and opposition groups label him as a radical conservative. Bill Clinton, of course, embodied the post-political consensus in a much more sophisticated and articulated manner, not to speak of his unfortunate successor, Al Gore, who recently resurfaced as a newborn climate change warrior (The Independent, 22 May 2006). The post-political environmental consensus, therefore, is one that is radically reactionary, one that forestalls the articulation of divergent, conflicting, and alternative trajectories of future socio-environmental possibilities and of human-human and human-nature articulations and assemblages. 

  Joseph, MPhil, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK, MA, Psychoanalytic Studies, Sheffield University, UK BSc, Psychology and Neuroscience, Manchester University, UK, Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and a member of several other professional organizations such as the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos p 27 *gender mod

  Daly, 2004, (Glyn, Risking the Impossible, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm) SRM

  Swyngedouw, Dept of Geography, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University, 2006.  Eirk, “Impossible “Sustainability” and the Post-Political Condition,”  Forthcoming in: David Gibbs and Rob Krueger (Eds.) Sustainable Development, http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/seminars/Sustainabilitypaper.doc

Tournament: CPS | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Srikar Pyda | Judge: Panel
. Reincarnation is true- three warrants. Chopra
  Deepak Chopra, Renowned Dr/ PhD of religion and spiritual studies, “Your First Kiss Lives On,” The renowned doctor talks about what happens after death and why everything--even your first kiss--has an afterlife, December 2006, http://www.beliefnet.com/Holistic-Living/2006/11/Deepak-Chopra-Your-First-Kiss-Lives-On.aspx?p=1)

The subtitle of...created or destroyed.

Tournament: stanford | Round: 9 | Opponent: nobody i think | Judge: nobody i think
CP Text: Latin American countries will harvest sugar cane for the production of ethanol. 

Its mutually exclusive since it extracts resources. 

Solves oil dependence and warming.  Matthews and Steglich, 11
(Robert B. Matthews, J/D/, C.P.A., M. Acctg., is assistant professor of business administration at Sam Houston State University.  He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics, and a master’s degree in accounting, from Rice University, and a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center.  Prior to joining the faculty at SHSU, he spent 35 years as a financial and legal consultant to numerous clients, primarily in the energy industry. Eric Steglich received his M.B.A. from Sam Houston State University.  This paper is derived from, and an expansion of, a paper he prepared while a graduate student at SHSU, “A Tale of Two Countries: What The United States Can Learn From Brazil About Reducing Dependence On Foreign Oil,” http://conferences.cluteonline.com/index.php/IAC/2011NO/paper/viewFile/306/314, August 2011)

