Tournament: NFL Quals | Round: 4 | Opponent: Manchester NA Nick Albertazzi | Judge: AJ Harris, Paul Wexler, and idk
Recent evidence shows that even non-mammals consciously feel pain.
Allen 11
Allen, Colin Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, “Animal Consciousness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Smith and Boyd (1991) assess the evidence for the pain-sensing capabilities of animals in the categories of whether nociceptors are connected to the central nervous system, whether endogenous opioids are present, whether analgesics affect responses, and whether the ensuing behavioral responses are analogous to those of humans (see table 2.3 in Varner 1998, p. 53, which updates the one presented by Smith and Boyd). On the basis of these criteria, Varner follows Smith and Boyd in concluding tentatively that the most obvious place to draw a line between painconscious organisms and those not capable of feeling pain consciously is between vertebrates and invertebrates. However, Elwood and Appel (2009) conducted an experiment on hermit crabs which they interpret as providing evidence that pain is experienced and remembered by these crustaceans. Varner also expressed some hesitation about the evidence for conscious pain in “lower” vertebrates: fish, reptiles and amphibians. Allen (2004b) argues, however, that subsequent research indicates that the direction of discovery seems  uniformly towards identifying more similarities among diverse species belonging to different taxonomic classes, especially in the domains of anatomy

Animals show empathy with others, even at their own expense. Magee 09
Magee, Michael (Chemist, PhD from U of Aston, retired). 19 July 2009. “Evolution and Animal Morality.” http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/b30animalmorals.php
Rhesus monkeys will not feed when they know another will get an electric shock as a consequence. Frans de Waal (Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, 2006) explains that a rhesus monkey was subjected to an experiment in which it pulled a chain to get food. Monkeys learn such tricks immediately. But then the experiment was arranged so that, besides delivering food, another monkey in the next cage got an electric shock when the chain was pulled. The monkey pulling the chain soon realized it was causing the other monkey distress, and it stopped doing it, and would not do it again for five days, until it was really hungry. Another starved itself for twelve days before it was forced to by hunger to pull the chain again. The monkeys would rather starve than cause pain to another monkey nearby, and it was not only when the other monkey was kin. When the monkeys were related, the longer they would starve themselves rather than cause distress, showing that genes and evolution were invoved even though the concern the monkeys had for each other was not limited to close kin. In monkeys and apes, as well as humans, the compassionate trait has extended to unrelated creatures in close enough proximity to notice distress in others of their kind.
Rats will not depress a lever to get food once they realize that by so doing they cause a rat in an adjacent cage pain through an electric shock. Stanley Milgram doing the same experiment to humans (who pretended to be shocked) found many were willing to apply such serious shocks that the victims would have died if the shocks were real. In another experiment with rats, one was suspended uncomfortably in the air, but another rat perfectly free to do as it wished could press a lever to release the suspended rat. The free rats did just that! Even mice have been shown to be capable of feeling empathy. They are observably distressed when nearby mice are tortured. Empathy in small mammals like mice shows it is probably common to all mammals, and certainly to more sophisticated species. Once it is accepted that many mammals can sense the pain of another of the same kind, the basis of morality must exist.

Tournament: NFL Quals | Round: 4 | Opponent: Manchester NA Nick Albertazzi | Judge: AJ Harris, Paul Wexler, and idk
Recent evidence shows that even non-mammals consciously feel pain.
Allen 11
Allen, Colin Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, “Animal Consciousness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Smith and Boyd (1991) assess the evidence for the pain-sensing capabilities of animals in the categories of whether nociceptors are connected to the central nervous system, whether endogenous opioids are present, whether analgesics affect responses, and whether the ensuing behavioral responses are analogous to those of humans (see table 2.3 in Varner 1998, p. 53, which updates the one presented by Smith and Boyd). On the basis of these criteria, Varner follows Smith and Boyd in concluding tentatively that the most obvious place to draw a line between painconscious organisms and those not capable of feeling pain consciously is between vertebrates and invertebrates. However, Elwood and Appel (2009) conducted an experiment on hermit crabs which they interpret as providing evidence that pain is experienced and remembered by these crustaceans. Varner also expressed some hesitation about the evidence for conscious pain in “lower” vertebrates: fish, reptiles and amphibians. Allen (2004b) argues, however, that subsequent research indicates that the direction of discovery seems  uniformly towards identifying more similarities among diverse species belonging to different taxonomic classes, especially in the domains of anatomy

Animals show empathy with others, even at their own expense. Magee 09
Magee, Michael (Chemist, PhD from U of Aston, retired). 19 July 2009. “Evolution and Animal Morality.” http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/b30animalmorals.php
Rhesus monkeys will not feed when they know another will get an electric shock as a consequence. Frans de Waal (Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, 2006) explains that a rhesus monkey was subjected to an experiment in which it pulled a chain to get food. Monkeys learn such tricks immediately. But then the experiment was arranged so that, besides delivering food, another monkey in the next cage got an electric shock when the chain was pulled. The monkey pulling the chain soon realized it was causing the other monkey distress, and it stopped doing it, and would not do it again for five days, until it was really hungry. Another starved itself for twelve days before it was forced to by hunger to pull the chain again. The monkeys would rather starve than cause pain to another monkey nearby, and it was not only when the other monkey was kin. When the monkeys were related, the longer they would starve themselves rather than cause distress, showing that genes and evolution were invoved even though the concern the monkeys had for each other was not limited to close kin. In monkeys and apes, as well as humans, the compassionate trait has extended to unrelated creatures in close enough proximity to notice distress in others of their kind.
Rats will not depress a lever to get food once they realize that by so doing they cause a rat in an adjacent cage pain through an electric shock. Stanley Milgram doing the same experiment to humans (who pretended to be shocked) found many were willing to apply such serious shocks that the victims would have died if the shocks were real. In another experiment with rats, one was suspended uncomfortably in the air, but another rat perfectly free to do as it wished could press a lever to release the suspended rat. The free rats did just that! Even mice have been shown to be capable of feeling empathy. They are observably distressed when nearby mice are tortured. Empathy in small mammals like mice shows it is probably common to all mammals, and certainly to more sophisticated species. Once it is accepted that many mammals can sense the pain of another of the same kind, the basis of morality must exist.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 5 | Opponent: Newark CQ | Judge: Courtney Nunley
Cap is the root cause of racism. The essential feature of the Middle Passage was the fact that slaves became commodities.
Smallwood 7 writes
Stephanie Smallwood (Associate Professor of History at University of Washingt0n). “Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from African to American Diaspora.” Harvard University Press. 2007.
The half century 1675–1725 marked the most active years of England’s Royal African Company, the chartered firm that from the time of its inception in 1672 until the close of the century held a monopoly on all English trade to Africa and that continued to play an active role in the first several decades of the eighteenth century, an era of “free trade.”4 The company employed a network of colonists as agents responsible for receiving slave cargoes in Anglo- American ports. As the Gold Coast was a region whose Atlantic exports moved through the bevy of coastal trading forts initially established to manage gold exports, most of the area’s human traffic flowed through those settlements in the seventeenth century; and any that did not pass through these holding centers was closely monitored by the fort administrators. From this English slaving system emerged a unique documentary record of slave trading on both African and American sides of the ocean. Working out of African and American ports, the agents of the Royal African Company generated a voluminous record of the system’s inner workings. Moreover, it is a record that, unlike the papers of most of the private individuals and independent firms that had come to dominate the English slave trade by the middle of the eighteenth century, has survived in relatively comprehensive form. The corpus of records produced by agents stationed in both West Africa and the English American colonies is uniquely transatlantic in scope, affording a kind of detail regarding the various stages of African migration in the Atlantic arena that is rarely available elsewhere. The business of slave trading produced two interrelated but distinct bodies of archival material—one quantitative, and the other largely textual. The former comprised the ledgers, bills of lading, and other instruments of accounting by which traders monitored and measured their investments. The latter comprised internal correspondence between and among officials in London and agents stationed in Africa and the Americas. It was the quantitative content of the archives that entered most directly into the public domain, in the form of commercial vital statistics published for British consumption. Circulating alongside the formal accounting of economic exchange, the correspondence formed a more private transcript that was largely hidden from public view. It is from the rich content of the company’s internal correspondence—between the trading factories along the Gold Coast and the company’s main fort, Cape Coast Castle; between the agents at Cape Coast Castle and their superiors in London; and finally between London and the company’s agents in the American colonies—that we gain a remarkably detailed picture, a window opening out onto the day-today conduct of the commerce in human beings. In this less visible transcript both traders and those traded appear as actors on the transatlantic stage. Distinct from the public transcript that produced the winners’ version of the story (how many units of merchandise sold, how many pounds sterling earned, how much profit, how much loss), the more hidden, internal transcript tells a fuller story—the human story of the Atlantic slave trade. At every point along the passage from African to New World markets, we find a stark contest between slave traders and slaves, between the traders’ will to commodify people and the captives’ will to remain fully recognizable as human subjects. The correspondence, voyage journals, and other texts that slave traders produced show us the inner workings of the system and its constitutive practices. They serve as a kind of mirror in which we can see reflected aspects of the human experience of captivity and migration. The documents detail the activities of the Europeans who traded for slaves in Africa and transported them to markets in America, the merchants from whom slaves were purchased on the African coast, and the planters to whom they were sold in American colonies. In documenting their roles as buyers and sellers of humans, the slave traders in their records also unwittingly reveal part of the slaves’ own stories. From the interplay of these stories, we can excavate something of the slaves’ own experience of the traffic in human beings and of life aboard the slave ship. Following the trace of African life within the commodity circuits of the Atlantic economy brings an essential element of the African diaspora into focus—the inexorable one-way trajectory of African dispersal via the transatlantic slave trade and its implications for African life in the Americas. Always doubling back on return voyages, ships made loops and spirals as they carried the commodities that sustained transatlantic markets: gold and silver, sugar and tobacco, rice and coffee, woolens and silks, cottons and linens, wine, brandy, and rum, muskets and gunpowder . . .and captive people. Unlike the ships, which plied back and forth, though, the human commodities followed a relentlessly linear course: the direction of their transatlantic movement never reversed. Ships traced circles. Commodities traveled in a straight line. For people who traveled not as emigrants seeking new lives in new places but as commodities, transatlantic exile admitted none of the return journeys, correspondence, and other means of contact by which migrants shaped networks of social and information exchange between their origins and destinations, the Old and New Worlds. Atlantic slaves in diaspora did not lack connections to the “Old World.” 

Capitalism is the root cause of racism. IBT 93
“Capitalism and Racism,” International Bolshevik Tendency. 1993. http://www.bolshevik.org/1917/no12/no12capitalismandracism.html
The absence of any scientific basis for distinguishing one "race" from another makes the whole concept meaningless. Yet biological refutation does not affect the social reality. As Richard Fraser, a veteran American Trotskyist, pointed out in "The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution," a document written in the 1950s and recently republished, race remains "a reality in spite of the fact that science reveals that it does not exist." Fraser wrote that: "The concept of race has now been overthrown in biological science. But race as the keystone of exploitation remains. Race is a social relation and has only a social reality." Racism is rooted in the historical development of capitalism as a world system. It has proved through several centuries to be a useful and flexible tool for the possessing classes. It justified the brutal wars of conquest and genocide, which established the European colonial empires. It rationalized the slave trade, which produced the primitive accumulation of capital necessary for the industrial revolution. Today racism in its various guises remains an important ideological mainstay for the capitalist elites, providing a rationale for the barbaric oppression of minorities. Racism "explains," for example, why black people in America fail to get a piece of the "American Dream" one generation after another. It can be used to "explain" why Japanese capitalism has been much more successful than its European and North American rivals. The arguments offered by racists, whether the psychotic ravings of a lumpenized skinhead or the "objective," pseudo-scientific scholarship of a Harvard professor, seek to direct popular anger away from the workings of an irrational and decaying capitalist system to some group of "outsiders." Racism has proved integral and necessary for the proper functioning of capitalist society for a variety of reasons. In the first place, it provides one of the essential axes along which the working class can be divided against itself, encouraging one segment of the proletariat to identify with the exploiters. This impedes the development of class consciousness and undermines the unity necessary to challenge capitalist rule. The working class of every imperialist country has been so poisoned with chauvinism and racism (also promoted by pro-capitalist misleaderships within the workers' movement) that in "normal" periods, workers often identify their interests with those of their "own" oppressors and exploiters rather than with those of workers in other countries. Secondly, racism, in common with other forms of biological determinism, has an essential ideological function. The bourgeoisie rose to ascendancy under the banner of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Yet for hundreds of millions of people daily reality in the world capitalist order is misery, oppression and poverty. Even in the so-called advanced capitalist countries there is a growing cynicism about the electoral process, with most adults recognizing that the "equality" of the ballot box is no different from the "equality of the market place—every dollar is equal, and big money takes all. Racists are not burdened with the obligation to prove that capitalist society is egalitarian. Instead, they openly claim that the inequalities of class society are based on natural distinctions.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Scarsdale BU Ben Ulene | Judge: Samir Reddy
Even if life isn’t intrinsically valuable under util, extinction is independently bad because it precludes all values. Seeley 86
Robert A., Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, The Handbook of Non-Violence, p. 269-70
In moral reasoning prediction of consequences is nearly always impossible. One balances the risks of an action against its benefits; one also considers what known damage the action would do. Thus a surgeon in deciding whether to perform an operation weighs the known effects (the loss of some nerve function, for example) and risks (death) against the benefits, and weighs also the risks and benefits of not performing surgery. Morally, however, human extinction is unlike any other risk. No conceivable human good could be worth the extinction of the race, for in order to be a human good it must be experienced by human beings. Thus extinction is one result we dare not-may not-risk. Though not conclusively established, the risk of extinction is real enough to make nuclear war utterly impermissible under any sane moral code.

Stopping meaningless human created extinction is key to affirm life
Barash and Lipton 85
David P. Barash, Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington (Seattle) and Judith Eve Lipton, psychiatrist at the Swedish Medical Center in Washington, “The Caveman and the Bomb” p.261-267. 1985
Fortunately, whatever genetic imperatives operate in Homo sapiens, they are unlikely to extend directly to nuclear weapons, any more than a tendency for body adornment necessarily leads to a Christian Dior necktie or a New Guinea penis sheath. The general patterns that char¬acterize today's nuclear Neanderthal are, in fact, general, nonspecific. They may incline us to a degree of saber rattling that seems likely to trouble the world in one way or another as long as we and the world persist, but these patterns don't require that the saber be nuclear.  On this level the nuclear Neanderthal doesn't even have to play "as if": We are called on to behave not as if we had free will regarding the renun-ciation of nuclear weapons and nuclear war, but to act in accord with that free will, which we assuredly have. That is honest empowerment indeed. Teilhard de Chardin wrote about the "Omega point" at which human beings become conscious of their own evolution and, hence, of them¬selves. He called for a recognition of unity and connectedness, with our species born on this planet and spread over its entire surface, coming gradually to form around its earthly matrix a single, major organic unity, enclosed upon itself; a single, hypercomplex, hyperconcentrated, hyperconscious arch-molecule, coextensive with the heavenly body on which it is born.9 In overcoming the Neanderthal mentality we could finally become hu¬man, or perhaps even more than this, at last able to answer affirmatively the question: Is there intelligent life on earth? As poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis pleaded, "Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle."'° Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth—Whereupon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising and the rivers flow." THOMAS WOLFE 11 For the existentialists the essence of humanity is in saying no—no to injustice, to murder, to the absurd and dehumanizing universe itself.  But the ultimate existential tragedy is that in the long run, saying no cannot succeed. Each of us will eventually die, and this looming inevitability makes our lives absurd.  By our very aliveness we are therefore embarked on a hopeless campaign, which may yield some victories, but only tem-porary ones. Like a cosmic poker game, we are playing against the house, but in this game the house never loses; even if we are briefly ahead, we cannot cash in our chips and go home winners. There is no other place to go. At the close of The Plague, Albert Camus lets us inside the thoughts of Dr. Rieux, who had courageously battled a typhoid epidemic in a North African city. Just as the plague has finally been overcome, and the survivors were celebrating in the streets, Dr. Rieux understood that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.12 But effectiveness per se is not the issue. The rats may come again, and with them the plague, just as every person now alive must some day die.  The real question—for would-be post-Neanderthals no less than for existential thinkers—concerns the obligation of human beings in the face of such a world. "In everlasting terms—those of eternity," wrote Thomas Wolfe, "there is no greater wisdom than the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, no acceptance finally so true as the stern fatalism of the rock. Man was born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end." Nonetheless, he concludes, we must "deny it all along the way." Although admitting the "stern lesson of acceptance," which calls for acknowledging the "tragic under-weft of life into which man is born, through which he must live, out of which he must die," Wolfe described his intention, "having accepted it, to try to do what was before me, what I could do, with all my might."13 Camus went farther. According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus had been condemned to spend eternity rolling an enormous rock up a steep hill;when the rock neared the top, it would roll back down, and Sisyphus would have to start again. In "The Myth of Sisyphus," Sisyphus serves not only as a metaphor for humanity but, as Camus sees it, as a model as well.  His struggle is not only self-defining, but also ennobling. More¬over, Camus concludes that Sisyphus is happy. There are some important differences between Sisyphus and Dr. Rieux, and the post-Neanderthal. For one thing, Dr. Rieux could afford to lose many battles and even many patients, just as Sisyphus can tolerate the constant victory of gravity. Sisyphus, after all, is crushed neither mentally nor literally by his stone; no matter how many people die from a plague, some survive. Dr. Rieux will never eradicate the plague; his glory comes from his fighting on in the face of that knowledge. Sisyphus will never succeed in his labor; his happiness comes from his self-defi¬nition, knowing his futility. Unlike them, however, we are not doomed to failure. Before beginning their combat the Roman gladiators used to face the spectators in the Coliseum and announce, "We who are about to die salute you." Two thousand years later the poet W. H. Auden updated their credo: "We who are about to die demand a miracle." Like the gladiators, Auden was concerned about the end of his life, what Kurt Vonnegut calls "plain old death." And to overcome plain old personal death, nothing less than a bona fide miracle in the theological sense will do. We can say no to personal death and an absurd universe all we like, but in the end, like Rieux and Sisyphus, we are bound to lose. The good news, however, is that the other kind of death—the mass, meaningless annihilation that would come with nuclear war—is not inevitable.  Unlike the overturning of personal death, no divine intervention is required. Unlike the eruption of a volcano or the brewing of a hurricane, nuclear war is a man-made problem, with man- and woman-made solutions. Unlike Auden and the gladiators, we have a precious and unique op¬portunity: We can say no to our Neanderthal mentality, to our genes.  We are the only creatures on earth who can do this. We have this op¬portunity because our genes whisper to us, they do not shout. They can be stubborn, but they can be persuaded, cajoled, bribed, or, if necessary, simply overruled and strong-armed into submission. Dr. Rieux learned in a time of pestilence that "there are more things to admire in men than to despise." Similarly, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, if we choose to be. We can be greater than the sum of our genes. If that is our decision, evolution can't do a thing about it. Making that decision is the supreme test of our humanity, our greatest challenge and our most sublime opportunity. Nonetheless, war touches a deep chord in most human beings, and the decision to say no will not be an easy one. Sigmund Freud com¬mented that prohibitions and taboos by their very existence strongly suggest a preexisting desire to perform the prohibited act, otherwise there would be no need for the prohibition: "What no human soul desires, there is no need to prohibit; it is automatically excluded. The very em¬phasis of the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill makes it certain that we spring from an endless ancestry of murderers, with whom the lust for killing was in the blood, as possibly it is to this day with ourselves." He also emphasized that wars occur because nations, like individuals, "still obey their immediate passions far more readily than their inter¬ests,"14 a succinct summary of the plight of today's Neanderthal. Prior to World War I especially, the making of war was generally considered a laudable activity. Admiration and often adulation flowed to such men as Alexander, Achilles, Caesar, Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Robert E. Lee. The first masterpiece of Western literature (Homer's Iliad) and the first histories (Herodotus' account of the Persian Wars, and Thucydides' study of the Peloponnesian War) focused on war. Western culture is by no means unique in its glorification of war, as witness the cultures of ancient Africa, Mexico, and Fiji. Ac¬cordingly, "the war against war," as William James pointed out, "is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party."15 The fact is that war and sanctified violence have had a powerful and persistent appeal cross culturally, although not in all cultures, and throughout human history. Thus, as James said, war has come to be seen as "preserving our ideals of hardihood," a supreme test of human effectiveness, the most de¬manding and, hence, for many people, the most rewarding activity of which they are capable. It is revealing that whereas "war" exists in the plural, "peace" is conceived only in the singular. (A similar pattern obtains in other lan¬guages as well.) We have the War of the Roses, the Napoleonic wars, the Maori wars, World Wars I and II, and so on, but only one peace, despite the fact that there must have been as many different kinds of peace as different kinds of wars. As with the Eskimos, who are said to have eleven words for what in English we simply call "snow," or the Bedouin, who have more than one hundred words for "camel," human beings distin¬guish carefully among whatever is important to them. For countless generations the human Neanderthal has been obsessed with war, and indifferent to peace, even slightly bored with it. When and if peace becomes as appealing as war, perhaps then we shall focus on it, identi¬fying its varieties and nuances. Words signifying normalcy, like "peace," "health," and "sanity," have lagged behind their pathological counter¬parts; thus, we know more about diseases than about wellness. Yet, as the holistic health movements are demonstrating, in order to practice preventive medicine, it is necessary to define, describe, and validate the state of wellness before one can act effectively to preserve it. Much of war's appeal, according to William James, comes from its aura of extremis, embodying the most dangerous and strenuous of human struggles, and hence becoming strangely ennobling despite (or in part, because of) its extraordinary horror. The contemplation of war, the prep¬aration for war, and in many cases even the fighting of war is something that most Neanderthals find compelling, exciting, and even fun. Accord¬ing to James, this gut-level attraction "cannot be met effectively by mere counter-insistency on war's expensiveness and horror. The horror makes the thrill; and when the question is of getting the extremist and supremist out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious." He therefore proposed a "substitute for war's disciplinary function"—his now-famous Moral Equivalent of War, suggesting a peacetime conscription which would not so much overcome the Neanderthal mentality as bypass it with a bit of social ju jitsu, sublimating dangerous human urges into constructive activity.16 In a sense, the Peace Corps was a practical example of James's con¬ception; but a real peace corps can be fashioned only when peacemaking becomes recognized as an acceptable and active verb, and when peace takes its rightful place at our own core. Ironically, in a world society that is increasingly intolerant of personal violence, that forbids murder, assault, even the threat of physical abuse, and in which fistfights and even bullying are grossly out of place, in diplomatic parlors, war and the threat of war remain acceptable. Rather than finding a moral equivalent of war, we have collectively made war itself into a morally acceptable form of violence such that societies can contemplate and plan actions that would be unacceptable if undertaken by its individual members. Those old Neanderthal cravings are still alive and well, running just beneath the surface, needing only the slightest provocation to erupt, even in the most sophisticated and presumably civilized societies. Just let some Americans be taken hostage in Iran, or a Korean airliner violate Soviet airspace, and suddenly the cavemen are at it again and the old predictable tribal bellowing resumes. Homo, called sapiens, is all but drowned in an atavistic avalanche of anger, distrust, and intolerance. The structures of peace, built up with such care and needing such nurturance, seem woefully delicate and fragile before the crude, easily evoked Neanderthal onslaught. But here we note Theodore Roethke's observation, "In a dark time, the eye begins to see." Perhaps by thinking, feeling, and believing, we can see through our Neanderthal mentality, and forge a new awareness where we confront our limitations and our strengths, able to bend, but nonetheless to resist and not to break. A major impediment to this awareness has been our ignorance that the Neanderthal mentality even exists. There is also the double irony of pessimism—the assumption that the Neanderthal mentality, under the alias of "human nature," is un¬changeable. Insofar as it succeeds, this assumption is a triumph for the Neanderthal mentality and, moreover, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is also seductive; it leaves each of us free to go ahead with his or her own little life, all the while treading on unstable slopes, heedless of the danger. "The challenge to humans in our time is whether they can become aroused not just over small but over larger dangers," observed Norman Cousins. "Whether they can perceive universal problems as well as per¬sonal ones, whether they can become as concerned over their survival as a species as they are over their jobs."" This arousal is growing, in part because the overriding universal problem is increasingly perceived as an intensely personal one, because it threatens the deepest personal values of every human being, and also because it demands a committed personal response. Perhaps we shall have the final laugh after all, and perhaps the laugh will be on evolution. In giving so much autonomy to the bodies they create, the genes of Homo sapiens have unwittingly sewn the seeds of their own overthrow (not the seeds of their destruction, for that would mean our own demise as well). It is precisely—and only—by overthrowing our genes, by taking the unprecedented step and saying no to their dangerous and insistent whisperings, that we can preserve them, along with everything else. By saying no to that aspect of our genes, we say yes to life, to love, and to hope, and even to the continuation of those troublesome genes themselves. There is no better time. "At this moment," wrote Albert Camus, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.18 Maybe in the long run we shall all laugh together, as through our negation of the Neanderthal mentality we arrive at a new affirmation, a higher level of life, its most exalted accomplishment. This will be the point at which, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to universal murder, we resolve to overcome the Neanderthal mentality and thereby transcend,if not overcome, our biology itself. 

Value to life is subjective – life comes first.
Schwartz 2
Lisa Schwartz, Chair at the Centre for Health Economics and Policy Analysis, 2002
The second assertion made by supporters of the quality of life as a criterion for decisionmaking is closely related to the first, but with an added dimension. This assertion suggests that the determination of the value of the quality of a given life is a subjective determination to be made by the person experiencing that life. The important addition here is that the decision is a personal one that, ideally, ought not to be made externally by another person but internally by the individual involved. Katherine Lewis made this decision for herself based on a comparison between two stages of her life. So did James Brady. Without this element, decisions based on quality of life criteria lack salient information and the patients concerned cannot give informed consent. Patients must be given the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not. To ignore or overlook patients’ judgement in this matter is to violate their autonomy and their freedom to decide for themselves on the basis of relevant information about their future, and comparative consideration of their past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we must treat persons as rational and as ends in themselves. 

AT Troxell 

This evidence doesn’t justify extinction, just rejecting desire. Neg author Troxell 11
Mary Troxell. “Arthur Schopenhauer.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Boston College. May 11, 2011.
Since the essence of existence is insatiable striving, and insatiable striving is suffering, Schopenhauer concludes that nonexistence is preferable to existence. Ben’s card ends However, suicide is not the answer. One cannot resolve the problem of existence through suicide, for since all existence is suffering, death does not end one’s suffering but only terminates the form that one’s suffering takes. The proper response to recognizing that all existence is suffering is to turn away from or renounce one’s own desiring. In this respect, Schopenhauer’s thought finds confirmation in the Eastern texts he read and admired: the goal of human life is to turn away from desire. Salvation can only be found in resignation.

However, desire can’t be rejected. You dislike pain whether you choose to or not. That’s on the AC framework.

AT Griffin

Your author agrees that negative util fails and extinction is bad. I defend positive util, that we should maximize happiness, not minimize suffering. Griffin 79
James Griffin. “Is Unhappiness Morally More Important Than Happiness?” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 114 (Jan., 1979), pp. 47-55.
Suppose we adopted the Strong Negative Doctrine. I have spoken so far as though it were a single doctrine; in fact, quite different versions of it have had their advocates. Popper, you will remember, spoke in terms of the prevention of suffering. One version of the Strong Negative Doctrine -we could call it the UR version-might then go like this.6 We have a moral obligation to reduce as much as possible the quantity of suffering or pain in the world, and also to avoid as far as possible causing any suffering or pain; however, we have no moral obligation to promote people's happi- ness. But this version, just as it stands, has the notorious consequence, pointed out by R. N. Smart,7 of requiring the elimination of the human race for the following simple reason. Suppose that we have a weapon that will kill everyone painlessly. Either we kill them or we do not. If we do not, there is bound to be suffering. If we do, there will be none. Various plausible ways around this dire consequence have been suggested, but the case against the UR version by no means rests with the world destroyer. We should, on the UR version, stop having children, because that too will end suffering. Or suppose that a scientist discovers that chemicals now used in agriculture will cause genetic damage of such a sort that, say, future people will be enervated, or that exceptionally well-endowed or talented children will no longer be born. The lack of strength, or of talent, will not make life no longer worth living, it will only reduce it near to the border. The scientist, there- fore, does not fail in his obligations, if he cannot be bothered to warn us. However, we should think for a moment whether a person who has other moral principles, in addition to the UR version, to apply to these situations is any better off. An obvious addition is a principle of the sanctity of life. The expression 'the sanctity of life' is vague, but suppose that the principle requires us to protect not just lives now being lived but also lives that will be lived in the future. Still, I doubt whether the UR version is acceptable even when joined to other moral principles. Because, although the form of pluralism which we should get by combining it with a principle of the sanctity of life would prohibit deliberately ending the human race, it would not require us to warn about the genetic damage. But I do not think that it is worth going on with the UR version, because its weakness is clear. By making the avoidance of suffering the only source of moral obligation, so far as considerations of welfare go, it gives insufficient weight to normal or happy life. So it would seem wise to look instead for another version of the Strong Negative Doctrine. 

… See omitted text at bottom

Now if the benefits here slightly exceed the burdens, that is, every- one agrees that if he had to bear a hundredth part of the burden to reap a hundredth part of the benefit he would think it just worthwhile, would we feel that the benefit had to be greater still to justify the burdens? I doubt that we would. So it seems that the most plausible way to treat the cases where we do is by appeal to justice rather than to the Weak Negative Doctrine. I know of no plausible form of the Negative Doctrine. 

Omitted Griffin Text

The following version, which, I think, is the one most often advocated
and is perhaps closer to the version Popper had in mind,8 is certainly promis-
ing. The notion of a "par" state for humans is central to it; so we can call
it the PAR version. It goes: we have an obligation not to push a person
below par and also an obligation to restore a person as close to par as pos-
sible; so long as a person is at or above par, however, we have no obligation
to benefit him; it may be praiseworthy but it is never required to do so.
This version has some standing in contemporary political practice; it justifies
such standards as "minimum wage" and "minimum acceptable level of
welfare".
But what is par? The first hurdles this version must clear are conceptual
ones. It is easy to say in very rough terms what 'par' means: par is the
level at which a recognizably human life is possible, where one is free from
mortal dangers, great pain, distressing financial insecurity, and so on, and
where therefore one has in one's own hands the basic materials for making
something valuable of one's life. That, no doubt, is roughly what the mini-
mum level is meant to be. But the concept is far too vague; the range of
levels of welfare it determines is too broad. The notion of "basic materials
for a valuable life" has changed substantially with time. At first, for instance,
it did not include literacy, then it did, and now it includes far more. It also
varies from person to person. How someone, here and now, interprets 'par'
will so much depend upon his generosity of spirit. Ask a man where the
minimum level is whose own life is deeply satisfying and who is passionately
committed to improving the human condition. Then ask a man whose own
life is crabbed and who believes that men deserve no better. Of course,
each might, if sharp enough, refuse to answer such an unclear question, but
if they were willing to work with such a concept at all, then they might
well give very different answers. The second man might give an answer that
would make the moral standards of the Negative Doctrine intolerably low.
And the first man's answer might have us teetering on the edge of the
Positive Doctrine.
Admittedly, these are difficulties for, not objections to, the PAR version.
They present a challenge. If par cannot be defined except for our being
assured that a few cases clearly fall on each side of it, we shall be unclear
about our obligation to most people. If the PAR version cannot do better
than this, then it can probably be rejected simply on conceptual grounds.
In any case, even if the PAR version can do better, there is the question
of its consequences. And it is not much better off in this regard than the
first version. Suppose the genetic damage in the previous example would
not reduce us to the border of misery, only to the border of par-wherever
that is finally placed. Some of the drops in welfare would be very great,
but one would still have no moral obligation to warn people.
As before, things are not much better for a pluralist. If we accept that
we have an obligation to prevent these striking drops in happiness, the
principle of the sanctity of life does not seem to provide it. Nor, I believe,
is it provided by any of the other principles that commonly appear in pluralist
theories-at least on common interpretations of them. Nor is it possible,
I think, to save the PAR version by appealing to the distinction between
obligation and supererogation. That is, one might try suggesting that pre-
venting or avoiding such damage to people's well-being is not, strictly
speaking, an obligation, though it is, clearly, morally desirable. But what
seems unacceptable is the suggestion that it is not an obligation, that if we
ought to do it, the 'ought' is not imperative but merely hortatory. I am
morally obliged, it would seem, to warn everyone of the genetic damage.
Taking our cue from this, we might simply make some ad hoc amend-
ments to the PAR version to get a version that will give us the answers we
want. We have a moral obligation, the AD HOC version goes, not to reduce
a person's present level of life (whether that is at par, above it, or below it);
furthermore, we have an obligation to raise a person who is below par as
close to par as possible; we do not, however-and this is the clause which
preserves the status of this position as a version of the Strong Negative
Doctrine-have an obligation to raise still higher a person who is already at
par or above. I have called this "ad hoc", but perhaps there is an intuitive
justification for it: many people do recognize an obligation not to take what
a person already has, and fail to see any obligation to give to a person at
an already tolerable level of life. And this version is invulnerable to all of
those particularly troublesome cases where someone suffers a disastrous drop
in welfare which stops just short of misery or right on par. In fact, it gives
us-by design-what seem to be the right answers in all the previous cases.
However, this AD HOC version has its troubles. First of all, since it too
uses the notion of par, it suffers from the same conceptual defects as the
second version. Furthermore, it has the following consequence. Imagine a
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsIS UNHAPPINESS MORALLY MORE IMPORTANT? 51
society of the sort that most countries are aiming at-one where, so far as
possible, no one is below the minimum acceptable level of welfare. But the
country is poor and most people are at about par. A very bright idea comes
to a man out of the blue about some labour-saving device that would greatly
raise the quality of life. All the man has to do is to open his mouth and tell
the right people, but he cannot be bothered. On the AD HOC version he
has not failed in any moral obligation. This consequence, I should think,
very many people, monists or pluralists, will find deeply counter-intuitive.
What the counter-intuitiveness of this last consequence suggests is that
when the cost to a person of acting in a certain way is negligible, and the
benefit to others is of an extremely broad and substantial nature, then he
is morally required to do it. To say only that it is morally desirable is too
weak. That is, we can amend the AD HOC version of the Strong Negative
Doctrine so that benefits, in high proportion to costs, can determine obliga-
tions. But that amendment gives us the Weak Negative Doctrine. And
although I have not considered all possible varieties of the Strong version,
I am going to turn now to the more plausible Weak Negative Doctrine.
The Weak Negative Doctrine says that both negative and positive
utilitarian considerations have weight in determining moral obligation, but
that the negative ones have more weight. The Positive Doctrine says that
both positive and negative considerations have weight, and that they have
equal weight. It does not require much reflection on these claims to begin
to wonder precisely how, or more radically even whether, they differ.
Of course, it is not impossible to find varieties of the Weak Negative
Doctrine that do differ from the Positive Doctrine. One would be this.
Both negative and positive considerations determine obligations; however,
when the requirement to relieve or not to produce unhappiness conflicts
with the requirement to promote happiness, the second counts for nothing;
there can be no trade-off of happiness against unhappiness. This NO TRADE
version of the Weak Negative Doctrine at least gives us the answer that
most of us want in the last example. The man with the bright idea who has
only to open his mouth to bring about great benefit ought to speak; it is
not going to hurt him. But this version of the Weak Negative Doctrine,
although certainly different from the Positive Doctrine, seems not to be
different enough from the Strong Negative Doctrine. For add the most
minute element of pain to the example (the man has a sore throat), and
it is not wrong of him to stay silent. All of the attractive versions of the
Weak Negative Doctrine, it seems to me, are those in which one may trade
off benefit against cost. However, they are the ones that are difficult to
keep separate from the Positive Doctrine.
The one to start with is probably this. One might try to explain the
Weak Negative Doctrine by appealing to a sentiment which goes deep in
many of us: namely, that very often it takes a large amount of happiness
to justify the infliction of a pretty small amount of unhappiness. Now
suppose we take the Weak Negative Doctrine-we might call this the BASIC
SENTIMENT version-to be just this claim. I suspect that this sentiment
is at the base of a great deal of allegiance to the Weak Negative Doctrine.
And I do not gainsay its importance; it would be a good thing, for instance,
if all politicians contemplating going to war were strongly under its influence.
However, the BASIC SENTIMENT version is not clearly incompatible with
the Positive Doctrine. It may be that what this version amounts to is this:
that it takes a relatively large amount of happiness (as happiness goes, i.e.,
relative to other cases of happiness) to justify a relatively small amount of
unhappiness (as unhappiness goes, i.e., relative to other cases of unhappiness).
That is, one is appealing to two distinct scales. And the Positive Doctrine
can accommodate this claim, because when we move to a single scale (whether
ordinal or cardinal) on which both happiness and unhappiness are ranked or
measured, it may turn out that this small unhappiness and large happiness
have just the utility, on this single scale, that the BASIC SENTIMENT
version says that they should have. A fairly small amount of unhappiness
may be far more undesirable than a fairly large amount of happiness is
desirable. But then perhaps the utility scale is, or is based on, a scale of
desirability, so that once we have the scale, then if x (some unhappiness) is
more undesirable than y (some happiness) is desirable, x will have a negative
number larger than the positive number that y has.
Suppose then that we amend the Weak Negative Doctrine in this obvious
way. We state it in terms of a single cardinal scale of utility. This version
-the CALCULUS version-then goes: n amount of unhappiness is not
equal in moral significance to n amount of happiness; only n--m amount of
happiness (where m0) has the same moral weight as n amount of un-
happiness, and only n+m+-1 amount of happiness justifies choosing a
course of action including n amount of unhappiness. But is this, at least in
all cases, an intelligible way of speaking? Can the notion of equal amounts
of happiness and unhappiness always be distinguished from the notion of
their having equal weight in determining our choice? I do not deny that
there may be situations in which one can speak in the way the CALCULUS
version speaks. There may be cases in which we can establish that a certain
amount of happiness is equal to a certain amount of unhappiness, and in-
dependently decide at what point we should choose a course containing both
happiness and unhappiness for us. That is, we might say that we should
choose such a course as soon as the happiness more than equals the un-
happiness; or we might say, as the CALCULUS version recommends, that
we should choose only when the happiness greatly exceeds the unhappiness.
We might call these cases, where the preference judgement is based on judge-
ments about amounts of happiness and unhappiness that are independent
of it, derived preference judgements. But there may also be cases, which we
might call basic preference judgements, where the preference judgement is
not derived from this other sort of judgement. And certain cases in which
we have to determine the point at which happiness may be traded off against
unhappiness may be of this type. Consider a realistic case. A doctor (an
orthopaedic surgeon, say, or a psychotherapist) must decide between alter-
native treatments for a patient. On the one hand the patient's suffering can be
stopped quickly but not much more achieved, while on the other his suffering
will continue but in the end he will recover more fully. In a case like this, of
course, choice ought to depend upon how great the suffering will be, how
long it will last, and how much improvement can be achieved. There will
be a point at which the amount of suffering and the amount of benefit in
the second more painful but more ambitious course of treatment are such
that the treatment would be neither clearly desirable nor clearly undesirable:
one would be indifferent between the two treatments. And perhaps in many
situations the judgement whether amounts of happiness and unhappiness
are equal is not independent of, not distinguishable from, one's being in-
different to a situation in which they are combined. Similarly, perhaps in
these cases the judgement whether a certain amount of happiness is just
greater than a certain amount of unhappiness is not independent of the
judgement that the point has just been reached where one would prefer a
situation in which they are combined. On the CALCULUS version one
speaks of two points of equality and of two points at which benefit is greater
or less than cost. One speaks of equality when benefit and cost are both of
n amount. And then, when the benefit is greater than the cost by a certain
amount, the CALCULUS version suggests that we multiply the benefit by
a discounting factor and get another point at which benefit and cost are
equal-namely, equal in weight in determining our choice. The two points
of equality, then, are, respectively, equal in (numerical) quantity, and equal
in weight in determining choice. What I am suggesting, however, is that
there are cases in which we can speak of only one point of equality-namely,
equality of weight in determining choice. But if there are cases in which it
is not possible to speak of these two points of equality, then for them the
CALCULUS version cannot even be stated.
I want to follow the Weak Negative Doctrine through just one more
turn in formulation. So far I have not considered in any explicit way inter-
personal comparisons of welfare. And it may be thought that if I do, I shall
encounter a plausible form of the Weak Negative Doctrine, which we might
call the INTERPERSONAL version, that goes: perhaps one will accept a
certain benefit as justifying a certain suffering in one's own case; but when it
comes to inflicting suffering on another person, it takes a good deal more
benefit to justify the same amount of suffering. Since the INTER-
PERSONAL version is offered as a moral principle, one must not confuse
it with a principle of caution, which warns: since judgements about when
a benefit is substantial enough to justify a harm are often rough and un-
certain, although one may take risks with fine calculation in one's own case,
one should play safe in another person's case. The moral principle must be
distinct from this, because a principle of caution makes no claim that it
takes a greater amount of benefit to justify a certain amount of harm; it
merely advises us to work with a wide margin of error.
There is much to be said for a principle of caution. But once it is put
aside, I find it hard to see the rationale of the moral principle alone. Let
us take as the point at which a benefit just exceeds a certain amount of
suffering that point at which I should think it justified to accept the suffer-
ing myself (involved, say, in a course of treatment that will restore the use
of my limbs) in order to achieve the benefit. But then, on the INTER-
PERSONAL version, if I were a doctor taking the decision not for myself
but for a young patient, I must not use the point at which I should think
the treatment justified for myself but require a point at which the benefit
was greater still. But it is hard to see the point of a dual standard here.
It lands us in the odd position of having to say that, if the patient could
have chosen for himself, he would choose such and such benefit, but since
we are choosing for him, we must turn it down.
But perhaps the INTERPERSONAL version has not been made inter-
personal enough, and perhaps it should go:9 when the sufferer and the
beneficiary are different persons, the benefit must be far more substantial
than it need be to justify a given amount of suffering when the sufferer and
the beneficiary are the same person. If, say, a whole generation in an under-
developed country is allowed to suffer hardships to produce great economic
benefit later on, then perhaps the benefits have to be greater, to justify
such a policy, if they accrue to a later generation than if they later accrue
to the same generation. But although this is a common opinion, it is com-
monly backed by appeal, not to the INTERPERSONAL version of the
Weak Negative Doctrine, but to a principle of justice. Why a policy of
allowing one generation to suffer for the good of future generations seems
wrong (if indeed it is wrong) is that it does not distribute benefits and bur-
dens at all equally: one lot gets all the burdens and another all the benefits.
And why it seems right (if indeed it is right) to require a very great surplus
of benefit over burden in order to justify the policy is that if, in case of
conflict, a principle of utility is ever to over-ride a principle of justice, it
will only be in virtue of there being a very great deal of utility at stake.
But what if burden and benefit went to different people and no injustice
were involved? Would we still feel that the benefit had to be substantially
greater than the burden? Imagine a country where troops put up a trans-
mitting station in the middle of a jungle to bring the benefits of television
to the outlying parts. They suffer hardship and illness, but in this country
soldiers are generally pampered while the peasants in the outlying parts are
generally deprived, so the overall distribution of benefits and burdens is not unjust
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Tournament: Harvard RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Hopkins CK Claire Kueffner | Judge: Alli Gofman and Adam Bennett

1. 95 of all LD debates are slow and traditional, and 2 of the 3 national tournaments are slow also. Two impacts. (a) she has no uniqueness, you can compete at slow tournaments now. (b) she excludes fast debaters because he prohibits speed at the only fast tournament.