Note that the USA produces about 11 and consumes about 25 of world demand. Recent increases are attributable largely to growing economies in China, India, and other developing countries. At the current rate of worldwide oil consumption, the above worldwide oil reserves equate to about 44 years of production. Of course, total proved reserves includes both developed and undeveloped reserves, and a substantial portion of the total proved reserves have yet to be developed and produced. Such development and production will require considerable expenditures. For economic reasons, therefore, we have tended generally to have somewhere in the range of 10-15 years of developed and producing reserves at any time. Of course, we cannot accurately determine the amount of reserves present until they are developed and produced, but these estimates are developed using reasonable methodologies. What must be understood is that this does not mean we have 10 or 15 or 44 years before the oil runs out. The “peak oil” question must be addressed when new discoveries start to run out, but that has not been the case yet. However, at some point the question of how long we can continue to rely on oil must be faced. Given that the 44 years of reserves identified above represent what has been found with technology to date, and that finding new reserves is becoming technologically more difficult and substantially more expensive, it is not unreasonable to infer from the above that the era of relatively cheap oil will be over within something approaching 50 years, and therefore we need to be migrating away from oil in earnest by that time. The problem with migrating away from oil is that it has proved to be very difficult to find a reasonable alternative to oil. Sandalow has identified ten key facts about oil, each with an important implication, as follows (Sandalow, 2008): One reason that oil is so hard to replace is that it is a relatively efficient energy source. Cleveland, Costanza, Hall, and Kaufmann compared the “energy profit ratio” of various renewable and nonrenewable energy sources (Cleveland, et al, 1984), and Howard T. Odum compared the “energy yield ratio” (Odum, 1976). Their findings were summarized by Richard Heinberg (Heinberg, 2006, pp 162-164). Oil has yield rates in the range of 8 to 11 and natural gas in the range of 7 to 10, with coal even higher. Among alternatives, only sugar cane ethanol (8.3 to 10.2, per Goettemoeller, 2007), 100-year growth rainforest (12.0 per Odum), hydroelectric (11.2 per Cleveland and 10.0 per Odum), solar photovoltaics (1.7 to 10.0, per Cleveland), geothermal from hot dry rock (1.9 to 13.0 per Cleveland and 13.0 per Odum), and tidal electric with a 25-foot tide range (15.0 per Odum). The fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal) as a group produce significantly higher energy profit ratios or energy yield ratios than do most green alternatives. This differential is typically reflected in price; we depend so heavily on oil, and to a lesser extent on other fossil fuels, because they provide more energy cheaper than do the currently available alternatives. One barrier to alternative energy sources is that the cost of those alternatives is higher than the cost of oil. However, the cost of oil is also rising. As time passes, we are still making significant discoveries (such as Brazil’s finds in the Campos, Santos, and Espirito Santo basins) and as prices rise so will oil supplies, as some known reservoirs are economically viable to produce only at higher prices. But we appear to have found most of the “easy” oil, and what is discovered in the future can reasonably be expected to be more expensive to produce. Green, Jones, and Leiby, in a 1995 report prepared for the Office of Transportation Technology of the United States Department of Energy, forecasted that “in the long run the net price of oil (price minus marginal extraction costs) will rise steadily at the rate of interest” (Green, et al, 1995, p. 5). Since that time, oil prices have fluctuated wildly but the overall trend is clearly upward. The Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE/EIA) prepares an annual energy report and forecast with projections of future energy supply and demand, specifically projecting supply and demand components for 2020 and 2030. The 2007 and 2009 forecasts (DOE/EIA, 2007 and DOE/EIA, 2009) can be compared as follows (reference case, volumes in quadrillion Btu/year): The 2009 forecast differs from the 2007 forecast primarily in that it considers the impact of the decline in energy consumption during the latter half of 2008. Although both forecasts predict an increase in domestic oil and gas production as well as energy from other source, both forecasts leave the U.S. very much dependent on foreign oil as far into the future as 2030. President Barack Obama has stated, "And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as president: In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East (Obama, 8/28/2008).” Unfortunately, it does not appear that the energy program outline by President Obama will accomplish that goal. Efforts to develop wind, solar, and improved insulation for buildings will have minimal impacts on oil usage. Perhaps the signature element—the electric automobile—is now coming into use, with a goal of 1 million on the road by 2015 (Obama, 1/25/2011). Assuming that each electric vehicle saves 4 gallons of gasoline per day, achieving that goal would reduce current oil consumption by about 200,000 barrels per day, or less than 1 percent. It is entirely likely that on the current path, the US will import more oil in 2015 than today, thus continuing the trend of the last 40 years of becoming ever more dependent on foreign oil. To date, the US has fallen far short of its intended goal of reducing its dependency on foreign oil. In fact that dependency has increased rather than decreased. It is the opinion of the authors that this results from three flaws in the US approach: ? There has been a focus on developing a perfect solution in a laboratory environment and then implementing it, rather than making use of what is available. ? Particularly with respect to oil, the perfect alternative has not been found, nor at this point is there any strong suggestion of what it might be. ? Regulations have hampered many private sector efforts to develop solutions. As a result the US finds itself in a position where it must address two potentially negative factors: ? The era of cheap energy is coming to an end. ? We currently have no good substitutes for oil. THE APPROACH TAKEN BY BRAZIL Brazil, which was even more dependent on foreign oil than was the U.S. in the 1970s, is today virtually energy-independent. Because of transportation considerations and difficulties refining heavy oil, Brazil does import some oil, primarily from Bolivia (although that is expected to change once production in the offshore Campos, Santos, and Espirito Santo basins is up to speed), but it exports sufficient oil to be a net exporter of energy. Brazil is now among the ten largest suppliers of oil to the USA. Clearly, the Brazilian economy in general, and its energy consumption in particular, is significantly smaller than in the USA, so some lessons are not strictly applicable. However, Brazil clearly did some things better than the U.S., and there are some broad general principles that have significant applicability. Brazil’s well-known and massive effort to develop alternatives to gasoline (sugar cane ethanol) and diesel fuel (soybean-based biodiesel) has replaced approximately 50 of gasoline and 44 of the country’s on-the-road motor fuel. It should be noted that criticism that Brazil has destroyed the Amazon basin to produce ethanol is unfounded. Sugar cane is produced in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Goias, Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo, Parana, Rio de Janeiro, Espirito Santo, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, and Sergipe. The area with maximum potential for expansion lies in the states of Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, and Goias. All these areas lie outside the Amazon basin (Lachlau, Sergio Andre, in Schwind, 2007). Further, it is estimated that approximately 65 of the area now producing sugar cane was converted from pasture land before. Brazil does also produce a significant amount of biodiesel, primarily from soybeans, and a considerable amount of soybean production does take place in areas that have been cleared in the Amazon basin. What may be less well known is that Brazil’s approach also included significant amounts of increased domestic exploration for oil and gas (the source of the other 56 of motor fuel) and hydroelectric (35 of Brazil’s total energy needs). Today Petrobras is perhaps the world’s leading center of expertise in deep water drilling. This has resulted in significant new finds in the offshore Santos, Campos and Espirito Santo basins. While Brazil’s recoverable reserves of oil and gas are less than those of the U.S., they are growing rapidly, and continued development could transform Brazil into one of the largest oil producers in the world (DOE/EIA, Brazil country brief, 2011). This emphasis on a broad frontal attack on the problem from all sources was accompanied by a strong bias in favor of action, specifically action utilizing known technology rather than waiting for future technologies to prove themselves. The ethanol plants are themselves relatively primitive, particularly when compared to a U.S. oil refinery (Schwind, 2007). Brazil has refused to become slave to “perfect” or to allow “perfect” to become the worst enemy of “good enough.” This is quite a contrast to the U.S. effort, where there has been considerable research into a “perfect” solution, but comparatively little effort to get “good enough” solutions implemented. Brazil’s approach also included a heavy orientation toward the private sector and free markets. Realizing that as a government-owned entity, Petrobras would likely be too bureaucratic and not sufficiently nimble to respond as needed, the government sold a large stake in the company and passed management duties and privileges to the non-government shareholders. Brazil moved further toward a free-market approach by ending Petrobras’s exclusive concession to develop all domestic oil and gas, and invited foreign companies to come in and take down exploration and production concessions. The mechanisms whereby sugar growers determine whether to sell there produce for making into sugar or into ethanol, and similarly the mechanisms whereby motorists decide whether to burn gasoline or ethanol in their autos (which are set up to burn either) rely almost entirely upon free-market principles. The sugar cane grower compares the prices he can receive at the sugar mill and at the ethanol plant before deciding where to sell his crop. Because automobiles and trucks are configured to run on either gasoline/diesel or ethanol/bio-diesel, the motorist can check the price of each, adjust for performance differential, and make a rational economic decision which one she should put into her vehicle today. Using sugar cane ethanol as the “swing” product introduces some price elasticity to both sugar and oil. While the sugar market is depressed today, lower sugar prices mean that farmers will deliver more sugar cane to the ethanol plant, and ethanol prices give some insulation against oil—and resulting gasoline—price shocks. The lessons to be learned from the Brazilian experience may be summarized as follows: Table 8 United States Of America Brazil The U.S. has debated the question of “drill here, drill now” versus alternatives versus conservation. The emphasis has been on debate and discussion rather than action. Brazil pursued all available options vigorously and simultaneously. The Brazilian approach has been “drill here, drill now” plus alternatives plus conservation. There has been a strong bias toward action. The U.S. has focused upon developing the “perfect” solution in the laboratory and then bringing that solution to reality. Brazil utilized existing technology to the maximum extent possible, and phased in improved technologies as they make the transition from laboratory to real world usefulness. Brazil has vigorously avoided letting “perfect” get in the way of “good enough”. The U.S. government has maintained an adversarial stance toward the energy industry, and has sought to regulate its activities heavily. Brazil has pushed toward a more cooperative approach with the energy industry, and generally allowed the free market to work. APPLYING THE LESSONS FROM BRAZIL TO THE UNITED STATES These lessons learned from Brazil can be applied to address the USA’s energy problems. Conservation, alternatives, and increased production from conventional domestic sources must be accompanied by vigorous research and development effort. Rather than wait for perfect technology to be developed, the timing is such that we need to implement some “good enough” steps today. Participation by the private sector in an energy market that sends the right price signals is the fastest way to make real progress; this requires a more cooperative, rather than adversarial, relationship with government, and efforts to ensure that free markets send the proper economic signals. The good news is that a solution appears possible. The bad news is that it will not be cheap. The era of cheap energy is over. Pursuing All Available Options Pursuing all available options means that conservation, alternative fuels, and increased production of domestic fuel—fossil and non-fossil—must be accomplished vigorously and simultaneously. Conservation The potential to “find” energy by saving it through conservation is enormous. The USA currently consumes 68.672 barrels of oil per day per 1,000 people, compared to Europe’s 29.42 barrels of oil per day per 1,000 people. Of particular note is that several European countries are able to maintain GDP per capita at, near, or above US levels, with significantly lower energy consumption: Admittedly, Europe has some advantages over the USA, which enable Europeans to use less energy: ? Europe is more compact, with less distance between population centers. ? Europe has generally better rail and public transit systems. ? European homes are generally much smaller, requiring less energy to heat and cool. ? Because Europe is so much further north, European summers are cooler, requiring less air conditioning, but this is offset somewhat because European winters are generally cooler, requiring more energy to heat. At the same time, these data suggest considerable potential for improvement. If the USA reduced its oil consumption to European levels, it would require no imports of oil from sources outside NAFTA. More realistically, a report prepared in 2005 for the Natural Resources Defense Council suggested that the United States could save an average of 2.5 million barrels per day by 2015 (Bordetsky, 2005). The proposed approach includes: ? Providing tax incentives to auto manufacturers to retool to build more energy-efficient vehicles ? Increasing the Corporate Adjusted Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards ? Requiring replacement tires and motor oil to be at least as fuel efficient as original equipment tires and motor oil; ? Requiring efficiency improvements in heavy-duty trucks; ? Supporting smart growth and better transportation choices. ? Expanding industrial efficiency programs to focus on oil use reduction and adopting standards for petroleum heating; ? Replacing chemical feedstocks with bioproducts through research and development and government procurement of bioproducts; Upgrading air traffic management systems so aircraft follow the most-efficient routes; and ? Promoting residential energy savings with a focus on oil-heat. Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer has proposed a revenue-neutral consumption tax on gasoline to encourage conservation (Krauthammer, 2009). The principle behind this proposal is that a substantial tax be added to the price of motor fuel, with an offsetting reduction in the payroll tax. A driver who drove a lesser number of miles, or utilized a more fuel-efficient vehicle, than the standard would realize a net income from this approach. A variation of this approach is that revenue neutrality should apply to a majority of the tax, with the remainder comprising a net revenue stream that could be used to fund alternatives or research or infrastructure to reduce the use of oil. The savings resulting from the imposition of such a tax are not easily quantifiable, but reductions in consumption in response to the 2008 price spike would suggest that this could save at least 1 million barrels a day. Alternatives In the long run, the development of green energy technology will make the biggest difference in reducing or eliminating our dependence upon foreign, and even domestic, oil. The United States’ energy policy needs a more forceful approach to making alternative energy sources mainstream (Toal, 2008). Oil is a natural resource and will deplete in time and as the problem of global warming becomes more severe, the need for alternative fuel becomes more and more imperative (Luchansky and Monks, 2009). Unfortunately, in the short run all alternative fuels suffer from two basic shortcomings: ? Because the vast majority of oil is used for transportation, translating alternative energy into an alternative for oil is a difficult proposition. ? Alternatives compare poorly to traditional energy sources in at least one of the following areas: o Scale o Infrastructure o Price The relevant question, as stated by Richard Heinberg, ultimately becomes, “To what degree can any given non-petroleum energy source, or combination of sources enable industrial civilization to survive the end of oil?” (Heinberg, 2006, p.138) Heinberg further notes that the advantages of oil as an energy commodity, and by implication the disadvantages of alternatives, are that oil is: ? Easily transported (liquid fuels are more easily transported than solids such as coal or gases such as methane, and may be carried in ships far more easily than can be gases); ? Energy-dense (gasoline contains roughly 40 kilowatt-hours per gallon); ? Capable of being refined into several fuels (including gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel) suitable for a variety of applications; and ? Suitable for a variety of uses (including transportation, heating, and the production of chemicals and other materials) Because of the above limitations, the use of alternatives must be managed very carefully to obtain maximum advantage. As noted above, Brazil gets 50 of its “gasoline” and over 40 of its motor fuels from Biofuels. An equivalent ratio here would mean somewhere between 5 and 6 million barrels per day from Biofuels. That level is clearly achievable, with relatively inexpensive modifications to automobiles to enable flex fuel operations. The US currently gets about 1 million barrels a day from corn ethanol, and further growth expectations for that market are limited. The quickest possibility of a material impact probably lies with sugarcane ethanol from Latin America. Estimates are that as much as 10 of world gasoline usage could be replaced with sugar cane ethanol using current technology (Goldemberg, 2007). Ron Soligo has estimated the potential for sugar cane ethanol from Latin America to be 2.5 to 3 million barrels per day, depending on amount of land dedicated and yields obtained (Soligo and Jaffe, 2008). If the trade sanctions with Cuba were lifted, Juan Tomás Sanchez of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy estimates that Cuba alone could supply up to 3.2 billion gallons of ethanol annually (200,000 barrels/day, or 1 of total U.S. energy consumption), while Cuba expert Jorge Hernandez Fonseca projects a more modest production figure around 2 billion gallons per year (Elledge, 2009). The difficulty arises because the current sanctions make the acquisition of accurate information more difficult. Since Cuban sugar production has declined from 44 million tons/year in 1950 to 11 million tons/year today (Zuurbier, 2008), significant upside potential is obvious. These impacts are substantially larger than any other steps under consideration, except perhaps the “drill here, drill now” option. We would still be importing, but it would be from countries that are closer and have more in common than areas in the Middle East and elsewhere in the third world. The existence of a new cash crop in Latin America could dramatically improve their economies, reducing the pressure from illegal immigration, and could also provide farmers with an alternative to marijuana, cocaine, and other plants that are the source of many drugs currently being smuggled into the U.S. Moreover, the ability to use ethanol as a substitute for gasoline would introduce at least some elasticity into the gasoline consumption model, thereby limiting the exposure to oil price shocks in the future. The EPA estimates that use of sugar cane ethanol could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 61, compared to 21 for corn ethanol (EPA, 2011). Additional ethanol supplies could be obtained from domestic sugar cane and sugar beets. Estimating the potential production from these sources is difficult, but perhaps another 500,000 barrels per day would be possible. That would mean a total of 4 million barrels per day from ethanol, slightly less than the 40 number, but a significant reduction in oil consumption. Additionally, this would enable the installation of significant ethanol infrastructure now, to be in place already when more exotic forms of ethanol, like cellulosic, become commercially viable. Incurring those costs now would actually reduce the commercial viability threshold for the exotic sources of ethanol, as they become available. The arguments against importing ethanol to add to domestic production center around the negative point that the US would still be importing. However, several counter-arguments should be kept in mind: ? The proposed approach makes full use of domestic ethanol production capability, so no domestic enterprise is harmed. ? Importing from Central America, the Caribbean, and South America places our energy supplies in far less jeopardy than importing from Asia and Africa. ? The development of an additional lucrative cash crop would aid Latin American economies; in addition to being a good neighbor, the US should also see some relief with its drug and immigration issues along its southern border. ? Ethanol would be the first true alternative to oil, and having it developed commercially in sufficient volumes would offer some elasticity to the oil-pricing problem, and provide some leverage against oil price spikes