2. Turn: spreading boosts short term memory, key to education and everyday life
Psychology Today October 1992 (report of the results of the Raine et al study)

"If friends criticize you for talking too fast, at least they can't also accuse you of having a bad memory.  Speech rate is a strong index of short term memory span...  'Therefore, the faster you can talk, the greater your short-term memory,' says Adrian Raine, PhD, a University of Southern California psychologist.  The link has been established for adults for some time, Raine reports in Child Development.  Now, he and his colleagues find the correlation holds for kids as well, a finding that promises short-term payoff in the classroom and long-term payoff in life.  Short-term memory is the power behind recall of phone numbers, directions, and other everyday tasks.  It is also the foundation of arithmetic and reading skills...  That raises the possibility that speech- training may be a short-cut to achievement." (p.14)

3. How fast is ‘too fast’?  There’s no bright line.

4. Personal ethics solves. I don’t spread against novices. She’s qualled to the TOC. She can obviously follow speed. None of her studies are in the context of varsity of debaters who have been trained to follow speed.

5. No exclusion. Marshall Thompson and Joe Vaughan are empirical examples of people with dyslexia who are very successful nationally.

6. Public forum and speech solve.

7. Spreading’s key to education. (A) We can go more in depth in round, (B) it encourages more research out of round because we need more cards to fill in the longer speeches, (C) it’s key to critical thinking because we have to make more in round strategic decisions.

8. No terminal impact to her arguments. It doesn’t matter if she makes debate inclusive if it’s utterly devoid of education as a result. The people who are included don’t benefit.

9. Prewritten arguments solve. She can follow along.

10. Default to community consensus; we wouldn’t spread unless there were good reason to.

1. 1. Voting neg puts me into elims of the RR which will inspire other small school debaters. That’s a larger form of exclusion because it’s empirically verified year after year by the domination of large schools in debate.

12. Fast debate is more fun. That’s why we do it. Boredom excludes people who like having fun.

13. Talking faster solves memory loss in old age.

Hulme, Charles and Mackenzie, Susie. (1992).  Working Memory and Severe
Learning Difficulties.  Hillsdale, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pg 45

 "These results are striking in that the same linear function relating recall to speech rate fits the results for all age groups.  Subjects of different ages in this study all recalled, on average, as much as they could say in roughly 1.5 seconds.  Increases in memory span with age are seen to be very closely related to changes in speech rate with age.  Thus the results of these different studies are remarkably clear and consistent.  The dramatic improvements in serial recall performance with increasing age are closely and quantitatively related to changes in speech rate.  In terms of the articulatory loop theory, which gave impetus to these studies, the length of the loop appears to remain constant across different ages; more material is stored in this system because it can be spoken and so rehearsed more rapidly.  These results, relating developmental increases in  speech rate to increases in short-term memory efficiency, lead quite directly to a simple causal theory:   That increases in memory span with age depend upon increases in speech rate.  Needless to say, however, such a theory is not necessitated by the findings.  The findings are essentially correlational; as children get older their speech rate increases and in line with this so does their memory performance. It could be that both these changes depend upon some other factor.  The obvious way to test this causal theory is to conduct a training study.  If short-term memory depends upon speech rate, if we can successfully train children to speak faster, then this should, according to the theory, lead to a corresponding increase in short-term memory. (p.45)

Tournament: Harvard RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Palo Alto TC | Judge: JScog, Tom Evnen
He read PICs must have solvency advocate

Counter-Interp, neg gets to PIC out of payment for ecosystem services.

All of his standards say the CP isn't specific to the plan text, but it is because his solvency mech is ecosystem services. 

His interp excludes all PICs. No author advocates the exact plan or PIC text.

PICs are key to real-world decision-making. Branson 7
Josh Branson, CSIS and just graduated from Harvard Law, 2007 (“eDebate Reflections about debate and policymaking”, http://www.mail-archive.com/edebate@www.ndtceda.com/msg01593.html)
Well, thats not the way it worked at all, at least for me. No doubt in a collegiate debate judged by one of ya’ll I could have killed them all on the Pan K, probably even if we talked slow, but in the real world, I was kind of surprised to find that the knowledge generated by debate proved to be fairly damn cursory and artificial. I could rattle off a list of most of the arguments for/against most of the general nonproliferation doctrines, but a lot of the empirical and factual basis for these arguments was completely missing in my brain. I could make the basic claim for almost anything in the field, but the technical issues that underlines a lot of them (the names and locations of the Russian CW destruction plants, an understanding of how the fine points of the budget process works, how a capital market sanction would actually be implemented, where did we get our intelligence that revealed Chinese serial proliferators selling bombs to AQ Khan, how does a centrifuge cascade work and why exactly would multilateral sanctions undermine Irans ability to get uranium gas piping technology, the names of the key players in the various foreign governments that make nonproliferation policy etc) was all missing. Maybe this stuff sounds pretty boring, and some of it is, but this is the type of stuff that really determines whether or not policies are successful and whether or not they are effectively promulgated. But the details pretty much get left out in debates, replaced by a simplistic and power-worded DA that culminates in nuclear winter.’ To my surprise, when setting out in the nonproliferation world, you dont get to make grand pronouncements about the impact of funding Nunn-Lugar on US soft power or whether funding it would cause a budget deficit which would collapse the global economy and cause multiple scenarios for nuclear war. Instead, most of the work that is done is deciding which and what type of Russian facilities to allocate the money to, knowing the specific people within the Russian government we can trust, which types of nuclear disposition is safest and what types of transportation we should use when moving spent fuel back to storage, etc. When dealing with these discussions repeatedly, I found that debate had provided me a very sound abstract conceptual frame through which to analyze the general issues being raised, but little in a way of meaningfully engaging the policy process. Of course, debaters can learn this language. There are plenty who have. But I’d wonder whether or not people who claim that debate has trained people for this life are mistaking correlation with causation. Two other interesting conclusions: A) To all the people who attack debate for propounding an overly elitist and undemocratic discourse and undermines good broadly appealing public speaking skills: I think you’ve got it backwards. Yes, a lot of debates involve jargon, no question. But at least in my experience, I found that debate provided me the opposite. The times I was most confident at CSIS were when we were doing public debates or discussions in front of unqualified audiences. I could take on even the most senior experts; in these types of forums, I could out debate them and rhetorically counteract their vast experience/knowledge advantage. On the flip side, when I was in conferences with only experts in the field, I often felt at a severe disadvantage. In forums like this, bad arguments get called out, and rhetorically powerful but intellectually flimsy claims are pretty much non-starters. Debate experience wasn’t a ton of help. In terms of research, I did feel that all the debate research I’ve done provided some advantages and gave me a marginal edge over a lot of other people at CSIS, but nothing enormous. Most of the people there, even though they’d never done debate, can research just as well as the average college debater (ESPECIALLY on technical issues). I realize there are problems with the sample size etc, but it made me think twice about the infallible research advantages supposedly generated by policy debate. B) How to make debate more like the technical policy world? Narrower debates. PICs are vital to this (sorry, Duck). Thinking back on my 8 years in debate, the topic about which I can best converse with experts about is the design of emissions trading schemes. That was because the literature was deep and the prevalence of upstream/downstream/auctioned/timetable PICs narrowed the debates and forced a real in-depth discussion. I just don’t think we get that in a ton of debates, because most PICs are either wanky rhetoric PICs (and yes I was an extreme culprit) or something even worse like Consultation. Thinking back on it, I don’t think that the legal topic was worded particularly poorly, I just think that our strategic norms of judging/debating create a lot of problems in generating the type of education a lot of us want. But one of the most striking thing for me about last year’s topic was that I learned more from Repko’s post about his day at the Supreme Court than I did from all the debates I judged combined. In any event, how to create the types of narrow debates that will general real sustainable expertise on topics is tough. I think that we’ve got to learn how to become accepting as a community of analytical smart arguments to answer carded-yet-stupid arguments, maybe start accepting intrinsicness (something that I might post on some other day) as a way to eliminate politics DAs and consultation CPs, and start modifying our theory dispositions to be willing to call out bullshit CPs (see DHeidts new judge philosophy), and finally moving away from the cult of new and surprise arguments (see below). This will also involve changing the way we teach kids as they enter debate; I know I, for one, am going to change the way I teach camp this summer to include at least a little of these thoughts. Of course, the focus must remain on winning above all else, but I think that that pursuit can be synthesized with a change in some of our debate practices. 2. Why an elite or technical discourse is important My second conclusion is directed at people who decry the topic process because it’s too technical, too narrow, drown out the personal or the things that people want to talk about. Again, my opinion is that this is backwards. I think it’s a major problem that more of the people who conduct policy and who are influential in the process are not well-schooled in the actual empirical pragmatic details of the policies that they are advocating. I’ve read a significant amount about Iraq lately, and got to talk to a bunch of people who were intimately involved in the process, and one of the primary problems was that too much of our policy was executed in a cavalier and emotion-laden fashion. The dangerous pursuit of the “liberation of the oppressed” Iraqis at the expense of all the obvious problems entailed with that pursuit, the complete “lack of a plan,” for how to stabilize the country, and an utter ignorance of the technical or real policy issues facing a peacebuilding operation of that magnitude-~--these are all issues that come up REPEATEDLY when discussing the reason we went into Iraq in such a cavalier and short-sighted manner. A bunch of the more scathing indicts of the topic committee’s work-~--that the topic is too technical, that it undermines creativity etc…these are traits that for me are reflected in some of the most loathsome policymakers we have. Bush is by all accounts an idiot when it comes to policy expertise, but he’s the president that most people would love to have a beer with, and one who has let his personal conviction guide his policymaking more than any I can remember. His administration appears to conceive of the world in relatively simple generic conceptual dichotomies (stay the course vs. cut and run, terrorists are good or evil, our intelligence is either 100 accurate or its not). Is that really what we want our topics to boil down to? A be nice to the Middle East topic? Because its in the extra 60 words that the real problems with policy are revealed, and its there that we find the difference between an effective invasion that removes a horrible dictator from power and one which kills thousands of people and causes the region to implode.

Real-world decision-making comes first; there’s no reason to have a fair or substantive debate if it doesn’t help us with making real-world life choices.
Strait and Wallace 7
The scope of negative fiat and the logic of decision making. L. Paul Strait George Mason University and Brett Wallace Write: George Washington University.
Why debate? Some do it for scholarships, some do it for social purposes, and many just believe it is fun. These are certainly all relevant considerations when making the decision to joining the debate team, but as debate theorists they aren’t the focus of our concern. Our concern in finding a framework for debate that educates the largest quantity of students with the highest quality of skills, while at the same time preserving competitive equity. The ability to make decisions deriving from discussions, argumentation or debate, is the key skill. It Decision-making is the one thing every single one of us will do every day besides breathing. Decision making it transcends boundaries between categories of learning like “policy education” and “kritik 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. It is the skills we learn, not the content of our arguments, that can best improve all of our lives. While policy comparison skills are going to be learned through debate in one way or another, those skills are useless if they are not grounded in the kind of logic actually used to make decisions.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 2 | Opponent: Bronx DM | Judge: Emily Massey, Catherine Tarsney
Spills over outside the political sphere
Sánchez 13 (Andrea Nill, J.D. Student @ Yale Law, “Mexico’s Drug “War”: Drawing a Line Between Rhetoric and Reality,” The Yale Journal of International Law Vol. 38, 2013) 

This section focuses on demonstrating the extent to which war rhetoric has pervaded both U.S. and Mexican political discourse surrounding initiatives to combat Mexico ’ s drug cartels, motivating some public figures to push for transforming a metaphorical war into a literal armed conflict. “ Rhetoric has long been employed to persuade, even goad, people to action, ” Susan Stuart wrote in her piece on the effect of militaristic rhetoric on the United States ’ domestic “ war ” on drugs. 58 “ Today ’ s increasing use of militaristic rhetoric by politicians and pundits goes beyond its metaphorical use as a war against an abstraction. Instead, use of such language is becoming literal, and that rhetorical shift matters, ” Stuart wr ote. 59 While Stuart ’ s research posits that war rhetoric has “ identified fellow United States citizens as enemies in a literal war, ” 60 her observations translate internationally as well. Another legal scholar has observed that the language of war “ has a profound impact on how the law’s intervention is shaped, or how the laws governing the transnational use of force are interpreted to accommodate a ‘ war. ’” 61 He posited that war and its rhetoric create legal norms and that the meaning of law is formed at the intersection of language and politics. 62 Put simply, “ the language of war shapes and creates the international legal norms governing the use of force. ” 63 Outside of legal academia, the late Wayne C. Booth — who dedicated his life to analyzing rhetoric — similarly pointed out that war rhetoric is essentially the most influential form of political rhetoric that “ makes (and destroys) our realities. ” 64 This is because political rhetoric is inherently aimed at changing present circumstances. 65 Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have maintained that our conceptual system itself is metaphorical and that metaphors thus “ structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do. ” 66 Citing the rhetorical use of the term “ war, ” they note that the very acceptance of the war metaphor leads to certain inferences and also clears the way for political action. 67 Thus, the examples that follow in this section should not be merely dismissed as insignificant rhetorical flourishes. As Lackoff and Johnson warn, Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions, will of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self fulfilling prophecies. 68

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 4 | Opponent: Ft Lauderdale TT | Judge: David Joannides
Ecological morality is capitalist. Its hidden objective is to prop up class divisions.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). The Coming Insurrection. Sixth Circle. 2009.
Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hurricanes, epidemics, global overpopulation, erosion of the soil, mass extinction of living species…this will be our burden. They tell us, “everyone must do their part,” if we want to save our beautiful model of civilization. We have to consume a little less to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically to keep producing. We have to control ourselves to go on controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself while giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they would like to convince us to participate in the great industrial challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment we’re ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us out of it. Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s the new morality of capital. The system’s internal state of crisis and the rigorous screening that’s underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this screening and selection will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two different diets, one “healthy and organic” for the rich and their children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to make its normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest whims weren’t so scrupulously “respectful of the environment.” Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag every objection to the exorbitant progress of control. 

The aff’s claim that developing countries are made poor by the West masks working class oppression in the West and obscures the fact that capitalist state is the root cause of environmental harm in developed and developing countries, turning case.
McGregor 13 writes
Warren McGregor (member of the ZACF). “Linking Environment Activism and Other Struggles: An Anarchist Analysis.” Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front. February 11th, 2013. http://zabalaza.net/2013/02/11/linking-environment-activism-and-other-struggles-an-anarchist-analysis/
We as anarchists feel that the ecological problem we face is not industry and production in and of itself, but the way production is organised and controlled and how goods are distributed. Most modern industrial techniques make inefficient use of resources (both human and other) and many are based on the use of resources which are scarce (such as fossil fuels, e.g. oil, coal, etc.) and which produce massive waste and huge levels of pollution. Also, much of production is ultimately useless to the vast majority of people who can’t afford the goods produced (gold watches, big houses, yachts, etc.) and who need other goods for their daily needs (housing materials, nutritious food, adequate clothing, etc.). As a result much of what is produced is dumped and literally thrown into the sea 3. However, anarchists reject the argument that economic development and economic growth always leads to the destruction of the environment. The implication of this type of argument is either that environmental crisis is unavoidable and that we should just “grin and bear it”, or that the world’s economy must be drastically shrunk, and industry replaced with small-scale craft and agricultural production. What we require, however, is an economic growth and development that takes into account human needs and the availability of resources. For this we need anarchist social economics – and the anarchist society. The problem we are faced with is not excessive consumption, since most people, especially the popular classes, are short of housing, decent health, jobs, transport, education, etc. The problem is wasteful production for the world’s ruling minority. In the anarchist society production to meet the immediate and longer term needs of society will not only be entrenched, but will need to be greatly expanded. We argue that it is not technology and its development in and of itself that is problematic, but capitalist and state uses of technology that systematically under-invest in useful, necessary and ecologically sustainable technology in favour of “high pollution-high profit” technology and weapons of war for elite power and control. We also reject a purely “developed” versus “developing world” argument that states that poorer countries (in the so-called “Global South”) are made poor and their poverty and underdevelopment is sustained by richer countries (the so-called “Global North”) who are also the biggest polluters. These arguments also fail to incorporate a localised class analysis and thus fail to see hierarchies of control within all countries. Because capitalism and the state always result in the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, this means that there is huge inequality in the countries of the “North” between its ruling and working classes. South Africa might be a “developing” country, but is, relative to the size of its economy, one of the biggest polluters in the world 4. The ecological crisis is clearly due to the excessively high consumption of the ruling classes of the so-called “developed” and “developing” worlds and the massive industries created to produce for their desires. 

The alternative is to embrace protests against the capitalist state, in favor of anarchism. Anarchism is key; working within the system perpetuates working class oppression, so the perm fails. The aff’s characterization of the conflict between developed and developing countries kills global class solidarity needed for the revolution.
McGregor 13 writes
Warren McGregor (member of the ZACF). “Linking Environment Activism and Other Struggles: An Anarchist Analysis.” Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front. February 11th, 2013. http://zabalaza.net/2013/02/11/linking-environment-activism-and-other-struggles-an-anarchist-analysis/
Comrades, we are not saying not to go to conferences like those, but we would stress that we, as activists, ask ourselves these questions and decide where our struggles would be better focused if we decide against going to protest. We should also make decisions based on honest and democratic reflection of the benefits (like networking and popularising our struggles) and losses of attending such protests (like using precious limited resources and energy sending comrades to workshops and marches for a few days, and at the behest of organisations that we don’t control). We should use protests and other forms of demonstration to build sustained mass formations of counterpower. Our protests should reflect and energise mass structures and not be, as it seems today, something of a “rent-a-crowd” substitute for organising and/or re-energising mass formations. We must not allow our movements to be used to swell the ranks of protestors so as either to placate NGO sponsors, or the authoritarian, undemocratic desires of leaders 9. These structures should be strong and sustainable enough so that they exist and grow between events. This we see as opposed to a politics of summit-hopping, which could rob activist organisations of vital resources and energy and which might see little achieved in the way of having demands met. Environmental justice and the working class – for anarchism! As stated above, revolutionary mass organisations are required to fundamentally challenge and defeat capitalism and the state. These organisations of counterpower must seek to use mass direct action to achieve their goals as opposed to elections and lobbying to put new or different leaders into the ruling class. These electoral and reformist strategies only serve to perpetuate our subjugation to authority and domination. Throughout history, the working class and poor have only ever achieved rights through struggle! This struggle has to be international. We must work towards global popular class solidarity against the exploitative and consumerist upper classes. We should not let ourselves be drawn into divisive “developed” versus “developing” world arguments and characterisations that ultimately divide the working class into nationalities; but seriously challenge and destroy divisions within the class based on race, gender, nationality, etc. We must come again to the realiseation of working class commonalities across borders. It is the consumerist upper classes, the capitalists and the state bosses, that are the real polluters – the real enemy! We have nothing in common with them! We should be organising against capitalism and the state, as single-focus protest movements (for electricity or water), vital for organising people in their communities, can easily be sidelined and might also not seek to build links across the popular classes. Anarchism offers us that path. It is a path that develops the fighting capability of our organisations to move away from petitioning the state and capitalist elite for a few more crumbs from the table of the ruling class. Anarchism offers us the path of class struggle to move towards claiming an entirely new table for ourselves, one at which all can feast as equals. 

The K comes first.
You have a moral obligation to reject every instance of capitalist ideology. Status quo modes of thought only serve to legitimize the system.
Zizek and Daly 04
Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Zizek, 2004 page 14-16
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. … Full text available In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalizes capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation.

Permutations don’t solve. Actions taken within capitalism only reproduce the capitalist system. Zizek 02
Slavoj Zizek, professor of philosophy at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana, Revolution at the Gates, 2002, pg 167-172
Indeed, since the “normal” functioning of capitalism involves some kind of disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning (today’s model capitalist is someone who, after ruthlessly generating profit, then generously shares parts of it, giving large donations to churches, victims of ethnic or sexual abuse, etc., posing as a humanitarian), the ultimate act of transgression is to assert this principle directly, depriving it of its humanitarian mask. I am therefore tempted to reverse Marx’s Thesis 11: the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: “What can we do against global capital?”), but to question the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates. In short, our historical moment is still that of Adorno: To the question “What should we do?” I can most often truly answer only with “I don’t know.” I can only try to analyse rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me: When you practise criticism, you are also obliged to say how one should make it better. To my mind, this is incontrovertibly a bourgeois preiudice. Many times in history it so happened that the very works which pursued purely theoretical goals transformed consciousness, and thereby also social reality. If, today, we follow a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who “really want to do something to help people” get involved in (undoubtedly honourable) exploits like Mediecins sans frontieres, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach on economic territory (for example, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions, or use child labour) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing.

Capitalism precludes ethics and turns the environment by reducing decision-making to economic calculation.
Morgaridge 98 writes
Morgaridge, Clayton, Prof of Philosophy at Lewis and Clark College, 1998, Why Capitalism is Evil 08/22 http://www.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/evil.html
To show why this is the case, let me turn to capital's greatest critic, Karl Marx. Under capitalism, Marx writes, everything in nature and everything that human beings are and can do becomes an object: a resource for, or an obstacle to, the expansion of production, the development of technology, the growth of markets, and the circulation of money. For those who manage and live from capital, nothing has value of its own. Mountain streams, clean air, human lives -- all mean nothing in themselves, but are valuable only if they can be used to turn a profit. If capital looks at (not into) the human face, it sees there only eyes through which brand names and advertising can enter and mouths that can demand and consume food, drink, and tobacco products. If human faces express needs, then either products can be manufactured to meet, or seem to meet, those needs, or else, if the needs are incompatible with the growth of capital, then the faces expressing them must be unrepresented or silenced. Obviously what capitalist enterprises do have consequences for the well being of human beings and the planet we live on. Capital profits from the production of food, shelter, and all the necessities of life. The production of all these things uses human lives in the shape of labor, as well as the resources of the earth. If we care about life, if we see our obligations in each others faces, then we have to want all the things capital does to be governed by that care, to be directed by the ethical concern for life. But feeding people is not the aim of the food industry, or shelter the purpose of the housing industry. In medicine, making profits is becoming a more important goal than caring for sick people. As capitalist enterprises these activities aim single-mindedly at the accumulation of capital, and such purposes as caring for the sick or feeding the hungry becomes a mere means to an end, an instrument of corporate growth. Therefore ethics, the overriding commitment to meeting human need, is left out of deliberations about what the heavyweight institutions of our society are going to do. Moral convictions are expressed in churches, in living rooms, in letters to the editor, sometimes even by politicians and widely read commentators, but almost always with an attitude of resignation to the inevitable. People no longer say, "You can't stop progress," but only because they have learned not to call economic growth progress. They still think they can't stop it. And they are right -- as long as the production of all our needs and the organization of our labor is carried out under private ownership. Only a minority ("idealists") can take seriously a way of thinking that counts for nothing in real world decision making. Only when the end of capitalism is on the table will ethics have a seat at the table.

Tournament: Harvard RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Hopkins CK Claire Kueffner | Judge: Alli Gofman and Adam Bennett
Environmental regulations push oil companies to the Arctic.
Toomey and Klare 12
Diane Toomey (award-winning public radio journalist who has worked at Marketplace, theWorld Vision Report and Living on Earth, where she was the science editor. She also has reported on science, medicine and the environment for WUNC, the public radio station in Chapel Hill, N.C.) and Michael Klare (professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts). “Global Scarcity: Scramble for Dwindling Natural Resources.” Environment 360 interview with Michael Klare. May 23rd, 2012. http://e360.yale.edu/feature/global_scarcity_scramble_for_dwindling_natural_resources/2531/
Klare: There’s profits to be made, and this is particularly important to recognize — that this is attractive to the private international oil companies, like Shell, BP, and Exxon Mobil that are going into the Arctic, because they’ve been pushed out of the Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia by state-owned companies. So there are very few places where they can go and control the whole process of production, from beginning to end, and the Arctic is one of those few areas. LISTEN: Michael Klare talks about how mining companies are exploiting one of the last protected areas of Gabon.  There’s more to it than just that. We’re really at a turning point and I think most people in this country and around the world understand that before too long we’re going to have to transition to other types of energy if we’re to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change. But the big oil companies, they only know one business, which is producing oil and natural gas and selling it in their service stations. And so they’re determined to maintain their business model as long as possible and they’re resisting the transition to alternative fuels. e360: North America has more than its share of so-called tough oil and gas. That includes the Alberta tar sands and the shale gas fields in the U.S. that are being fracked. As energy extraction heats up in North America, you’ve written that the U.S. is in danger of becoming “a third-world petro state.” What do you mean by that? Klare: Consider what happened in the 1960s and 1970s when U.S. and European oil companies moved into countries like Nigeria and Angola. You had very low government oversight of oil company operations, little or no environmental protection, a lot of corruption, so it was easy to expatriate your profits. You didn’t have to worry about labor regulations or labor unions. But now those places in the so-called Third World are becoming much tougher. They’re either nationalizing their resources or enforcing their environmental regulations or labor laws. So it’s not as profitable as it once was. Meanwhile, in the United States, there are these formations that were once inaccessible, shale rock in particular. But to gain access to these resources in the United States and Canada it will be necessary to roll back a lot of the A major task of China’s leadership is to scour the world for the resources they need to keep the Chinese economy growing.” environmental protections and the labor and tax laws that were imposed over the past 50 years. So the oil companies and the gas companies really want to turn this country back to what it was before environmentalism became an issue, and make it more like the way the Third World was in the 1950s and 60s, with very lax environmental oversight and labor concerns, so that they can use the very aggressive, environmentally hazardous techniques to extract oil and gas from these tough formations. e360: What developments can you point to that indicate that the U.S. is on the road to this? 

Increased involvement in the Arctic causes US-Canada tensions. SIPRI 12
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Kristopher Berg - researcher with the SIPRI Armed Conflict and Conflict Management Programme, “The Arctic Policies of Canada and the United States: Domestic Motives and International Context”, pg. 19, SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security, July 2012, http://www.scribd.com/doc/99895997/The-Arctic-policies-of-Canada-and-the-United-States-domestic-motives-and-international-context)
While the USA has not particularly distinguished itself in the inter- national cooperation over the Arctic—although it seems that this is now changing—Canada has repeatedly made clear that it is seeking a leadership role. The lingering disagreements between the two countries may, however undermine their ability to pursue their interests in the region. The future of the Arctic will require close cooperation between Canada and the USA, not least if human activity in the area increases as it becomes more accessible. Increased traffic in the Northwest Passage will present a challenge to both Canadian and US capacity to operate in the region, not least if responsibilities in the area are unclear. The two countries’ inability to agree on key issues such as the legal status of the Northwest Passage and the maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea is affecting not only their domestic abilities but also their abilities to exercise international leadership in the region. In terms of boundary issues, for example, Norway and Russia, rather than Canada and the USA, have set a positive example and created a model for future delimitations.

Loss of US-Canada Relations kills heg.
Lamont 94
Lansing, Time Correspondent, Breakup, p. 229
Most assuredly, the United States would lose a valued ally in an increasingly turbulent world, would see the North American partnership weakened and future relations with Canada cast in doubt. The United States would also confront to its north a prickly new nation of Quebec with dubious allegiances and an uncertain course. Canada's dissolution, if it comes, would not present the same dangers it might have twenty years ago when the separatists first came to power in Quebec. Then, the loss of a united Canada would have been a strategic blow to the Western alliance as it sought to maintain a solid front against Soviet expansion. The end of the Cold War has reduced the military dangers of a northern breakup, just as free trade has mitigated the economic perils. But the rupture of Canada would still put at risk many of America's commercial and continental defense arrangements, while entailing substantial costs to its export economy and foreign policy . Canada's relia¬bility as our closest NATO and North American stalwart would be the first big casualty. No superpower like America can give full focus to, and effectively exercise, its worldwide leadership responsibilities with insecurity or turmoil in its backyard. Over the long term, a wounded Canada would act less boldly and swiftly in North America 's interests, and would take fewer risks in the international arena. U.S. designs in the hemisphere-for more dependable security structures in Central America arid the Caribbean, say, or for more durable democracies in the southern cone- would be that much more difficult to accomplish without Canada's committed support. A fractured Canada would gradually lose its international Boy Scout image, which U.S. diplomats have found immeasurably helpful. When America has wished some other power to take the lead on initiatives where U.S. credibility was weak, it has frequently used Canada as a stalking horse because, as one U.S. diplomat put it, 'They can do things that we can't."

Heg solves every impact. Decline causes extinction. Barnett 11
Thomas Barnett, Former Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis and Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at Wikistrat., worked as the Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense, “The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads,” March 7 2011 http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rules-leadership-fatigue-puts-u-s-and-globalization-at-crossroads
Let me be more blunt: As the guardian of globalization, the U.S. military has been the greatest force for peace the world has ever known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics that governed the 20th century, the mass murder never would have ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there would now be no identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered the killing equation.  But the world did not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war. Instead, America stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our now-perpetual great-power peace. We introduced the international liberal trade order known as globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. What resulted was the collapse of empires, an explosion of democracy, the persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the doubling of life expectancy, a roughly 10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths from state-based conflicts. That is what American "hubris" actually delivered. Please remember that the next time some TV pundit sells you the image of "unbridled" American military power as the cause of global disorder instead of its cure.  With self-deprecation bordering on self-loathing, we now imagine a post-American world that is anything but. Just watch who scatters and who steps up as the Facebook revolutions erupt across the Arab world. While we might imagine ourselves the status quo power, we remain the world's most vigorously revisionist force. As for the sheer "evil" that is our military-industrial complex, again, let's examine what the world looked like before that establishment reared its ugly head. The last great period of global structural change was the first half of the 20th century, a period that saw a death toll of about 100 million across two world wars. That comes to an average of 2 million deaths a year in a world of approximately 2 billion souls. Today, with far more comprehensive worldwide reporting, researchers report an average of less than 100,000 battle deaths annually in a world fast approaching 7 billion people. Though admittedly crude, these calculations suggest a 90 percent absolute drop and a 99 percent relative drop in deaths due to war.  We are clearly headed for a world order characterized by multipolarity, something the American-birthed system was designed to both encourage and accommodate. But given how things turned out the last time we collectively faced such a fluid structure, we would do well to keep U.S. power, in all of its forms, deeply embedded in the geometry to come. To continue the historical survey, after salvaging Western Europe from its half-century of civil war, the U.S. emerged as the progenitor of a new, far more just form of globalization -- one based on actual free trade rather than colonialism. America then successfully replicated globalization further in East Asia over the second half of the 20th century, setting the stage for the Pacific Century now unfolding. 

AT Biodiversity Advantage

?
Arctic drilling causes biodiversity loss and Arctic oil spills are harder to solve, turns case.
Toomey and Klare 12
Diane Toomey (award-winning public radio journalist who has worked at Marketplace, theWorld Vision Report and Living on Earth, where she was the science editor. She also has reported on science, medicine and the environment for WUNC, the public radio station in Chapel Hill, N.C.) and Michael Klare (professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts). “Global Scarcity: Scramble for Dwindling Natural Resources.” Environment 360 interview with Michael Klare. May 23rd, 2012. http://e360.yale.edu/feature/global_scarcity_scramble_for_dwindling_natural_resources/2531/
Bracket in origjnal Klare: We’re really going to be using very aggressive means of extraction, so the environmental consequences are going to be proportionally greater. For example, to get oil and natural gas out of shale rock, you can’t just drill Oil companies want to turn this country back to what it was before environmentalism became an issue.” and expect it to come out. It doesn’t work that way. You have to smash the rock, you have to produce fractures in the rock, and we use a very aggressive technology to do that — hydraulic fracturing — and the water is brought under tremendous pressure and it’s laced with toxic chemicals, and when the water is extracted from these wells it can’t be put back into the environment without risk of poisoning water supplies. So there’s a tremendous problem of storage, of toxic water supplies, and we really haven’t solved that problem. And that’s just one example. Drilling in the Arctic presents a tremendous problem because the Arctic, by its very nature, is at the edge of survival and all the species there are living at the edge of survival, so any oil spill could push them over the edge into extinction. So oil companies must have on hand all kinds of extra capacity to deal with the possibility of spills, and that’s much more difficult to engineer than in the Gulf of Mexico, where there are tens of thousands of boats that you could hire on short notice to bring out skimmers and booms to contain a spill. There’s nothing like that in the Arctic. Moreover, if this were to happen in winter, there would be no way to move equipment up there to build a relief drill. Remember, it was a relief drill that closed the Deepwater Horizon spill, but you can’t do that in the middle of winter when the Arctic Ocean is covered with ice. e360: Yet despite all that, there’s profits to be made.

Destruction of the Arctic ecosystem causes extinction.
Ford 3
Violet, Vice President – Inuit Circumpolar Conference, “Global Environmental Change: An Inuit Reality”, 10-15, http://www.mcgill.ca/files/cine/Ford.pdf
The Arctic ecosystem is a fundamental contributor to global processes and the balance of life on earth. Both the unique physical and biological characteristics of the Arctic ecosystem play key roles in maintaining the integrity of the global environment. Massive ice sheets and ice cover regulate the global temperatures by reflecting much of the solar radiation back into space, the Arctic ocean influences global ocean currents which are responsible for a variety of weather conditions and events, to name but two. The Arctic is also the recipient of the by-products of southern-based industry and agricultural practices. In February 2003, UNEP’s Governing Council passed a resolution effectively recognizes the Arctic as a “barometer” or indicator region of the globe’s environmental health. This is important and is further reason why Arctic indigenous peoples should work together at the international level. Late last year ICC and RAIPON participated in the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Council meeting in Beijing, China with the aim of sensitizing this organization to the Arctic dimension of global environmental issues. I understand that the GEF is now willing to consider indigenous peoples and their organizations to be distinct and separate from environmental and other NGO’s.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 5 | Opponent: Grapevine AY | Judge: Ben Koh
Arctic resource extraction causes conflict. Rogate and Ferrara 12
Chiara Rogate ( M.A. candidate at The Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS Bologna Center) and Marco Ferrara (M.A.I.A. candidate at The Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS Bologna Center). “Climate Change and Power Shifts in the Arctic Region.” Bologna Center Journal for International Affairs Vol 15. August 21st, 2012. http://bcjournal.org/volume-15/climate-change-and-power-shifts-in-the-arctic-region.html
The 2008 U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic holds up to 22 of untapped global reserves of energy resources.30 The potential wealth of such untapped natural resources is drawing the Arctic from the periphery back into mainstream international politics as nations scramble to strengthen and consolidate their influence over the region. It is therefore fair to state that global climate change, along with significant technological innovations in extraction processes and infrastructure,31 is contributing to the transformation of the Arctic from a backwater to a key geographical entity, resulting in premonitions of the Arctic as the background for the “Great Game” of the 21st Century.32 The Arctic thaw has not simply unfrozen the former perennial ice shelves, but has also sparked new conflicts on top of established ones, thus compounding an environmental problem with acrimonious political disputes over resources. The lack of an applicable framework of international law has therefore made the Arctic a region in which it is possible to observe international anarchy in one of its purest and most striking forms, as states with divergent interests rush to establish their claims and plant a foothold in this contested area. 