Tournament: berk | Round: Doubles | Opponent: The Walia Man | Judge: Shmikler, Fink, Fried
Cutting emissions washes sulfate aerosols out of the atmosphere – causes runaway warming. Connor 

MAN'S attempts to halt the greenhouse effect by cutting carbon dioxide emissions could make the world even hotter, scientists have warned. The latest research challenges the conventional wisdom about the best way to stop global warming: to burn less coal and oil and thus release smaller amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists say that, if fewer fossil fuels were burnt, there would be a reduction in the release of sulphur dioxide as well as of carbon dioxide - and their research suggests that sulphur dioxide has been keeping the world cooler than it would otherwise have become as a result of the Industrial Revolution.  Professor Tom Wigley, of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, says in the current issue of Physics World that sulphur dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide. Cutting both gases would thus remove sulphur dioxide more quickly. ''The first response of the climate system to a fossil-fuel cutback might therefore be a warming rather than a cooling,'' he says. Professor Wigley, one of the world's leading experts on climate, reached this conclusion after a new study of the role of sulphur emissions by a team of researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Factories and power stations release thousands of tons of sulphur dioxide over land in the northern hemisphere by burning fossil fuels. Some of this falls back to Earth in the form of acid rain, and some wafts out to sea where it is converted into sulphates. Once over the sea, sulphates act as tiny particles for water vapour to condense, and so are important in the formation of clouds which block sunlight and keep the oceans cool. Without sulphates, fewer clouds would form and sea temperatures would rise. The suggestion was first made nearly 20 years ago, but with little evidence to support it. It was revived more recently, but researchers thought that sulphates could result from marine algae rather than industrial sources. So important is sulphur dioxide in the formation of clouds that the Lawrence Livermore researchers believe man-made emissions of sulphur dioxide could account for the fact that global warming since the Industrial Revolution has been less than predicted from known increases in carbon dioxide emissions over the past 100 years.''A 1C rise is indicated but we've only seen about 0.5C,'' said Dr Joyce Penner of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory. ''Man- made emissions of sulphur dioxide may explain why we haven't seen the magnitude of warming we expected.''