Arctic conflict goes nuclear.
Wallace and Staples 10
Michael Wallace and Steven Staples. *Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and President of the Rideau Institute in Ottawa
“Ridding the Arctic of Nuclear Weapons: A Task Long Overdue,”http:www.arcticsecurity.org/docs/arctic-nuclear-report-web.pdf
The fact is, the Arctic is becoming a zone of increased military competition. Russian President Medvedev has announced the creation of a special military force to defend Arctic claims. Last year Russian General Vladimir Shamanov declared that Russian troops would step up training for Arctic combat, and that Russia’s submarine fleet would increase its “operational radius.” 55 Recently, two Russian attack submarines were spotted off the U.S. east coast for the first time in 15 years. 56 In January 2009, on the eve of Obama’s inauguration, President Bush issued a National Security Presidential Directive on Arctic Regional Policy. It affirmed as a priority the preservation of U.S. military vessel and aircraft mobility and transit throughout the Arctic, including the Northwest Passage, and foresaw greater capabilities to protect U.S. borders in the Arctic. 57 The Bush administration’s disastrous eight years in office, particularly its decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty and deploy missile defence interceptors and a radar station in Eastern Europe, have greatly contributed to the instability we are seeing today, even though the Obama administration has scaled back the planned deployments. The Arctic has figured in this renewed interest in Cold War weapons systems, particularly the upgrading of the Thule Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar in Northern Greenland for ballistic missile defence. The Canadian government, as well, has put forward new military capabilities to protect Canadian sovereignty claims in the Arctic, including proposed ice-capable ships, a northern military training base and a deep-water port. Earlier this year Denmark released an all-party defence position paper that suggests the country should create a dedicated Arctic military contingent that draws on army, navy and air force assets with shipbased helicopters able to drop troops anywhere. 58 Danish fighter planes would be tasked to patrol Greenlandic airspace. Last year Norway chose to buy 48 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, partly because of their suitability for Arctic patrols. In March, that country held a major Arctic military practice involving 7,000 soldiers from 13 countries in which a fictional country called Northland seized offshore oil rigs. 59 The manoeuvres prompted a protest from Russia – which objected again in June after Sweden held its largest northern military exercise since the end of the Second World War. About 12,000 troops, 50 aircraft and several warships were involved. 609 Ridding the Arctic of Nuclear Weapons: A Task Long Overdue Jayantha Dhanapala, President of Pugwash and former UN under-secretary for disarmament affairs, summarized the situation bluntly: “From those in the international peace and security sector, deep concerns are being expressed over the fact that two nuclear weapon states – the United States and the Russian Federation, which together own 95 per cent of the nuclear weapons in the world – converge on the Arctic and have competing claims. These claims, together with those of other allied NATO countries – Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway – could, if unresolved, lead to conflict escalating into the threat or use of nuclear weapons.” 61 Many will no doubt argue that this is excessively alarmist, but no circumstance in which nuclear powers find themselves in military confrontation can be taken lightly. The current geo-political threat level is nebulous and low – for now, according to Rob Huebert of the University of Calgary, “the issue is the uncertainty as Arctic states and non-Arctic states begin to recognize the geo-political/economic significance of the Arctic because of climate change.” 62

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Byram Hills AJ Amos Jeng | Judge: Mark Gorthey and Christi Bendi
Arctic oil drilling makes an oil spill very likely. Experts agree.
Harvey and Walker 13
Fiona Harvey (award-winning environmental journalist) and Shaun Walker (Moscow correspondent for the Guardian). “Arctic oil spill is certain if drilling goes ahead, said top scientist.” The Guardian. November 19th, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/19/arctic-oil-drilling-russia
A serious oil spill in the Arctic is a "dead cert" if drilling goes ahead, with potentially devastating consequences for the pristine region, according to a leading marine scientist who played a key role in analysis of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The warning came as Russia filed court orders this week to have Greenpeace activists and journalists kept in prison for a further three months in prison before their trial over a protest at Arctic oil dirlling. Concerns about the potentially dire consequences of drilling for oil in the region have intensified as the Russian government and others have begun exploration under the Arctic seas. In such a cold region, any spill would be much more troublesome, because the oil would not naturally disperse as it does in warmer waters, and because of the difficulty of mounting a clean-up operation in hostile weather conditions. The "Arctic 30" – comprising 28 activists and two journalists – were arrested when Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise vessel was boarded by Russian coastguards in September and are facing lengthy jail terms if they are convicted. They have been kept in harsh conditions in freezing cold jail cells with poor food, and are being moved 800 miles from Murmansk to St Petersburg. Simon Boxall, an oil spill expert from the University of Southampton, told the Guardian exploring the region was inherently dangerous: "It is inevitable you will get a spill – a dead cert. I would expect to see a major spill in the not too distant future. I would be astonished if you did not see a major spill from this." The conditions in the Arctic would vastly compound the problem, he said. "It's a completely different environment. In temperate climes, oil disperses quickly. Bacteria help to digest the oil. In the Arctic the oil does not break down in this way – it can take decades before it breaks down. Nature will not help us." During those decades, any spilled oil would be a serious hazard to marine life. No industry is perfect, Boxall said, but the oil industry has behaved poorly in the past. "There are lots of failsafes on planes, but accidents still happen. At times, this is an irresponsible industry. Corners are cut, money is saved in small ways. Then it can go wrong and end up costing a huge amount of money, like in the Gulf of Mexico." He added: "Different countries have different levels of health and safety. Russia does not have an enviable record on this."
?
Arctic oil spill turns the environment and will be worse than the BP spill, turns case.
McCarthy 11
Michael McCarthy (environmental editor). “Oil exploration under Arctic ice could cause 'uncontrollable' natural disaster.” The Independent. September 6th, 2011. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/oil-exploration-under-arctic-ice-could-cause-uncontrollable-natural-disaster-2349788.html
Any serious oil spill in the ice of the Arctic, the "new frontier" for oil exploration, is likely to be an uncontrollable environmental disaster despoiling vast areas of the world's most untouched ecosystem, one of the world's leading polar scientists has told The Independent. Oil from an undersea leak will not only be very hard to deal with in Arctic conditions, it will interact with the surface sea ice and become absorbed in it, and will be transported by it for as much as 1,000 miles across the ocean, according to Peter Wadhams, Professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge. The interaction, discovered in large-scale experiments 30 years ago, means that the Arctic oil rush, which was given a huge boost last week with a $3.2 billion (£1.9bn) investment from Exxon Mobil, is likely to be the riskiest form of oil exploration ever undertaken, said Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute. "If there is serious oil spill under ice in the Arctic it will be very hard, if not impossible to stop it becoming an environmental catastrophe," he said. "It will be very much harder to deal with than a major spill in open water." The world's oil companies are now turning to the Far North as supplies elsewhere across the globe start to run out or become harder to extract, and both the potential profits from Arctic oil, and the fears about the damage that extracting it may do, are enormous. The area north of the Arctic Circle is thought to contain as much as 160 billion barrels of oil, more than a quarter of the world's undiscovered reserves. Some of it is under land, as in Alaska's North Slope field, but large amounts of it are known to lie under the seabeds of the Arctic Ocean and Baffin Bay off Greenland, which are ice-covered for all or part of the year, depending on the region. It is this offshore oil which is now the focus of a new exploration rush, with Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon among the strongest contenders, focusing on the Arctic Ocean itself, while the first wells in the sea off Greenland are already being drilled by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy. However, many observers are seriously alarmed about the spill risks in the extreme conditions, especially in the wake of BP's calamitous leak at the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico last year, which could not be controlled for three months, released as much as five million barrels of crude, and came close to wrecking the company. "A spill in the Arctic would essentially make dealing with something like Deepwater Horizon look almost straightforward," said Ben Ayliffe, polar campaigner for Greenpeace. "There are problems with ice encroachment, the remoteness of the Arctic, darkness, extreme weather, deep water, high seas, freezing conditions and icebergs. Basically it would mean that responding to a Gulf of Mexico-style spill off somewhere like Greenland would be impossible." Yet Professor Wadhams, who was the first civilian scientist to travel under the Arctic ice in a submarine, in 1971, and who has made five more under-ice trips, is spotlighting an even greater level of concern with his knowledge of how oil and ice interact – with potentially calamitous consequences. It stems from large-scale experiments he took part in off the coast of Canada in the 1970s, in which substantial quantities of oil were deliberately released into the frozen sea, to see how it behaved. "What we found, and one of the great difficulties, is that spilled oil becomes encapsulated in the ice and is then transported around the Arctic by it," he said. "The oil is caught underneath the ice, so you can't get at immediately to clean it up or burn it off. You don't know exactly where it is, and then it gets encapsulated in the new ice which grows underneath, so you then have a kind of oil sandwich inside the pack ice. "And that's being transported around the Arctic and isn't released until spring, when it may be several hundred or even a thousand miles from the source of the spill, so you can have a huge area of the Arctic becoming polluted by oil without initially it being clear where that oil is." He added: "Once it is released in springtime, it's very toxic, because the encapsulation in the ice preserves the oil from weathering, so that instead of the lighter fraction evaporating and the heavier fraction becoming just tar balls, you have fresh oil being released exactly where the ice is melting, usually round the edge of the pack ice where you've got a lot of migratory birds. "Not great for the environment. In fact, I think the appropriate word would be 'terrible'." Professor Wadhams is so concerned that he is helping to organise a high-level scientific workshop on the subject of oil spills in sea ice, in Italy later this month. While companies such as Cairn Energy stress that they will be drilling exploratory wells only in the summer months, in areas of sea which are ice-free, it is likely that once oil production actually begins, it will be a year-round business and continue through the winter when production facilities are ice-bound. "We would need to produce all year round, in order to make the whole thing worthwhile," a spokesman for Shell said at the weekend. The oil companies insist that they are aware of the risks and have prepared detailed oil spill response plans, but Professor Wadhams, who has read several of them, said they did not amount to comprehensive plans for dealing with oil in ice.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Byram Hills AJ Amos Jeng | Judge: Mark Gorthey and Christi Bendi
Arctic drilling excludes indigenous people, turns case. Multiple warrants.
Macalister 11
Terry Macalister (energy editor of The Guardian). “Arctic resource wealth poses dilemma for indigenous communities.” The Guardian. July 4th, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jul/04/arctic-resources-indigenous-communities
Brackets in original. "I certainly have seen the benefits that can come from oil royalties. Schools are better. There are swimming pools, gymnasium, cars – and jobs – all the result of billions of dollars." Patricia Cochran, a former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council from Alaska, expresses the view of many indigenous people on industrial development in the Arctic. Vast oil and mineral wealth have brought huge benefits to some communities. But her own conflicted feelings about development neatly sum up the dilemma that indigenous leaders in the region face. In Barrow – Alaska's oil capital – there are also high rates of suicide and depression, while offshore drilling is a threat to subsistence whaling and the hunting of seals and walrus, she points out. So despite the benefits, Cochran is personally quite negative about industrial development and questions the wider benefit to society. "I personally have a problem with it. I was raised in a traditional way and regard it as my job to be a steward of the land. I see this industrialised world of hedonism and consumption as a sign we have lost our moral compass." And there are fears that the vast sums on offer can sometimes be too tempting. Aqqaluk Lynge, current chair of the council, says the wave of money that big multinationals bring to their lobbying "overwhelms" local community organisations. "We have questions about how the democratic process is gone about and how decisions are reached," he said. "How can we survive as a people under the pressure that comes from oil companies whose daily income can be higher than our annual budget? "Arctic people themselves must have the time to look into proposed industrial projects to ensure we are not risking losing our country, self-rule or livelihoods." Lynge, a continuing activist based in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, is most concerned about the decision by the government there to allow British-based oil explorer, Cairn Energy, to drill last summer and again this year. But he is also worried about moves by Canadian metals group, Alcoa, to try to press ahead with plans to build a massive aluminium smelter on the island. The Inuit leader accepts Greenland ministers have the democratic right to negotiate and to reach agreements with companies. But he says the consultation process is still fatally undermined by the imbalance between the financial resources of Cairn and the like, compared to that available to local indigenous communities. Greenland, whose population is 80 Inuit, has recently won a measure of self-rule from its traditional colonial masters, Denmark. The new government in Nuuk is desperately keen to win complete independence and understands this is impossible while the country is dependent on financial handouts from Copenhagen. But Inuuteq Holm Olsen, Greenland deputy foreign minister, says that environmental concerns should be balanced against economics. "We welcome focus and attention on environmental issues … What we don't welcome is the notion that there should not be any industrial development in the name of environmental protection." Lynge says he realises that Cairn and Alcoa may offer a get-rich-quick route for Greenland and therefore a fast-track to political self-determination. But he says that rushing into oil and mineral exploitation deals risks drowning out a proper debate within the country about the pros and cons of industrialisation which could further undermine the traditional Inuit way of life based around fishing and hunting. "We don't have the proper democratic infrastructure in place for a public hearing mechanism. So Cairn can knock on one government door and win agreement for their plans. This is a problem. "We are not against development in general as such but what we really want to see is sustainable development that will enable us to live in the future in the way we have for hundreds of years around fishing. We know oil and gas is not ultimately sustainable because it will run out." Other concerns are more particular – such as where the kind of skilled workforce will come from to deal with any oil or other largescale industrial schemes. Greenland's workforce is just 32,000 people. If large numbers of workers are brought in from outside, indigenous people risk becoming a minority. There is also a fear that big business can use its financial muscle to buy off opposition while not having its own track records fully investigated. "Propaganda can be done in simple ways. Promises to give lots of work or money to local communities: people tend to say 'yes' to these things without necessarily thinking them through the consequences," said Lynge. Inuit in Canada have 40 years' experience with oil so have found their own way of accommodating change. But even there, local leaders of indigenous people have mixed views about who is really benefiting. And overall the "community" representing indigenous people is split down the middle over the issue. Certainly the big oil companies that have been active in the seas off Alaska since the late 1980s are keen to be seen consulting local people. Robert Blaauw, the Anglo-Dutch company's spokesman on the Arctic said: "Many coastal native communities depend on fishing and hunting of sea mammals not only for survival but also to keep alive a cultural centrepiece that has thrived for centuries. With that experience comes a deep knowledge of the Arctic environment … We continue to be humbled by what we don't know and we are constantly looking for ways to incorporate traditional knowledge into our operations. Not just for the advancement of our project, but out of respect for those who will live off the ocean long after we are gone." Ove Gudmestad, a professor of marine and Arctic technology at the University of Stavanger in Norway, carries out academic research which is useful to oil companies, and has travelled widely in the far north region. He believes there are practical problems and a fundamental lack of trust between indigenous people and the oil industry. "Of course it is important to take local knowledge into account, but it is hard to speak local languages. Whether it is in the US or Norway, fishermen do not trust the politicians or the NPD Norwegian Petroleum Directorate – never mind the oil companies." Gudmestad said local people were rightly wary that they could get sucked into a legal dispute that could last for decades and for which the oil companies are far better prepared and resourced. "Just remember that in the US for every petroleum engineer being trained there are 200 lawyers," he jokes. Lynge would like to see a more holistic look at the future for the Arctic in the light of climate change which already threatens some coastal communities with flooding and dislocation. "I don't like the way that the debate seems to be framed around the industrial opportunities created by global warming. I would rather see a much better study about how climate change will affect fish stocks and renewable energy sources to see what we can survive on in future."

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 5 | Opponent: Newark CQ | Judge: Courtney Nunley
Ecological morality is capitalist. Its hidden objective is to prop up class divisions.
Invisible Committee 9 writes  
Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hurricanes, epidemics, global overpopulation, erosion of the soil, mass extinction of living species…this will be our burden. They tell us, “everyone must do their part,” if we want to save our beautiful model of civilization. We have to consume a little less to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically to keep producing. We have to control ourselves to go on controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself while giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they would like to convince us to participate in the great industrial challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment we’re ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us out of it. Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s the new morality of capital. The system’s internal state of crisis and the rigorous screening that’s underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this screening and selection will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two different diets, one “healthy and organic” for the rich and their children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to make its normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest whims weren’t so scrupulously “respectful of the environment.” Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag every objection to the exorbitant progress of control. 

The aff’s promotion of sustainability doesn’t question capitalism, so it fails to solve the root cause of the environmental harms they criticize, turning case.
McGregor 13 writes
We argue for a decentralisation and collectivisation of decision-making and production. Why? Because: 1. Capitalism is a wasteful socio-economic system that over-produces niche products for the minority who can afford them. It breeds competition between private owners of productive means whose goods are made by exploited wage-slaves and then exchanged through a market for profit and perpetual growth. Most production techniques today use fossil fuels (as mentioned above). Thus capitalism’s drive is towards profit and expansion and not efficient, sustainable productive practices. Importantly, because of its nature, as to produce things based on exploitation and for sale, it ultimately under-produces for people’s needs 5 and is a system that generates regular crises. 2. States are also responsible for ecological destruction. Competition between states for power and control over people and land leads to the development of huge war industries and war technology adapted for industry. These have obvious serious negative implications for people (injuries, death, refugees, etc.) and the environment (the terrible effects of current nuclear technological failures, etc.). State-owned enterprises contribute massively to ecological destruction 8. In South Africa, the nationalised and capitalist enterprise Eskom uses the energy released from burning coal to generate electricity. Eskom has plans to increase its use of coal for electricity. This puts into serious contradiction the South African government’s role in the Congress of Parties (or COP) -17 which took place in late 2011. Competition between states for resources (such as oil, natural gas, land, etc.) breeds conflict and war not only between countries, but also within countries, e.g. the diamond-funded civil wars of west Africa of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Also, states are not willing to enforce strong ecological protection laws against capitalist bosses and themselves as owners because these would cut into the profits and the states’ own tax revenue. 3. Many solutions to ecological and social degradation don’t question a hierarchical order of social organisation; or if they do they focus on eliminating one form of control while usually ignoring other dimensions of oppression. Under capitalism, solutions to ecological crises are based on consumer choice – a green consumerism – whereby customers choose to buy products and make choices that will supposedly help to sustain the environment, e.g. buying electric cars and energy-saving light bulbs, going vegetarian or vegan, recycling, living in eco-villages or eco-squats, etc. This form of consumerism, however, is based on an inadequate and incorrect analysis as to where the pollution problem actually lies – at the doorsteps of big industry, not individuals, and certainly not the working class and poor. Green consumerism is then, ultimately, a class-based choice and doesn’t question the role of capitalist production in creating and exacerbating ecological destruction. The majority of people, the working class, does not have the financial ability to afford these products and lifestyle choices (due to the very nature of capitalism) and thus does not have the financial power to shift production to more sustainable, “greener” means. There is also no evidence to suggest that a “greener” capitalism will adequately provide for society’s energy needs. For example, it may produce fuel efficient or electric cars, but what production procedures were used to make these cars, and how will electricity be provided for them? Energy will still have to be bought, and the many “service delivery” struggles around South Africa show that most of our people cannot afford energy. Ecological crises DO NOT, however, signal the end of capitalism itself, and we should guard against such thinking. Due to resource pressures, e.g. oil shortages, etc. and people’s struggles, capitalism will be forced to “go green”. However, this transition to different kinds of technology will be, at best, slow and lengthy and will not alter the class relations of who controls what. Also, weapons production, ultimately, cannot by its very nature be green, never mind the devastating impact it has on people the world over. Calling for more state intervention is another solution offered. However, this model of production and distribution is still not outside a capitalist framework as it serves to centralise control of resources (land, factories, water, air and people) in the hands of those lucky few who manage and control the state apparatus. One needs only reflect on the terrible environmental records of the former East-Bloc countries to see that a centrally-planned or state-led development model is not an automatic solution to ecological and social degradation (Steele, 2002).

Global endogenous democracy will be effective now-~--the plan’s consolidation of U.S.-driven economic orthodoxy causes extinction
Vandana Shiva 12, founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, chairs the Commission on the Future of Food set up by the Region of Tuscany in Italy and is a member of the Scientific Committee which advises President Zapatero of Spain, March 1, 2012, “Imposed Austerity vs Chosen Simplicity: Who Will Pay For Which Adjustments?,” online: http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/2012/03/01/imposed-austerity-vs-chosen-simplicity-who-will-pay-for-which-adjustments/
The dominant economic model based on limitless growth on a limited planet is leading to an overshoot of the human use of the earth’s resources. This is leading to an ecological catastrophe. It is also leading to intense and violent resource grab of the remaining resources of the earth by the rich from the poor. The resource grab is an adjustment by the rich and powerful to a shrinking resource base – land, biodiversity, water – without adjusting the old resource intensive, limitless growth paradigm to the new reality. Its only outcome can be ecological scarcity for the poor in the short term, with deepening poverty and deprivation. In the long run it means the extinction of our species, as climate catastrophe and extinction of other species makes the planet un-inhabitable for human societies. Failure to make an ecological adjustment to planetary limits and ecological justice is a threat to human survival. The Green Economy being pushed at Rio +20 could well become the biggest resource grabs in human history with corporations appropriating the planet’s green wealth, the biodiversity, to become the green oil to make bio-fuel, energy plastics, chemicals – everything that the petrochemical era based on fossil fuels gave us. Movements worldwide have started to say “No to the Green Economy of the 1”.
But an ecological adjustment is possible, and is happening. This ecological adjustment involves seeing ourselves as a part of the fragile ecological web, not outside and above it, immune from the ecological consequences of our actions. Ecological adjustment also implies that we see ourselves as members of the earth community, sharing the earth’s resources equitably with all species and within the human community. Ecological adjustment requires an end to resource grab, and the privatization of our land, bio diversity and seeds, water and atmosphere. Ecological adjustment is based on the recovery of the commons and the creation of Earth Democracy.
The dominant economic model based on resource monopolies and the rule of an oligarchy is not just in conflict with ecological limits of the planet. It is in conflict with the principles of democracy, and governance by the people, of the people, for the people. The adjustment from the oligarchy is to further strangle democracy and crush civil liberties and people’s freedom. Bharti Mittal’s statement that politics should not interfere with the economy reflects the mindset of the oligarchy that democracy can be done away with. This anti-democratic adjustment includes laws like homeland security in U.S., and multiple security laws in India.
The calls for a democratic adjustment from below are witnessed worldwide in the rise of non-violent protests, from the Arab spring to the American autumn of “Occupy” and the Russian winter challenging the hijack of elections and electoral democracy.
And these movements for democratic adjustment are also rising everywhere in response to the “austerity” programmes imposed by IMF, World Bank and financial institutions which created the financial crisis. The Third World had its structural Adjustment and Forced Austerity, through the 1980s and 1990s, leading to IMF riots. India’s structural adjustment of 1991 has given us the agrarian crisis with quarter million farmer suicides and food crisis pushing every 4th Indian to hunger and every 2nd Indian child to severe malnutrition; people are paying with their very lives for adjustment imposed by the World Bank/IMF. The trade liberalization reforms dismantled our food security system, based on universal PDS. It opened up the seed sector to seed MNCs. And now an attempt is being made through the Food Security Act to make our public feeding programmes a market for food MNCs. The forced austerity continues through imposition of so called reforms, such as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in retail, which would rob 50 million of their livelihoods in retail and millions more by changing the production system. Europe started having its forced austerity in 2010. And everywhere there are anti-austerity protests from U.K., to Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, and Portugal. The banks which have created the crisis want society to adjust by destroying jobs and livelihoods, pensions and social security, public services and the commons. The people want financial systems to adjust to the limits set by nature, social justice and democracy. And the precariousness of the living conditions of the 99 has created a new class which Guy Standing calls the “Precariate”. If the Industrial Revolution gave us the industrial working class, the proletariat, globalization and the “free market” which is destroying the livelihoods of peasants in India and China through land grabs, or the chances of economic security for the young in what were the rich industrialized countries, has created a global class of the precarious. As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich have written in “The making of the American 99”, this new class of the dispossessed and excluded include “middle class professional, factory workers, truck drivers, and nurses as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawn of the affluent”.
Forced austerity based on the old paradigm allows the 1 super rich, the oligarchs, to grab the planets resources while pushing out the 99 from access to resources, livelihoods, jobs and any form of freedom, democracy and economic security. It is often said that with increasing growth, India and China are replicating the resource intensive and wasteful lifestyles of the Western countries. The reality is that while a small 3 to 4 of India is joining the mad race for consuming the earth with more and more automobiles and air conditioners, the large majority of India is being pushed into “de-consumption” – losing their entitlements to basic needs of food and water because of resource and land grab, market grab, and destruction of livelihoods. The hunger and malnutrition crisis in India is an example of the “de-consumption” forced on the poor by the rich, through the imposed austerity built into the trade liberalization and “economic reform” policies.
There is another paradigm emerging which is shared by Gandhi and the new movements of the 99, the paradigm of voluntary simplicity of reducing one ecological foot print while increasing human well being for all. Instead of forced austerity that helps the rich become super rich, the powerful become totalitarian, chosen simplicity enables us all to adjust ecologically, to reduce over consumption of the planets resources, it allows us to adjust socially to enhance democracy and it creates a path for economic adjustment based on justice and equity.
Forced austerity makes the poor and working families pay for the excesses of limitless greed and accumulation by the super rich. Chosen simplicity stops these excesses and allow us to flower into an Earth Democracy where the rights and freedoms of all species and all people are protected and respected.

The alternative is to completely withdraw from the logic of capital. This is essential to destroy the fetishism that allows capital to survive. Johnston 04
Perhaps the absence of a detailed political roadmap in Zizek's recent writings isn't a major shortcoming. Maybe, at least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby to truly open up the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Zizek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or hindrance (Zizek, 2001d, pp 22-23) (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the illusory projection of an inner obstacle, Zizek, 2000a, p 16). From this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies by learning how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining merely an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the analysis of commodity fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately relies upon nothing more than a kind of "magic," that is, the belief in money's social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance's money’s powers. The "external" obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that because subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, "internally" believe in it. 

The K comes first.
You have a moral obligation to reject every instance of capitalist ideology. Status quo modes of thought only serve to legitimize the system.
Zizek and Daly 04
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. … In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalizes capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 5 | Opponent: Newark CQ | Judge: Courtney Nunley
Government sponsored top-down solutions to the problems of brownfields are doomed to failure due to their lack of focus on the community
EPA 8 (6/6/08, NEJAC: Report on Public Dialogues - Key Issues in the Brownfields Debate http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:n0_lvvakD98J:www.epa.gov/swerrims//ej/html-doc/pub04.htm+Brownfields+racism+criticalandhl=enandct=clnkandcd=1andgl=us)
"Urban revitalization" is very different from "urban redevelopment." The two concepts are not synonymous and should not be confused with each other. Urban revitalization is a bottom-up process. It proceeds from a community-based vision of its needs and aspirations and seeks to build capacity, build partnerships, and mobilize resources to make the vision a reality. Revitalization, as we define it, does not lead to displacement of communities through gentrification that often results from redevelopment policies. Governments must not simply view communities as an assortment of problems but also as a collection of assets. Social scientists and practitioners have already compiled methodologies to apply community planning models. There must be opportunities for full articulation of the importance of public participation in Brownfields issue. While public participation is cross-cutting in nature, its meaning is shaped within the context of concrete issues. It is not merely a set of mechanical prescriptions but a process of bottom-up engagement that is "living." With regards to Brownfields and the future of urban America, Public Dialogue participants were emphatic that "without meaningful community involvement, urban revitalization simply becomes urban redevelopment."

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Bronx ID | Judge: Emily Massey, Martin Sigalow, Ernie Querido
Text: Developing countries should engage in prior consultation with Earth over whether they should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction.

It’s mutually exclusive. “Resolved” implies a firm determination, and if we were consulting we wouldn’t be firmly determined.

There is a gap between knowledge of environmental harm and educational responses to the crisis. The counter-plan solves because it bridges the mind, heart, body, and spirit divide in our academic discussions.
Barrett 9 writes
.J. Barrett. Taking Representation Seriously: Epistemological and Ontological Congruence in Hypertexual Research/Representation. Beyond Human-Nautre-Spirit Boundaries: Research with Animate EARTH.
This doctoral research is a deliberate response to what Berry and Tucker (2006) refer to as a “deep cultural pathology” that enables continuing devastation of the planet (p. 17). Poised at the cusp of what many call “the great turning” (e.g. Korten, 2006; Macy, 1998), it both calls for and provides beginning tools to support the ‘shifts in consciousness’ long called for by those working in the environmental field. It is a reconstructive text in that it both engages and talks about a different form of consciousness many (e.g. Stirling, 2007) claim is required to respond to the ongoing and persistent gap between what is known about anthropogenic environmental degradation, and what appears to be the limited effectiveness of educational and other responses to prompt significant or lasting change (Stevenson, 2007a, 2007b). This does not mean a rejection of Western scientific or rational conceptual knowing, but rather a creation of more opportunities for both/and texts: research texts which demand different forms of consciousness from both 'writer' and 'reader,' and texts that enable 'reading' and researching through an integrated mind, heart, body and spirit. Paraphrasing the oft-cited quotation from Einstein, we cannot solve the human-created environmental and social problems with the same kind of thinking, (and I would add, consciousness, and knowledge-making processes) which created them. The dissertation emerged as an effect of my own de-colonizing journey as an academic working in the field of education where most conversations are based on assumptions of reality as material or discursively produced. It is also contextualized within continued and increasing calls for different ways of thinking (e.g. Stirling, 2007; Hart, 2005; Haraway, 2004a), a different paradigm (e.g. Capra, 1982), and different languages through which to conceptualize and engage with the more-than-human (Abram, 1996; Cole, 2002; Dunlop, 2002; Haraway, 2004b; Harvey, 2006a, 2006b). Yet to engage in such difference, as Harvey (2006b) suggests, may require “a reconfiguration of academic protocols" (p. 9). It may also involve a reconsideration of who we can be as individuals, and academics (see Dillard, 20006a, 2006b).

The aff’s current communication scholarship assumes the dominant narrative of reasons, further separating us from nature. The method of the counter-plan solves extinction.
Plumwood 2 writes
Val Plumwood. Environmental Culture: The Ecological crisis of reason. Routlege: New York. 2002.
The ecological crisis requires from us a new kind of culture because a major factor in its development has been the rationalist culture and the associated human/nature dualism characteristic of the west. Human/nature dualism, as I argued in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature , is a system of ideas that takes a radically separated reason to be the essential characteristic of humans and situates human life outside and above an inferiorised and manipulable nature. Rationalism and human/nature dualism are linked through the narrative which maps the supremacy of reason onto human supremacy via the identification of humanity with active mind and reason and of non-humans with passive, tradeable bodies. We should not mistake rationalism for reason – rather it is a cult of reason that elevates to extreme supremacy a particular narrow form of reason and correspondingly devalues the contrasted and reduced sphere of nature and embodiment. Feminist thinker Elizabeth Gross puts her finger on the basic denial mechanism involved in the irrationality of rationalist forms of reason when she writes that the crisis of reason ‘is a consequence of the historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal; that is, it is a consequence of the inability of western knowledges to conceive their own processes of (material) production, processes that simultaneously rely on and disavow the role of the body’. 1 The ecological crisis can be thought of as involving a centric and self-enclosed form of reason that simultaneously relies on and disavows its material base, as ‘externality’, and a similar failure of the rationalised world it has made to acknowledge and to adapt itself adequately to its larger ‘body’, the material and ecological support base it draws on in the long-denied counter-sphere of ‘nature’. Rationalism and human/nature dualism have helped create ideals of culture and human identity that promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of nature as the Other, while minimising non-human claims to the earth and to elements of mind, reason and ethical consideration. Its monological logic leads to denials of dependency on the Other in the name of an hyperbolised autonomy, and to relationships that cannot be sustained in real world contexts of radical dependency on the Other. That the Other is an independent being on whom one is dependent is the child’s first and hardest lesson, even before the lesson that the nurturing Other must in turn be nurtured. It is a lesson that some children never properly learn, and neither do some cultures of denial. Rationalist culture has distorted many spheres of human life; its remaking is a major but essential cultural enterprise. The old reason-centred culture of the west which has allowed the ecological crisis to deepen to the current dangerous point may at one time have facilitated the dominant culture’s comparative advantage over and conquest of other more modest and ecologically-adapted cultures on this planet. This is speculation, but what is not speculation is that in an era when we are reaching the biophysical limits of the planet, this reason-centred culture has become a liability to survival. Its ‘success-making’ characteristics, including its ruthlessness in dealing with the sphere it counts as ‘nature’, have allowed it to dominate both non-human nature and other peoples and cultures. But these characteristics, and the resulting successes in commodifying the world (or producing ‘cargo’), are only too clearly related to our longer-term ecological and ethical failures. We must change this culture or face extinction. The ecological crisis we face then is both a crisis of the dominant culture and a crisis of reason, or rather, a crisis of the culture of reason or of what the dominant global culture has made of reason. Some might be tempted to suggest that reason is an experiment on the part of evolution, and that its hubris and inability to acknowledge its own dependency on the ecological order show that reason itself is ultimately a hazard to survival. But we would not need to deliver the sweeping and pessimistic judgement that reason itself is dysfunctional if we recognised reason as plural, and understood its political character as part of its social context. It is not reason itself that is the problem, I believe, but rather arrogant and insensitive forms of it that have evolved in the framework of rationalism and its dominant narrative of reason’s mastery of the opposing sphere of nature and disengagement from nature’s contaminating elements of emotion, attachment and embodiment. Increasingly these forms of reason treat the material and ecological world as dispensable. The revision of our concepts of rationality to make them more ecologically aware and accountable is one of the main themes of this book. Reason has been made a vehicle for domination and death; it can and must become a vehicle for liberation and life.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 3 | Opponent: Needham JP | Judge: Jonathon Alston
The aff’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 aff. Dodds 12 writes
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
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). 

Technological management is a manifestation of the death drive which turns and outweighs environmental harm, and makes extinction inevitable.
Dodds 12 writes
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
Here there are echoes of Freud's (1916) idea of 'anticipatory mourning' and the associated attacks and spoiling that we will study below (see p. 72). However, for Searles the natural world is not just a space for externalizing our conflicts. Rather, a healthy relationship to the non-human environment is essential for human psychological well-being. Furthermore, one consequence of our alienation from nature is an omnipotent longing for fusion with our technology, and a powerful anxiety should this fully occur. Over recent decades we have come from dwelling in an outer world in which the living works of nature either predominated or were near at hand, to dwelling in an environment dominated by a technology which is wondrously powerful and yet nonetheless dead ... This technology-dominated world is so alien, so complex, so awesome, and so overwhelming that we have been able to cope with it only by regressing, in our unconscious experience ... to a degraded state of nondifferentiation from it ... This 'outer' reality is psychologically as much a part of us as its poisonous waste products are part of our physical selves. (Searles 1972: 368) The further we are alienated from nature, the more we are driven into primitive regressive identification and omnipotent fascination with our technology, a powerful positive feedback loop. The inner conflict between our human and non-human selves, and our animal and technological natures, is projected onto the environment, further rupturing the relationship and leading to a spiral of destructiveness as we 'project this conflict upon, and thus unconsciously foster, the war in external reality between the beleaguered remnants of ecologically balanced nature and *(hu)man's technology which is ravaging them' (ibid.). Here we are in Klein's paranoid-schizoid world, with a primitive ego unable to differentiate between good and bad mother. While ecologists portray a good eco-mummy doing battle with bad techno-mummy, things are not so simple. As we have seen, civilization (and its technology) is a defence, a 'good mother' to protect us from capricious and uncaring mother nature (Freud 1930), but, as Searles suggests, we are supposed to accept that 'our good mother is poisoning us' (Searles 1972: 369). For Searles (1972), behind both nuclear danger and ecological catastrophe lies the raw destructiveness Kleinians link to Thanatos, or what Erich Fromm (1992) understands in terms of necrophilia. Searles (1972: 370) argues that at this level of functioning we project 'our own pervasive, poorly differentiated and poorly integrated murderousness, bora of our terror and deprivation and frustration, upon the hydrogen bomb, the military-industrial complex, technology.' We may find the slow, more controllable death from pollution preferable to 'sudden death from nuclear warfare' or we might yearn for the quick relief of a nuclear blast to the 'slow strangulation' of environmental devastation (Searles 1972: 370). Living with such apocalyptic threats leads to a kind of ultimate version of the defence Anna Freud (1936) described as identification with the aggressor. At an unconscious level we powerfully identify with what we perceive as omnipotent and immortal technology, as a defense against intolerable feelings of insignificance, of deprivation, of guilt, of fear of death ... Since the constructive goal of saving the world can be achieved only by one's working, as but one largely anonymous individual among uncounted millions ... it is more alluring to give oneself over to secret fantasies of omnipotent destructiveness, in identification with the forces that threaten to destroy the world. This serves to shield one from the recognition of one's own guilt-laden murderous urges, experienced as being within oneself, to destroy one's own intrapersonal and interpersonal world. (Searles 1972: 370) In this view, we are seeing a kind of repetition on a planetary level of an early intrapsychic anxiety situation. In childhood 'a fantasied omnipotence protected us against the full intensity of our feelings of deprivation, and now it is dangerously easy to identify with seemingly limitless technology and to fail to cope with the life-threatening scarcity of usable air, food, and water on our planet' (ibid.). Unfortunately our technological powers have outstripped our emotional maturity, and the omnipotent phantasies of infancy now have a frightening objectivity. In place of a religion we no longer believe in, or hopes for future generations we no longer have meaningful contact with, we identify with our immortal, inanimate technology. In this realm of omnipotent fantasy ... mother earth is equivalent to all of reality ... a drag ... to our yearnings for unfettered omnipotence ... It may be not at all coincidental that our world today is threatened with extinction through environmental pollution, to which we are so strikingly apathetic, just when we seem on the threshold of technologically breaking the chains that have always bound our race to this planet of our origin. I suspect that we collectively quake lest our infantile omnipotent fantasies become fully actualized through man's becoming interplanetary and ceasing thereby to be man ... We are powerfully drawn to suicidally polluting our planet so as to ensure our dying upon it as men, rather than existing elsewhere as ... gods or robots ... The greatest danger lies neither in the hydrogen bomb ... nor in the more slowly lethal effect of pollution ... but in the fact that the world is in such a state as to evoke our very earliest anxieties and at the same time to offer the delusional 'promise' ... of assuaging these anxieties, effacing them, by fully externalizing and reifying our most primitive conflicts ... In the pull upon us to become omnipotently free of human conflict, we are in danger of bringing about our extinction. (Searles 1972: 371-372) 

The alternative is to challenge the psychological drives of the aff that underlie their rationale for environmental protection. Eco-psychoanalysis is not only key to recognizing that tech fixes are illusory since the world is chaotic, but changing how we view ourselves.
Dodds 12 writes
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
The metaphor of an acrobat on a high wire referred to by Bateson (2000: 506) is particularly apt for us now. The acrobat, in order not to fall, requires maximum freedom to 'move from one position of instability to another.' This is the paradox of order and disorder that we discussed in Chapter 11. In our current ecological crisis we must face the possibility that achieving the freedom and flexibility that we need to survive requires a fundamental re-examination of many of the basic coordinates of our lives, and some of our most cherished theories. In analyzing the rise and fall of past civilizations, we find that a 'new technology for the exploitation of nature or a new technique for the exploitation of other men ... gives elbow room or flexibility' but that 'the using up of that flexibility is death' (Bateson 2000: 503). Like the patient stuck on a local optima that we discussed in Chapter 12, unable or unwilling to cross the threshold to a more adaptive peak, entire species, and civilizations, have in the past found themselves in dangerous dead ends and unable to change. These dead ends include those within the ecology of mind, ways of thinking and being that become pathological if they fail to evolve along with the constantly shifting relations in the constitution of natural and social ecosystems. Ecopsychoanalysis, which draws on the tools and ideas of nonlinear science, understands that our world is governed by nonlinear dynamics, to the extent that the prediction and control promised by Enlightenment rationality will always remain to some degree illusory. Instead, we need to engage with the creativity of the Earth, and follow the lines of flight we uncover, exploring 'the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy' (DeLanda 2005:273). Our species has experienced such severe existential threats before. One of the most extreme examples was an evolutionary bottleneck which molecular biology shows us occurred approximately 70,000 years ago, when the human species was down to the last few thousand individuals or even less. Geological evidence suggests that this near extinction may have been linked to the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia, whose eruption triggered sudden climate change with major environmental impacts (Dawkins 2004). We do not know how we emerged from that particular crisis, or how close we may have come to extinction at various other times in our history. We might reflect on these experiences as applying to the whole species an idea that Winnicott (1974: 104) once discussed in terms of the fear of breakdown in individual psychoanalysis. For Winnicott, this fear refers to a breakdown that has already occurred, but it was a catastrophe which took place before there was yet a subject to folly experience it with a reflective consciousness. At the risk of anthropocentrism, we might do well to consider Dennett's (2003: 267) point that in many ways we do occupy a unique position in the history of the Earth, as 'wherever lineages found themselves on local peaks of the adaptive landscape, their members had no way of so much as wondering whether or not there might be higher, better summits on the far side of this valley or that.' Despite all the defensive reasons to not know which we explored in Chapters 4-7. we are, to some extent at least, becoming conscious of the enormity of the danger which confronts us. Today we are forced to think in these complex terms, to wonder about other valleys and other peaks on the plane of immanence, our virtual realm of possibility, to find a path through the current deadlock. As we saw in Part I of this book, these are difficult times. As Bateson (2000: 495) writes, the 'massive aggregation of threats to (hu)man(kind) and his ecological systems arises out of errors in our habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels.' The contribution of psychoanalysis is precisely to help us to overcome such errors through investigating their unconscious roots. Ecopsychoanalysis recognizes the need for a radical questioning of our theories, whether psychoanalytic, philosophical, scientific or political, and the corresponding ways of living individually and collectively that they make possible and reflect. However, it does so through a respectful engagement with the best that our various traditions have to offer, entering into uncanny new symbioses, making these disciplines strange to themselves not in order to destroy them but to make them more vital and alive. Despite the gravity of our situation, there are 'patches of sanity still surviving in the world' (Bateson 2000: 495), ideas in the ecology of mind worth exploring, helping us to construct a new alpha function we can only hope is capable of dreaming at the precipice. This book has sought to uncover what some of the components of this might be, focusing in particular on the constructive synergy between psychoanalysis, complexity theory,  ecology,  and the philosophy of Deleuze  and  Guattari. Ecopsychoanalysis wonders whether it is precisely in the very severity of the desperate ecological situation we face that a great opportunity lies for re-imagining the human, our societies, and our place in the world. It is in the ecopsychological spirit of nurturing hope while facing despair that this book was written. However, there is no 'big Other' (Zizek 2007) to guarantee our success, or even our future existence. In a chaotic world without certainty, ecopsychoanalysis can turn to the experimental pragmatics of Deleuze and Guattari (2003a: 161): 'Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers ... find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.' Assumptions according to which we have long lived our lives collapse as we begin to feel the disturbing effects of the hyperobject of climate change on the ecology of mind. Ecopsychoanalysis itself can be viewed as a hyperobject in that it does not yet fully exist. It should not be seen as an end state but a process of becoming, a work in progress, a meshwork emerging at the interstices of the three ecologies, and the elaboration of an alpha function that is able to think and dwell in our new uncanny home. As Bateson (2000: 512) writes, 'we are not outside the ecology for which we plan - we are always and inevitably a part of it. Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology.' Ecopsychoanalysis can never occupy an outside from which to explore and engage with the new strange ecology(s), but is always already extimate with it (Lacan 1992: 139). For all its chaos, because of all its chaos, the world is still a place of wonder, and we can only hope that we find ways of staying in it at least a little while longer. The nonlinearity and chaos of nature, and the forms of thinking required to sustain our relationship to it beyond the limited horizons of our experience, are both frightening and liberating. Yet, despite the anxiety, guilt and terror that climate change forces us to face, this moment of crisis can also offer us an opportunity for a more open vision of ourselves, as subjects, as societies, and as a species among the interconnected life systems of the Earth. 

The K comes first. “Sustainability” assumes an idealized notion of nature that implicitly pursues a maintenance of the status quo order. Questioning what we mean by nature comes prior to focus on the aff’s environmental threats.
Swyngedouw 6 writes
Erik, Dept of Geography, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University “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
This chapter seeks to destabilise some of the most persistent myths about nature, sustainability and environmental politics. First, I shall argue that there is no such thing as a singular Nature around which a policy of ‘sustainability’ can be constructed. Rather, there are a multitude of natures and a multitude of existing or possible socio-natural relations. Second, the obsession with a singular nature that requires ‘sustaining’ is sustained by an apocalyptic imaginary that forecloses asking serious political questions about possible socio-environmental trajectories, particularly in the context of a neo-liberal hegemony. Third, and most importantly, I shall argue that environmental issues and their political ‘framing’ contribute to the making and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition, one that actually forecloses the possibility of a real politics of the environment. I conclude with a call of a politicization of the environment, one that is predicated upon the recognition of radically different possible socio-environmental futures and the proliferation of new socio-environmental imaginaries.  1. The Question of Natures “Nature does not exist” … or …When vegetarians will eat meat! The Guardian International reported recently (13th August 2005) how a University of Maryland scientist had succeeded in producing “cultured meat”. Soon, he said, “it will be possible to substitute reared beef or chicken with artificially grown meat tissue. It will not be any longer necessary to kill an animal in order to get access to its meat. We can just rear it in industrialised labs”. A magical solution, so it seems, that might tempt vegetarians to return to the flock of animal protein devotees, while promising yet again (after the failed earlier promises made by the pundits of pesticides, the green revolution and now genetic engineering and GM products) the final solution for world hunger and a more sustainable life for the millions of people who go hungry now. Meanwhile, NASA is spending circa US$ 40 million a year on how to recycle wastewater and return it to potable conditions, something that would of course be necessary to permit space missions of long duration, but which would be of significant importance on earth as well. At the same time, sophisticated new technologies are developed for sustainable water harvesting, for a more rational use of water, or a better recycling of residual waters, efforts defended on the basis of the need to reach the Millennium Development Goals that promise, among others, a reduction by half of the 2.5 billion people that do not have adequate access to safe water and sanitation. In the mean time, other ‘natures’ keep wrecking havoc around the world. The Tsunami disaster comes readily to mind, as do the endless forest fires that blazed through Spain in the summer of 2005 during the country’s driest summer since records started, killing dozens of people and scorching the land; HIV continues its genocidal march through Sub-Saharan Africa, summer heat waves killed thousands of people prematurely in 2004 in France. In 2006, Europeans watched anxiously the nomadic wanderings of the avian flue virus and waits, almost stoically, for the moment it will pass more easily from birds to humans. While all this is going on, South Korea’s leading bio-tech scientist, Hwang Woo Suk proudly presented, in August 2005, the Seoul National University Puppy (SNUPPY) to the global press as the first cloned dog (a Labrador) while a few months later, in December 2005, this science hero was forced to withdraw a paper on human stem cells from Science after accusations of intellectual fraud (later confirmed, prompting his resignation and wounding South-Korea’s great biotech dream). In the UK, male life expectancy between the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ areas is now more than 11 years and the gap is widening with life expectancy actually falling (for the first time since the second world war) in some areas . Tuberculosis is endemic again in East London, obesity is rapidly becoming the most seriously lethal socio-ecological condition in our fat cities (Marvin and Medd, 2006), and, as the ultimate cynical gesture, nuclear energy is again celebrated and iconized by many elites, among whom Tony Blair, as the world’s saviour, the ultimate response to the climatic calamities promised by continuing carbon accumulation in our atmosphere while satisfying our insatiable taste for energy. This great variety of examples all testify to the blurring of boundaries between the human and the artificial, the technological and the natural, the non-human and the cyborg-human; they certainly also suggest that there are all manner of ‘natures’ out there. While some of the above examples promise ‘sustainable’ forms of development, others seem to stray further away from what might be labelled as sustainable. At first glance, Frankenstein meat, cyborg waters and stem cell research are exemplary cases of possibly ‘sustainable’ ways of dealing with apparently important socio-environmental problems while solving significant social problems (animal ethics and food supply on the one hand, dwindling freshwater resources or unsustainable body metabolisms on the other). Sustainable processes are sought for around the world and solutions for our precarious environmental condition are feverishly developed. Sustainability, so it seems, is in the making, even for vegetarians. Meanwhile, as some of the other examples attest, socio-environmental processes keep on wrecking havoc in many places around the world. ‘Responsible’ scientists, environmentalists of a variety of ideological stripes and colours, together with a growing number of world leaders and politicians, keep on spreading apocalyptic and dystopian messages about the clear and present danger of pending environmental catastrophes that will be unleashed if we refrain from immediate and determined action. Particularly the threat of global warming is framed in apocalyptic terms if the atmospheric accumulation of CO2 (which is of course the classic ‘side effect’ of the accumulation of capital in the troposphere) continues unheeded. Table 1 collects a sample of some of the most graphic recent doomsday media headlines on the theme. The world as we know it will come to a premature end (or be seriously mangled) unless we urgently reverse, stop, or at least slow down global warming and return the climate to its status quo ante. Political and regulatory technologies (such as the Kyoto Protocol) and CO2 reducing techno-machinery (like hybrid cars) are developed that would, so the hope goes, stop the threatening evolution and return the earth’s temperature to its benevolent earlier condition. From this perspective, sustainability is predicated upon a return, if we can, to a perceived global climatologic equilibrium situation that would permit a sustainable continuation of the present world’s way of life. So, while one sort of sustainability seems to be predicated upon feverishly developing new natures (like artificial meat, cloned stem cells, or manufactured clean water), forcing nature to act in a way we deem sustainable or socially necessary, the other type is predicated upon limiting or redressing our intervention in nature, returning it to a presumably more benign condition, so that human and non-human sustainability in the medium and long term can be assured. Despite the apparent contradictions of these two ways of ‘becoming sustainable’ (one predicated upon preserving nature’s status quo, the other predicated upon producing new natures), they share the same basic vision that techno-natural and socio-metabolic interventions are urgently needed if we wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it contains. But these examples also show that ‘nature’ is not always what it seems to be. Frankenstein meat, dirty water, bird - flue virus symbiosis, stem cells, fat bodies, heat waves, tsunamis, hurricanes, genetic diversity, CO2, to name just a few, are radically different things, expressing radically different natures, pushing in radically different directions, with radically different consequences and outcomes, and with radically different human/non-human connectivities. If anything, before we can even begin to unpack ‘sustainability’, the above examples certainly suggest that we urgently need to interpolate our understandings of ‘nature’, revisit what we mean by nature, and, what we assume ‘nature’ to be. Surrendering Nature – Indeterminate natures Slavoj Žižek suggests in Looking Awry that the current ecological crisis is indeed a radical condition that not only constitutes a real and present danger, but, equally importantly, “questions our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our everyday understanding of ‘nature’ as a regular, rhythmic process” (Zizek, (1992) 2002: 34). It raises serious questions about what were long considered self-evident certainties. He argues that this fundamental threat to our deepest convictions of what we always thought we knew for certain about nature is co-constitutive of our general unwillingness to take the ecological crisis completely serious. It is this destabilising effect that explains “the fact that the typical, predominant reaction to it still consists in a variation of the famous disavowal, “I know very well (that things are deadly serious, that what is at stake is our very survival), but just the same I don’t really believe, … and that is why I continue to act as if ecology is of no lasting consequence for my everyday life” (page 35). The same unwillingness to question our very assumptions about what nature is (and even more so what natures might ‘become’) also leads to the typical obsessive reactions of those who DO take the ecological crisis seriously. Žižek considers both the case of the environmental activist, who in his or her relentless and obsessive activism to achieve a transformation of society in more ecologically sustainable ways expresses a fear that to stop acting would lead to catastrophic consequences. In his words, obsessive acting becomes a tactic to stave off the ultimate catastrophe, i.e. “if I stop doing what I am doing, the world will come to an end in an ecological Armageddon”. Others, of course, see all manner of transcendental signs in the ‘revenge of nature’, read it as a message that signals our destructive intervention in nature and urge us to change our relationship with nature. In other words, we have to listen to nature’s call, as expressed by the pending environmental catastrophe, and respond to its message that pleas for a more benign, associational relation with nature, a post-human affective connectivity, as a cosmopolitical “partner in dialogue”. While the first attitude radically ignores the reality of possible ecological disaster, the other two, which are usually associated with actors defending ‘sustainable’ solutions for our current predicament, are equally problematic in that they both ignore, or are blind to the inseparable gap between our symbolic representation (our understanding) of Nature and the actual acting of a wide range of radically different and, often contingent, natures. In other words, there is – of necessity – an unbridgeable gap, a void, between our dominant view of Nature (as a predictable and determined set of processes that tends towards a (dynamic) equilibrium – but one that is disturbed by our human actions and can be ‘rectified’ with proper sustainable practices) and the acting of natures as an (often) unpredictable, differentiated, incoherent, open-ended, complex, chaotic (although by no means unordered or un-patterned) set of processes. The latter implies the existence not only of many natures, but, more importantly, it also assumes the possibility of all sorts of possible future natures, all manner of imaginable different human-non human assemblages and articulations, and all kinds of different possible socio-environmental becomings. The inability to take ‘natures’ seriously is dramatically illustrated by the controversy over the degree to which disturbing environmental change is actually taking place and the risks or dangers associated with it. Lomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist captures one side of this controversy in all its phantasmagorical perversity (Lomborg, 1998), while climate change doomsday pundits represent the other. Both sides of the debate argue from an imaginary position of the presumed existence of a dynamic balance and equilibrium, the point of ‘good’ nature, but one side claims that the world is veering off the correct path, while the other side (Lomborg and other sceptics) argues that we are still pretty much on nature’s course. With our gaze firmly fixed on capturing an imaginary ‘idealised’ Nature, the controversy further solidifies our conviction of the possibility of a harmonious, balanced, and fundamentally benign ONE Nature if we would just get our interaction with it right, an argument blindly (and stubbornly) fixed on the question of where Nature’s rightful point of benign existence resides. This futile debate, circling around an assumedly centred, known, and singular Nature, certainly permits -- in fact invites --  imagining ecological catastrophe at some distant point (global burning (or freezing) through climate change, resource depletion, death by overpopulation). Indeed, imagining catastrophe and fantasising about the final ecological Armageddon seems considerably easier for most environmentalists than envisaging relatively small changes in the socio-political and cultural-economic organisation of local and global life here and now. Or put differently, the world’s premature ending in a climatic Armageddon seems easier to imagine (and sell to the public) than a transformation of (or end to) the neo-liberal capitalist order that keeps on practicing expanding energy use and widening and deepening its ecological footprint.

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: Finals | Opponent: Collegiate AO | Judge: Paul Zhou, Adam Bennett, Monisha Reginald, Jerry Chen, Student Vote
His focus on land ownership is an independent link. Private property is the sine qua non of capitalism. His solution to indigenous struggles is to give them more property which is the meaningless reform I criticize.

Capitalism imposes a particular way of thinking about the world, making his philosophical conclusions meaningless.
Marcuse 64 writes
Herbert Marcuse (Marxist dude, critical theorist). “One-Dimensional Man - Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.” First Edition. 1964. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/one-dimensional-man.pdf
In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer. As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own. By the same token, however, no tribunal can justly arrogate to itself the right to decide which needs should be developed and satisfied. Any such tribunal is reprehensible, although our revulsion does not do away with the question: how can the people who have been the object of effective and productive domination by themselves create the conditions of freedom?4 The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation. To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea - although one might dispute the righteousness of a society which ridicules this idea while making its own population into objects of total administration. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. The process always replaces one system of pre-conditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction. The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation - liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable - while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets. Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear - that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.

Tournament: NFL Quals | Round: 5 | Opponent: Acton-Boxboro VA Vrinda Agarwal | Judge: Lindsey Donovan, Advik Shreekumar, Jim Murphy

These tags were much more lay when the cards were read. Also why I read this as a "contention" after conceding the util fw.

Fossil fuels are key to economic growth of developing countries. There’s no alternative.
Levi 13
Michael Levi (David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming book The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future). “The Other Resource Curse.” Foreign Policy Magazine. February 7, 2013
Moving away from fossil fuels could be devastating for some of the world's poorest countries. For as long as people have talked about moving beyond fossil fuels, another tantalizing prospect has hovered over the horizon: the decline of resource-rich authoritarian countries and the rogue nonstate actors that depend on them. A world of reduced demand for coal, oil, and gas is a world in which Iran, Russia, and various al Qaeda supporters are significantly weakened. That would certainly qualify as good news. But visiting Mozambique last week, I was reminded that not all of the losers from lower fossil-fuel demand will be the traditional bad guys. Mozambique's economy has tripled in size in the decade since the end of the country's 15-year-long civil war, but GDP per capita remains barely over $1,000 a head -- and highly concentrated among relatively wealthy elites. Leaders in Maputo, the capital, relied on international aid for 40 percent of the national budget last year. But an end is in sight: Massive coal deposits and offshore natural gas are poised to end Mozambique's aid dependence and rapidly increase economic output. The most bullish projections are far from assured -- Mozambique suffers from a lack of skilled labor, regulatory capacity, and essential infrastructure. But perhaps the biggest unknown is demand for what the country hopes to sell. If the world were to sharply reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, appetite for Mozambique's exports would decline or vanish, likely leaving the country in considerably worse shape. Mozambique is hardly the only country that would face this predicament. Africa in particular is packed with countries for which resource extraction appears to be the only viable first rung on the road to economic growth. Others in Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific confront similar prospects. Some plan to sell oil, gas, or coal. Others foresee extracting minerals like iron ore and bauxite, the processing of which requires massive amounts of fossil fuels. In a carbon-constrained world, however, consumers would need to cut back on their use of these minerals. Resource wealth is, of course, far from a guarantee of prosperity. Indeed, it can often bring the opposite: corruption, violence, and economic distortions that crowd out manufacturing and other industries, often deepening inequality in the process. But save for a few lucky countries like Costa Rica that have become favorite tourist destinations, there are few alternatives to resource extraction for many of the poorest developing countries. Development economist Paul Collier argues this point well in his powerful 2010 book, The Plundered Planet. The best alternative to suffering the resource curse, he explains, isn't necessarily forgoing resource development. It's harnessing revenues from resource extraction more effectively for broad and sustainable social and economic good. But while a great deal of effort has been expended looking at how low-carbon development could work in resource-consuming developing countries, very little time has been spent considering what it would look like for resource-rich developing countries. Entire careers are spent devising ideas for how China could power its economy using nuclear energy and renewable fuels, or how India could boost its resource efficiency. Not so when it comes to the travails of resource-rich countries. Many rightly mock demands for compensation from of the likes of Saudi Arabia, which would be hurt by reduced oil exports, but few stop to think about others that would suffer.

The African economy is key to the global economy. Ichikowitz 13
Ivor Ichikowitz (South African businessman and defense contractor, founded Paramount Group which sells armored vehicles, aircraft, equipment and training to governments).“Stability in Africa now key to world economy” January 18th, 2013. http://www.bdlive.co.za/world/africa/2013/01/18/stability-in-africa-now-key-to-world-economy
A significant change in the way the world’s leaders are starting to see Africa was revealed this week but has gone almost entirely unreported. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was in Cote d’Ivoire’s capital, Abidjan, and identified conflict as the "enemy number one" of Africa’s economic growth. She said: "Security is too fragile … if there is no peace, the people simply won’t have the confidence or courage to invest in their own future and neither will (foreign investors)." However, Lagarde did not stop at security being significant merely because it crippled economic development in Africa. She said it was vital for the financial stability of the entire world. "It’s clear that emerging countries are the motor of world economic growth," she said, backing the IMF’s projections that sub-Saharan Africa will grow 5.25 this year, second only to Asia’s boom economies and well above the world average of 3.6. To hear the recognition from such a leading figure in the international community that security is one of Africa’s core problems was incredibly uplifting. It echoes statements I made last year, when I said: "Capitalism is the most powerful driving force behind Africa’s economic development…. Stability is crucial because the growing middle classes (up to a third of all Africans) will spend more money if they feel confident, and they will feel more confident if they feel safe. The next stage will be to convince private investors that no sudden, unexpected or violent shift in government will happen and make their funds disappear overnight." Lagarde said: "I cannot help but be impressed by the continent’s resilience … in the face of the most serious disturbances seen by the world’s economy since the Great Depression." While the leading economies are struggling to tiptoe back into growth, it is to Africa that the world is turning for impetus. Lagarde’s recognition of this is a minor historical moment in Africa’s relations with the rest of the world — instead of Africa being seen as a drain, it has been accepted as a vital driver of the global economy by one of its leading figures. Global leaders have previously come close but have never been so explicit. When US President Barack Obama visited Ghana in 2009, he said: "Your prosperity can expand America’s. Your health and security can contribute to the world’s…. All of us must strive for the peace and security necessary for progress." He also said that "development depends upon good governance" but I would say that, beyond this, good governance depends on stable societies. I would venture that Lagarde agrees. I have had the privilege to work with many African countries to strengthen the capabilities and capacity of their defence, police and peacekeeping forces. I have seen first-hand the benefits for economic activity, inward investment, regional stability and long-term growth that stability can bring. Africa cannot rely solely on its booming sectors, such as oil, for its growth. It needs to build strong and wide economic foundations. Its projected growth might be second only to Asia’s, but unlike Asia it is happening in the absence of the institutional framework necessary to absorb that growth and direct it towards more investment in things such as infrastructure, health, education and public transport.

Growth solves every impact, including the environment. Goklany 7
Indur Goklany, Julian Simon Fellow at the Political Economy Research Center, PhD, 2007, Now For the Good News, http://www.reason.com/news/show/119252.html
Environmentalists and globalization foes are united in their fear that greater population and consumption of energy, materials, and chemicals accompanying economic growth, technological change and free trade—the mainstays of globalization—degrade human and environmental well-being.  Indeed, the 20th century saw the United States’ population multiply by four, income by seven, carbon dioxide emissions by nine, use of materials by 27, and use of chemicals by more than 100.  Yet life expectancy increased from 47 years to 77 years. Onset of major disease such as cancer, heart, and respiratory disease has been postponed between eight and eleven years in the past century. Heart disease and cancer rates have been in rapid decline over the last two decades, and total cancer deaths have actually declined the last two years, despite increases in population. Among the very young, infant mortality has declined from 100 deaths per 1,000 births in 1913 to just seven per 1,000 today.  These improvements haven’t been restricted to the United States. It’s a global phenomenon. Worldwide, life expectancy has more than doubled, from 31 years in 1900 to 67 years today. India’s and China’s infant mortalities exceeded 190 per 1,000 births in the early 1950s; today they are 62 and 26, respectively. In the developing world, the proportion of the population suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1970 and 2001 despite a 83 percent increase in population. Globally average annual incomes in real dollars have tripled since 1950. Consequently, the proportion of the planet's developing-world population living in absolute poverty has halved since 1981, from 40 percent to 20 percent. Child labor in low income countries declined from 30 percent to 18 percent between 1960 and 2003.  Equally important, the world is more literate and better educated than ever. People are freer politically, economically, and socially to pursue their well-being as they see fit. More people choose their own rulers, and have freedom of expression. They are more likely to live under rule of law, and less likely to be arbitrarily deprived of life, limb, and property.  Social and professional mobility have also never been greater. It’s easier than ever for people across the world to transcend the bonds of caste, place, gender, and other accidents of birth. People today work fewer hours and have more money and better health to enjoy their leisure time than their ancestors.  Man’s environmental record is more complex. The early stages of development can indeed cause some environmental deterioration as societies pursue first-order problems affecting human well-being. These include hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, and lack of education, basic public health services, safe water, sanitation, mobility, and ready sources of energy.  Because greater wealth alleviates these problems while providing basic creature comforts, individuals and societies initially focus on economic development, often neglecting other aspects of environmental quality. In time, however, they recognize that environmental deterioration reduces their quality of life. Accordingly, they put more of their recently acquired wealth and human capital into developing and implementing cleaner technologies. This brings about an environmental transition via the twin forces of economic development and technological progress, which begin to provide solutions to environmental problems instead of creating those problems.  All of which is why we today find that the richest countries are also the cleanest. And while many developing countries have yet to get past the “green ceiling,” they are nevertheless ahead of where today’s developed countries used to be when they were equally wealthy. The point of transition from "industrial period" to "environmental conscious" continues to fall. For example, the US introduced unleaded gasoline only after its GDP per capita exceeded $16,000. India and China did the same before they reached $3,000 per capita.  This progress is a testament to the power of globalization and the transfer of ideas and knowledge (that lead is harmful, for example). It's also testament to the importance of trade in transferring technology from developed to developing countries—in this case, the technology needed to remove lead from gasoline.  This hints at the answer to the question of why some parts of the world have been left behind while the rest of the world has thrived. Why have improvements in well-being stalled in areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world?  The proximate cause of improvements in well-being is a “cycle of progress” composed of the mutually reinforcing forces of economic development and technological progress. But that cycle itself is propelled by a web of essential institutions, particularly property rights, free markets, and rule of law. Other important institutions would include science- and technology-based problem-solving founded on skepticism and experimentation; receptiveness to new technologies and ideas; and freer trade in goods, services—most importantly in knowledge and ideas.  In short, free and open societies prosper. Isolation, intolerance, and hostility to the free exchange of knowledge, technology, people, and goods breed stagnation or regression.  

Economic crisis causes nuclear war. Royal 10
Jedediah, director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal, and Political Perspectives, pg 213-215
Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defense behavior of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson’s (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin, 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflicts as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remains unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland’s (1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations suggest that “future expectation of trade” is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behavior of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace item such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states. Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favor. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg and Hess, 2002, p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess and Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. “Diversionary theory” suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a “rally around the flag” effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995) and Blomberg, Hess and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states due to the fact the democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. De DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States and thus weak Presidential popularity are statically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels. This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in economic-security debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of external conflict, such as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created by economic crises. As such the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views. 

Nuclear war turns the case. It causes global pollution.
Greene et al. 85
Owen Greene (Expert on Security issues, Director of Bradford U. Centre for Int’l Coop and Security, Arms Consultant to UN and EU), Ian Percival (Physics Professor) and Irene Ridge (Biologist). Nuclear Winter: The Evidence and the Risks, New York: Polity Press, 1985, 123-4
Pollution is certain to be a long term problem after nuclear war and the problems we have now pale into insignificance by comparison. Nearly all factories contain stores of toxic chemicals, and some have very large quantities indeed. These could be released in target areas. As cities burned, producing pyrotoxins from plastics, and as volatile liquids escaped from factories, acute pollution of the atmosphere would be the first effect. The death of over 2,500 people in Bhopal, India, late in 1984 is a grim parallel, and this was the result of an accidental release of toxic gas from just one factory. When toxic liquids drained away and dry toxins dispersed as dust, wider pollution of the soil and water could occur. There would also be global pollution by radioactive fallout. 

Fossil fuels are key to biodiversity. Goklany 12
Indur Goklany (has worked with federal and state governments, think tanks, and the private sector for 40 years and written extensively on the interactions between globalization, economic development, environmental quality, technological change, climate change, risk analysis, and human well-being. He has published in Nature, the Lancet, Energy and Environment, and other journals. He is the author of several books, including The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet and The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment). “Humanity Unbound How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity.” http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa715.pdf, December 20, 2012
The collective demand for land to meet humanity’s demands for food, fuel, and other products of living nature is—and always has been—the single most important threat to ecosystems and biodiversity. 63 Fossil fuel– dependent technologies have kept that demand for land in check. This positive aspect of the impact of fossil fuels on the environment has been ignored in most popular narratives, which instead emphasize fossil fuels’ potential detrimental effects, including air, water, and solid-waste pollution, as well as any climate change associated with the use and production of these fuels. Because of this oversight, and thus lacking balance, these studies generally conclude that fossil fuels have been an environmental disaster. To obtain a notion of the magnitude of the environmental benefits of fossil fuels, consider just the effect of fertilizers and pesticides on the amount of habitat saved from conversion to cropland because fossil fuels were used to meet current food demands. The Haber-Bosch process, by itself, is responsible for feeding 48 percent of global population and pesticides have reduced losses from pests for a range of food-related crops by 26–40 percent. Together, these two sets of technologies might therefore be responsible for feeding approximately 60 percent of the world’s population, assuming that pesticides that are not manufactured with significant fossil fuel inputs would be half as effective as those that require fossil fuels. Therefore, had fossil fuels not been used, the world would have needed to increase the global amount of cropland by an additional 150 percent. 64 This means that to maintain the current level of food production, at least another 2.3 billion hectares of habitat would have had to be converted to cropland. This is equivalent to the total land area of the United States, Canada, and India combined. Considering the threats posed to ecosystems and biodiversity from the existing conversion of 1.5 billion hectares of habitat to cropland, the effect of increasing that to 3.8 billion hectares is inestimable. 65 The above calculation underestimates the additional habitat that would have to be converted to cropland because it assumes that the additional 2 billion hectares of cropland would be as productive as the current 1.5 billion hectares—an unlikely proposition since the most productive areas are probably already under cultivation. Moreover, even if the same level of production could have been maintained, eschewing the use of today’s first-best technologies to produce fertilizers or pesticides would necessarily have meant higher food prices. That would have added to the 925 million people that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates are already chronically hungry worldwide.

Development in developing countries is key to solve poverty.
World Bank 11
World Bank (international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs). “Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger by 2015.” Millenium Development Goals. 2011. http://www.worldbank.org/mdgs/poverty_hunger.html
World Bank Group: Working to End Extreme Poverty and Hunger For more than 60 years, the World Bank Group has partnered with governments worldwide, reducing poverty by providing financial and technical help. Since 2000, developing countries have cut extreme poverty in half, achieving MDG 1 five years ahead of schedule. That milestone was not met in much of Africa and South Asia, however. More than a billion people worldwide still live in extreme poverty, and many more experience hunger and are vulnerable to environmental or price shocks. The Bank Group is working with the international community to end extreme poverty in a generation and boost incomes for the bottom 40 percent in each country. With food security a vital part of this effort, the Bank Group is boosting agriculture financing to $8-10 billion a year and is working in multiple ways to build agricultural productivity and resilience to climate change. Peanuts are one of Mali’s primary exports. Peanuts are one of Mali’s primary exports. We can reduce poverty and hunger by: investing in agriculture creating jobs expanding social safety nets expanding nutrition programs that target children under 2 years of age universalizing education promoting gender equality protecting vulnerable countries during crises Making Strides in Eradicating Poverty and Hunger A meaningful path out of poverty requires a strong economy that produces jobs and good wages; a government that can provide schools, hospitals, roads, and energy; and healthy, well-nourished children who are the future human capital that will fuel economic growth. Between 2003 and 2013, the Bank Group supported basic nutrition services for more than 211 million pregnant women, nursing mothers, adolescent girls, and children under 5. The Bank Group’s fund for the poorest countries –the International Development Association (IDA) – committed a record $16.3 billion in fiscal year 2013 to promote economic growth, increase shared prosperity, and fight extreme poverty.

Poverty turns resource war. Caldwell 3
Joseph George Caldwell, PhD, The End of the World, and the New World Order, updae of an article published 10/26/00, March 6, 2003, www.foundation.bw/TheEndOfTheWorld.htm.
It would appear that global nuclear war will happen very soon, for two main reasons, alluded to above.  First, human poverty and misery are is increasing at an incredible rate.  There are now three billion more desperately poor people on the planet than there were just forty years ago.  Despite decades of industrial development, the number of wretchedly poor people continues to soar.  The pressure for war mounts as the population explodes.  Second, war is motivated by resource scarcity -- the desire of one group to acquire the land, water, energy, or other resources possessed by another.  With each passing year, crowding and misery increases, raising the motivation for war to higher levels.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Bronx GM | Judge: Norberto Romero, Jason Zhou, Devin Kasinki
The role of the ballot is to consider yourself a policy-maker and vote for the best developing country policy. Reasons to prefer.

1. Political Engagement.
   Roleplaying as a policy maker is key to create informed political advocates.

Schaap 5
Andrew Schaap, University of Melbourne, Politics, Vol 25 Iss 1, February 2005
Learning political theory is largely about acquiring a vocabulary that enables one to reflect more critically and precisely about the terms on which human beings (do and should) co-operate for and compete over public goods, symbolic and material. As such, political theory is necessarily abstract and general. But, competency in political theory requires an ability to move from the general to the particular and back again, not simply by applying general principles to particular events and experiences but by reflecting on and rearticulating concepts in the light of the particular. Role play is an effective technique for teaching political theory because it requires that students employ political concepts in a particular context so that learning takes place as students try out new vocabularies together with their peers and a lifelong learner in the subject: their teacher.

Engagement with the political sphere is key to solve state violence and oppression. Boggs 2k
(CAROL BOGGS, PF POLITICAL SCIENCE – SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 2000, THE END OF POLITICS, 250-1)
But it is a very deceptive and misleading minimalism.  While Oakeshott debunks political mechanisms and rational planning, as either useless or dangerous, the actually existing power structure-replete with its own centralized state apparatus, institutional hierarchies, conscious designs, and indeed, rational plans-remains fully intact, insulated from the minimalist critique.  In other words, ideologies and plans are perfectly acceptable for elites who preside over established governing systems, but not for ordinary citizens or groups anxious to challenge the status quo.  Such one-sided minimalism gives carte blanche to elites who naturally desire as much space to maneuver as possible.  The flight from “abstract principles” rules out ethical attacks on injustices that may pervade the status quo (slavery or imperialist wars, for example) insofar as those injustices might be seen as too deeply embedded in the social and institutional matrix of the time to be the target of oppositional political action.  If politics is reduced to nothing other than a process of everyday muddling-through, then people are condemned to accept the harsh realities of an exploitative and authoritarian system, with no choice but to yield to the dictates of “conventional wisdom”.  Systematic attempts to ameliorate oppressive conditions would, in Oakeshott’s view, turn into a political nightmare.  A belief that totalitarianism might results from extreme attempts to put society in order is one thing; to argue that all politicized efforts to change the world are necessary doomed either to impotence or totalitarianism requires a completely different (and indefensible) set of premises.  Oakeshott’s minimalism poses yet another, but still related, range of problems: the shrinkage of politics hardly suggests that corporate colonization, social hierarchies, or centralized state and military institutions will magically disappear from people’s lives.  Far from it: the public space vacated by ordinary citizens, well informed and ready to fight for their interests, simply gives elites more room to consolidate their own power and privilege.  Beyond that, the fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian civil society, not too far removed from the excessive individualism, social Darwinism and urban violence of the American landscape could open the door to a modern Leviathan intent on restoring order and unity in the face of social disintegration.  Viewed in this light, the contemporary drift towards antipolitics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more authoritarian and reactionary guise-or it could simply end up reinforcing the dominant state-corporate system.  In either case, the state would probably become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.16 And either outcome would run counter to the facile antirationalism of Oakeshott’s Burkean muddling-through theories.  
2. Clash. Topical discussion is key to have a stable locus for debate. It is literally the only way to have meaningful discourse or solve anything. Bracketing out discussions is necessary- the failure of the occupy movement is an empirical example of the turn.
White 11
Jeremy B. White, National Affairs reporter at International Business Times, “As Occupy Wall Street Expands, Tensions Mount Over Structure”, http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/237339/20111025/occupy-wall-street-occupy-wall-street-structure-occupy-wall-street-general-assembly-occupy-wall-stre.htm?page=2, October 25, 2011
From the beginning, Occupy Wall Street has been committed to direct democracy. Anyone can participate in the General Assembly, the movement's main decision making body, by offering ideas or questioning other peoples' proposals. But that model is coming under strain as the still-nascent movement becomes more organized and maps a way forward. The last few weeks have seen a proliferation of working groups devoted to tasks that include managing food and supplies, coordinating community outreach and overseeing nearly $500,000 in donations. As the movement becomes larger and its structure grows more complex, protesters are debating ways to reform the General Assembly, which many veteran protesters say has become too unwieldy. "People are extremely frustrated with the process and how it is now," said protester Ronny Nunez. "The General Assemblies are great, they offer the ability for anyone to speak out, but there comes a point in which you have so many people involved in the process that it loses any sort of effectiveness." Nunez cited a recent General Assembly in which members of the sanitation working group sought emergency funding to purchase trash bins. Deliberations dragged on as people offered amendments, including a requirement that the protesters purchase their supplies secondhand, that "made it effectively impossible to get the funding they needed," Nunez said. Follow us "We're going through all these different growing pains where we're learning, and we're learning that some things work on a smaller level and some on a bigger level," Nunez said. Spokes Council Protesters are circulating a proposal to streamline the process with something called a Spokes Council. Under that model, the various working groups would nominate representatives to participate in the General Assembly on their behalf. The spokesperson would rotate, and during the General Assembly they would periodically conferring with their respective working groups, which would be seated behind them. The idea has already been blocked once in the General Assembly, but is set to come up again. A protester arrived at a recent meeting of the Outreach working group to explain the proposal. The current format had become "untenable," he argued. He noted that under the Spokes Council, anyone can join a working group and thereby have a say. "I think that's bulls-t," another protester responded, arguing that the idea endangered the movement's inclusiveness. "In participatory democracy," the protester presenting the idea shot back, "as long as you allow access at all times you've done your bit." Marisa Holmes, who on Monday night explained the Spokes Council idea during a meeting of the Structure working group, argued that the idea encouraged people to become more deeply invested in Occupy Wall Street by having them join working groups that are essential to the movement's day-to-day operations. Hours-long meetings where people debate the logistics of laundry, Holmes said, can vitiate the process by leading working groups to avoid the General Assembly altogether. "The General Assembly has been an amazing body for movement building, and it enables people to have a voice for what is sometimes the first time," Holmes said. "We don't want to destroy it but we see that there's a lot of work done in a not always accountable and transparent way." Dilemma: Preserve Participatory Structure or Become More-Efficient? The tension between people who want to preserve the movement's initial qualities and those who want to make it more efficient reflects an overlapping but different set of goals, said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and communications at Columbia University who observed the evolution of an activist movement as president of Students for a Democratic Society. He said the movement will need to find a way to accommodate the "purists and pragmatists," or those for whom "the very participation is the goal" and those whose "goals have to do with moving the world." "You can think of this as the process by which a nation-state is formed," Gitlin said. "At one point anyone who shows up is a member, and then at another point those who have been members and have an appreciation for tasks to be done say 'wait a minute, we need to capitalize on our experience and value our continuity'... You're talking about the founding of some kind of functioning democracy, and the rules continue to evolve in nation-states, too." As that process unfolds, observers and members of the movement worry about the movement becoming fractured or co-opted. "My fundamental question is why would anyone in this movement, which is pro-democracy and pro-consensus, repeatedly bring up a proposal after it was already blocked, which is very divisive?" asked Etan Ben-Ami, a licensed social worker who is skeptical of the Spokes Council idea. "On the left we always have to guard what's occurred in the past frequently: takeovers by the vanguard left that infiltrates the process and pushes an agenda." On Monday night, Edward Ledford sat by the Structure working group, listening intently as Holmes explained the Spokes Council idea. Ledford, 61, had traveled from Lincoln, Nebraska armed with a plan, based on an obscure academic paper by a mathematician, for a series of deliberative juries that flow into a parliamentary body. Ledford spoke eloquently of the challenges Occupy Wall Street faces, repeatedly referencing James Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10, which warned presciently against the danger factionalism poses to democracy. Follow us "People do not seem to have learned their history. I see a very classical historical error unfolding," Ledford said, adding that he had seen "several red flags" in less than a day. "The movement has to be structured, but if it's structured in a bad way it is going to fail. Direct participatory democracy has in every instance, once it takes hold of a national institution, basically destroyed it because of its propensity to succumb to the violence of faction."

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3. Switch side topical debate is the only meaningful forum to foster critical thinking. The impact is extinction. Harrigan 8 writes
Casey Harrigan, Associate Director of Debate at UGA, Master’s in Communications – Wake Forest U., “A Defense of Switch Side Debate”, Master’s thesis at Wake Forest, Department of Communication, May 2008, pp.6-9
Additionally, there are social benefits to the practice of requiring students to debate both sides of controversial issues. Dating back to the Greek rhetorical tradition, great value has been placed on the benefit of testing each argument relative to all others in the marketplace of ideas. Like those who argue on behalf of the efficiency-maximizing benefits of free market competition, it is believed that arguments are most rigorously tested (and conceivably refined and improved) when compared to all available alternatives. Even for beliefs that have seemingly been ingrained in consensus opinion or in cases where the public at-large is unlikely to accept a particular position, it has been argued that they should remain open for public discussion and deliberation (Mill, 1975).  Along these lines, the greatest benefit of switching sides, which goes to the heart of contemporary debate, is its inducement of critical thinking. Defined as "reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do" (Ennis, 1987, p.10), critical thinking learned through debate teaches students not just how to advocate and argue, but how to decide as well. Each and every student, whether in debate or (more likely) at some later point in life, will be placed in the position of the decision-maker. Faced with competing options whose costs and benefits are initially unclear, critical thinking is necessary to assess all the possible outcomes of each choice, compare their relative merits, and arrive at some final decision about which is preferable. In some instances, such as choosing whether to eat Chinese or Indian food for dinner, the importance of making the correct decision is minor. For many other decisions, however, the implications of choosing an imprudent course of action are potentially grave. As Robert Crawford notes, there are "issues of unsurpassed important in the daily lives of millions upon millions of people...being decided to a considerable extent by the power of public speaking" (2003). Although the days of the Cold War are over, and the risk that "The next Pearl Harbor could be 'compounded by hydrogen" (Ehninger and Brockriede, 1978, p.3) is greatly reduced, the manipulation of public support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the continuing necessity of training a well-informed and critically-aware public (Zarefsky, 2007). In the absence of debate-trained critical thinking, ignorant but ambitious politicians and persuasive but nefarious leaders would be much more likely to draw the country, and possibly the world, into conflicts with incalculable losses in terms of human well-being. Given the myriad threats of global proportions that will require incisive solutions, including global warming, the spread of pandemic diseases, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cultivating a robust and effective society of critical decision-makers is essential.