That’s independently a reason to negate since they’ll trigger their own impacts FASTER but even if you don’t buy that, Decreases in sulfur emissions means an increase in methane emissions. Gauci 

Our estimates of the combined effects of climate change, sulfate aerosol radiative effects, and SDEP (GHGAEROSDEP) on CH4 emissions show that anthropogenic SDEP may have been sufficient to have decreased the global wetland CH4 source to a level below preindustrial estimates by 10–15 Tg during the second half of the 20th century (Fig. 3). The combined effect of SO4 2 aerosols (cooling) and SO4 2-deposition (limiting methane production at the source by microbial competition) are predicted to offset the effect of GHG warming on CH4 emissions by 26 Tg in 2030 and by 15 Tg in 2080. In this scenario, CH4 emissions will exceed preindustrial emissions by 14 Tg by 2080. The influence of production and deposition of oxidized sulfur compounds through economic growth in North America and Europe between 1960 and 1980, followed by increases in the economic growth in South America, Africa, and (primarily) Asia, are responsible for this pattern. Beyond 2030, however, a decline is predicted in sulfur pollution because of anticipated cleaner technologies. Together with the additional effect of enhanced greenhouse warming, we predict this reduction in sulfur pollution will result in a rapid increase in CH4 emission (15 enhancement between 2030 and 2080) that may exacerbate climate warming during that time.