4. Switch side debate.

Micropolitics militarizes the debate-space. Every single thing we do in and out of round becomes subject to criticism. That destroys debate as a protected space for critical thinking.
Coverstone 95 writes
Alan Coverstone, Princeton High School, “An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchell’s Outward Activist Turn,” 1995 www.wfu.edu/Student-organizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 3-16-05uwyo-ajl
Yet, Mitchell goes too far. In two important areas, his argument is slightly miscalibrated. First, Mitchell underestimates the value of debate as it is currently practiced. There is greater value in the somewhat insular nature of our present activity than he assumes. Debate's inward focus creates an unusual space for training and practice with the tools of modem political discourse. Such space is largely unavailable elsewhere in American society. Second, Mitchell overextends his concept of activism. He argues fervently for mass action along ideological lines. Such a turn replaces control by society's information elite with control by an elite all our own. More than any other group in America today, practitioners of debate should recognize the subtle issues upon which political diversity turns. Mitchell's search for broad themes around which to organize mass action runs counter to this insight. As a result, Mitchell's call for an outward activist turn threatens to subvert the very values it seeks to achieve.
Multiple studies confirm that switch side debate about the topic increases critical thinking. It’s the largest link to education. Keller et al 1 writes
Thomas E., James K., and Tracl K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago, professor of Social Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, “Student debates in policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and knowledge through active learning,” Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer 2001, EBSCOhost
Since its origins in classical times, academic debate has been recognized as one of the best methods of learning and applying the attributes of critical thinking (Freeley, 1996). Recent empirical studies of students participating in competitive interschool forensics societies illustrate the link between debating and proficiency in critical thinking. Colbert (1987) found that students involved in intercollegiate debating for one year showed a larger pretest to posttest gain on a critical thinking test than a nondebating control group. Likewise, Shinn (1995) discovered that, after statistically controlling for intelligence, high school debaters students who engaged in two years of competitive debating exhibited higher levels of critical thinking than a comparison group of nondebaters.
Debates have been recommended as a strategy to engage students in active learning in the classroom (Bean, 1996; Bonwell and Eison, 1991; Schroeder and Ebert, 1983). The use of in-class debates has been reported in subjects as diverse as sociology and dentistry (Huryn, 1986; Scannapieco, 1997). Nevertheless, a search of the literature revealed no reference to student debates within social work education, despite evidence that debates have been assigned in some social work courses (Zlotnik, Rome,and DePanfilis, 1998). Furthermore, the authors discovered only two studies, both by Combs and Bourne (1989,1994), which provide empirical evidence of the value of debates in a classroom context. In their initial report, Combs and Bourne (1989) presented findings on the use of debates in two upper level business courses with a combined enrollment of 59 students. Nearly 80 of the students (n=47) believed the debates provided them with a better understanding of both sides of the issues than a standard lecture format would have. Likewise, 66 (n=39) felt they had learned more than if the course material had been presented in a lecture. Another important finding was that students' confidence in their public speaking skills increased following the debates. In general, there was satisfaction with the debates. At the beginning of the course only 57 of the students (n=35) looked forward to the upcoming debates, but by the end of the course 85 (n=50) stated that they enjoyed the debates, and 71 (n=42) wished debates were used in other courses. Combs and Bourne (1994) extended their initial study to cover a five-year period with a combined sample of over 500 students. The results were even stronger in favor of using debates, perhaps reflecting improvement in the instructors' application of the debate format over time.
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5. The resolution is the most accessible, researchable, and rigorously developed baseline for debating. You should affirm it. Galloway 7 writes
Ryan Galloway, assistant professor of communication studies and director of debate at Samford University, “DINNER AND CONVERSATION AT THE ARGUMENTATIVE TABLE: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEBATE AS AN ARGUMENTATIVE DIALOGUE,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007), ebsco
The central claim to this essay is that debate works best when it is dialogic and the topic is an invitation to participate. There are three pedagogical benefits to conceptualizing the resolution as an invitation. First, all teams have equal access to the resolution. Second, teams spend the entire year preparing approaches for and against the resolution. Finally, the resolution represents a community consensus of worthwhile and equitably debatable topics rooted in a collective history and experience of debate. First, teams have equal access to the resolution. The problem with relying upon prior disclosure, case lists, and word of mouth is that access is often tied to opportunity and resources. While it is true that there has been a phenomenal upsurge in the availability of case list access through technology, it is still the case that the resolution provides the most equal and fair access for all teams concerned. Each school in the community knows the wording of the resolution, even if they are not aware of the modifications made to any particular case. The notion that the negative team can rely upon the benevolence of the affirmative to provide strategic options radically tilts the argumentative table in favor of the affirmative. Providing the resolution as a baseline test operates as a demand for the negative’s approach to the topic to be heard. Instead of leaving the affirmative in complete control of what approaches to the topic the negative is allowed to argue, debate as a dialogue uses the resolution as a centerpiece of a demand to be heard. Second, teams spend the entire year preparing approaches for and against the resolution. The best debates often come from in-depth clash over a core area of the topic. It is not uncommon for debaters to spend between forty and sixty hours a week on debate, carefully refining their approaches to the topic. A common rejoinder is that debaters should think on their feet, and be prepared to debate against unusual affirmative cases and plans. While thinking on one’s feet is certainly valuable, allowing one side to think on their feet with the benefit of research, prior preparation, coaching, and thinking through arguments in advance, while depriving the other side of all such benefits hardly seems like a strategy that will result in a productive dialogue. Thinking on one’s feet is always framed by one’s past thoughts, arguments, and research base. Instead, debates are best when both sides have the opportunity to think ahead to the range of choices that the affirmative team can provide to the resolution. While there may always be some ground for the negative to respond to the affirmative team, that ground should stem from the resolution in order to maximize the benefits of the dialogical exchange which competitive debate allows. Finally, there has been a concerted community effort to ensure that the resolution provides subjects of controversy that are controversial, balanced, and anticipate a nuanced approach. Ross Smith notes, “Affirmative teams try to find what they think might be a slam dunk case, but in crafting resolutions the idea is to find a controversial area with ground for both sides” (2000). The resolution is the result of a painstaking process; it is thoroughly discussed, debated, and ultimately submitted to the debate community for a vote. It is framed, ultimately, as an issue about which reasonable minds could differ. Reliance upon alternative systems, such as germaneness, lists of ground provided by the other side in the debate, or the fact that a team has run a case in the past, betrays the central point of having a dialogue about the resolution and undermines the consensus upon which the whole enterprise depends. And while there are obviously some valid complaints about individual topics, as a whole, resolutions allow for a wide range of approaches to issues of the day. It is striking on the 20082009 resolution that conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute as well as Oxfam and the Sierra Club oppose agricultural subsidies, if for very different reasons. Teams could easily find evidence that subsidies go down a rat-hole, are counter-productive to free market economics, as well as arguing that subsidies entrench racism both domestically and globally, and prevent an ethic of care toward the global environment. Those that argue that the topic does not access issues relevant to a wide variety of special interests and minority groups may simply be asking for too much. Establishing the resolution as the bright line standard for evaluation of equity at the argumentative table allows all sides to the controversy access to formulating their approach to both sides of the topic question.

Representations of extinction are key to genuine resistance to violence. Schatz 12
JL Schatz, Binghamton U, "The Importance of Apocalypse: The Value of End?Of? The?World Politics While Advancing Ecocriticism," The Journal of Ecocriticism: Vol 4, No 2 (2012)
Any hesitancy to deploy images of apocalypse out of the risk of acting in a biopolitical manner ignores how any particular metaphor—apocalyptic or not—always risks getting co-opted. It does not excuse inaction. Clearly hegemonic forces have already assumed control of determining environmental practices when one looks at the debates surrounding off--?shore drilling, climate change, and biodiversity within the halls of Congress. “As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems … will go unsolved … only to fester more ominously into the future. … Ecological crisis … cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context … of internationalized markets, finance, and communications” (Boggs 774). If it weren’t for people such as Watson connecting things like whaling to the end of the world it wouldn’t get the needed coverage to enter into public discourse. It takes big news to make headlines and hold attention spans in the electronic age. Sometimes it even takes a reality TV show on Animal Planet. As Luke reminds us, “Those who dominate the world exploit their positions to their advantage by defining how the world is known. Unless they also face resistance, questioning, and challenge from those who are dominated, they certainly will remain the dominant forces” (2003: 413). Merely sitting back and theorizing over metaphorical deployments does a grave injustice to the gains activists are making on the ground. It also allows hegemonic institutions to continually define the debate over the environment by framing out any attempt for significant change, whether it be radical or reformist. Only by jumping on every opportunity for resistance can ecocriticism have the hopes of combatting the current ecological reality. This means we must recognize that we cannot fully escape the master’s house since the surrounding environment always shapes any form of resistance. Therefore, we ought to act even if we may get co-opted. As Foucault himself reminds us, “instead of radial ruptures more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about. … And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power” (96--?97). Here Foucault “asks us to think about resistance differently, as not anterior to power, but a component of it. If we take seriously these notions on the exercise and circulation of power, then we … open … up the field of possibility to talk about particular kinds of environmentalism” (Rutherford 296). This is not to say that all actions are resistant. Rather, the revolutionary actions that are truly resistant oftentimes appear mundane since it is more about altering the intelligibility that frames discussions around the environment than any specific policy change. Again, this is why people like Watson use one issue as a jumping off point to talk about wider politics of ecological awareness. Campaigns that look to the government or a single policy but for a moment, and then go on to challenge hegemonic interactions with the environment through other tactics, allows us to codify strategic points of resistance in numerous places at once. Again, this does not mean we must agree with every tactic. It does mean that even failed attempts are meaningful. For example, while PETA’s ad campaigns have drawn criticism for comparing factory farms to the Holocaust, and featuring naked women who’d rather go naked than wear fur, their importance extends beyond the ads alone6. By bringing the issues to the forefront they draw upon known metaphors and reframe the way people talk about animals despite their potentially anti--?Semitic and misogynist underpinnings. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theorization of the multitude serves as an excellent illustration of how utilizing the power of the master’s biopolitical tools can become powerful enough to deconstruct its house despite the risk of co--?optation or backlash. For them, the multitude is defined by the growing global force of people around the world who are linked together by their common struggles without being formally organized in a hierarchal way. While Hardt and Negri mostly talk about the multitude in relation to global capitalism, their understanding of the commons and analysis of resistance is useful for any ecocritic. They explain, The multitude has matured to such an extent that it is becoming able, through its networks of communication and cooperation … and its production of the common, to sustain an alternative democratic society on its own. … Revolutionary politics must grasp, in the movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture … that can create a new world. In the face of the destructive state of exception of biopower, then, there is also a constituent state of exception of democratic biopolitics, … creating … a new constitutive temporality. (357) Once one understands the world as interconnected—instead of constructed by different nation--?states and single environments—conditions in one area of the globe couldn’t be conceptually severed from any other. In short, we’d all have a stake in the global commons. Ecocritics can then utilize biopolitics to shape discourse and fight against governmental biopower by waking people up to the pressing need to inaugurate a new future for there to be any future. Influencing other people through argument and end--?of--?the--?world tactics is not the same biopower of the state so long as it doesn’t singularize itself but for temporary moments. Therefore, “it is not unreasonable to hope that in a biopolitical future (after the defeat of biopower) war will no longer be possible, and the intensity of the cooperation and communication among singularities … will destroy its very possibility” (Hardt and Negri 347). In The context of capitalism, when wealth fails to trickle down it would be seen as a problem for the top since it would stand testament to their failure to equitably distribute wealth. In the context of environmentalism, not--?in--?my--?backyard reasoning that displaces ecological destruction elsewhere would be exposed for the failure that it is. There is no backyard that is not one’s own. Ultimately, images of planetary doom demonstrate how we are all interconnected and in doing so inaugurate a new world where multitudes, and not governments, guide the fate of the planet.

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 4 | Opponent: Ft Lauderdale TT | Judge: David Joannides
Nanotech could be utilized to prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction.
EPA 7 writes
US Environmental Protection Agency. “Nanotechnology White Paper.” Science Policy Council. February 2007. http://epa.gov/ncer/nano/publications/whitepaper12022005.pdf
Nanotechnology may be able to advance environmental protection by addressing the long-term sustainability of resources and resource systems. Listed in Table 2 are examples describing actual and potential applications relating to water, energy, and materials. Some applications bridge between several resource outcomes. For example, green manufacturing using nanotechnology (both top down and bottom up) can improve the manufacturing process by increasing materials and energy efficiency, reducing the need for solvents, and reducing waste products. Many of the following applications can and should be supported by other agencies. However, EPA has an interest in helping to guide the work in these areas. 2.3.1 Water Nanotechnology has the potential to contribute to long-term water quality, availability, and viability of water resources, such as through advanced filtration that enables more water re-use, recycling, and desalinization. For example, nanotechnology-based flow-through capacitors (FTC) have been designed that desalt seawater using one-tenth the energy of state-of-the art reverse osmosis and one-hundreth of the energy of the energy of distillation systems. The projected capital and operation costs of FTC-based systems are expected to be one-third less than conventional osmosis systems (NNI, 2000). Applications potentially extend even more broadly to ecological health. One long-term challenge to water quality in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay, and elsewhere is the build up of nutrients and toxic substances due to runoff from agriculture, lawns, and gardens. In general with current practices, about 150 of nitrogen required for plant uptake is applied as fertilizer (Frink et al., 1996). Fertilizers and pesticides that incorporate nanotechnology may result in less agricultural and lawn/garden runoff of nitrogen, phosphorous, and toxic substances, which is potentially an important emerging application for nanotechnology that can contribute to sustainability. These potential applications are still in the early research stage (USDA, 2003). Applications involving dispersive uses of nanomaterials in water have the potential for wide exposures to aquatic life and humans. Therefore, it is important to understand the toxicity and environmental fate of these nanomaterials. 2.3.2 Energy There is potential for nanotechnology to contribute to reductions in energy demand through lighter materials for vehicles, materials, and geometries that contribute to more effective temperature control, technologies that improve manufacturing process efficiency, materials that increase the efficiency of electrical components and transmission lines, and materials that could contribute to a new generation of fuel cells and a potential hydrogen economy. However, because the manufacture of nanomaterials can be energy-intensive, it is important to consider the entire product lifecycle in developing and analyzing these technologies.

Environmental protection will incentivize developing countries to develop nanotech.
CRN 4 writes
US Environmental Protection Agency. “Nanotechnology White Paper.” Science Policy Council. February 2007. http://epa.gov/ncer/nano/publications/whitepaper12022005.pdf
Those of us who read (and write) this blog know, of course, that there is an answer to these problems: a clean, cheap, environmentally friendly form of light manufacturing that will provide high quality goods to all without raping the land, and that could turn China into the envy of the Earth. It may be just a matter of time until nanotechnology can deliver on these promises and more, but will it be soon enough? A few days ago, we mentioned here that molecular manufacturing might, in fact, be invented somewhere in the developing world sooner than in the United States, Europe or Japan. Considering the enormous incentives — economic, environmental, and, yes, military — that less developed nations might see in nanotechnology, this scenario does not seem at all implausible. You also could make a strong argument that such a beneficial technology should be developed as rapidly as possible. You could argue that the humanitarian and ecological benefits alone should be enough to motivate all leading nations to band together and bring this to pass. You could say this, and CRN does say this!
Nanotech transforms atoms into a standing reserve.
Scrinnis 7 writes
Gyorgy Scrinis (research associate at RMIT University's Globalism Institute; Kristen Lyons: rural sociologist at Griffith) “THE EMERGING NANO-CORPORATE PARADIGM:  NANOTECHNOLOGY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF  NATURE, FOOD AND AGRI-FOOD SYSTEMS,” 2007. http://www.csafe.org.nz/ijsaf/archive/vol15(2)-07/articles/220-20Scrinis-Lyons.pdf
These techno-scientific characteristics will in turn constitute or enable the extension and  continued transformation of the ecological relations of the contemporary food system.  Nanotechnology greatly extends the ability to engage with, transform and reconstitute nature at the atomic and molecular levels, including the engineering of thoroughly novel organisms, materials and final food products. While this level of engagement with nature is not in itself  new, its reach and the ability to apply it in a wider range of situations is being radically  enhanced. This mode of engagement involves encountering nature — ie. plants, animals,  microorganisms, wholefoods — as being constructed from a set of standardised and  increasingly interchangeable nano-molecular components (Scrinis, 2006a). There is little respect here for the integrity of the objects of nature in their received form, for all are encountered as plastic and malleable, a standing-reserve of raw material (Heidegger, 1977)  ready to provide useful components, to be re-engineered from the atom up, or whose self-  assembling properties at the molecular level are to be harnessed, in order to meet the  requirements of — and to be smoothly integrated into — the dominant agri-food system  (Dupuy, 2007). This more abstract mode of encountering nature will increasingly define the  character of food production practices and products as it works its way through the system,  including plant and animal breeding and production practices, food processing techniques  and products, and consumption practices.

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 1 | Opponent: Cypress Bay DW | Judge: Jason Larey
African war is inevitable
Gettleman 10 – East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times (Jeffrey, “Africa's Forever Wars,” Foreign Policy, March/April, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/22/africas_forever_wars)//SS

There is a very simple reason why some of Africa's bloodiest, most brutal wars never seem to end: They are not really wars. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The combatants don't have much of an ideology; they don't have clear goals. They couldn't care less about taking over capitals or major cities -- in fact, they prefer the deep bush, where it is far easier to commit crimes. Today's rebels seem especially uninterested in winning converts, content instead to steal other people's children, stick Kalashnikovs or axes in their hands, and make them do the killing. Look closely at some of the continent's most intractable conflicts, from the rebel-laden creeks of the Niger Delta to the inferno in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and this is what you will find. What we are seeing is the decline of the classic African liberation movement and the proliferation of something else -- something wilder, messier, more violent, and harder to wrap our heads around. If you'd like to call this war, fine. But what is spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic is actually just opportunistic, heavily armed banditry. My job as the New York Times' East Africa bureau chief is to cover news and feature stories in 12 countries. But most of my time is spent immersed in these un-wars. I've witnessed up close -- often way too close -- how combat has morphed from soldier vs. soldier (now a rarity in Africa) to soldier vs. civilian. Most of today's African fighters are not rebels with a cause; they're predators. That's why we see stunning atrocities like eastern Congo's rape epidemic, where armed groups in recent years have sexually assaulted hundreds of thousands of women, often so sadistically that the victims are left incontinent for life. What is the military or political objective of ramming an assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Terror has become an end, not just a means. This is the story across much of Africa, where nearly half of the continent's 53 countries are home to an active conflict or a recently ended one. Quiet places such as Tanzania are the lonely exceptions; even user-friendly, tourist-filled Kenya blew up in 2008. Add together the casualties in just the dozen countries that I cover, and you have a death toll of tens of thousands of civilians each year. More than 5 million have died in Congo alone since 1998, the International Rescue Committee has estimated. Of course, many of the last generation's independence struggles were bloody, too. South Sudan's decades-long rebellion is thought to have cost more than 2 million lives. But this is not about numbers. This is about methods and objectives, and the leaders driving them. Uganda's top guerrilla of the 1980s, Yoweri Museveni, used to fire up his rebels by telling them they were on the ground floor of a national people's army. Museveni became president in 1986, and he's still in office (another problem, another story). But his words seem downright noble compared with the best-known rebel leader from his country today, Joseph Kony, who just gives orders to burn. Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don't want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?

No water wars
Katz 11—Director of the Akirov Institute for Business and Environment at Tel Aviv University. PhD (David, Hydro-Political Hyperbole, Global Environmental Politics, 11; 1; Feb 2011)
A number critiques have been leveled against both the theory and the empirical evidence behind the water wars hypothesis. One critique of the environmental security literature, of which much of the published material on water wars is guilty, is that warnings and threats of future violence are often considered as evidence.28 Statements from the 1980s that the next war in the Middle East will be over water have already proven false. Research has shown, however, that even the more general predictions of imminent water wars that are based on comments by officials may be suspect. Leng, for instance, found no correlation between the frequency of threats of war and the onset of war.29 Examining conflict and cooperation over water resources, Yoffe and colleagues noted over 400 incidents of water-related verbal exchanges by political figures between 1948 and 1999 that were conflictual in nature, but only 37 instances of violent conflict of varying levels of intensity. Thirty of these were from the Middle East, none were End Page 15 more recent than 1970, none were all-out wars, and in none was water the central cause of conflict.30 Proponents of water war scenarios often premise their dire conclusions on the fact that water is essential for life and non-substitutable.31 Yet water for basic needs represents a small share of total water use, even in arid countries.32 Economists and others point out that over 80 percent of world freshwater withdrawals are for the agricultural sector, a relatively low-value use and one in which large gains in efficiency could be made by changes in irrigation techniques and choice of crops. Thus, economic critiques of the water war hypothesis stress that the value of water that would be gained from military conflict is unlikely to outweigh the economic costs of military preparation and battle, much less the loss of life.33 Some authors have even questioned the empirical basis for the conclusion that freshwater is increasingly scarce, 34 an assumption on which the water war hypothesis relies. Such a “cornucopian” view claims that people adapt to scarcity through improvements in technology, pricing, and efficiency—rendering water less scarce, not more so. Perhaps the strongest case against the likelihood of water wars is the lack of empirical evidence of precedents. Wolf found only one documented case of war explicitly over water, and this took place over 4500 years ago.35 Moreover, he could document only seven cases of acute conflict over water. Yoffe and colleagues also find that armed conflict over water resources has been uncommon.36 They found that cooperation was much more common than conflict, both globally and in all world regions except the Middle East/North Africa. This pattern may explain why only a limited number of case studies of water conflict are presented in the water wars literature. Analysts have criticized environmental security arguments that are based on case studies because such works tend to have no variation in the dependent variable.37 Many large sample statistical studies have attempted to address such shortcomings, however, in several cases these studies too have come under fire. For instance, a number of large-sample statistical studies find correlations between water-related variables and conflict, however, few, if any, provide convincing support for causal relationships. Moreover, several studies found that water availability had no impact on the likelihood of either domestic or international conflict, 38 including at least one study that attempted to replicate earlier studies End Page 16 that claimed to have found such correlations.39 Moreover, the results of several studies that do find correlations between water and conflict are either not robust or are contrasted by other findings. For instance, Raleigh and Urdal find that the statistical significance of water scarcity variables is highly dependent on one or two observations, leading them to conclude that actual effects of water scarcity “are weak, negligible or insignificant.”40 Jensen and Gleditsch find that the results of Miguel and colleagues are less robust when using a recoding of the original dataset.41 Gleditsch and colleagues found that shared basins do predict an increased propensity for conflict, but found no correlation between conflict and drought, the number of river crossings, or the share of the basin upstream, leading them to state that “support for a scarcity theory of water conflict is somewhat ambiguous.”42

Tournament: Sunvite RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: University DB | Judge: Ellen Hense and Zack Struver
The aff’s focus on environmental catastrophe replicates the logic of the metropolis, a relationship based on estrangement. The idea that we “have” an environment as a surrounding feature distances us from the world.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” Sixth Circle. Semiotext(e). 2009.
We have to admit it: this whole “catastrophe,” which they so noisily inform us about, doesn’t really touch us. At least not until we are hit by one of its foreseeable consequences. It may concern us, but it doesn’t touch us. And that is the real catastrophe. There is no “environmental catastrophe.” The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop—they don’t have an “environment”; they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. It’s only we, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour—who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television—only we get to have an environment. And there’s no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of the disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia. What has congealed as an environment is a relationship to the world based on management, which is to say, on estrangement. A relationship to the world wherein we’re not made up just as much of the rustling trees, the smell of frying oil in the building, running water, the hubbub of schoolrooms, the mugginess of summer evenings. A relationship to the world where there is me and then my environment, surrounding me but never really constituting me. We have become neighbors in a planetary board meeting. It’s difficult to imagine a more complete hell. No material habitat has ever deserved the name “environment,” except perhaps the metropolis of today. The digitized voices making announcements, streetcars with such a 21st century whistle, bluish streetlamps shaped like giant matchsticks, pedestrians done up like failed fashion models, the silent rotation of a video surveillance camera, the lucid clicking of the subway turnstyles, supermarket checkouts, office time-clocks, the electronic ambiance of the cybercafé, the profusion ofplasma screens, express lanes and latex. Never has a setting been so able to do without the souls traversing it. Never has a milieu been more automatic. Never has a context been so indifferent, and demanded in return—as the price of survival—such an equal indifference from us. Ultimately the environment is nothing more than the relationship to the world that is proper to the metropolis, and that projects itself onto everything that would escape it. 

Prioritizing environmental protection paves the way for the ecological state of emergency, which estranges us from the environment by putting the police in between. Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” Sixth Circle. Semiotext(e). 2009.
Tracking, transparency certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being. “Once the new economic and behavioral culture has become common practice, coercive measures will doubtless fall into disuse of their own accord.” You’d have to have all the ridiculous aplomb of a TV crusader to maintain such a frozen perspective and in the same breath incite us to feel sufficiently “sorry for the planet” to get mobilized, while remaining anesthetized enough to watch the whole thing with restraint and civility. The new green asceticism is precisely the self-control that is required of us all in order to negotiate a rescue operation where the system has taken itself hostage. Henceforth, it’s in the name of environmentalism that we must all tighten our belts, just as we did yesterday in the name of the economy. The roads could certainly be transformed into bicycle paths, we ourselves could perhaps, to a certain degree, be grateful one day for a guaranteed income, but only at the price of an entirely therapeutic existence. Those who claim that generalized self-control will spare us from an environmental dictatorship are lying: the one will prepare the way for the other, and we’ll end up with both. As long as there is Man Human and Environment, the police will be there between them.

3 impacts.

a. The estrangement of the metropolis undermines any coherent notion of the self.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” First Circle. Semiotext(e). 2009.
It’s dizzying to see Reebok’s “I AM WHAT I AM” enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only exist as a family, that is, as a hell, for those who’ve quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don’t know how to. The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied. “I AM WHAT I AM,” then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn’t everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well-ordered, empty, froze space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities. 

b. The paranoid drive to shut off all that is external from the metropolis makes social collapse inevitable. Trying to maintain it is doomed to fail.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” Fourth Circle. Semiotext(e). 2009.
The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this final collision between city and country. It is also a flow of beings and things, a current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train lines, satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making sure that this world keeps running straight to its ruin. It is a current that would like to drag everything along in its hopeless mobility, to mobilize each and every one of us. Where information pummels us like some kind of hostile force. Where the only thing left to do is run. Where it becomes hard to wait, even for the umpteenth subway train. With the proliferation of means of movement and communication, and with the lure of always being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the here and now. Hop on an intercity or commuter train, pick up a telephone—in order to be already gone. Such mobility only ever means uprootedness, isolation, exile. It would be insufferable if it weren’t always the mobility of a private space, or a portable interior. The private bubble doesn’t burst, it floats around. The process of cocooning is not going away, it is merely being put into motion. From a train station, to an office park, to a commercial bank, from one hotel to another, there is everywhere a foreignness, a feeling so banal and so habitual it becomes the last form of familiarity. Metropolitan excess is this capricious mixing of definite moods, indefinitely recombined. The city centers of the metropolis are not clones of themselves, but offer instead their own auras; we glide from one to the next, selecting this one and rejecting that one, to the tune of a kind of existential shopping trip among different styles of bars, people, designs, or playlists. “With my mp3 player, I’m the master of my world.” To cope with the uniformity that surrounds us, our only option is to constantly renovate our own interior world, like a child who constructs the same little house over and over again, or like Robinson Crusoe reproducing his shopkeeper’s universe on a desert island—yet our desert island is civilization itself, and there are billions of us continually washing up on it. It is precisely due to this architecture of flows that the metropolis is one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has ever existed. Supple, subtle, but vulnerable. A brutal shutting down of borders to fend off a raging epidemic, a sudden interruption of supply lines, organized blockades of the axes of communication—and the whole façade crumbles, a façade that can no longer mask the scenes of carnage haunting it from morning to night. The world would not be moving so fast if it didn’t have to constantly outrun its own collapse. The metropolis aims to shelter itself from inevitable malfunction via its network structure, via its entire technological infrastructure of nodes and connections, its decentralized architecture. The internet is said to be capable of surviving a nuclear attack. Permanent control of the flow of information, people and products makes the mobility of the metropolis secure, while its’ tracking systems ensure that no shipping containers get lost, that not a single dollar is stolen in any transaction, and that no terrorist ends up on any airplane. Thanks to an RFID chip, a biometric passport, a DNA profile. But the metropolis also produces the means of its own destruction. An American security expert explains the defeat in Iraq as a result of the guerrillas’ ability to take advantage of new ways of communicating. The US invasion didn’t so much import democracy to Iraq as it did cybernetic networks. They brought with them one of the weapons of their own defeat. The proliferation of mobile phones and internet access points gave the guerillas newfound ways to self-organize, and allowed them to become such elusive targets. 

c. K turns the case.
The estrangement perpetuated by the metropolis is the root cause of environmental harms.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” Sixth Circle. Semiotext(e). 2009.
Everything about the environmentalists’ discourse must be turned upside-down. Where they talk of “catastrophes” to label the present system’s mismanagement of beings and things, we only see the catastrophe of its all too perfect operation. The greatest wave of famine ever known in the tropics (1876-1879) coincided with a global drought, but more significantly, it also coincided with the apogee of colonization. The destruction of the peasant’s world and of local alimentary practices meant the disappearance of the means for dealing with scarcity. More than the lack of water, it was the effect of the rapidly expanding colonial economy that littered the Tropics with millions of emaciated corpses. What is presented everywhere as an ecological catastrophe has never stopped being, above all, the manifestation of a disastrous relationship to the world. Inhabiting a nowhere makes us vulnerable to the slightest jolt in the system, to the slightest climactic risk. As the latest tsunami approached and the tourists continued to frolic in the waves, the islands’ hunter-gatherers rushed away from the coast, following the birds. Environmentalism’s present paradox is that under the pretext of saving the planet from desolation it merely saves the causes of its desolation. 

The alternative is to embrace the proliferation of the communes.
Communes resist estrangement through an embracing of our ties with others and displacing of modern social institutions.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” Find Each Other. Semiotext(e). 2009.
Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say “we,” and makes that an event. What’s strange isn’t that people who are attuned to each other form communes, but that they remain separated. Why shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every street, every village, every school. At long last, the reign of the base committees! Communes that accept being what they are, where they are. And if possible, a multiplicity of communes that will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union, sports club, etc. Communes that aren’t afraid, beyond their specifically political activities, to organize themselves for the material and moral survival of each of their members and of all those around them who remain adrift. Communes that would not define themselves – as collectives tend to do – by what’s inside and what’s outside them, but by the density of the ties at their core. Not by their membership, but by the spirit that animates them. A commune forms every time a few people, freed from their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only on themselves and measure their strength against reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is a commune. The action committees of 1968 were communes, as were the slave maroons in the United States, or Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977. Every commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on which it is founded. There all kinds of communes that wait neither for the numbers nor the means to get organized, and even less for the “right moment” – which never arrives.

Communes require prioritizing resource extraction over environmental protection to be viable.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” Get Organized. Semiotext(e). 2009.
On the other hand, a commune can’t bank on the “welfare state” being around forever, and on the other, it can’t count on living for long off shoplifting, nighttime dumpster diving at supermarkets or in the warehouses of the industrial zones, misdirecting government subsidies, ripping off insurance companies and other frauds, in a word: plunder. So it has to consider how to continually increase the level and scope of its self-organization. Nothing would be more logical than using the lathes, milling machines, and photocopiers sold at a discount after a factory closure to support a conspiracy against commodity society. The feeling of imminent collapse is everywhere so strong these days that it would be hard to enumerate all of the current experiments in matters of construction, energy, materials, illegality or agriculture. There’s a whole set of skills and techniques just waiting to be plundered and ripped from their humanistic, street-culture, or eco-friendly trappings. Yet this group of experiments is but one part of all the intuitions, the know-how, and the ingenuity found in slums that will have to be deployed if we intend to repopulate the metropolitan desert and ensure the viability of an insurrection beyond its first stages. 

 The K comes first. Sustainable development should be rejected in favor of an allowance of the inevitable ecological crisis. Solving environmental harms should not be our primary goal; this only furthers our estrangement.
Invisible Committee 9 writes
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). “The Coming Insurrection.” Sixth Circle. Semiotext(e). 2009.
The normal functioning of the world serves to hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession. What is called “catastrophe” is no more than the forced suspension of the state, one of those rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world. Let the petroleum reserves run out earlier than expected; let the international flows that regulate the tempo of the metropolis be interrupted; let us suffer some great social disruption and some great “return to savagery of the population,” a “planetary threat,” the “end of civilization”! Whatever. Any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision. When this comes, the specialists in sustainable development won’t be the ones with the best advice. It’s within the malfunction and short-circuits of the system that we find the elements of a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems themselves. Among the signatory nations to the Kyoto Protocol, the only countries that have fulfilled their commitments, in spite of themselves, are Ukraine and Romania. Guess why. The most advanced experimentation with “organic” agriculture on a global level has take place since 1989 on the island of Cuba. Guess why. And it’s along the African highways, and nowhere else, that auto mechanics has been elevated to a form of art. Guess how. What makes the crisis desirable is that in the crisis the environment ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact, albeit a potentially fatal one, with what’s there, to rediscover the rhythms of reality. What surrounds us is no longer a landscape, a panorama, a theater, but something to inhabit, something we need to come to terms with, something we can learn from. We won’t let ourselves be led astray by the ones who’ve brought about the “catastrophe.” Where the managers platonically discuss amongst themselves how to reduce emissions “without breaking the bank,” the only realistic option we can see is to “break the bank” as soon as possible and, in the meantime, take advantage of every collapse in the system to increase our own strength.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 3 | Opponent: Needham JP | Judge: Jonathon Alston
Text: Less industrialized economies should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction when the two conflict.

“Developing countries” promotes Western imperialism which kills the environment, turns case.
Berger 12 writes
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/
In a speech at the Congress of Black African Writers in 1959, Frantz Fanon remarked: “Colonial domination… very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people… The intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture.” 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. Foreign aid, the medium of expression for the discourse of development, perpetuates domination of nature in the name of “progress.” Certainly, pre-colonial and pre-development India was no utopia. A rigid caste system and draconian governmental regimes firmly anchored poverty, hunger, and inequality in the culture. One could not reasonably argue that India should or could be returned to its pre-colonial state, or that all development efforts there should be halted or reversed. It is true that development has and will continue to improve the lives of millions of people in India, by providing jobs, income, infrastructure, and improved healthcare for many over the course of this century. Yet it has undoubtedly deepened existing inequality, and, while it has allowed India to enjoy short-term economic success, it has arguably positioned the country for long-term difficulties. Development has bred dependence on foreign aid while weakening self-sufficiency and the prospect of future sustainability. In the 21st century, India will continue to feel immense growing pains and will place considerable strain on the world’s resources.

Imperialism risks extinction. Eckhardt 90 writes
William Eckhardt (Lentz Peace Research Laboratory of St. Louis). JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, February 1990, p. 15-16
Modern Western Civilization used war as well as peace to gain the whole world as a domain to benefit itself at the expense of others: The expansion of the culture and institutions of modern civilization from its centers in Europe was made possible by imperialistic war… It is true missionaries and traders had their share in the work of expanding world civilization, but always with the support, immediate or in the background, of armies and navies (pp. 251-252). The importance of dominance as a primary motive in civilized war in general was also emphasized for modern war in particular: '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 processof 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! This is surely carrying self-destruction to some infinite power beyond all human comprehension. It's too much, or superfluous, as the Existentialists might say. Why we should care is a mystery. But, if we do, then the need for civilized peoples to respond to the ethical challenge is very urgent indeed. Life itself may depend upon our choice.

“Less industrialized economies” solves Western imperial bias.
Donaldson 8 writes
Krista Donaldson. “Why to be Wary of ‘Design for Developing Countries’.” Ambidextrous. 2008. http://www.stanford.edu/~kmd/donaldson_wary_2008.pdf
I’m not a fan of using the word “de¬veloping” to describe people. What makes a society developed? Wealth? Mass consumerism? Stability? Equality? There are several projects that attempt to measure happiness—and few cor¬relate it with gross domestic product or per capita income. And “developing country” seems like a summation of two misnomers considering that the borders of most post-colonial countries are European map carvings with mini¬mal thought to the local people. With my work, I tend to stick with “less in¬dustrialized economies.” It’s not a great label and produces a terrible acronym, but it is scalable and gets away from the more subjective issues of development. That said, I still refer to design aimed at promoting social well-being and help¬ing people meet their basic needs as “design for development.” 

Discourse comes first. It shapes environmental policy.
Meisner 95 writes
Mark Meisner (Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University). “Resourcist Language: The Symbolic Enslavement of Nature.” 1995.
Language is a central part of how humans view and act in the world. It is both a tool we use and a place where we live. Through the study of language we can learn about ourselves, and in this case, specifically about our relationships to the non-human world. So it is not that I think language is the problem that needs fixing. I prefer to think of it (with apologies to Susan Sontag (1978) and an awareness of the problems with the metaphor) as a sort of contagious symptom of an underlying disease. Treating language will not make the anthropocentric-resourcist ideology and its behavioural, economic and structural manifestations go away. But language is a sign of something wrong and it is a way to get the people concerned to think about the issues. By “language” I simply mean words and ways of arranging them. I therefore distinguish between what people mean to say (propositional content), and how they say it (lexical and syntactic choices). For example, if a supporter of deep ecology were to say: “The natural resources should be conserved for their own sakes,” I would ask if “natural resources” was an appropriate label for facets of nature (because it denies their independence from human valuation), and whether “conserved” was an appropriate verb for what we need to do for nature, in the context of arguing for nature for its own sake. In this example there is a contradiction between the message being attempted and the message implied in the word choices. Thus, the language is an issue in such a statement. To be so, it must be considered in light of its contexts: the speaker and their philosophical or political position, their propositions, and the discursive communities in which they participate. The relationship between language and worldview is complex and uncertain. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis asserts the theories of linguistic determinism and relativity (Whorf, 1956). Though the strong version of this theory is not widely accepted, a weaker version is (e.g. Fowler, 1991; Lakoff, 1987). So, as Paul Chilton (1988, 47) puts it, “instead of making absolute claims about the necessary determination of all thought by all aspects of language, it is more useful to ask which parts of language influence which speakers in which contexts and to what degree.” In other words, we can say that language does not necessarily determine thought, but rather affects it; language does not set the limits of thought, but it does guide it in certain directions. This view is supported by Wendy Martyna who says of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: “it has come to be generally accepted in its moderate version: that language may influence, rather than determine, thought and behaviour patterns” (1983, 34). Language is the dominant medium with which ideas of nature are constructed and maintained. Through language we encode, reinforce and legitimate categories, values, concepts, and feelings relating to the natural world. Since words carry values, the words we choose to name and characterize nature are a significant part of how we view it. Furthermore, language allows for multiple interpretations of meaning, and for ambiguities and manipulation. It also serves a powerful legitimating function and can tend to reinforce hegemonic ideologies. However, it is also a creative resource and provides opportunities for change and transformation. Language, thought, feeling, and worldview are then mutually shaping dimensions of an ongoing process of perception, conceptualization, representation, construction, legitimation, reproduction, and sometimes transformation of ideologies. There is no such thing as neutral language (See Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Connolly, 1983; Fairclough, 1989; Hall, 1980; Spender, 1985; and Williams, 1983). The feature of language that most influences our views of nature is metaphor. Since metaphors have been widely theorized (See for example, Black, 1979; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Ortony, 1979; and Sacks, 1979), and since I have explored their environmental significance elsewhere (Meisner, 1995), I do not feel I need to go into detail here. It is enough to say that metaphors are pervasive in our linguistic constructions of nature, and that all representations of nature draw upon them. They serve to cognitively and emotively massage our understanding of the world. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) assert, metaphors are part of thought and action as well as language. As they say, in all aspects of life,...we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor. (158) In addition to thinking about metaphors, I also find the concept of linguistic registers useful for looking at issues of language and nature. A register is a variety of language that is particular to a field of use (See Cameron, 1985; and Fowler, 1991). In the case of words, we can speak of lexical registers that are associated with specific situations. As Fowler (1991, 84) suggests, lexical registers can “mark off socially and ideologically distinct areas of experience: they have a categorizing function.” So, in the case of resourcism, I think it is possible to say that there is a distinct lexical register associated with this environmental ideology. What is even more interesting, though, is the possibility that ecocentric environmental advocates are still using a resourcist register to refer to non-human nature. Furthermore, some of them--including Monte Hummel, President of WWF Canada--employ code-switching tactics to better reach their more extraction-oriented audiences (Hummel, 1991). To explore that register, I now turn to my taxonomy.

Tournament: Columbia | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison MW | Judge: Noel Selegzi

See Delbarton RT, he also runs this.

I negate today’s resolution, developing countries should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction when the two conflict.

English Language and Usage defines should as ought to
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4972/difference-between-should-and-ought-to
Thus, I value morality, since “ought” is a normative term, establishing what is right and wrong.

Every individual has a right to their own body, which entails respect for property rights. This is not only the basis for our inalienable rights, but explains why nature would be valuable.
Zev Tractenberg 7 writes
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma University.  ““This habitable earth of ours:” Locke on humanity in the environment”
Locke’s solution rests on his “self-ownership” thesis. He holds that there is an exception to the original condition of common ownership of the goods of the earth: each person has an exclusive right to his or her own body. Locke appeals to that exclusive right to explain how individuals can obtain an exclusive right to what begins as a commonly owned item in nature. The key is his observation that people must physically transform nature in order to consume those items they need to survive: the apple must be picked from the tree before it can be eaten. The physical activity of the person—the labor of his or her body—is “mixed” with the item, marking it off as no longer common, but rather as exclusive, private property. We must leave aside the puzzles associated with the mixing metaphor; 4 let us simply note that Locke invests our relationship to certain external objects (our property) with the moral authority of our autonomous selfhood—our right over our own bodies. Note also that, for Locke, both the general entitlement to some property or other, as needed to support survival, and the specific entitlement to one’s own body, hence to the items one appropriates through labor, stem directly from God. Therefore he characterizes property as a natural right, justified in terms of natural law. Locke’s account is particularly vivid with respect to items that are hunted or gathered from nature. But the relatively low-impact harvesting of readily available natural products is short of the fuller sense of habitation his theory provides. For, he uses the labor theory to justify property rights in the habitat itself: beyond spontaneous products that can be foraged, agricultural labor grounds ownership of the transformed land. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (Locke 2T, § 31).

And, the only reason we enter into a society is to promote our interests. This is premised on the ability to own the means to the ends that we hold valuable, which means all governmental obligations assume the primacy of property rights.

Thus my value criterion is consistency with Lockean property rights.

Contention 1
The Lockean right to property implies an absolute right to destroy one’s own property.

The Lockean right to property opposes any state interference in individual use of property.  Zev Tractenberg 7 continues
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma University.  ““This habitable earth of ours:” Locke on humanity in the environment”
The expansion of holdings made possible by the system of exchange sets the stage for the transition from the state of nature to civil society, and Locke’s account of government. Locke observes that although the unequal distribution of property in the state of nature is justified by natural law, it is subject to a variety of “inconveniences” that render individuals’ property rights fragile. Owners are fully entitled to their property—but they are not secure in their possession. Thus, they are motivated to establish, through the social contract, a civil authority whose purpose is precisely to secure their natural property rights, which Locke understands to encompass people’s “lives liberties and estates” (2T, § 123). For Locke, civil society has the task of enforcing a preexisting and conceptually independent moral order (Tully 1980, 154, 162). We can now see how Locke’s view can be used to justify opposition to environmental regulation. The state whose function is to guarantee its members’ natural rights against each other must respect those rights as well (Locke 2T, §135). The allied notions that property is a natural right, and that the function of the state is precisely to protect natural rights, jointly place property owners in an extremely strong position vis a vis state action: any state action that interferes with the free exercise of property rights is illegitimate (Locke 2T, §138). In the United States, this moral vision, which limits government to make room for the exercise of property rights, is institutionalized and enforced by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The “Takings Clause” in that amendment—“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”—restricts the burdens the state may place on property rights to those which serve a public purpose, and requires that any owner so burdened be fairly compensated. The Takings Clause is standardly seen as the most environmentally significant institutionalization of Locke’s ideas. Because environmental regulations typically prevent landowners from engaging in otherwise permissible activities, much of the framework of law and regulation designed to protect the environment operates by placing limitations on the use of private property. Thus, many regulations have been challenged as violations of the Takings Clause: by limiting what owners can do, the state has in effect taken some measure of their property, and must compensate them (Meyer 1998, 51). In general the requirement of compensation functions as a brake on efforts to regulate property use, since it can make those efforts simply too expensive for the state to enforce.

This has three important implications.
First, the Aff must win an alternate conception of property rights in order to win the debate, this notion opposes state interference.  Even conflicting rights claims are resolved through punishment and not preventative action.

Second, Even if they win the entirety of the AC, the only way the government is justified in restricting property rights is if they compensate the owner which harms the economy and it probably impossible for a developing country to do given the large costs

And third, the aff must win that the government uniquely should prioritize environmental protection.  Even if they win their arguments, that just means that private companies should prioritize protection, which wouldn’t violate rights.  This would solve all of the impacts in the affirmative case and not violate property rights

Contention Two
Prioritizing resource extraction is essential to benefitting the citizens of developing countries.

The government has a unique relationship to the citizens of the country in that they are the ones that tacitly consent to its laws and also give up certain freedoms for the purpose of creating the state.  This does not extend beyond the borders of the state since a) there is no assurance that other state will act accordingly and not take advantage of the state that does recognize obligations and b) there is no government with coercive authority to impose restrictions on individual states.

Resource extraction is important for the economic growth of developing countries. There is no feasible alternative. Michael Levi 13 writes
Michael Levi (David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming book The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future). “The Other Resource Curse.” Foreign Policy Magazine. February 7, 2013
Moving away from fossil fuels could be devastating for some of the world's poorest countries. For as long as people have talked about moving beyond fossil fuels, another tantalizing prospect has hovered over the horizon: the decline of resource-rich authoritarian countries and the rogue nonstate actors that depend on them. A world of reduced demand for coal, oil, and gas is a world in which Iran, Russia, and various al Qaeda supporters are significantly weakened. That would certainly qualify as good news. But visiting Mozambique last week, I was reminded that not all of the losers from lower fossil-fuel demand will be the traditional bad guys. Mozambique's economy has tripled in size in the decade since the end of the country's 15-year-long civil war, but GDP per capita remains barely over $1,000 a head -- and highly concentrated among relatively wealthy elites. Leaders in Maputo, the capital, relied on international aid for 40 percent of the national budget last year. But an end is in sight: Massive coal deposits and offshore natural gas are poised to end Mozambique's aid dependence and rapidly increase economic output. The most bullish projections are far from assured -- Mozambique suffers from a lack of skilled labor, regulatory capacity, and essential infrastructure. But perhaps the biggest unknown is demand for what the country hopes to sell. If the world were to sharply reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, appetite for Mozambique's exports would decline or vanish, likely leaving the country in considerably worse shape. Mozambique is hardly the only country that would face this predicament. Africa in particular is packed with countries for which resource extraction appears to be the only viable first rung on the road to economic growth. Others in Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific confront similar prospects. Some plan to sell oil, gas, or coal. Others foresee extracting minerals like iron ore and bauxite, the processing of which requires massive amounts of fossil fuels. In a carbon-constrained world, however, consumers would need to cut back on their use of these minerals. Resource wealth is, of course, far from a guarantee of prosperity. Indeed, it can often bring the opposite: corruption, violence, and economic distortions that crowd out manufacturing and other industries, often deepening inequality in the process. But save for a few lucky countries like Costa Rica that have become favorite tourist destinations, there are few alternatives to resource extraction for many of the poorest developing countries. Development economist Paul Collier argues this point well in his powerful 2010 book, The Plundered Planet. The best alternative to suffering the resource curse, he explains, isn't necessarily forgoing resource development. It's harnessing revenues from resource extraction more effectively for broad and sustainable social and economic good. But while a great deal of effort has been expended looking at how low-carbon development could work in resource-consuming developing countries, very little time has been spent considering what it would look like for resource-rich developing countries. Entire careers are spent devising ideas for how China could power its economy using nuclear energy and renewable fuels, or how India could boost its resource efficiency. Not so when it comes to the travails of resource-rich countries. Many rightly mock demands for compensation from of the likes of Saudi Arabia, which would be hurt by reduced oil exports, but few stop to think about others that would suffer.

The negative case functions on two levels.  First, the affirmative must prove that there is no rights violation occurring and second, they must show an increase in the welfare of the citizenry as a result of environment protection.

Tournament: Harvard RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Palo Alto TC | Judge: JScog, Tom Evnen
Limits are a prereq to other offense. Large limits kill the activity.
Rowland 84
Robert C., Baylor U., “Topic Selection in Debate”, American Forensics in Perspective. Ed. Parson, p. 53-4
The first major problem identified by the work group as relating to topic selection is the decline in participation in the National Debate Tournament (NDT) policy debate. As Boman notes: There is a growing dissatisfaction with academic debate that utilizes a policy proposition. Programs which are oriented toward debating the national policy debate proposition, so-called “NDT” programs, are diminishing in scope and size.4 This decline in policy debate is tied, many in the work group believe, to excessively broad topics. The most obvious characteristic of some recent policy debate topics is extreme breath. A resolution calling for regulation of land use literally and figuratively covers a lot of ground. Naitonal debate topics have not always been so broad. Before the late 1960s the topic often specified a particular policy change.5 The move from narrow to broad topics has had, according to some, the effect of limiting the number of students who participate in policy debate. First, the breadth of the topics has all but destroyed novice debate. Paul Gaske argues that because the stock issues of policy debate are clearly defined, it is superior to value debate as a means of introducing students to the debate process.6 Despite this advantage of policy debate, Gaske belives that NDT debate is not the best vehicle for teaching beginners. The problem is that broad policy topics terrify novice debaters, especially those who lack high school debate experience. They are unable to cope with the breadth of the topic and experience “negophobia,”7 the fear of debating negative. As a consequence, the educational advantages associated with teaching novices through policy debate are lost: “Yet all of these benefits fly out the window as rookies in their formative stage quickly experience humiliation at being caugh without evidence or substantive awareness of the issues that confront them at a tournament.”8 The ultimate result is that fewer novices participate in NDT, thus lessening the educational value of the activity and limiting the number of debaters or eventually participate in more advanced divisions of policy debate. In addition to noting the effect on novices, participants argued that broad topics also discourage experienced debaters from continued participation in policy debate. Here, the claim is that it takes so much times and effort to be competitive on a broad topic that students who are concerned with doing more than just debate are forced out of the activity.9 Gaske notes, that “broad topics discourage participation because of insufficient time to do requisite research.”10 The final effect may be that entire programs either cease functioning or shift to value debate as a way to avoid unreasonable research burdens. Boman supports this point: “It is this expanding necessity of evidence, and thereby research, which has created a competitive imbalance between institutions that participate in academic debate.”11 In this view, it is the competitive imbalance resulting from the use of broad topics that has led some small schools to cancel their programs. 

Research overload kills in-depth education
Chokshi 10
Niraj Chokshi is a former staff editor at TheAtlantic.com, where he wrote about technology. He is currently freelancing How Do We Stop the Internet From Making Us Stupid? JUN 8 2010 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/how-do-we-stop-the-internet-from-making-us-stupid/57796/
When it comes to focus, turning on the spotlight may not matter as much as our ability to dim the ambient light. Nicholas Carr argued on Saturday in The Wall Street Journal that the Internet is making us dumber and on Monday The New York Times had a front-page feature on the mental price we pay for our multi-tasked lifestyles. If we are indeed losing our ability to think deeply, the key to fighting back may lie in a subtlety: focus may be more about our ability to filter out distractions than our ability to home in on the issue at hand. Carr posed his idea that technology is making us stupid in a 2008 Atlantic cover story and his forthcoming book "The Shallows" is a longer rumination on the theory. According to professors and research cited in The Times piece "the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research." And those distractions, according to research Carr cites, are forcing us to change the way we think. Deep thought is losing ground to superficiality. So, if our multitasking lifestyle causes distraction, and distraction leads to superficial thinking, how do we fight back? Carr offers some advice:

Limits are an intellectual necessity and are key to creativity.
Intrator 10
David Intrator (President of The Creative Organization). “Thinking Inside the Box.” October 21st, 2010. http://www.trainingmag.com/article/thinking-inside-box
One of the most pernicious myths about creativity, one that seriously inhibits creative thinking and innovation, is the belief that one needs to “think outside the box.” As someone who has worked for decades as a professional creative, nothing could be further from the truth. This a is view shared by the vast majority of creatives, expressed famously by the modernist designer Charles Eames when he wrote, “Design depends largely upon constraints.” The myth of thinking outside the box stems from a fundamental misconception of what creativity is, and what it’s not. In the popular imagination, creativity is something weird and wacky. The creative process is magical, or divinely inspired. But, in fact, creativity is not about divine inspiration or magic. It’s about problem-solving, and by definition a problem is a constraint, a limit, a box. One of the best illustrations of this is the work of photographers. They create by excluding the great mass what’s before them, choosing a small frame in which to work. Within that tiny frame, literally a box, they uncover relationships and establish priorities. What makes creative problem-solving uniquely challenging is that you, as the creator, are the one defining the problem. You’re the one choosing the frame. And you alone determine what’s an effective solution. This can be quite demanding, both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually, you are required to establish limits, set priorities, and cull patterns and relationships from a great deal of material, much of it fragmentary. More often than not, this is the material you generated during brainstorming sessions. At the end of these sessions, you’re usually left with a big mess of ideas, half-ideas, vague notions, and the like. Now, chances are you’ve had a great time making your mess. You might have gone off-site, enjoyed a “brainstorming camp,” played a number of warm-up games. You feel artistic and empowered. But to be truly creative, you have to clean up your mess, organizing those fragments into something real, something useful, something that actually works. That’s the hard part. It takes a lot of energy, time, and willpower to make sense of the mess you’ve just generated. It also can be emotionally difficult. You’ll need to throw out many ideas you originally thought were great, ideas you’ve become attached to, because they simply don’t fit into the rules you’re creating as you build your box.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Byram Hills AJ Amos Jeng | Judge: Mark Gorthey and Christi Bendi
Environmental regulations push oil companies to the Arctic.
Toomey and Klare 12
Diane Toomey (award-winning public radio journalist who has worked at Marketplace, theWorld Vision Report and Living on Earth, where she was the science editor. She also has reported on science, medicine and the environment for WUNC, the public radio station in Chapel Hill, N.C.) and Michael Klare (professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts). “Global Scarcity: Scramble for Dwindling Natural Resources.” Environment 360 interview with Michael Klare. May 23rd, 2012. http://e360.yale.edu/feature/global_scarcity_scramble_for_dwindling_natural_resources/2531/
Brackets in original. Klare: There’s profits to be made, and this is particularly important to recognize — that this is attractive to the private international oil companies, like Shell, BP, and Exxon Mobil that are going into the Arctic, because they’ve been pushed out of the Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia by state-owned companies. So there are very few places where they can go and control the whole process of production, from beginning to end, and the Arctic is one of those few areas. LISTEN: Michael Klare talks about how mining companies are exploiting one of the last protected areas of Gabon.  There’s more to it than just that. We’re really at a turning point and I think most people in this country and around the world understand that before too long we’re going to have to transition to other types of energy if we’re to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change. But the big oil companies, they only know one business, which is producing oil and natural gas and selling it in their service stations. And so they’re determined to maintain their business model as long as possible and they’re resisting the transition to alternative fuels. e360: North America has more than its share of so-called tough oil and gas. That includes the Alberta tar sands and the shale gas fields in the U.S. that are being fracked. As energy extraction heats up in North America, you’ve written that the U.S. is in danger of becoming “a third-world petro state.” What do you mean by that? Klare: Consider what happened in the 1960s and 1970s when U.S. and European oil companies moved into countries like Nigeria and Angola. You had very low government oversight of oil company operations, little or no environmental protection, a lot of corruption, so it was easy to expatriate your profits. You didn’t have to worry about labor regulations or labor unions. But now those places in the so-called Third World are becoming much tougher. They’re either nationalizing their resources or enforcing their environmental regulations or labor laws. So it’s not as profitable as it once was. Meanwhile, in the United States, there are these formations that were once inaccessible, shale rock in particular. But to gain access to these resources in the United States and Canada it will be necessary to roll back a lot of the A major task of China’s leadership is to scour the world for the resources they need to keep the Chinese economy growing.” environmental protections and the labor and tax laws that were imposed over the past 50 years. So the oil companies and the gas companies really want to turn this country back to what it was before environmentalism became an issue, and make it more like the way the Third World was in the 1950s and 60s, with very lax environmental oversight and labor concerns, so that they can use the very aggressive, environmentally hazardous techniques to extract oil and gas from these tough formations. e360: What developments can you point to that indicate that the U.S. is on the road to this? 

Arctic drilling causes methane emissions which risk extinction.
Bannerjee 13
Subankhar Banerjee (founder of ClimateStoryTellers.org). “Destabilization of Arctic Sea Ice Would Be Game Over for Climate.” Huffington Post. September 27th, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/subhankar-banerjee/destabilization-of-arctic_b_4000445.html?
Brackets in original. "Arctic sea ice extent certainly is continuing the long-term decline," Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder was quoted in a Guardian article. "We are looking at long-term changes and there are going to be bumps and wiggles along the long-term declining trend, but all the climate models are showing that we are eventually going to lose all of that summer sea ice." According to the NSIDC the 1979 to 2000 average of the minimum Arctic sea ice extent was 2.59 million square miles, 2007 (1.61), 2008 (1.77), 2009 (1.98), 2010 (1.79), 2011 (1.67), 2012 (1.32), 2013 (1.97). You can see that in two successive years, 2008 and 2009 the number went up a bit from 2007, but then three years in a row, starting in 2010 it went down reaching the lowest ever recorded in 2012, and now it's back up a bit but still 24 percent less than the 1979-2000 average. This is what Julienne Stroeve refers to as "bumps and wiggles along the long-term declining trend." But the most worrisome part of Stroeve's statement is that "we are eventually going to lose all of that summer sea ice." When that happens, life on earth will be in very serious trouble. So we need to understand all aspects of the significance of the Arctic sea ice and why we shouldn't contribute further to its disintegration. The enormous white surface of the Arctic sea ice reflects back solar radiation. But when the sea ice is replaced by dark water it does the reverse, absorbs solar radiation, which in turn contributes to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet (which would raise the sea level), thawing of permafrost on tundra (which would release methane trapped in soil), and destabilization of the subsea permafrost (which would release methane trapped in methane hydrates or clathrates). Methane as a greenhouse gas is 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. A complete loss of summer sea ice could potentially release huge amount of Arctic methane that might lead to a catastrophic climate change event, even possibly akin to the end-Permian extinction 252 million years ago that wiped out more than 90 percent of life on earth. So our goal should be -- to not add salt to the injury. Dr. James Hansen has repeatedly warned that if Canada's tar sands were fully exploited it would be "game over" for the climate. A complete destabilization of the Arctic sea ice would also be -- game over for the climate. Unfortunately, the Obama administration's National Strategy for the Arctic Region that was released in May is a disaster in the making. The document states: "The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs." It's referring to the oil and gas that sits underneath the Arctic seabed in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas of Alaska. In 2012, the Obama administration ignored science and all concerns of the indigenous Iñupiat communities, and gave Shell the approval to begin exploratory drilling (only top-hole drilling and not to penetrate the oil bearing zones) in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. In February, Shell announced that after both its rigs, Noble Discoverer and Kulluk, suffered heavy damage last year and were cited for EPA violations, it would not drill in Alaska's Arctic waters in 2013. Shell's Arctic drilling operation is in limbo right now. "Six months after federal officials chastised Shell Oil for its faulty offshore drilling operations in the Arctic, the company has yet to explain what safeguards it has put in place or when it plans to resume exploring for oil in the vulnerable region," the Los Angeles Times reported on September 25. Shell has not yet applied to drill in Alaska's Arctic seas in 2014. This is a good time to reflect on drilling in the Arctic Ocean as it relates to sea ice. Drilling in Arctic seas will result in gas flaring, which emits black carbon that absorbs solar radiation and will speed up melting of the Arctic sea ice. We need to connect a few dots about gas flaring.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit JS John Sasso | Judge: Ben Koh
A. Interpretation – In the AC, aff must unconditionally defend implementation of a developing country policy. He doesn’t need a plan to meet the interp. He just needs a stable government action that I can link disads to.

B. Violation – aff refuses to specify a real-world policy.

Spirit of the law is what matters. Don’t let the aff exploit loopholes in interp wording. It doesn’t matter if she technically meets the text as long as she violates the clear intention of the interp because that’s where the abuse comes from.

C. Standards

1. Ground. Core neg arguments like growth or poverty links assume implementation. No one says resource extraction is intrinsically valuable.

Implementation-focus is the core of the topic lit. Olivera 2
Jose Antonio Puppim de Olivera (Assistant Director and Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) where he coordinates the Sustainable Urban Futures programme. Previously, he was lecturer and course co-director of MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development at University College London (UK) and was associate professor at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (EBAPE) of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). He is editor of the journal Public Administration and Development (PAD, Wiley-Blackwell). Jose holds a Ph.D. in Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), a Master of Environmental Science from Hokkaido University (Japan) and a degree in Engineering from the Aeronautics Technological Institute (ITA), Brazil. Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration). “Implementation Environmental Policies in Developing Countries Through Decentralization: The Case of Protected Areas in Bahia, Brazil.” ScienceDirect. 2002.
The literature is proficient in describing cases of failures in implementing environmental policies in developing countries, such as in India (Reich and Bowonder, 1992; Vyas and Reddy, 1998), China (Jan, 1995; Ross, 1992), Eastern European countries (Hardi, 1992; Klarer and Francis, 1997), and Latin America (Ames and Keck, 1997; Pichon, 1992). Common explanations for policy failure range from the classical Malthusian paradigm regarding rapid population growth to widespread corruption in political systems (Sham, 1994). Although these explanations may often be true, they do not suggest practical solutions to problems in implementing environmental policies in developing countries. To be useful to policymakers, analyzes must identify the main factors that impede successful implementation and suggest how these obstacles could be overcome. Toward that end, understanding the political economy in which the implementation process occurs is crucial. As Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) recognized, implementation––and we could say especially environmental policy––encompasses the governmental and nongovernmental sector as well as interorganizational links. Thus, scholars have begun to analyze how organizations work together to success- fully implement environmental policy in developing countries (Brinkerhoff, 1996; Lemos, 1998; Lopes, Bastos Filho, Biller, and Bale, 1996). This literature provides practical recommendations to policymakers.

2. Real-World Policy Making Education 

Aff forces us to debate about philosophy in the abstract instead of real world implementation concerns. That kills education. 90 of policymaking is deciding on implementation. Elmore 80
Prof. Public Affairs at University of Washington, 1980  PolySci Quarterly 79-80, p. 605,
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 matter 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.

D. Voter – Education comes first because it’s the end goal of debate and the only portable skill. Substance doesn’t matter unless there’s an educational benefit to discussing it. Dropping the argument doesn’t solve because it’s too late to restart from the AC and have an educational debate. Also, the ballot has to set good norms for future rounds because debaters care first and foremost about winning, meaning voting on theory is the only way to deter bad arguments.

Prefer competing interpretations because reasonability is arbitrary and requires judge intervention.

Switch side policy debate has an out of round impact. It’s the best method for effecting change in energy policy.
Hager 92 (, professor of political science – Bryn Mawr College, ‘92 (Carol J., “Democratizing Technology: Citizen and State in West German Energy Politics, 1974-1990” Polity, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 45-70)
During this phase, the citizen initiative attempted to overcome its defensive posture and implement an alternative politics. The strategy of legal and technical challenge might delay or even prevent plant construction, but it would not by itself accomplish the broader goal on the legitimation dimension, i.e., democratization. Indeed, it worked against broad participation. The activists had to find a viable means of achieving change. Citizens had proved they could contribute to a substantive policy discussion. Now, some activists turned to the parliamentary arena as a possible forum for an energy dialogue. Until now, parliament had been conspicuously absent as a relevant policy maker, but if parliament could be reshaped and activated, citizens would have a forum in which to address the broad questions of policy-making goals and forms. They would also have an institutional lever with which to pry apart the bureaucracy and utility. None of the established political parties could offer an alternative program. Thus, local activists met to discuss forming their own voting list. These discussions provoked internal dissent. Many citizen initiative members objected to the idea of forming a political party. If the problem lay in the role of parliament itself, another political party would not solve it. On the contrary, parliamentary participation was likely to destroy what political innovations the extraparliamentary movement had made. Others argued that a political party would give the movement an institutional platform from which to introduce some of the grassroots democratic political forms the groups had developed. Founding a party as the parliamentary arm of the citizen movement would allow these groups to play an active, critical role in institutionalized politics, participating in the policy debates while retaining their outside perspective. Despite the disagreements, the Alternative List for Democracy and Environmental Protection Berlin (AL) was formed in 1978 and first won seats in the Land parliament with 7.2 percent of the vote in 1981.43 The founders of the AL were encouraged by the success of newly formed local green parties in Lower Saxony and Hamburg,44 whose evolution had been very similar to that of the West Berlin citizen movement. Throughout the FRG, unpopular administrative decisions affecting local environments, generally in the form of state-sponsored industrial projects, prompted the development of the citizen initiative and ecology movements. The groups in turn focused constant attention on state planning "errors," calling into question not only the decisions themselves, but also the conventional forms of political decision making that produced them.45 Disgruntled citizens increasingly aimed their critique at the established political parties, in particular the federal SPD/ FDP coalition, which seemed unable to cope with the economic, social, and political problems of the 1970s. Fanned by publications such as the Club of Rome's report, "The Limits to Growth," the view spread among activists that the crisis phenomena were not merely a passing phase, but indicated instead "a long-term structural crisis, whose cause lies in the industrial-technocratic growth society itself."46 As they broadened their critique to include the political system as a whole, many grassroots groups found the extraparliamentary arena too restrictive. Like many in the West Berlin group, they reasoned that the necessary change would require a degree of political restructuring that could only be accomplished through their direct participation in parliamentary politics. Green/alternative parties and voting lists sprang up nationwide and began to win seats in local assemblies. The West Berlin Alternative List saw itself not as a party, but as the parliamentary arm of the citizen initiative movement. One member explains: "the starting point for alternative electoral participation was simply the notion of achieving a greater audience for our own ideas and thus to work in support of the extraparliamentary movements and initia-tives,"47 including non-environmentally oriented groups. The AL wanted to avoid developing structures and functions autonomous from the citizen initiative movement. Members adhered to a list of principles, such as rotation and the imperative mandate, designed to keep parliamentarians attached to the grassroots. Although their insistence on grassroots democracy often resulted in interminable heated discussions, the participants recognized the importance of experimenting with new forms of decision making, of not succumbing to the same hierarchical forms they were challenging. Some argued that the proper role of citizen initiative groups was not to represent the public in government, but to mobilize other citizens to participate directly in politics themselves; self-determination was the aim of their activity.48 Once in parliament, the AL proposed establishmento f a temporary parliamentary commission to study energy policy, which for the first time would draw all concerned participants together in a discussion of both short-term choices and long-term goals of energy policy. With help from the SPD faction, which had been forced into the opposition by its defeat in the 1981 elections, two such commissions were created, one in 1982-83 and the other in 1984-85.49These commissions gave the citizen activists the forum they sought to push for modernization and technical innovation in energy policy. Although it had scaled down the proposed new plant, the utility had produced no plan to upgrade its older, more polluting facilities or to install desulfurization devices. With prodding from the energy commission, Land and utility experts began to formulate such a plan, as did the citizen initiative. By exposing administrative failings in a public setting, and by producing a modernization plan itself, the combined citizen initiative and AL forced bureaucratic authorities to push the utility for improvements . They also forced the authorities to consider different technological solutions to West Berlin's energy and environmental problems. In this way, the activists served as technological innovators. In 1983, the first energy commission submitted a list of recommendations to the Land parliament which reflected the influence of the citizen protest movement. It emphasized goals of demand reduction and efficiency, noted the value of expanded citizen participation and urged authorities to "investigate more closely the positive role citizen participation can play in achieving policy goals."50 The second energy commission was created in 1984 to discuss the possibilities for modernization and shutdown of old plants and use of new, environmentally friendlier and cheaper technologies for electricity and heat generation. Its recommendations strengthened those of the first commission.51 Despite the non-binding nature of the commissions' recommendations, the public discussion of energy policy motivated policy makers to take stronger positions in favor of environmental protection. III. Conclusion The West Berlin energy project eventually cleared all planning hurdles, and construction began in the early 1980s. The new plant now conforms to the increasingly stringent environmental protection requirements of the law. The project was delayed, scaled down from 1200 to 600 MW, moved to a neutral location and, unlike other BEWAG plants, equipped with modern desulfurization devices. That the new plant, which opened in winter 1988-89, is the technologically most advanced and environmentally sound of BEWAG's plants is due entirely to the long legal battle with the citizen initiative group, during which nearly every aspect of the original plans was changed. In addition, through the efforts of the Alter-native List (AL) in parliament, the Land government and BEWAG formulated a long sought modernization and environmental protection plan for all of the city's plants. The AL prompted the other parliamentary parties to take pollution control seriously. Throughout the FRG, energy politics evolved in a similar fashion. As Habermas claimed, underlying the objections against particular projects was a reaction against the administrative-economic system in general. One author, for example, describes the emergence of two-dimensional protest against nuclear energy: The resistance against a concrete project became understood simultaneously as resistance against the entire atomic program. Questions of energy planning, of economic growth, of understanding of democracy entered the picture. . . . Besides concern for human health, for security of conditions for human existence and protection of nature arose critique of what was perceived as undemocratic planning, the "shock" of the delayed public announcement of pro-ject plans and the fear of political decision errors that would aggravate the problem.52 This passage supports a West Berliner's statement that the citizen initiative began with a project critique and arrived at Systemkritik.53 I have labeled these two aspects of the problem the public policy and legitimation dimensions. In the course of these conflicts, the legitimation dimen-sion emergd as the more important and in many ways the more problematic. Parliamentary Politics In the 1970s, energy politics began to develop in the direction Offe de-scribed, with bureaucrats and protesters avoiding the parliamentary channels through which they should interact. The citizen groups them-selves, however, have to a degree reversed the slide into irrelevance of parliamentary politics. Grassroots groups overcame their defensive posture enough to begin to formulate an alternative politics, based upon concepts such as decision making through mutual understanding rather than technical criteria or bargaining. This new politics required new modes of interaction which the old corporatist or pluralist forms could not provide. Through the formation of green/alternative parties and voting lists and through new parliamentary commissions such as the two described in the case study, some members of grassroots groups attempted to both operate within the political system and fundamentally change it, to restore the link between bureaucracy and citizenry. Parliamentary politics was partially revived in the eyes of West German grassroots groups as a legitimate realm of citizen participation, an outcome the theory would not predict. It is not clear, however, that strengthening the parliamentary system would be a desirable outcome for everyone. Many remain skeptical that institutions that operate as part of the "system" can offer the kind of substantive participation that grass-roots groups want. The constant tension between institutionalized politics and grassroots action emerged clearly in the recent internal debate between "fundamentalist" and "realist" wings of the Greens. Fundis wanted to keep a firm footing outside the realm of institutionalized politics. They refused to bargain with the more established parties or to join coalition governments. Realos favored participating in institutionalized politics while pressing their grassroots agenda. Only this way, they claimed, would they have a chance to implement at least some parts of their program. This internal debate, which has never been resolved, can be interpreted in different ways. On one hand, the tension limits the appeal of green and alternative parties to the broader public, as the Greens' poor showing in the December 1990 all-German elections attests. The failure to come to agreement on basic issues can be viewed as a hazard of grass-roots democracy. The Greens, like the West Berlin citizen initiative, are opposed in principle to forcing one faction to give way to another. Disunity thus persists within the group. On the other hand, the tension can be understood not as a failure, but as a kind of success: grassroots politics has not been absorbed into the bureaucratized system; it retains its critical dimension, both in relation to the political system and within the groups themselves. The lively debate stimulated by grassroots groups and parties keeps questions of democracy on the public agenda. Technical Debate In West Berlin, the two-dimensionality of the energy issue forced citizen activists to become both participants in and critics of the policy process. In order to defeat the plant, activists engaged in technical debate. They won several decisions in favor of environmental protection, often proving to be more informed than bureaucratic experts themselves. The case study demonstrates that grassroots groups, far from impeding techno-logical advancement, can actually serve as technological innovators. The activists' role as technical experts, while it helped them achieve some success on the policy dimension, had mixed results on the legitimation dimension. On one hand, it helped them to challenge the legitimacy of technocratic policy making. They turned back the Land government's attempts to displace political problems by formulating them in technical terms.54 By demonstrating the fallibility of the technical arguments, activists forced authorities to acknowledge that energy demand was a political variable, whose value at any one point was as much influenced by the choices of policy makers as by independent technical criteria. Submission to the form and language of technical debate, however, weakened activists' attempts to introduce an alternative, goal-oriented form of decision making into the political system. Those wishing to par-ticipate in energy politics on a long-term basis have had to accede to the language of bureaucratic discussion, if not the legitimacy of bureaucratic authorities. They have helped break down bureaucratic authority but have not yet offered a viable long-term alternative to bureaucracy. In the tension between form and language, goals and procedure, the legitima-tion issue persists. At the very least, however, grassroots action challenges critical theory's notion that technical discussion is inimical to democratic politics.55 Citizen groups have raised the possibility of a dialogue that is both technically sophisticated and democratic. In sum, although the legitimation problems which gave rise to grass-roots protest have not been resolved, citizen action has worked to counter the marginalization of parliamentary politics and the technocratic character of policy debate that Offe and Habermas identify. The West Berlin case suggests that the solutions to current legitimation problems may not require total repudiation of those things previously associated with technocracy.56 In Berlin, the citizen initiative and AL continue to search for new, more legitimate forms of organization consistent with their principles. No permanent Land parliamentary body exists to coordinate and con-solidate energy policy making.57 In the 1989 Land elections, the CDU/ FDP coalition was defeated, and the AL formed a governing coalition with the SPD. In late 1990, however, the AL withdrew from the coali-tion. It remains to be seen whether the AL will remain an effective vehi-cle for grassroots concerns, and whether the citizenry itself, now includ-ing the former East Berliners, will remain active enough to give the AL direction as united Berlin faces the formidable challenges of the 1990s. On the policy dimension, grassroots groups achieved some success. On the legitimation dimension, it is difficult to judge the results of grass-roots activism by normal standards of efficacy or success. Activists have certainly not radically restructured politics. They agree that democracy is desirable, but troublesome questions persist about the degree to which those processes that are now bureaucratically organized can and should be restructured, where grassroots democracy is possible and where bureaucracy is necessary in order to get things done. In other words, grassroots groups have tried to remedy the Weberian problem of the marginalization of politics, but it is not yet clear what the boundaries of the political realm should be. It is, however, the act of calling existing boundaries into question that keeps democracy vital. In raising alternative possibilities and encouraging citizens to take an active, critical role in their own governance, the contribution of grassroots environmental groups has been significant. As Melucci states for new social movements in general, these groups mount a "symbolic" challenge by proposing "a different way of perceiving and naming the world."58 Rochon concurs for the case of the West German peace movement, noting that its effect on the public discussion of secur-ity issues has been tremendous.59 The effects of the legitimation issue in the FRG are evident in increased citizen interest in areas formerly left to technical experts. Citizens have formed nationwide associations of environmental and other grassroots groups as well as alternative and green parties at all levels of government. The level of information within the groups is generally quite high, and their participation, especially in local politics, has raised the awareness and engagement of the general populace noticeably.60 Policy concessions and new legal provisions for citizen participation have not quelled grassroots action. The attempts of the established political parties to coopt "green" issues have also met with limited success. Even green parties themselves have not tapped the full potential of public support for these issues. The persistence of legitima-tion concerns, along with the growth of a culture of informed political activism, will ensure that the search continues for a space for a delibera-tive politics in modern technological society.61

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Environmental policy discussions are key to critical thinking and decision-making skills. Pereiro-Munoz et al 2
Jiménez-Aleixandre, professor of education – University of Santiago de Compostela, and Pereiro-Muñoz High School Castelao, Vigo (Spain), ‘2 (Maria-Pilar and Cristina, “Knowledge producers or knowledge consumers? Argumentation and decision making about environmental management,” International Journal of Science Education Vol. 24, No. 11, p. 1171–1190)
If science education and environmental education have as a goal to develop critical thinking and to promote decision making, it seems that the acknowledgement of a variety of experts and expertise is of relevance to both. Otherwise citizens could be unable to challenge a common view that places economical issues and technical features over other types of values or concerns. As McGinn and Roth (1999) argue, citizens should be prepared to participate in scientific practice, to be involved in situations where science is, if not created, at least used. The assessment of environmental management is, in our opinion, one of these, and citizens do not need to possess all the technical knowledge to be able to examine the positive and negative impacts and to weigh them up. The identification of instances of scientific practice in classroom discourse is difficult especially if this practice is viewed as a complex process, not as fixed ‘steps’. Several instances were identified when it could be said that students acted as a knowledge-producing community in spite of the fact that the students, particularly at the beginning of the sequence, expressed doubts about their capacities to assess a project written by experts and endorsed by a government office. Perhaps these doubts relate to the nature of the project, a ‘real life’ object that made its way into the classroom, into the ‘school life’. As Brown et al. (1989) point out, there is usually a difference between practitioners’ tasks and stereotyped school tasks and, it could be added, students are not used to being confronted with the complexity of ‘life-size’ problems. However, as the sequence proceeded, the students assumed the role of experts, exposing inconsistencies in the project, offering alternatives and discussing it with one of its authors. The issue of expertise is worthy of attention and it needs to be explored in different contexts where the relationships among technical expertise, values hierarchies and possible biases caused by the subject matter could be unravelled. One of the objectives of environmental education is to empower people with the capacity of decision making; for this purpose the acknowledging of multiple expertise is crucial. 

Ecological morality is capitalist. Its hidden objective is to prop up class divisions.
Invisible Committee 9
The Invisible Committee (a bunch of French commune dwellers). The Coming Insurrection. Sixth Circle. 2009.
Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hurricanes, epidemics, global overpopulation, erosion of the soil, mass extinction of living species…this will be our burden. They tell us, “everyone must do their part,” if we want to save our beautiful model of civilization. We have to consume a little less to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically to keep producing. We have to control ourselves to go on controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself while giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they would like to convince us to participate in the great industrial challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment we’re ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us out of it. Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s the new morality of capital. The system’s internal state of crisis and the rigorous screening that’s underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this screening and selection will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two different diets, one “healthy and organic” for the rich and their children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to make its normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest whims weren’t so scrupulously “respectful of the environment.” Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag every objection to the exorbitant progress of control. 

The aff’s promotion of sustainability doesn’t question capitalism, so it fails to solve the root cause of the environmental harms they criticize, turning case.
McGregor 13
Warren McGregor (member of the ZACF). “Linking Environment Activism and Other Struggles: An Anarchist Analysis.” Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front. February 11th, 2013. http://zabalaza.net/2013/02/11/linking-environment-activism-and-other-struggles-an-anarchist-analysis/
We argue for a decentralisation and collectivisation of decision-making and production. Why? Because: 1. Capitalism is a wasteful socio-economic system that over-produces niche products for the minority who can afford them. It breeds competition between private owners of productive means whose goods are made by exploited wage-slaves and then exchanged through a market for profit and perpetual growth. Most production techniques today use fossil fuels (as mentioned above). Thus capitalism’s drive is towards profit and expansion and not efficient, sustainable productive practices. Importantly, because of its nature, as to produce things based on exploitation and for sale, it ultimately under-produces for people’s needs 5 and is a system that generates regular crises. 2. States are also responsible for ecological destruction. Competition between states for power and control over people and land leads to the development of huge war industries and war technology adapted for industry. These have obvious serious negative implications for people (injuries, death, refugees, etc.) and the environment (the terrible effects of current nuclear technological failures, etc.). State-owned enterprises contribute massively to ecological destruction 8. In South Africa, the nationalised and capitalist enterprise Eskom uses the energy released from burning coal to generate electricity. Eskom has plans to increase its use of coal for electricity. This puts into serious contradiction the South African government’s role in the Congress of Parties (or COP) -17 which took place in late 2011. Competition between states for resources (such as oil, natural gas, land, etc.) breeds conflict and war not only between countries, but also within countries, e.g. the diamond-funded civil wars of west Africa of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Also, states are not willing to enforce strong ecological protection laws against capitalist bosses and themselves as owners because these would cut into the profits and the states’ own tax revenue. 3. Many solutions to ecological and social degradation don’t question a hierarchical order of social organisation; or if they do they focus on eliminating one form of control while usually ignoring other dimensions of oppression. Under capitalism, solutions to ecological crises are based on consumer choice – a green consumerism – whereby customers choose to buy products and make choices that will supposedly help to sustain the environment, e.g. buying electric cars and energy-saving light bulbs, going vegetarian or vegan, recycling, living in eco-villages or eco-squats, etc. This form of consumerism, however, is based on an inadequate and incorrect analysis as to where the pollution problem actually lies – at the doorsteps of big industry, not individuals, and certainly not the working class and poor. Green consumerism is then, ultimately, a class-based choice and doesn’t question the role of capitalist production in creating and exacerbating ecological destruction. The majority of people, the working class, does not have the financial ability to afford these products and lifestyle choices (due to the very nature of capitalism) and thus does not have the financial power to shift production to more sustainable, “greener” means. There is also no evidence to suggest that a “greener” capitalism will adequately provide for society’s energy needs. For example, it may produce fuel efficient or electric cars, but what production procedures were used to make these cars, and how will electricity be provided for them? Energy will still have to be bought, and the many “service delivery” struggles around South Africa show that most of our people cannot afford energy. Ecological crises DO NOT, however, signal the end of capitalism itself, and we should guard against such thinking. Due to resource pressures, e.g. oil shortages, etc. and people’s struggles, capitalism will be forced to “go green”. However, this transition to different kinds of technology will be, at best, slow and lengthy and will not alter the class relations of who controls what. Also, weapons production, ultimately, cannot by its very nature be green, never mind the devastating impact it has on people the world over. Calling for more state intervention is another solution offered. However, this model of production and distribution is still not outside a capitalist framework as it serves to centralise control of resources (land, factories, water, air and people) in the hands of those lucky few who manage and control the state apparatus. One needs only reflect on the terrible environmental records of the former East-Bloc countries to see that a centrally-planned or state-led development model is not an automatic solution to ecological and social degradation (Steele, 2002).