Methane emissions guarantee a cycle of warming. Kaku
Tundra covers nearly 9 million square miles of land in the Northern Hemisphere, containing vegetation frozen since the last Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago. This tundra contains more carbon dioxide and methane than the atmosphere, and this poses an enormous threat to the world’s weather. Methane gas, moreover, is a much deadlier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It does not stay in the atmosphere as long, but it causes much more damage than carbon dioxide. The release of so much methane gas from the melting tundra could cause temperatures to rapidly rise, which will cause even more methane gas to be released, causing a runaway cycle of global warming. 

Extend their impact, its going to happen faster with emissions reduction. 

 Connor, Science Editor of the Independent London, 1990  Steve, Science Editor of The Independent (London), “Carbon dioxide cuts 'may heat up earth'”, The Independent (London), August 19, 1990, pg. 7
  Gauci, Professor of Earth Sciences, Open University, 2004 Vincent Gauci, Department of Earth Sciences, Open University, “Sulfur pollution suppression of the wetland methane source in the 20th and 21st centuries”, Environmental Sciences, http://cepsar.open.ac.uk/pers/v.gauci/pics/d39285.pdf
  Kaku , co-creator of string field theory, a branch of string theory. 11 Michio Kaku, He received a B.S. (summa cum laude) from Harvard University in 1968 where he came first in his physics class. (“Physics of the Future” http://213.55.83.52/ebooks/physics/Physics20of20the20Future.pdf PB)

Tournament: anything jan feb | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Evolution determines morality. Ruse : 

This is a powerful response, but today’s evolutionary ethicist argues that it misses entirely the full force of what biology tells us. It is indeed true that you cannot deduce moral claims from factual claims (about origins). However, using factual claims about origins, you can give moral claims the only foundational explanation that they might possibly have. In particular, the evolutionist argues that, thanks to our science, we see that ought claims like “You ought to maximize personal liberty” are no more than subjective expressions, impressed upon our thinking because of their adaptive value. In other words, we see that morality has no philosophically objective foundation. It is just an illusion, fobbed off on us to promote biological “altruism.” This is a strong claim, so let us understand it fully. The evolutionist is no longer attempting to derive morality from factual foundations. His/her claim now is that there are no foundations of any sort from which to derive morality-be these foundations evolution, Gods will, or whatever. Since, clearly, ethics is not nonexistent, the evolutionist locates our moral feelings simply in the subjective nature of human psychology. At this level, morality has no more (and no less) status than that of the terror we feel at the unknown-another emotion which has good biological adaptive value.

That’s the only way to make moral statements prescriptively valid. Joyce 

Moral inescapability is an elusive notion. Imagine the child asking why he mustn’t pinch his play mate. The parent replies “Because it’s wrong.” The child continues “But why mustn’t I do what’s wrong?” The parent might give an exasperated “Because you mustn’t!” It is the attempt to clarify the inadequate parental response that is the task of this chapter. Of course, there are all sorts of kinds of reasons that the parent might give: “If you pinch Violet Elizabeth, then she might pinch you back” or “...then she won’t play with you” or “...then you’ll be sent to your room.” All good (and possibly effective) prudential reasons. But prudence does, I shall argue, is not what underwrites moral prescriptivity. Regarding any type of prescription which can be justified on prudential grounds, we can always imagine an unusually situated or unusually constituted agent who “escapes” the prescription. Perhaps the child doesn’t want Violet Elizabeth as his friend, perhaps he doesn’t mind being pinched or being sent to his room. Or perhaps these costly consequences are things he has the power to avoid. In such a case what becomes of the injunction against pinching? On prudential grounds, it must evaporate. But moral proscriptions do not evaporate, regardless of how we imagine the agent situated. If it is not pinching, but torturing that is at stake, then there is no escaping. But the thought that torturing is always proscribed on prudential grounds is just silly. That it always is as a matter of fact is a case that might be made – but that it must be, even in situations where the philosopher gets to stipulate the costs and benefits (let’s say without breaking any laws of nature) is are nothing but groundless optimism. (Morality as a kind of prudence is discussed further in later chapters: §3.2 and §7.1.)

Thus the standard is consistency with evolutionary tendencies. Strong evolutionary tendencies favor resource extraction. Penn:

We humans, especially those living in industrialized nations, consume an amazing portion of the Earth’s available natural resources. Americans, for example, represent around 5 percent of the Earth’s population, and yet consume 25 percent of the resources, release 20 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global climate change, and generate almost 50 percent of the hazardous waste produced on the planet. How can we explain why people in industrialized countries consume so much? Americans consume so many calories from fats and sugars that obesity and diabetes have become major epidemics! The evolutionary reason for overeating seems straightforward: selection appears to have favored open-ended cravings for fats and sugars that were difficult to obtain for our ancestors; modern fast foods satisfy our evolved dietary preferences but remove the energetic costs of hunting, foraging, and processing the good. Our environmental impact, however, is not simply from overconsuming food and other resources needed for sustenance and survival. It is mainly from the pursuit of extravagant goods, such as fashionable clothes, luxurious cars, and massive homes (Durning 1992; Frank 2000; de Graaf et al. 2001). Why do people spend so much time and trouble pursuing resources that have no survival value? What is the appeal of buying expensive large automobiles, designer watches, fur coats, and following the latest fashion trends? To explain the evolution of conspicuous and extravagant traits in animals, such as a peacock’s elaborate plumage, Charles Darwin  To explain the evolution of conspicuous and extravagant traits in animals, such as a peacock’s elaborate plumage, Charles Darwin (1871) proposed that they function to attract mates and repel rivals (i.e., they evolve through differential mating success or “sexual selection”). The problem has been to explain why traits that are handicaps to survival would be sexually attractive or increase status. Amotz Zahavi (1975) suggested that costly exaggerated displays enable high quality males to honestly advertise their quality to potential mates and rivals because only high quality individuals can bear the costs of the display. This “handicap principle” or “honest signaling theory” helps to explain the evolution of extravagant displays in animals (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997), and offers implications for many aspects of human behavior (Miller 2000). Interestingly, honest signaling theory was first suggested by the economist Thorstein Veblen (1899) to explain the excessive consumption by wealthy people. He coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe extravagant and ostentatious displays of resources that function as a competitive strategy to demonstrate wealth and social status: “Conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure are reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary strength” (p 181). “Since the consumption of these . . . excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit” (p 74). Veblen also suggested why this process tends to escalate into increasingly wasteful displays of fashion and consumption: people instinctively acquire items to demonstrate group membership, but to rise in social status they must be able to display items worn by high status individuals, which in the modern world means wearing the expensive designer clothes, driving costly and wasteful cars, and buying large homes in expensive neighborhoods. If low status individuals are able to acquire the luxury items (or cheap copies) usually reserved to the wealthy “leisure class,” then the wealthy simply acquire more costly and ostentatious items to display their wealth. Veblen even attempted to place his ideas about conspicuous consumption within an evolutionary framework, but evolutionary biology was not yet a mature science.

Michael Ruse, University of Guelph, Ontario, “Evolutionary Ethics: A Phoenix Arisen,” Joint Publication Board of Zygon, 1986. SM
 
Joyce, Richard. Myth of Morality. Port Chester, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. p 31.
 
Dustin J. Penn, Konrad Lorenz Institute of comparative Ethology, (September 2003), the Quarterly Review of Biology, THE EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS OF OUR ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS: TOWARD A DARWINIAN ECOLOGY, (http://web.mit.edu/jjay/Public/Penn-EvolutionaryRoots-QRB-Sep2003.pdf)

Tournament: anything jan feb | Round: 2 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The meta-ethic is constitutivism, since only it gives agents non-optional reasons for acting. Katsafanas

Enter a third theory, which attempts to do just that: constitutivism. According to constitutivism, there is an element of truth in both the internalist and the externalist positions. For the constitutivist agrees with the internalist that the truth of a normative claim depends on the agent’s aims, in the sense that the agent must possess a certain aim in order for the normative claim to be true. But the constitutivist traces the authority of norms to an aim that has a special status, an aim that is constitutive of being an agent. This constitutive aim is not optional; if you lack the aim, you are not an agent at all. So the constitutivist agrees with the internalist that practical reasons derive from the agent’s aims; but the constitutivist holds that the relevant aim is one that is intrinsic to being an agent. Accordingly, the constitutivist gets the conclusion that the externalist wanted: there are non-optional reasons for acting. 

The will to power is the best constitution of action. Action always aims at overcoming because any action is a drive for power. Katsafanas 2

So while a purely goal-directed act would seek to minimize resistances, a process-directed activity involves an active desire to encounter and overcome resistances. For if you aim to engage in some process, you must actually seek the objects upon which the process can be directed. This is why Nietzsche sometimes describes the will to power as “a will to overcome, a will that has in itself no end… a processus in infinitum, an active determin-ing” Or, as he elsewhere puts it, “the will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it” The link between the will to power thesis and the drive psychology should now beclear. Will to power is not an independent drive, but a description of the form that all drive-motivated actions take. This is why Heidegger was entirely correct to write that  “ power can never be pre-established as will’s goal, as though power were something that could??rst be posited outside the will...The expression ‘to power ’ therefore never mean some sort of appendage to will. Rather, it comprises an elucidation of the essence of will itself.” To say that we will power is to say that we are motivated by drives.In sum, the will to power thesis describes the structure of drive-motivated actions. If an action is drive-motivated, then it aims at power. If, as Nietzsche seems to maintain,all  actions are drive-motivated, then all  actions aim at power.This entails that will to power is the constitutive aim of drive-motivated actions. For drives are motivational states that aim at their own continuous expression, and aiming at continuous expression entails aiming to encounter resistances to overcome. Theconclusion is simple: drive-motivated activities aim at encountering and overcomingresistance. 