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3 impacts.

a. Capitalism renders the poor and working class uniquely susceptible to environmental harm, so the alternative is a prerequisite to aff solvency.
McGregor 13
Warren McGregor (member of the ZACF). “Linking Environment Activism and Other Struggles: An Anarchist Analysis.” Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front. February 11th, 2013. http://zabalaza.net/2013/02/11/linking-environment-activism-and-other-struggles-an-anarchist-analysis/
The working class and poor bear the brunt of economic and political domination and ecological destruction. Not only are we forced into wage-slavery (for those of us lucky enough to find work), but our class also carries the burden of the externalities of production (those effects of production, like waste and pollution, that the bosses in the state and capital don’t pay for). We also lack the ability to make decisions to affect and control industry. The working class is forced to perform the most unclean and dangerous jobs – jobs which threaten and take the lives of workers on a very regular basis. Capitalism and apartheid have also forced the majority black working class of southern Africa to live in poorly serviced communities close to production sites where the surrounding air, soil and water are heavily polluted. Unlike us, the bosses and the rulers (including the black politicians and businesspeople) are protected from the effects of their greed and appetite for power by their air-conditioned offices, luxury suburban homes and ostentatious holiday resorts far away from polluted zones. Therefore we must organise and mobilise for the struggle against capitalism and the state for a democratic and sustainable economy and society. We need a big movement of the working class and poor – a counterpower – that would, for example, fight for conversion of power stations to clean technologies for free electricity provision, for free and quality public transport, for sustainable growth to improve living standards worldwide, for cleaner, safer working environments. These organisations would also exist as centres of democratic social education and training, developing an anarchist counterculture equipping us for the road of struggle ahead and for the future society beckoning us towards it. We must organise and fight for an ecologically-sustainable development and economic growth in order to deal with poverty and under-development. We will still need a massive programme of house-building, provision of electricity, water, food, etc. and large scale ecologically-sustainable industrialisation is vital to this end. Industrial technology holds a number of advantages over small-scale craft production as to meeting the ends of development and growth. Industry can produce many types of goods on a larger scale and at a faster rate than craft production, and can thus not only increase the level of economic growth, but also help shorten the working day, and free us from many unpleasant jobs. A safe environment is a basic need for the workers and the poor of South Africa, the region and the world. The environment is not just something “out there” such as the veld 7 or the sea. The environment also refers to where people live and work. As such, we can distinguish between “green” ecological issues (like wildlife, trees, etc.) and “brown” ecological issues (like workplace safety and community development). The two are obviously connected: brown ecological issues (like lack of sewerage facilities) directly affects green ecological issues (like marine life) when authorities dump waste into the oceans. Also, human-exacerbated climate change will have devastating effects on the world’s poor and development in terms of destructive floods and disastrous droughts. Tackling brown issues must generally take into serious consideration green environmental conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources. 

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b. Corporate control of the environment means that capitalism ensures extinction.
Zizek 99
Zizek, Slavoj. Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, page 350-351
This already brings us to the second aspect of our critical distance towards risk society theory: the way it approaches the reality of capitalism. Is it not that, on closer examination, its notion of 'risk' indicates a narrow and precisely defined domain in which risks are generated: the domain of the uncontrolled use of science and technology in the conditions of capitalism? The paradigmatic case of 'risk', which is not simply one among many out risk 'as such', is that of a new scientific-technological invention put to use by a private corporation without proper public democratic debate and control, then generating the spectre of unforeseen cata¬strophic long-term consequences. However, is not this kind of risk rooted in the fact that the logic of market and profitability is driving privately owned corporations to pursue their course and use scientific and techno¬logical innovations (or simply expand their production) without actually taking account of the long-term effects of such activity on the environ¬ment, as well as the health of humankind itself? Thus - despite all the talk about a 'second modernity' which compels us to leave the old ideological dilemmas of Left and Right, of capitalism versus socialism, and so on, behind - is not the conclusion to be drawn that in the present global situation, in which private corporations outside public political control are making decisions which can affect us all, even up to our chances of survival, the only solution lies in a kind of direct socialization of the productive process - in moving towards a society in which global decisions about the fundamental orientation of how to develop and use productive capacities at the disposal of society would somehow be made by the entire collective of the people affected by such decisions? Theorists of the risk society often evoke the need to counteract reign of the 'depoliticized' global market with a move towards radical repoliticization, which will take crucial decisions away from state planners and experts and put them into the hands of the individuals and groups concerned themselves (through the revitalization of active citizenship, broad public debate, and so on) - however, they stop short of putting in question the very basics of the anonymous logic of market relations and global capitalism, which imposes itself today more and more as the 'neutral' Real accepted by all parties and, as such, more and more depoliticized. 34 

c. Capitalism imposes a particular way of thinking about the world, making their abstract philosophical conclusions meaningless.
Marcuse 64
Herbert Marcuse (Marxist dude, critical theorist). “One-Dimensional Man - Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.” First Edition. 1964. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/one-dimensional-man.pdf
In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer. As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own. By the same token, however, no tribunal can justly arrogate to itself the right to decide which needs should be developed and satisfied. Any such tribunal is reprehensible, although our revulsion does not do away with the question: how can the people who have been the object of effective and productive domination by themselves create the conditions of freedom?4 The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation. To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea - although one might dispute the righteousness of a society which ridicules this idea while making its own population into objects of total administration. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. The process always replaces one system of pre-conditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction. The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation - liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable - while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets. Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear - that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.
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The alternative is to endorse revolution against capitalism by slum dwellers in developing countries. Slum dwellers in developing countries are the new proletariat.
Zizek 8
Slavoj Zizek (Slovenian cultural critic and philosopher). “Nature and its Discontents.” SubStance, Issue 117, Volume 37, Number 3. 2008. http://engl273g-f11-cerrone.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/Zizek+Nature+and+its+Discontents.pdf
(4) Last, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. On September 11th, 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The latter date announced the “happy ‘90s,” the Francis Fukuyama dream of the “end of history,” the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won, that the search was over, that the advent of a global, liberal world community was just around the corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp that their time is over). In contrast, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy ‘90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on the U.S.-Mexico border. So, what if the new proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new megalopolises? The explosive growth of slums in the last decades, especially in the Third World megalopolises from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through Africa (Lagos, Chad) to India, China, Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times.1 Since, sometime very soon (or maybe, given the imprecision of the Third World censuses, it has already happened), the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural population, and since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban population, we are in no way dealing with a marginal phenomenon. We are thus witnessing the fast growth of the population outside state control, living in conditions half outside the law, in terrible need of the minimal forms of self-organization. Although their population is composed of marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and expeasants, they are not simply a redundant surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many of them working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) They are the true “symptom” of slogans like “Development,” “Modernization,” and “World Market”: not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.2 No wonder the hegemonic form of ideology in slums is Pentecostal Christianity, with its mixture of charismatic miracles-and-spectaclesoriented fundamentalism and social programs like community kitchens and care for children and the elderly. While one should resist the temptation to elevate and idealize slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class, one should nonetheless, in Badiou’s terms, perceive slums as one of the few authentic “evental sites” in today’s society— slum-dwellers are literally a collection of those who are the “part of no part,” the “surnumerary” element of society, excluded from the benefits of citizenship, uprooted and dispossessed, with “nothing to lose but their chains.” It is surprising how many features of slum dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (“freed” from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside police regulations of the state); they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic lifeforms.

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 1 | Opponent: Cypress Bay DW | Judge: Jason Larey
Nanotech could be utilized to prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction.
EPA 7 writes
US Environmental Protection Agency. “Nanotechnology White Paper.” Science Policy Council. February 2007. http://epa.gov/ncer/nano/publications/whitepaper12022005.pdf
Nanotechnology may be able to advance environmental protection by addressing the long-term sustainability of resources and resource systems. Listed in Table 2 are examples describing actual and potential applications relating to water, energy, and materials. Some applications bridge between several resource outcomes. For example, green manufacturing using nanotechnology (both top down and bottom up) can improve the manufacturing process by increasing materials and energy efficiency, reducing the need for solvents, and reducing waste products. Many of the following applications can and should be supported by other agencies. However, EPA has an interest in helping to guide the work in these areas. 2.3.1 Water Nanotechnology has the potential to contribute to long-term water quality, availability, and viability of water resources, such as through advanced filtration that enables more water re-use, recycling, and desalinization. For example, nanotechnology-based flow-through capacitors (FTC) have been designed that desalt seawater using one-tenth the energy of state-of-the art reverse osmosis and one-hundreth of the energy of the energy of distillation systems. The projected capital and operation costs of FTC-based systems are expected to be one-third less than conventional osmosis systems (NNI, 2000). Applications potentially extend even more broadly to ecological health. One long-term challenge to water quality in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay, and elsewhere is the build up of nutrients and toxic substances due to runoff from agriculture, lawns, and gardens. In general with current practices, about 150 of nitrogen required for plant uptake is applied as fertilizer (Frink et al., 1996). Fertilizers and pesticides that incorporate nanotechnology may result in less agricultural and lawn/garden runoff of nitrogen, phosphorous, and toxic substances, which is potentially an important emerging application for nanotechnology that can contribute to sustainability. These potential applications are still in the early research stage (USDA, 2003). Applications involving dispersive uses of nanomaterials in water have the potential for wide exposures to aquatic life and humans. Therefore, it is important to understand the toxicity and environmental fate of these nanomaterials. 2.3.2 Energy There is potential for nanotechnology to contribute to reductions in energy demand through lighter materials for vehicles, materials, and geometries that contribute to more effective temperature control, technologies that improve manufacturing process efficiency, materials that increase the efficiency of electrical components and transmission lines, and materials that could contribute to a new generation of fuel cells and a potential hydrogen economy. However, because the manufacture of nanomaterials can be energy-intensive, it is important to consider the entire product lifecycle in developing and analyzing these technologies.

Environmental protection will incentivize developing countries to develop nanotech.
CRN 4 writes
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. “Nanotechnology Incentives.” September 29th, 2004. http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2004/09/developing_with.html
Those of us who read (and write) this blog know, of course, that there is an answer to these problems: a clean, cheap, environmentally friendly form of light manufacturing that will provide high quality goods to all without raping the land, and that could turn China into the envy of the Earth. It may be just a matter of time until nanotechnology can deliver on these promises and more, but will it be soon enough? A few days ago, we mentioned here that molecular manufacturing might, in fact, be invented somewhere in the developing world sooner than in the United States, Europe or Japan. Considering the enormous incentives — economic, environmental, and, yes, military — that less developed nations might see in nanotechnology, this scenario does not seem at all implausible. You also could make a strong argument that such a beneficial technology should be developed as rapidly as possible. You could argue that the humanitarian and ecological benefits alone should be enough to motivate all leading nations to band together and bring this to pass. You could say this, and CRN does say this! 

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Nanotech leads to grey goo which causes extinction and turns case. Prado 12 writes
Mark Prado (Mark Prado, a space systems physicist, is the President and CEO of Permanent Space Resources, Inc.) “Nanotechnology.” GAIN (Genetics, Artificial Intelligence, and Nanotechnology). 2012.
http://www.gainextinction.com/nanotechnology.html
Some nanotechnology researchers are looking into ways to manufacture nano products by, for example, a fluid of raw materials whereby a manmade microscopic agent can reproduce in this fluid and in the process create large quantities of nano scale products relatively autonomously. These are manufacturing applications of nanotechnology, and this is an area where some grave threats exist to Earth's biosphere. The best known human extinction threat of nanotechnology is the creation of a selfreplicating "nanite". It could derive its energy by consuming plant and/or animal matter (eating us like flesh eating bacteria, except potentially far worse), or it could use sunlight and its own method of photosynthesis using elements in the air, water and/or surface material. It could turn the Earth's biosphere into dust or so-called "grey goo" very quickly, rendering Earth practically lifeless. This capability may be decades away, but it might come sooner. It is clearly a possibility. Before then, it's possible that a nanotechnology laboratory could manufacture a microscopic catalyst or other substance in great quantity which is absorbed by plants or animals and interferes with cellular functions in some way, thereby degrading us to the point of inability to reproduce or function for survival. It may possibly even reproducing itself like a virus, and unlike anything ever seen before, so that it spreads to potentially wipe out a lot of life. Keep in mind that 100 nm particles are so small and lightweight that they easily blow around in the air, and can spread worldwide very quickly. There are tremendous amounts of money being poured into nanotechnology biomedical research and development in attempts to treat diseases and aging, as well as human biological enhancement. The desires for the potential human benefits and potential profits from nanotechnology are sure to make many people ignore many risks such as human extinction or sudden ecosystem destruction. We see that rampantly already.

Nanotech is the most likely scenario for extinction. The author accounts for environmental harms and conflict.
Coughlan 13 writes
Sean Coughlan (BBC News education correspondent). “How are humans going to become extinct?” April 24th, 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22002530
The Swedish-born director of the institute, Nick Bostrom, says the stakes couldn't be higher. If we get it wrong, this could be humanity's final century. Been there, survived it So what are the greatest dangers? First the good news. Pandemics and natural disasters might cause colossal and catastrophic loss of life, but Dr Bostrom believes humanity would be likely to survive. This is because as a species we've already outlasted many thousands of years of disease, famine, flood, predators, persecution, earthquakes and environmental change. So the odds remain in our favour. And in the time frame of a century, he says the risk of extinction from asteroid impacts and super-volcanic eruptions remains "extremely small". Even the unprecedented self-inflicted losses in the 20th Century in two world wars, and the Spanish flu epidemic, failed to halt the upward rise in the global human population. Nuclear war might cause appalling destruction, but enough individuals could survive to allow the species to continue. If that's the feelgood reassurance out of the way, what should we really be worrying about? Dr Bostrom believes we've entered a new kind of technological era with the capacity to threaten our future as never before. These are "threats we have no track record of surviving". Lack of control Likening it to a dangerous weapon in the hands of a child, he says the advance of technology has overtaken our capacity to control the possible consequences. Nick Experiments in areas such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and machine intelligence are hurtling forward into the territory of the unintended and unpredictable. Synthetic biology, where biology meets engineering, promises great medical benefits. But Dr Bostrom is concerned about unforeseen consequences in manipulating the boundaries of human biology. Nanotechnology, working at a molecular or atomic level, could also become highly destructive if used for warfare, he argues. He has written that future governments will have a major challenge to control and restrict misuses. 

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Nanotech manufacturing risks arms races that cause extinction, outweighs nuclear war.
Vassar and Frietas 6 writes
Michael Vassar (Head of the Long-Term Strategy Division) and Robert A. Freitas Jr. (Head of the Nanomedicine Division), with participation by Amara D. Angelica, Philippe Van Nedervelde, Mike Treder, and other Scientific Advisory Board members, “Lifeboat Foundation NanoShield Version 0.90.2.13.” 2006. http://lifeboat.com/ex/nano.shield
Molecular manufacturing also raises the possibility of horrifically effective nonreplicating nanoweapons. The difference in purpose between a nanotech weapon and an ecophage is that an ecophage seeks primarily to replicate by consuming biological matter, thus becoming a direct resource competitor to biology, while nanotech weapons can have a far greater diversity of purposes, including killing only specific parties. Ecophages must devote significant resources to replication, whereas nanoweapons can focus solely on destruction. This means that active nanoweapons can be far more dangerous per gram than ecophages, and can act much more rapidly because they need not waste time replicating. As an example, the smallest insect is about 200 microns. This creates a plausible size estimate for a nanotech-built antipersonnel weapon capable of seeking and injecting toxin into unprotected humans. The human lethal dose of botulism toxin is about 100 nanograms, or about 1/100 the volume of the weapon. As many as 50 billion toxin-carrying devices — theoretically enough to kill every human on earth — could be packed into a single suitcase. Guns of all sizes would be far more powerful, and their bullets could be self-guided. Aerospace hardware would be far lighter and higher performance. Built with minimal or no metal, it would be much harder to spot on radar. Embedded computers would allow remote activation of any weapon, and more compact power handling would allow greatly improved robotics. Other possible nanoweapons (most of which have known defenses that could be incorporated into NanoShield) include: Arbitrarily large numbers of any robot. Deuterium filters for separating deuterium from seawater. Microscale isotopic separation of uranium. Massive utility fog banks that simply contain all movement in a large region. Computer viruses that make other people’s nanofactories build bombs. Inhalable or skin-penetrating machines that travel to the nervous system, allowing outside sources to take over inputs or outputs. Massive nanofactories could consume a substantial fraction of earth’s CO2. An important question is whether nanotech weapons — both replicating and nonreplicating — would be stabilizing or destabilizing. Nuclear weapons, for example, could perhaps be credited with preventing major wars since their invention. However, nanotech weapons differ from nuclear weapons. Nuclear stability stems from at least three factors. The most obvious is the massive destructiveness of all-out nuclear war. All-out nanotech war is probably equivalent in the short term, but nuclear weapons also have a high long-term cost of use (fallout, contamination) that would be much lower with nanotech weapons. Nuclear weapons cause indiscriminate destruction; nanotech weapons could be targeted. And nuclear weapons require massive research effort and industrial development, which can be tracked far more easily than nanotech weapons development. Finally, nanotech weapons can be developed much more rapidly due to faster, cheaper prototyping. Greater uncertainty of the capabilities of the adversary, less response time to an attack, and better targeted destruction of an enemy’s visible resources during an attack all make nanotech arms races less stable. Also, unless nanotech is tightly controlled, the number of nanotech nations in the world could be much higher than the number of nuclear nations, increasing the chance of a regional conflict blowing up.

Nanotech turns the environment. It kills river bacteria which are key to much of the food chain.
SFC 5 writes
San Francisco Chronicle. “Nanotechnology may hold risks, scientists warn.” 2005. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/20/MNGREFB1S71.DTL
The U.S. government should spend more money investigating potential health and environmental hazards of nanotechnology, a leading environmental group says. New types of materials and chemicals that are invisibly small -- i.e., with diameters measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter -- have many possible valuable uses in medicine, environmental cleanups, water treatment, energy production, technology and other areas, representatives of the Washington-based group Environmental Defense acknowledged at a news conference Wednesday. However, uncertainties linger over the possible harm of nanomaterials and nanoparticles on human health and the environment, they cautioned. For example, nanoparticles used as anti-tumor agents are so small that they might slip inside the human brain and perhaps damage it. Likewise, if leaked from a factory, the particles might destroy river bacteria, which lie at the base of much of the food chain. Because the toxic aspects of nanotechnology remain a frontier subject of research, "our traditional ways of thinking about hazardous materials are going to have to broaden a bit," said Dr. John Balbus, the organization's health program director. He and three colleagues wrote an article about the potential downsides of nanotechnology for a recent issue of the journal Issues in Science and Technology, a joint publication of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the University of Texas.

Tournament: Sunvite RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Sam Azbel | Judge: Emily Massey and Matt Kawahara
All “ought” I corrected this as "should" in CX statements must be deducible from “is” statements about the natural world. Morality cannot be based on a priori reasoning because only physical facts exist. Papineau 07 writes
David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007
In the middle of the nineteenth century the conservation of kinetic plus potential energy came to be accepted as a basic principle of physics (Elkana 1974). In itself this does not rule out distinct mental or vital forces, for there is no reason why such forces should not be ‘conservative’, operating in such a way as to compensate losses of kinetic energy by gains in potential energy and vice versa. (The term ‘nervous energy’ is a relic of the widespread late nineteenth-century assumption that mental processes store up a species of potential energy that is then released in action.) However, the conservation of energy does implies that any such special forces must be governed by strict deterministic laws: if mental or vital forces arose spontaneously, then there would be nothing to ensure that they never led to energy increases. During the course of the twentieth century received scientific opinion became even more restrictive about possible causes of physical effects, and came to reject sui generis mental or vital causes, even of a law-governed and predictable kind. Detailed physiological research, especially into nerve cells, gave no indication of any physical effects that cannot be explained in terms of basic physical forces that also occur outside living bodies.   Thus, for example, consider J.J.C. Smart's (1958) thought that we should identify mental states with brain states, for otherwise those mental states would be “nomological danglers” which play no role in the explanation of behaviour. Or take David Lewis's (1966) and David Armstrong's (1968) argument that, since mental states are picked out by their causal roles, and since we know that physical states play these roles, mental states must be identical with those physical states. Again, consider Donald Davidson's (1970) argument that, since the only laws governing behaviour are those connecting behaviour with physical antecedents, mental events can only be causes of behaviour if they are identical with those physical antecedents. 

The Naturalistic Fallacy is actually a reason to prefer. Critics misunderstand normativity, and evolutionary studies are normative.
Teehan and diCarlo 4 writes
John Teehan (Hofstra University) and Christopher diCarlo (University of Ontario Institute of Technology). “On the Naturalistic Fallacy: A Conceptual Basis for Evolutionary Ethics.” Evolutionary Psychology. 2004. http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep023246.pdf
The problem with this objection is that it misconstrues the purpose of the historical/ evolutionary approach to ethics, and the nature of ethical deliberation. Dewey’s imaginary critics, and Gould, are correct that this process will not reveal the “Good”, or the “Right” (as those terms are understood in traditional philosophical jargon.) But this is not the purpose of such an approach. For Dewey, we engage in moral inquiry because there is no clear, objective moral truth at hand. We investigate in order to better understand the conditions of human valuations and so be better equipped to understand and resolve those dilemmas which we must face. He writes, ‘It might be true that objective history does not create moral values as such, and yet be true that there is no way of settling questions of valid ethical significance in detail apart from historical consideration.’ (23) Dewey believes moral dilemmas are problematic situations in which there is a question about what to do. They arise when there is a disjunct between the desires/ interests of an agent and the environing conditions in which one finds oneself. Such situations call for deliberation in order to reach a judgment that “x” is the right/good thing to do. For Dewey, to claim “x” is “good” is not to commit the naturalistic fallacy of identifying a natural property with a moral evaluation. It is to judge that “x” will resolve the problematic situation. (1925a, 1925b,1929, 1939b) From Dewey’s perspective the entire situation is composed of natural elements, and so the moral conclusion must follow from naturalistic premises. But, as should be clear at this point, such conclusions are not violations of Moore’s injunction; nor is Dewey’s approach subject to the Open Question criticism. To say “x resolves the dilemma, but is x good?” is confused. Once we have established that “x” resolves the dilemma to then ask if it is good is either redundant, or it is to ask for further evaluation of the proposed resolution—i.e. it is to ask “does x truly resolve the dilemma?” “does it resolve the dilemma in the short run but create greater long term problems?” “does it resolve the problem by frustrating other significant interests?” etc. These are all fair questions, indeed important questions. They do not imply, however, that there is some fallacy lurking beneath the moral judgment, they merely seek to continue the process of moral inquiry in a meta-ethically and epistemically responsible way. In order to resolve a problematic situation, to make a moral judgment, we need to have a clear grasp of the situation at hand and the possible consequences of various options. Whatever contributes to our understanding of the situation, contributes to our judgment of what we may construe as the good in that situation. As Dewey says, ‘Whatever modifies the judgment…modifies conduct. To control our judgments of conduct…is in so far forth to direct conduct itself.’ (38) In other words, whatever contributes to that moral judgment has normative and not merely descriptive significance. Evolutionary studies clearly can make such a contribution. This is not to imply that evolution will have something to offer each dilemma; our moral experience is too complicated to make any such generalized claim. The point is that evolutionary studies, by helping to uncover the workings of human emotions and cognition provide a wealth of resources that can inform, in a practical way, our moral deliberations. Philosophers/ethicists can no longer turn a blind eye to the evolutionary sciences and related disciplines uncovering relevant information regarding human nature. We believe that the attribution of such information to the field of ethics is a clearly defined epistemically responsible method for framing ethical concepts. So, in conclusion, rather than excluding evolutionary considerations from ethics the Naturalistic Fallacy actually opens up space for evolution to contribute to moral philosophy. The deeper lesson of the Naturalistic Fallacy is that ethics is not about identifying pre-existing moral definitions. It is, instead, an ongoing process of deliberation concerning what is right/good to do. Given this, any discipline which contributes to an understanding of the human condition, contributes to this process. Evolutionary studies aspire to offer insights into the physical, psychological and social aspects of human existence and, to the degree that these insights are valid, may prove invaluable to our moral thinking. 7 

Human beings are biologically oriented to prioritize resource extraction.
Lazarus 10 writes
Richard J. Lazarus (prof of law at Georgetown University Law Center). “Human Nature, the Laws of Nature, and the Nature of Environmental Law” 24 VA. ENVTL. L.J. 231-261, January 2010
Some environmental pollution is, of course, unavoidable. Basic human life requires the consumption of the surrounding natural environment. While the First Law of Thermodynamics provides for the conservation of energy (and classical physics for the conservation Of mass),16 the Second Law provides for the inevitable increases in entropy that result from human activity. The term "entropy" refers to the degree of disorder in a system. For instance, as energy is transformed from one form to another, some energy is lost as heat; as the energy decreases, the disorder in the system, and hence the entropy, increases. Natural resource destruction and environmental contamination is a form of entropy. Disorder in the ecosystem is increased when common resources such as air and water are polluted. Disorder is likewise increased whenever complex natural resources are broken down into smaller parts. In consuming natural resources to provide the basic necessities of energy, food, shelter, and clothing, humankind necessarily increases entropy in parts of the ecosystem in the form of polluted global resources and destroyed natural resources. Fundamental human biological processes compel it. Human life depends, as life does in many animals, on a series of chemical reactions within the cells of the human body capable of breaking down complex chemical compounds such as glucose into its component parts of carbon dioxide and water.19 The technical name of the necessary biochemical process for the breakdown of glucose is carbohydrate catabolism, which itself consists of three major stages: glycosis, citric acid cycle (known as the "Krebs cycle") and phosphorylation.20 For the purposes of this essay, however, what is important for the nonscientific reader to understand is how these many biochemical processes ultimately depend on the breaking down of more complex and ordered chemical compounds into less complex and more disordered chemical elements. Some natural resource destruction and environmental pollution are necessarily implicated by such processes. As energy is transformed from one form to another, natural resources are consumed and contamination of existing natural resources results. To the extent, moreover, that it is human nature to seek to survive, it is human nature to undertake activities that cause such natural resource destruction and environmental pollution. That central threshold proposition should be noncontroversial. 

Resource extraction is key to natural reproductive processes. Gorelik et al 12 writes
Gregory Gorelik (Florida Atlantic University), Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford (Oakland University). “Human Violence and Evolutionary Consciousness.” Review of General Psychology. March 2012. http://www.toddkshackelford.com/downloads/Gorelik-Shackelford-Weekes-Shackelford-RGP.pdf
Not so obvious (except to students of evolutionary biology) is the second goal that the acquisition of resources fostered: the chance to acquire a mate—a resource in itself. Resources needed to fulfill this goal are numerous and vary across time and place. Examples of such resources are territory, allies, social dominance, status, weaponry, precious natural or human-made objects such as diamonds, body decorations and accessories, and currency. The reason that organisms compete for resources that are seemingly inessential for survival is attributable to sexual selection, a concept from evolutionary biology which posits that survival is not the only hurdle that organisms must surmount to reproduce; they must also defeat their reproductive rivals and attract members of the other sex. Defeating rivals often entails the evolution of traits supporting physical strength and social dominance (which may explain why men are, on average, larger and more violent than women; (Buss and Shackelford, 1997; Kolbert and Crothers, 2003). Such traits may also be considered attractive by members of the other sex. Thus, although human violence is mostly perpetrated by young men against other young men, the fact that many women find dominant and aggressive men attractive suggests that no one sex is to blame for the evolution of violent behavior in our species.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate AO Andrew ODonahue | Judge: Jonathan Alston and Shadman Zaman
Mexico’s model has failed to ensure sustainability – the author assumes aff studies.
RA 11
Rainforest Alliance (works to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices and consumer behavior). “Community Forestry in Mexico.” June 2011. http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/work/community-forestry/regions/mexico
The vast majority of Mexico's forests -- upwards of 80 percent -- are under the legal jurisdiction of communities. Through government-recognized tenure and an extraordinary degree of local decision-making authority, the last twenty five years have seen significant strides in the development of community forest enterprises (CFEs). Presently, more than 3,000 communities throughout Mexico have forest management plans and, as of June 2011, 23 CFEs held Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certificates verifying their sustainable forest management practices. Successful CFEs have contributed greatly to local development by generating employment and building community assets. Moreover, recent studies have shown that sustainably managed community forests can be even more effective than protected areas at conserving forestland and safeguarding associated environmental services. Tree Despite these gains, the bulk of Mexico's forest communities are not currently practicing sustainable management to maximize the potential benefits of their natural resources. Only about five percent have achieved a level of business development and profitability that would discourage forest conversion. More often than not, forest communities obtain only a small percentage of the market value of the wood and other forest products harvested on their lands, and forest extraction fails to create sustained employment for local residents. Lack of community involvement in forestry planning, operations and monitoring typically results in unsustainable management practices, which undermine forest resources, biodiversity and environmental services and forgo the substantial potential for social and economic improvements possible through well-run community forestry operations.
?
The plan excludes the poor.
Mahanty et al 6
Edited by Sango Mahanty (Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific), Jefferson Fox (East-West Center, Hawaii), Michael Nurse (Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific), Peter Stephen (Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific), and Leslie McLees (University of Hawaii at Manoa). “Hanging in the Balance: Equity in Community Based Natural Resource Management in Asia.” Introduction. 2006.
Jacobs (1989) defines two dimensions of equity relating to the substance or outcome of a policy or resource management system, and the process by which actions are formulated and implemented. The outcome refers to the allocation of costs and benefits amongst stakeholders as a result of policy or resource management decisions. This has been called economic equity (Poteete 2004), and also allocative or distributional equity (Jacobs 1989, Anand and Sen 2000). The distribution of benefits from community-based NRM amongst stakeholders is the most common measure of equity in the CBNRM literature. For example, Kellert and his colleagues assess the equity of CBNRM programs in terms of the distribution and allocation of socioeconomic benefits and resources. Researchers have paid less attention to equity in cost-sharing, though this is also emerging as an important area for attention. For example, the opportunity costs of attending a forest user group meeting or the labor costs of managing a community forest may be unacceptably high for the poorest in a community, which diminishes their capacity to engage in and benefit from community-based management (Nurse et al 2004). The processes by which various stakeholders make their voices heard by decision makers have equity implications in terms of access to decision-making and the ability of stakeholders to have their ideas and concerns expressed and heard. This has been referred to as procedural equity (Jacobs 1989) or political equity (Poteete 2004), a dimension which has also received significant attention in the CBNRM literature. For instance, the representation of marginal groups in resource management bodies, as well as opportunities for these groups to actually influence decision making, are the fundamental concern of authors such as Agarwal (2001) and Sarin (1998). Agarwal and Gupta (2005) found in their study of resource user groups and their functioning in Nepal that there is often a connection between economic and political equity. They suggest that those with economic and social advantage tended to be more likely to participate in forest user groups. In our task of facilitating analysis of equity in CBNRM, we found it important to be clear and explicit about which dimensions of equity were being considered and assessed, the economic and/or political, and where appropriate to consider relationships between the two.

Tournament: Harvard RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Palo Alto TC | Judge: JScog, Tom Evnen
Text: The Federal Republic of Nigeria, the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, and the Republic of Mozambique should establish protected areas for their mangroves.

Payment for ecosystem services renders people subservient to global capital.
Conniff 12
Richard Conniff (“2012 Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellow, is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications. He has been a frequent commentator on NPR’s Marketplace and a guest columnist for the New York Times. He is the author of several books, including The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he has written about the decline of wildlife in Africa and about Namibia’s community-based wildlife management system”). “What’s Wrong With Putting a Price on Nature?” Environment 360. October 18th, 2012.
Monbiot adds that making nature fungible, so one asset can be substituted for another, guarantees that they will be: “If a quarry company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by paying someone to create another somewhere else.” When governments and PES proponents talk about employing marketplace solutions instead of traditional regulatory approaches, he says, “what they are really talking about is shrinking democracy, shrinking public involvement in decision making, shrinking transparency and accountability. By handing it over to the market you are in effect handing it over to corporations and the very rich,” and to “a very plutocratic” decision-making process. Pavan Sukhdev, a former international banker who has pioneered efforts to highlight the economic importance of biodiversity, says none of these criticisms is especially new. He has raised many of them himself and says the marketplace is working to address them. “It’s useful to hear criticisms, but the critics must remember one basic fact. It wasn’t Christopher Columbus who discovered America, it was the Native Indians who lived there. So critics should not think that they have invented knowledge. They should be a little more humble in their attitude. And understand that the people on the ground are professionals who have been working on this and thinking about this for quite some time.” But no amount of financial tweaking or social engineering is likely to allay the deeper discomfort voiced by many PES critics with the whole idea of nature, in the words of one recent paper, “as a service provider fit to be incorporated into the global capital markets.” Or the notion, expressed by Jean-Christophe Vié, of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, that nature is “the largest company on Earth.” When you view nature in economic terms, as a provider in a sort of “master-servant” relationship, they suggest, you make a fundamental change not just in the world around us, but in ourselves. Indian banker Pavan Sukhdev has been grappling with the question of how to place a monetary value on nature. In an e360 interview, he discusses the ways natural ecosystems benefit people and why policymakers and businesses must rethink how they assess environmental costs and benefits. READ MORE Sian Sullivan, a University of London anthropologist, warns that past revolutions in capital investment, like the enclosure of common lands in eighteenth-century Britain, and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, resulted in “the shattering of peoples’ relationships with landscapes” and the conversion of rural folk into factory workers and service-providers for capital. In the ecosystem services movement, Sullivan warns, we are seeing “a major new wave of capture and enclosure of Nature by capital.” And it will come, she says, at the cost of profound cultural and psychological upheaval. 

Sustainable development that doesn’t question capitalist relations furthers environmental harm, turns case.
McGregor 13
Warren McGregor (member of the ZACF). “Linking Environment Activism and Other Struggles: An Anarchist Analysis.” Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front. February 11th, 2013. http://zabalaza.net/2013/02/11/linking-environment-activism-and-other-struggles-an-anarchist-analysis/
We argue for a decentralisation and collectivisation of decision-making and production. Why? Because: 1. Capitalism is a wasteful socio-economic system that over-produces niche products for the minority who can afford them. It breeds competition between private owners of productive means whose goods are made by exploited wage-slaves and then exchanged through a market for profit and perpetual growth. Most production techniques today use fossil fuels (as mentioned above). Thus capitalism’s drive is towards profit and expansion and not efficient, sustainable productive practices. Importantly, because of its nature, as to produce things based on exploitation and for sale, it ultimately under-produces for people’s needs 5 and is a system that generates regular crises. 2. States are also responsible for ecological destruction. Competition between states for power and control over people and land leads to the development of huge war industries and war technology adapted for industry. These have obvious serious negative implications for people (injuries, death, refugees, etc.) and the environment (the terrible effects of current nuclear technological failures, etc.). State-owned enterprises contribute massively to ecological destruction 8. In South Africa, the nationalised and capitalist enterprise Eskom uses the energy released from burning coal to generate electricity. Eskom has plans to increase its use of coal for electricity. This puts into serious contradiction the South African government’s role in the Congress of Parties (or COP) -17 which took place in late 2011. Competition between states for resources (such as oil, natural gas, land, etc.) breeds conflict and war not only between countries, but also within countries, e.g. the diamond-funded civil wars of west Africa of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Also, states are not willing to enforce strong ecological protection laws against capitalist bosses and themselves as owners because these would cut into the profits and the states’ own tax revenue. 3. Many solutions to ecological and social degradation don’t question a hierarchical order of social organisation; or if they do they focus on eliminating one form of control while usually ignoring other dimensions of oppression. Under capitalism, solutions to ecological crises are based on consumer choice – a green consumerism – whereby customers choose to buy products and make choices that will supposedly help to sustain the environment, e.g. buying electric cars and energy-saving light bulbs, going vegetarian or vegan, recycling, living in eco-villages or eco-squats, etc. This form of consumerism, however, is based on an inadequate and incorrect analysis as to where the pollution problem actually lies – at the doorsteps of big industry, not individuals, and certainly not the working class and poor. Green consumerism is then, ultimately, a class-based choice and doesn’t question the role of capitalist production in creating and exacerbating ecological destruction. The majority of people, the working class, does not have the financial ability to afford these products and lifestyle choices (due to the very nature of capitalism) and thus does not have the financial power to shift production to more sustainable, “greener” means. There is also no evidence to suggest that a “greener” capitalism will adequately provide for society’s energy needs. For example, it may produce fuel efficient or electric cars, but what production procedures were used to make these cars, and how will electricity be provided for them? Energy will still have to be bought, and the many “service delivery” struggles around South Africa show that most of our people cannot afford energy. Ecological crises DO NOT, however, signal the end of capitalism itself, and we should guard against such thinking. Due to resource pressures, e.g. oil shortages, etc. and people’s struggles, capitalism will be forced to “go green”. However, this transition to different kinds of technology will be, at best, slow and lengthy and will not alter the class relations of who controls what. Also, weapons production, ultimately, cannot by its very nature be green, never mind the devastating impact it has on people the world over. Calling for more state intervention is another solution offered. However, this model of production and distribution is still not outside a capitalist framework as it serves to centralise control of resources (land, factories, water, air and people) in the hands of those lucky few who manage and control the state apparatus. One needs only reflect on the terrible environmental records of the former East-Bloc countries to see that a centrally-planned or state-led development model is not an automatic solution to ecological and social degradation (Steele, 2002).

Corporate control of the environment turns the case. It disrespects nature’s intrinsic worth.
Zizek 99
Zizek, Slavoj. Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, page 350-351
This already brings us to the second aspect of our critical distance towards risk society theory: the way it approaches the reality of capitalism. Is it not that, on closer examination, its notion of 'risk' indicates a narrow and precisely defined domain in which risks are generated: the domain of the uncontrolled use of science and technology in the conditions of capitalism? The paradigmatic case of 'risk', which is not simply one among many out risk 'as such', is that of a new scientific-technological invention put to use by a private corporation without proper public democratic debate and control, then generating the spectre of unforeseen cata¬strophic long-term consequences. However, is not this kind of risk rooted in the fact that the logic of market and profitability is driving privately owned corporations to pursue their course and use scientific and techno¬logical innovations (or simply expand their production) without actually taking account of the long-term effects of such activity on the environ¬ment, as well as the health of humankind itself? Thus - despite all the talk about a 'second modernity' which compels us to leave the old ideological dilemmas of Left and Right, of capitalism versus socialism, and so on, behind - is not the conclusion to be drawn that in the present global situation, in which private corporations outside public political control are making decisions which can affect us all, even up to our chances of survival, the only solution lies in a kind of direct socialization of the productive process - in moving towards a society in which global decisions about the fundamental orientation of how to develop and use productive capacities at the disposal of society would somehow be made by the entire collective of the people affected by such decisions? Theorists of the risk society often evoke the need to counteract reign of the 'depoliticized' global market with a move towards radical repoliticization, which will take crucial decisions away from state planners and experts and put them into the hands of the individuals and groups concerned themselves (through the revitalization of active citizenship, broad public debate, and so on) - however, they stop short of putting in question the very basics of the anonymous logic of market relations and global capitalism, which imposes itself today more and more as the 'neutral' Real accepted by all parties and, as such, more and more depoliticized. 34 

?
You have a moral obligation to reject every instance of capitalist ideology.
Zizek and Daly 04
Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Zizek, 2004 page 14-16
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. … Full text available In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalizes capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation.

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Walt Whitman JL | Judge: Grant Weisberg, Mira Chernick
Presuming neg is key to fairness and real world education. Colling 12 writes
Richard Colling (Colling received a B.A., from the University of Houston . He is currently the Director of Forensics, Stony Point High School, and Partner and Co-Founder of The Forensics Files.) THE TRUTH-TESTING PARADIGM AS A STRAW MAN. The Forensics Files’s National Journal of Speech and Debate Vol. 1:1 (October 2012). http://site.theforensicsfiles.com/NJSD1-1.Final.pdf
A ‘tabula rasa default negative lacking affirmative offense’ paradigm is also real world because it is similar to the way issues are ‘resolved’ in courts. The prosecution has a burden to prove the accused guilty in a criminal trial, or the plaintiff has a burden to prove their case in civil law. The defendant in either case, unless some type of affirmative defense is submitted, does not have this reciprocal burden. Requiring a reciprocal burden would be an unfair imposition upon the defendant because it would presume some level of guilt. The same would apply to the negative in a debate round as it would presume the resolution true on some level (which again also defies the rules of logic.) The legalistic model is as real world as the legislative model, as cases are considered daily by the courts. It could even be considered more ‘real world’ considering the great frequency of court cases resolved compared to legislation passed by Congress, and more debaters end up lawyers than the debaters that end up legislators. The legalistic model seems a better fit for LD as well considering the variety of issues and resolutions debated annually. Courts consider a large variety of issues on a daily basis. Certainly legislative bodies do as well, but while some LD value resolutions are focused on the value of policies, others are more focused on individual, ethical issues. Courts consider policies, at least the Constitutionality of policies, but they also must deal with the individualized concerns of the particular parties in each case. Legislative model paradigms are valuable and beneficial, but there is certainly no logical justification for why the legislative model should apply exclusively to LD, assuming it is applicable at all. So, in LD, negative offense should never be absolutely essential for a negative ballot because, in courts, the defendant, unless opting for an affirmative defense need not prove anything other than that the prosecutor or plaintiff did not prove their case.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 5 | Opponent: Scarsdale MB Michael Bogaty | Judge: Julius Pak
Text: Amazon Countries should recognize a private property right in forest resources.