The will to power precludes us from assenting to general state action – it underpins a consistent state of anarchy where individuals reject the state from influencing their lives. Martin  
Mastery is by definition and action, a stasis. As a stasis, it is not a becoming or Overcoming. A more appropriate candidate for the overcoming nature of Will to Power is Growth as identified in third section. Life is Will to Power and Life immanently overcomes itself to grow. A corollary of this is life organizing itself in pyramidic structures. Here the strongest instantiation of Will to Power overcomes lesser ones and exploits them for its own interests by incorporating them. In this manner and trajectory, the strongest continues to grow. Politically and socially, this entails Aristocratic Radicalism. Again a pyramidic social structure apparently based on 'might is right' will follow contrary to the egalitarianism of 'Modern Ideas' which coincidentally or not, Nietzsche vehemently opposed. Furthermore, this lends itself to Fascistic and authoritarian interpretations of Nietzschean Philosophy; interpretations which had been argued against for by scholars intending to rehabilitate Nietzsche after the end of the Second World War. However, the Aristocratic Radicalist position is somewhat undermined by remaining faithful to the description of Will to Power as espoused by Nietzsche himself and examined in the final section.  This description holds that it is constituted by overcoming. As such, a stasis -- whether in the MetaphysicalChristian weltanshaaung or in fixed, hierarchical social structures of Aristocratic Radicalism -- will be at most unlikely or at least, subject to permanent challenges. For it must be remembered that Will to Power is  overcoming and therefore overcomes its previous instantiations. This 'becoming' can justify situations antithetical to Aristocratic Radicalism. For William Connolly, it can underpin agonistic liberalism where various instantiations of Will to Power contest others for democratic hegemony and where the existing political-social structures and values are overcome at various levels, by the creativity of growing life. It can also underpin a post-humanist Anarchism. Basing itself on the insights of Gilles Deleuze, this philosophy maintains that  social structures, identities, values, themselves instantiations of a now reactive Will to Power, can be contested by alternative ones inspired by active instantiations of Will to Power. This is, what Max Stirner would term a permanent process of insurrection against 'What is' and not the singular event of 'the Revolution'. It's success is not guaranteed by teleology and it is mostly specific. It occurs at what Deleuze and Michel Foucault would call 'the microlevel'. These specific instances can connect with others to create larger macro alliances, but these are contingent and not necessitated by historicism. This is precisely the philosophy of Post-Humanistic Anarchism. This continually and immanently challenges  existing social structures, practices, identities and values with alternatives. This is not to dismiss the possibilities of Aristocratic Radicalism. History and events demonstrate that it does and can occur. It is however, within the possibilities of Life, as Will to Power, to overcome and contest it 

Thus, the standard is the adherence to the Will to Power. Resource extraction is our greatest exertion of the will to power. Waters
The will to power is asserted first and foremost in the attempt to master nature. Natural resources are extracted from the earth and transformed into energy or artifacts. Cities increasingly dominate the global landscape and are connected by elaborate transportation infrastructures and communication networks. The “natural” habitat of late moderns is largely one of their own fabrication. Their corporate identity is that of homo faber – the creatures who construct a reality that they will into being through the power of their technology. Although humans carry the “murderous ape” in their genes, they have to a large extent, learned to control it. They do not routinely avoid, chase away, or kill strangers. Indeed, as inhabitants of the late modern world they must trust and cooperate with strangers to conduct their daily affairs. How has this come to be? We may say that biological evolution is being increasingly displaced by what may be characterized as “cultural evolution” as the dominant, formative feature of human life. To paraphrase Grant, late moderns are forming a culture predicated upon the progressive mastery of nature and human nature. To survive and thrive as a species, and as individuals, they must simultaneously reshape the natural social and political environments in which they live, while also transforming themselves within those environments. 

Katsafanas, Paul. “Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzchean Version of Constitutivism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC.  Boston University: 2011.
Katsafanas, Paul. “Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzchean Version of Constitutivism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC.  Boston University: 2011.
Aristocratic Radicalism or Anarchy? An examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Will to Power, Martin Jenkins. BA Hons, MA, PGCE, Cert Coun)
Brent Waters -- This Mortal Flesh: Incarnation and Bioethics, By Brent Waters p. 18 2009