Private property rights are key to sustainable forest management.
Namaalwa 8
Justine Namaalwa (Faculty of Forestry and Nature Conservation, Makerere University). “When do Property Rights matter for Sustainable Forest Management? A Case of the UFRIC sites in Uganda.” January 2008.
An important reason for the massive degradation of natural resources in developing countries is a lack of well-defined and secure property rights (Ostrom, 1999; Panayotou, 1993; Pearce and Warford, 1993). In a discussion of deforestation, Wardell et al.(2003:10) concluded that property rights should be developed to reduce open access to forest land and to establish competitive markets; “National governments and official development aid institutions should increase efforts to overcome transaction costs and implement closing of open access to forests, particularly through land reform and decentralization projects”. According to the property rights school, privatization of natural resources among potential users will lead to efficient use and allocation through market forces as it provides resource owners with incentives to undertake required investments to improve resource conditions (Demsetz, 1967). Hardin (1968) further argued that privatisation of renewable natural resources is the only feasible way to assure sustainable exploitation rates. This follows from the fact that private property combines both exclusivity and transferability (Randall, 1975). One owner depending on the revenue from such ownership would under most circumstances see to it that the resource is not depleted. For example, private ownership has been a successful forest management regime in many core capitalist countries (Beach et al., 2005; Karppinen, 1998). 

Sweden proves
Pennington 5
Mark Pennington (Department of Politics at Queen Mary College, University of London). “Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free Market Environmentalism.” The Independent Review. Summer 2005. http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_10_1_2_pennington.pdf
In this framework, free-market environmentalism has made a strong case for much greater use of private-property rights and “imperfect” market processes as an alternative to the regulatory state. Authors such as Terry Anderson and Donald Leal (2001) have documented numerous examples of environmental goods that can be and are supplied successfully in private markets, and empirical researchers examining state-centered models of environmental management have highlighted numerous cases of government failure. For land-based environmental assets such as forests and minerals, for example, evidence suggests that private-property solutions are highly successful in generating the necessary incentives that encourage resource conservation and help to overcome the problems of “free riding” associated with open-access conditions (De Alessi 2003). Thus, the record of forest management in Sweden under a predominantly private regime has been noticeably more impressive than the record of forest management under government ownership in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Similarly, the private ownership of wildlife in countries such as Botswana has had markedly more success in protecting stocks than government-sponsored trade bans on ivory products that have been put in place over much of Africa (Sugg and Kreuter 1994). 

Environmental regulation kills growth which turns the environment.
Adler 1
Jonathan Adler (professor of law at Case Western Reserve). “Free and Green: A New Approach to Environmental Protection.” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring 2001. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=26227
Brackets in original. Economic progress is absolutely essential to environmental progress. Environmental protection is a good, and like all goods it must be purchased. A healthy economy is necessary to finance environmental improvements. While many environmental activists perceive a conflict between economic growth and environmental progress, the opposite is true. Sewage treatment facilities and other environmental improvements are not free. Moreover, a significant body of literature has found a correlation between economic improvements and several measures of environmental quality. Not only are wealthy communities healthier than poor communities, but they also tend on average to be more concerned about upholding environmental values as well. Wealthier societies have both the means and the desire to address a wider array of environmental concerns. Economic growth fuels technological advance and generates the resources necessary to deploy new methods of meeting human needs efficiently and effectively. Thus, wealthier societies tend to provide for human needs in a more environmentally sound manner. “Countries undergo an environmental transition as they become wealthier and reach a point at which they start getting cleaner.” This occurs first with particularly acute environmental concerns, such as access to safe drinking water and sanitation services. As affluence increases, so does the attention paid to conventional pollution concerns such as fecal coliform bacteria and urban air quality. In much the same way that wealthier societies become cleaner, “wealthier is healthier.” In other words, as income increases, mortality and morbidity decline. Conversely, “when national income falls, there is often a significant increase in mortality and a decline in health status. Expenditures on regulatory compliance are rarely wealth enhancing, and therefore increasing regulatory costs can reduce gains in public health. As Justice Stephen Breyer observed, “at all times regulation imposes costs that mean less real income available to individuals for alternative expenditure, which itself has adverse health effects. Wealthier societies are not only cleaner and healthier; they are also more willing and able to devote resources to environmental concerns. Public support for environmental measures, both public and private, correlates with changes in personal income. In economic jargon, “willingness to pay for environmental measures…is highly elastic with respect to income.” Thus, it should be no surprise that donors to environmental groups tend to have above average annual incomes. Members of the Sierra Club, for example, have an average household income more than double the US average. In the aggregate, environmental regulation can work against continuing environmental progress by diverting tens of billions of dollars, if not more, away from wealth-creating activity. Insofar as regulation reduces economic growth by diverting investment and human energies away from productivity, it will retard environmental progress. While this is true in the US, it is especially true in the poorest of nations. Therefore, environmental policy makers must always be conscious of the costs of environmental measures, as increased compliance costs can come at the expense of environmental improvement. 

Solving growth is a prereq to aff solvency. EcoVitality 99
EcoVitality (non-profit environmental group). “Causes of Environmental Law Failures.” 1999.  http://ecovitality.org/badlaw.htm
Neither environmental law nor environmental education has been able to counter the overwhelming priority placed on economic development in virtually all poor countries.  Neither environmental law nor environmental education can succeed when people lack viable economic alternatives-~--poor people will not let their families starve to save trees or tigers, no matter how much they appreciate nature--and most people in developing nations want more than minimal subsistence.  Environmental law and education rely mainly on the impact of words, words that are often no more than idealized exhortations, but conservation-oriented words have seldom been compelling enough to produce meaningful conservation actions in the developing countries.

Private property rights are key to democracy which is a prerequisite to solving the aff.
Anderson and Huggins 3
Terry L. Anderson (executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center, a John and Jean de Nault senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and adjunct professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Laura Huggins (research fellow and director of outreach with PERC as well as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University). “The Property Rights Path to Sustainable Development.” Property and Environment Research Center. October 23rd, 2003. http://perc.org/articles/property-rights-path-sustainable-development
Improvement of the environment with income growth is not automatic but depends on policies and institutions. Economic growth creates the conditions for environmental improvement by raising the demand for improved environmental quality and makes the resources available for supplying it. Whether environmental quality improvements materialize or not, when, and how, depend critically on government policies, social institutions, and the completeness and functioning of markets. Institutions that promote democratic governments are a prerequisite for sustainable development and enhanced environmental quality. Where democracy dwells, constituencies for environmental protection can afford to exist-without people fearing arrest or prosecution. The democratization of thirty-plus countries in the last twenty-five years has dramatically improved the prospects for environmental protection (Desta 1999). In the other direction, dictatorships and warlords burden people and environments in many regions of the world such as China and much of Africa. Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, for example, has clearly indicated that he has no intention of respecting property rights or the rule of law. His "terror teens" have brutally killed innocent people, and his "land reform" plan demands that more than 20 million of the 23.5 million acres under private ownership be surrendered without compensation. Mugabe's assault on private property has also taken a toll on wildlife, for without landowners, there is no one to protect them from poachers. Before Mugabe's attack on private property, Zimbabwe had previously shown the world how to balance economic development with conservation through private and communal ownership. The CAMPFIRE program, for example, championed by the World Wide Fund for Nature, allowed local communities to manage wildlife. Hence wildlife became an asset as villagers in communal areas profited from hunting and photo safaris. Elephant populations mushroomed and poaching plummeted. But Mugabe has duped the poor people of Zimbabwe into thinking that land redistribution without compensation or due process is the key to economic prosperity. In fact, sustainable development will come only from stable property rights. Unless the sanctity of private property can be reestablished in Zimbabwe, its people and its wildlife will continue to suffer. Environmental degradation does not stem from the actions of the first world but rather from jumbled bureaucratic systems-often the result of well-meaning but misguided intervention. In particular, lack of well-defined and adequately enforceable property rights restricts economic development and stifles entrepreneurial activity in many countries. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (2000) estimates that people in the third world and in ex-communist countries hold more than $9 trillion in what he calls "dead capital"-property that is owned informally, but not legally, and is thus incapable of forming the basis of robust economic development. He advocates the formal recognition of property rights in these countries as an indispensable prerequisite for liberal democracy.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 5 | Opponent: Scarsdale MB Michael Bogaty | Judge: Julius Pak
REDD Fails; vague guidelines and high costs

The Economist, 2009:
(Seeing REDD IN The Amazon. June 11, 2009. The Economist)

So the second idea for saving forests lies in changing economic incentives by paying people not to chop down trees—an idea known in the ghastly jargon of climate-change diplomacy as “reduction of emissions from deforestation and degradation” (REDD). Since many rich countries felled their forests as they developed it seems fair that they should pay some of the cost of this. There are difficulties, though. One is that “avoided deforestation” is hard to define and quantify. Another, raised by officials in Europe who have chosen not to include REDD in the European carbon-trading scheme, is that the carbon market would be flooded with deforestation credits that will push down the price. Companies would then buy cheap credits and continue doing business as usual rather than cutting their own emissions. Further tricky issues abound: who should have the right to sell credits? How should the money be split between central governments, local governments and indigenous people? And should the money be paid in perpetuity? REDD schemes will require careful monitoring to ensure that forests really are left intact and that carbon credits for an area are not claimed more than once. Murky goings-on in Papua New Guinea, one of the leading advocates of REDD, highlight such worries (see article).

REDD’s Funding Mechanism Kills Solvency And Ensures Corruption And Fraud

Barbler, 2011:
(Spotlight: A REDD And Green Paradox. December 5, 2011. Edward B. Barbler, Professor of Economics At The University Of Wyoming.)

In addition, REDD+ is likely to rely on two sources of funding: through carbon market offsets, where polluters in rich countries purchase carbon credits from local communities and developing nations that maintain their forests, or through bilateral deals, such as the Norwegian government’s International Forests and Climate Initiative. The talks at Durban have not changed this funding dynamic for REDD+, nor will any subsequent climate change negotiations in the near future. However, both approaches have been criticized. First, carbon trading is treated with suspicion, as it seen as a way for rich country polluters to shift the full costs of their carbon emissions to developing countries. Second, bilateral REDD+ deals, such as those instigated by Norway, are criticized for transferring large sums of money to developing countries that simply perpetuate corruption, fraud and poor governance.

REDD Exponentially Increase Deforestation; Leakage

Grainger et al., 2009:
(Biodiversity and REDD AT Copenhagen. Current Biology, Vol. 19, Issue 21. November 17, 2009. Alain Grainger, Senior Lecturer In Global Change and Policy At The University Of Leeds, Et al.)

Another concern is ‘leakage’, whereby deforestation processes are not effectively abated by REDD but simply displaced to other areas. Site-specific conservation projects could save forests locally, but displace deforestation elsewhere. For instance, the establishment of forest reserves in the Peruvian Amazon contributed to forest degradation and clearing increasing in adjacent areas by 300–470 17. REDD policies are intended to minimize leakage by requiring emissions from deforestation to be reduced against national or large regional baselines, but risks remain. Recent modeling suggests that up to 95 of reductions in one country may be leaked as increased degradation in others 18. So implementing REDD might accelerate the conversion and degradation of high-biodiversity areas where REDD or other conservation funding is not available 1.

REDD Forces Countries To Backslide On Environmental Legislation

Grainger et al., 2009:
(Biodiversity and REDD AT Copenhagen. Current Biology, Vol. 19, Issue 21. November 17, 2009. Alain Grainger, Senior Lecturer In Global Change and Policy At The University Of Leeds, Et al.)

Finally, REDD might cause some nations to backslide on their environmental legislation, thinking that they might become eligible for more REDD funds at some point in the future. Central to UNFCCC rules is the concept of ‘additionality’ — credit can only be given for new actions, not ones already taken. Indonesia, for instance, recently removed its legislation prohibiting clearing of peat-swamp forests, and some suspect that the prospect of future REDD funding played a part in this 19.
REDD Allows Massive Deforestation To Continue

F.O.E.I., 2008:
(REDD myths a critical review of proposed mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries december 2008 | issue 114.  Friends Of The Earth International, is the world’s largest grassroots environmental network,
uniting more than 70 diverse national member groups and some 5,000 local activist groups on
every continent.)

First and foremost, REDD is about reducing deforestation, not stopping it. From a climate change point of view, the goal is to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at as low a level as possible. This can partly be achieved by reducing deforestation, which is a significant source of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. However, some countries, such as Brazil, are talking about reducing ‘net’ deforestation rates. This approach would enable countries to allow logging and agricultural expansion into the forest to continue in some areas, whilst conserving forests and/or extending plantations in others. Zero ‘net’ deforestation is not the same as stopping deforestation. It is also argued that the cumulative atmospheric concentration of CO2 can be reduced by deferring deforestation: even if deforestation rates return to their original level after a certain period, cumulative concentrations of greenhouse gaseswill still be less than they would have been (Ebeling, 2007). There now seems to be increasing governmental consensus around what is known as the ‘50-50-50’ option which involves: “reducing deforestation rates 50 by 2050 and then maintaining them at this level until 2100 which would avoid the direct release of up to 50GtC gigatonnes of carbon this century (equivalent to nearly 6 years of recent annual fossil fuel emissions)” (Gullison et al, 2007). This rather undermines another argument used to promote REDD: that it will be good for biodiversity (see below). In current REDD scenarios it is perfectly plausible that deforestation could be allowed to continue at unacceptable rates, with prolonged damage to biodiversity and the risk that forests will be tipped into a process of dieback (FOEI, 2008).

REDD’s Focus On Carbon Credits Proactively Undermines Efforts To Check Fossil Fuel Consumption, Which Is The Root Cause Of Their Impacts 

F.O.E.I., 2008:
(REDD myths a critical review of proposed mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries december 2008 | issue 114.  Friends Of The Earth International, is the world’s largest grassroots environmental network,
uniting more than 70 diverse national member groups and some 5,000 local activist groups on
every continent.)

A further major concern is that REDD could actually negate existing efforts to mitigate climate change if it is funded by the sale of forest carbon credits on the international compliance markets. If REDD is funded through carbon offsetting it will undermine current and future emissions reductions agreed to by industrialized countries. Allowing countries with carbon intensive lifestyles to continue consuming inequitably and unsustainably, by permitting them to fund cheaper forest carbon ‘offsets’ in developing countries, diverts critical resources and attention away from measures to address fossil fuel consumption and the real underlying causes of deforestation.

REDD Programs Result In The Violent Displacement Of Indigenous Peoples While Promoting Gender Discrimination

F.O.E.I., 2008:
(REDD myths a critical review of proposed mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries december 2008 | issue 114.  Friends Of The Earth International, is the world’s largest grassroots environmental network,
uniting more than 70 diverse national member groups and some 5,000 local activist groups on
every continent.)

Whether national or project-based, REDD could trigger a rapid expansion in lands set aside for REDD projects, without regard for the customary and territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples, as governments seek to protect an increasingly valuable resource from ‘outside’ interference, violently or otherwise. Some 1.6 billion people rely on forests, including 60 million Indigenous people, who are entirely dependent upon forests for their livelihoods, food, medicines and/or building materials (FAO, 2008). These people have already been severely impacted both by the loss of forests, cleared largely to grow crops and agrofuels for export, and by CDM reforestation and afforestation projects. Often having no formal land title, many people have already been forcibly and even violently ejected fromtheir ancestral territories. If the financial value of standing forests goes up they are increasingly likely to face governments and companies willing to go to extreme lengths to wrest their forests from them. Commodifying forest carbon is also inherently inequitable, since it discriminates against people, and especially women, who previously had free access to the forest resources they need to raise and care for their families, but cannot afford to buy forest products or alternatives (GFC, 2008).

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 5 | Opponent: Grapevine AY | Judge: Ben Koh
Text: Developing countries should prioritize resource extraction but include comprehensive engagement with local communities at the beginning of resource concessions. I reserve the right to clarify.

The counter-plan solves indigenous sovereignty and is key to alleviating tensions between RE industries and indigenous people.
Caerus no date
Caerus Associates (strategy and design firm, helps clients work in complex and conflict-ridden environments). “Profiting from Engagement: A View From Liberia.” No date. http://caerusassociates.com/ideas/profiting-from-engagement-a-view-from-liberia/
Resource extraction is a central pillar in reducing poverty and spurring economic growth for countries recovering from conflict. In post-conflict Liberia, the extraction of minerals, rubber and timber has led to significant GDP growth and created an increasingly favorable investment environment. However, the resource concessions that underpin extractive activities are often complicated by disagreements over land rights between central governments, companies and local communities. Comprehensive engagement with local stakeholders at the commencement of a concession process can reduce community friction, improve the working environment, insure the legitimacy of contracts and contribute to long-term profitability. Liberia has experienced considerable economic growth since 2003, when a Comprehensive Peace Agreement brought Liberia’s second civil war to a close. Despite the lingering effects of the global economic downturn, Liberia posted a 7 GDP increase in 2011, with higher growth expected for 2012. This growth is largely driven by extraction of natural resources such as minerals, rubber, palm oil and timber. Even though resource extraction is key to economic growth, it often relies on sub-optimal concessionary practices. Concessionary agreements made with the Liberian government in Monrovia are based on formal land ownership models and often conflict with local-level communal land use traditions. Corporations engaging in resource extraction generally comply with societal and environmental regulations and perform significant Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. Some companies even go beyond CSR to provide social services at levels above those available from the central government. However, involving communities in social agreements over land is often addressed too late in the process. Firms secure legal rights to land with the government and only then engage communities to ascertain the terms of local compensation and service provision. Terms of the agreement are crafted through an unwieldy process of negotiation where citizen demands are expressed through ad hoc community consultations, and corporate calculations of community contribution are made separately. This model of post hoc negotiation often leads to conflict and undermines profitability. Communities, suddenly faced with restrictions on mobility or the use of land as a result of agreements they felt rushed to execute, may seek to disrupt extractive operations. These activities may also lead to complete displacement of the population. In some instances these disruptions lead to complete displacement . In 2007, the General Manager of the Liberian Agricultural Corporation (LAC), a rubber plantation holding of the Belgian Societe Financiere Des Caoutchoucs (SocFin) portfolio, was assassinated by a member of the community who was upset by the firm’s plans to expand extraction on lands within its leasehold. Extraction from the firm’s full concession area remains a challenge to date. Global major Sime Darby, which holds one of Liberia’s largest agricultural concessions, has also faced challenges recently. In December, Caerus Principal Matt McNabb travelled to Liberia to explore this trend and examine opportunities for creating more stable growth. While there, he met with corporate and rural community stakeholders in Montserrado, River Cesse and Grand Bassa counties with interests in ongoing agricultural, rubber and timber extraction. Matt’s takeaway was this: when a firm engages with the community as a system it becomes possible to better appreciate land value and the scope and potential for local disruptions. Mapping these communal systems at the point of concession, rather than as part of a post-concession communal contract process, will enable the investor to better identify the volume of extractable resources, reduce risk and improve long-term growth prospects. The challenge of reconciling growth with communal land rights is by no means unique to Liberia. The volume of worldwide resource concessions has exploded in the past decade. According to some estimates, agricultural land concessions alone grew from an estimated 4 million hectares in 2008 to 60 million hectares (approximately the size of France) in 2009. The trend towards growth by concession is on the rise, particularly in post-conflict settings. For places like Liberia, community-level tensions may have effects well beyond the risk profile of any one investment. In a conflict-affected environment, the need for careful attention to communal perceptions and the responsiveness of government to citizens demands is crucial –particularly where land resources themselves have historically been used to fuel conflict. Rule of law and perceived legitimacy of government are critical factors in successfully transitioning from fragility. This transition is critical not only as a matter of policy, but also as a matter of political risk for the investor.

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 1 | Opponent: Cypress Bay DW | Judge: Jason Larey
Text: Developing countries should prioritize resource extraction for the purpose of space colonization.

The counter-plan is key to sustaining a high enough level of tech and resource use to give space colonization momentum.
Engdahl 12 writes
Sylvia Engdahl (teaches an online course on Space Age Mythology). “Space and Human Survival:
My Views on the Importance of Colonizing Space.” June 18th, 2012. http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space/survival.htm
We do not want even the present restriction on resources. Currently, some nations live well while others are deprived, and it’s asserted that even those with the best access to resources should stop using them up—the underdeveloped nations, under this philosophy, are not given the hope of a standard of living commensurate with the level our species has achieved. Will the Third World tolerate such a situation forever? I surely wouldn’t blame them for not wanting to. And neither do I want the rest of the world reduced to a lower level of technology. Even if I had no other objection to such a trend, the plain fact is that a low level of technology cannot support the same size population as a high level; so if you want to cut back on technology, you have to either kill people outright or let them starve. And you certainly can’t do anything toward extending the length of the human lifespan. This is the inevitable result of planning based on a single-planet environment.  If there is pessimism in Earthbound science fiction (which its most outstanding characteristic), these truths are the source of it. I have not seen any that denies any of them; pop-culture SF reveals that what people grasp mythopoeically about such a future involves catastrophic war, cut-throat human relationships in overcrowded cities, and a general trend toward dehumanization. Apart from the major films with which my course dealt (e.g. Bladerunner), Soylent Green postulates cannibalism and Logan’s Run is based on the premise that everybody is required to die at the age of 30. The destruction of the world’s ecology is a basic assumption—which is natural, since in a contest between a stable biosphere and personal survival, humans will either prevail or they will die.  Myths showing these things are indeed part of the response to a new perception of our environment: the perception that as far as Earth is concerned, it is limited. A basic premise of my course was that all myth is a response of a culture to the environment in which it perceives itself to exist. But at the rational level, people do not want to face them. They tell themselves that if we do our best to conserve resources and give up a lot of the modern conveniences that enable us to spend time expanding our minds, we can avoid such a fate—as indeed we can, for a while. But not forever. And most significantly, not for long enough to establish space settlements, if we don’t start soon enough. Space humanization is not something that can be achieved overnight.  I have called this stage in our evolution the “Critical Stage.” Paul Levinson the Director of Connected Education uses different terminology for the same concept. He says that we have only a narrow window to get into space, a relatively short time during which we have the capability, but have not yet run out of the resources to do it. I agree with him completely about this. Expansion into space demands high technology and full utilization of our world’s material resources (although not destructive utilization). It also demands financial resources that we will not have if we deplete the material resources of Earth. And it demands human resources, which we will lose if we are reduced to global war or widespread starvation. Finally, it demands spiritual resources, which we are not likely to retain under the sort of dictatorship that would be necessary to maintain a “sustainable” global civilization. 

Space col solves all aff impacts.
Schulze-Makuch and Davies 10 write
 Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Ph.D., School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Washington State University and Paul Davies, Ph.D., Beyond Center, Arizona State University, “To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars”, 2010 http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html
There are several reasons that motivate the establishment of a permanent Mars colony. We are a vulnerable species living in a part of the galaxy where cosmic events such as major asteroid and comet impacts and supernova explosions pose a significant threat to life on Earth, especially to human life. There are also more immediate threats to our culture, if not our survival as a species. These include global pandemics, nuclear or biological warfare, runaway global warming, sudden ecological collapse and supervolcanoes (Rees 2004). Thus, the colonization of other worlds is a must if the human species is to survive for the long term. The first potential colonization targets would be asteroids, the Moon and Mars. The Moon is the closest object and does provide some shelter (e.g., lava tube caves), but in all other respects falls short compared to the variety of resources available on Mars. The latter is true for asteroids as well. Mars is by far the most promising for sustained colonization and development, because it is similar in many respects to Earth and, crucially, possesses a moderate surface gravity, an atmosphere, abundant water and carbon dioxide, together with a range of essential minerals. Mars is our second closest planetary neighbor (after Venus) and a trip to Mars at the most favorable launch option takes about six months with current chemical rocket technology.

Reducing the probability of existential disaster through space colonization is more valuable than preventing specific impact scenarios.  Overly detailed impact predictions are improbable and create false perceptions of security.
Yudkowsky 6 writes
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Co-founder and Research Fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence—a non–profit research institute dedicated to increasing the likelihood of, and decreasing the time to, a maximally beneficial singularity, one of the world’s foremost experts on Artificial Intelligence and rationality), “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment Of Global Risks,” Draft of a chapter in Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, August 31st, 2006, Available Online at http://singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf, Accessed 11-11-2010
According to probability theory, adding additional detail onto a story must render the story less probable. It is less probable that Linda is a feminist bank teller than that she is a bank teller, since all feminist bank tellers are necessarily bank tellers. Yet human psychology seems to follow the rule that adding an additional detail can make the story more plausible. People might pay more for international diplomacy intended to prevent nanotechnological warfare by China, than for an engineering project to defend against nanotechnological attack from any source. The second threat scenario is less vivid and alarming, but the defense is more useful because it is more vague. More valuable still would be strategies which make humanity harder to extinguish without being specific to nanotechnologic threats - such as colonizing space, or see Yudkowsky (this volume) on AI. Security expert Bruce Schneier observed (both before and after the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans) that the U.S. government was guarding specific domestic targets against "movie-plot scenarios" of terrorism, at the cost of taking away resources from emergency-response capabilities that could respond to any disaster. (Schneier 2005.)  Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: "X is not an existential risk and you don't need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E"; where the failure of any one of propositions A, B, C, D, or E potentially extinguishes the human species. "We don't need to worry about nanotechnologic war, because a UN commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such time as an active shield is developed, capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this condition will persist indefinitely." Vivid, specific scenarios can inflate our probability estimates of security, as well as misdirecting defensive investments into needlessly narrow or implausibly detailed risk scenarios.

Tournament: NFL Quals | Round: 4 | Opponent: Manchester NA Nick Albertazzi | Judge: AJ Harris, Paul Wexler, and idk
Civil society is fundamentally opposed to animals. The human-animal divide is the foundation of modern biopolitics.
Wadiwel 8
Dinesh Wadiwel (Adj researcher at Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies Social Policy Research Group). “Three Fragments from a Biopolitical History of Animals: Questions of Body, Soul, and the Body Politic in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies. 2008.
The civil political sphere – that space where human public politics occurs, where ‘the political is declared,’ often through government, representation, measured participation and the ballot - has inherent limitations that frustrate the project of ending violence towards animals. Animals are “by nature” always, at best, secondary entities, not due the political agency that is naturally bestowed upon humans. In this way a perceived fundamental differentiation undermines any claim for equivalent political agency between human and non human, and assures that animals, even if granted consideration, will always be owed a lesser degree of responsibility.  These limitations very clearly underpin animal welfare approaches, which seek to minimise animal suffering without necessarily changing the frameworks of violence and power that perpetuate this suffering. For example, the notion that slaughter houses are tolerable once perceived pain is eliminated.  Animal rights approaches often fare better in this regard by seeking to demonstrate the existence of unjustifiable speciesism in order to guarantee equal protections. One of their principle arguments is that the life that is held by both non human and human animals alike has an intrinsic value. Yet rights approaches themselves face constraints that reproduce the same fundamental differentiation – the gap – between human and non human. For instance, in the “life boat case,” Tom Reagan stops short of agreeing that the death of an animal would constitute the same harm as the death of a human (2004: 324).  Recent work by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (see 1998, 1999 and 2004) provides an opportunity to consider the place of animals within politics from a different standpoint than other approaches, such as animal rights or animal welfare interventions. Agamben’s focus on the concept of biopolitics, his attention to the relationship of politics to violence and to legitimation and the relation between the human and the non human, make his work worthy of analysis by those interested in the violence perpetrated by humans against non human animal life, even if Agamben’s own conclusions are themselves not aimed at finding solutions to these problems (see Wadiwel, 2003). While this approach differs from animal rights or welfare strategies in that it focuses concern on the nature and meaning of politics itself and its relationship to animality (Agamben understands the political sphere as a space that aims to exclude animal life as its primary activity), this approach does not seek to promote action within the terms of the civil political space. Rather it challenges the very boundaries of this space itself. Thus, although Agamben is no champion of animal rights or welfare, his philosophy offers a different way to conceptualise “the problem of the animal.”  The term “biopolitics” is taken from Michel Foucault’s description of the contemporary focus of power towards biological life, its vicissitudes, its requirements, and its essence. An example of the effect of biopower within contemporary government is the focus upon meeting the broad biological needs of human populations: today government concerns itself with the deployment of resources for education and training, public health, the facilitation of relationships and organisations, fertility and “family” planning, the management of the economy, and the generalised financial well being of populations.  Where Foucault treats biopolitics as a relatively modern form of rationality, tied closely with the emergence of government and the disciplines, Agamben suggests that the connection between biopower and the political space is much more significant and enduring. According to Agamben, biological life is given both place and meaning within the domain of sovereignty through its position of vulnerability in relation to sovereign power. Following Walter Benjamin, Agamben defines the life constituted by exception as “bare life,” which he identifies as the “bearer of the link between life and law” (1998: 65). Bare life represents life contained within the “zone of indistinction” or the sovereign ban, a life which is neither constituted by law, nor by divine justice, where it is licit for sovereign power to “kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice” (83). It is for this reason that Agamben insists in his definition of ‘bare life,’ that sovereignty constitutes life within the context of a power over life and death: in Agamben’s words “human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed” (85). Biopolitical rationales become inseparable from the exceptional character of sovereign power, since the constitution of the political sphere itself necessarily entails the constitution of life (181). Thus, in so far as political sovereignty in the Western tradition defines itself through the capture of biological life, it is biopolitical in origin.  Further, Agamben suggests that this view of political sovereignty assists to resolve the apparent tension between Foucault’s two apparently divergent foci of study: namely, “political techniques” associated with the State and government and “technologies of the self” relating to the disciplines and individuated power (5). In Agamben’s insistence that biopolitics is synonymous with the whole history of politics in the West, he identifies a process that unites the activity of state sovereignty with the evolution of individuated forms of biological control. Agamben remarks: “It can be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (6).  Not only does Agamben identify closely the relation between biology and the political sphere, but he also identifies this process as constitutive of the human / animal divide. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben states: “In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.” (Agamben, 2004: 80). I should be clear here that is not controversial in itself that Agamben should consider animal life within his understanding of biopolitics. After all, Foucault himself was aware of the long philosophical connection between human life and that of animals that gave shape to biopower: thus Foucault states “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault, 1998: 143). But what is interesting in relation to Agamben’s understanding is that the contestation between human and animal should figure as defining of biopolitics itself, rather than a mere feature. Biopower (or politics in the West) is, before any thing else, a question of determining the distinction between human and animal.  What interests me in Agamben’s pronouncements– if we hold them as true - is the possibility not merely of telling a history of biopolitics as the history of politics in the West, but tracing the genealogy of the relationship between the human, the animal and thus the biopolitical. There is an opportunity to revisit the “primal” scenes of Western public politics in order to draw attention to the curious recurrence of the animal within the development of the human political subject, and highlighting the fact that this subject is mapped by threshold points which although operate to formally exclude animal life, also intersect, and are grounded in, the animal. It is after all no coincidence, as I shall discuss, that Aristotle describes “human” as the political animal; that entity that finds its home within the polis; an animal that is at once an animal, yet is also beyond other animals due to its natural residence within political community. This construction of the human political subject illustrates the necessary biopolitical connection of the human to its animal bare existence – its biological soul if you like – that speaks and yet does not speak at the same time as the fully formed human subject. The animal arrives as a necessary burden to the human political subject, the connection to biological life it cannot seem to shake, and in many respects, the destiny that it inescapably returns to.  Below, I provide three fragments on the animal from the classical age. These fragments are not intended to provide definitive statements on the positions of these thinkers on animals. Rather they intend to highlight the curious positioning of the animal with respect to the human, and the implication of this co-deportment for politics in the Western tradition. Thus, the fragments I look at are in many respects taken for what they are; the question I pose throughout is why they are positioned in the way that they are, and in what way do they illustrate something about the intersection of animal and human life, and its relationship to politics. These intertwinings are significant, as they indicate the historical existence of an active process of dividing between the human and the animal, a process that simultaneously defines the frontiers of the civil political space. And the flow on from this intersection, as I shall discuss in the conclusion to this paper, are the inherent limitation of engaging with the civil political space when this same sphere maintains as a principle of its operation a primary exclusion of non human animal life. 

An additional link is cross-ex. He says explicitly that nature only matters because of human gain.

Resource conservation is anthropocentric. Its anthropocentric assumptions risk extinction.
Sivil 1
Richard Sivil (studied at the University of Durban Westville, and at the University of Natal, Durban. He has been lecturing philosophy since 1996). "Why we Need a New Ethic for the Environment.” Cultural Heritage 2(7): 103 – 116. 2001. http://www.crvp.org/book/Series02/II-7/chapter_vii.htm
Three most significant and pressing factors contributing to the environmental crisis are the ever increasing human population, the energy crisis, and the abuse and pollution of the earth’s natural systems. These and other factors contributing to the environmental crisis can be directly linked to anthropocentric views of the world. The perception that value is located in, and emanates from, humanity has resulted in understanding human life as an ultimate value, superior to all other beings. This has driven innovators in medicine and technology to ever improve our medical and material conditions, in an attempt to preserve human life, resulting in more people being born and living longer. In achieving this aim, they have indirectly contributed to increasing the human population. Perceptions of superiority, coupled with developing technologies have resulted in a social outlook that generally does not rest content with the basic necessities of life. Demands for more medical and social aid, more entertainment and more comfort translate into demands for improved standards of living. Increasing population numbers, together with the material demands of modern society, place ever increasing demands on energy supplies. While wanting a better life is not a bad thing, given the population explosion the current energy crisis is inevitable, which brings a whole host of environmental implications in tow. This is not to say that every improvement in the standard of living is necessarily wasteful of energy or polluting to the planet, but rather it is the cumulative effect of these improvements that is damaging to the environment. The abuses facing the natural environment as a result of the energy crisis and the food demand are clearly manifestations of anthropocentric views that treat the environment as a resource and instrument for human ends. The pollution and destruction of the non-human natural world is deemed acceptable, provided that it does not interfere with other human beings. It could be argued that there is nothing essentially wrong with anthropocentric assumptions, since it is natural, even instinctual, to favour one’s self and species over and above all other forms of life. However, it is problematic in that such perceptions influence our actions and dealings with the world to the extent that the well-being of life on this planet is threatened, making the continuance of a huge proportion of existing life forms "tenuous if not improbable" (Elliot 1995: 1). Denying the non-human world ethical consideration, it is evident that anthropocentric assumptions provide a rationale for the exploitation of the natural world and, therefore, have been largely responsible for the present environmental crisis (Des Jardins 1997: 93). Fox identifies three broad approaches to the environment informed by anthropocentric assumptions, which in reality are not distinct and separate, but occur in a variety of combinations. The "expansionist" approach is characterised by the recognition that nature has a purely instrumental value to humans. This value is accessed through the physical transformation of the non-human natural world, by farming, mining, damming etc. Such practices create an economic value, which tends to "equate the physical transformation of ‘resources’ with economic growth" (Fox 1990: 152). Legitimising continuous expansion and exploitation, this approach relies on the idea that there is an unending supply of resources. The "conservationist" approach, like the first, recognises the economic value of natural resources through their physical transformation, while at the same time accepting the fact that there are limits to these resources. It therefore emphasises the importance of conserving natural resources, while prioritising the importance of developing the non-human natural world in the quest for financial gain. The "preservationist" approach differs from the first two in that it recognises the enjoyment and aesthetic enrichment human beings receive from an undisturbed natural world. Focusing on the psychical nourishment value of the non-human natural world for humans, this approach stresses the importance of preserving resources in their natural states. All three approaches are informed by anthropocentric assumptions. This results in a one-sided understanding of the human-nature relationship. Nature is understood to have a singular role of serving humanity, while humanity is understood to have no obligations toward nature. Such a perception represents "not only a deluded but also a very dangerous orientation to the world" (Fox 1990: 13), as only the lives of human beings are recognised to have direct moral worth, while the moral consideration of non-human entities is entirely contingent upon the interests of human beings (Pierce and Van De Veer 1995: 9). Humanity is favoured as inherently valuable, while the non-human natural world counts only in terms of its use value to human beings. The "expansionist" and "conservationist" approaches recognise an economic value, while the "preservationist" approach recognises a hedonistic, aesthetic or spiritual value. They accept, without challenge, the assumption that the value of the non-human natural world is entirely dependent on human needs and interests. None attempt to move beyond the assumption that nature has any worth other than the value humans can derive from it, let alone search for a deeper value in nature. This ensures that human duties retain a purely human focus, thereby avoiding the possibility that humans may have duties that extend to non-humans. This can lead to viewing the non-human world, devoid of direct moral consideration, as a mere resource with a purely instrumental value of servitude. This gives rise to a principle of ‘total use’, whereby every natural area is seen for its potential cultivation value, to be used for human ends (Zimmerman 1998: 19). This provides limited means to criticise the behaviour of those who use nature purely as a warehouse of resources (Pierce and Van De Veer 1995: 184). It is clear that humanity has the capacity to transform and degrade the environment. Given the consequences inherent in having such capacities, "the need for a coherent, comprehensive, rationally persuasive environmental ethic is imperative" (Pierce and Van De Veer 1995: 2). The purpose of an environmental ethic would be to account for the moral relations that exist between humans and the environment, and to provide a rational basis from which to decide how we ought and ought not to treat the environment. The environment was defined as the world in which we are enveloped and immersed, constituted by both animate and inanimate objects. This includes both individual living creatures, such as plants and animals, as well as non-living, non-individual entities, such as rivers and oceans, forests and velds, essentially, the whole planet Earth. This constitutes a vast and all-inclusive sphere, and, for purposes of clarity, shall be referred to as the "greater environment". In order to account for the moral relations that exist between humans and the greater environment, an environmental ethic should have a significantly wide range of focus.

This species-contingent paradigm creates continuous genocidal violence against “dehumanized” forms of life.
Kochi and Ordan 8
tarik and noam, queen’s university and bar llan university, “an argument for the global suicide of humanity”, vol 7. no. 4., bourderlands e-journal
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as an example of ‘evil’, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of ‘evil’ given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity   comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again. However, if we take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was ‘evil’, then one must surely include along side it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human history. Hence, if we are to think of the content of the ‘human heritage’, then this must include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures across the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased from what the people of the ‘West’ generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples’ land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of ‘race war’ that often underlies human social organisation and many of its legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially ‘inferior’ and in some instances that they were closer to ‘apes’ than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view of ‘race’ is in many ways merely an extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing and enslavement of non-human species by humans. Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of differing human ‘races’) and interspecies violence, is well expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s comment that whereas humans consider themselves “the crown of creation”, for animals “all people are Nazis” and animal life is “an eternal Treblinka” (Singer, 1968, p.750).

The alternative is a complete and radical break away from humanism. Only the alt can solve. Nash 89
Roderick Nash, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at UC-SB, 1989 The Rights of Nature p. 164-166
Karl Marx, of course, had studied this last form of hierarchy and proposed a revolutionary remedy. Bookchin began where Marx stopped. He recommended discarding ecological as well as economic class distinctions along with the governments that sanctioned and sustained them. This meant revolution and, here again, Bookchin transcended Marx. The nineteenth-century revolutionary called for a government of and by the working class; Bookchin wanted no gov¬ernment at all. His objective was not to seize power for one group or another but to dissolve  it entirely as an apparatus by which people related to each other and, as a species, to nature. As early as 1965 Bookchin linked anarchism and ecology. Both. perspectives, he be¬lieved, stressed the equal value of every part of the community and the necessity of maximizing individual freedom so that every com¬ponent could fulfill its potential. "I submit," Bookchin wrote in "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (1965), "that an anarchist community would approximate a normal ecosystem; it would be diversified, balanced and harmonious." 6 The means to this end, he explained in his major work, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), was through an "ethics of complementarity" derived from an "ecological vision of nature." Bookchin's utopia was not only based on ecologi¬cal models; it included the ecosystem. He sought a "new and lasting equilibrium with nature" just as he did with other humans. Bookchin was under no illusion about the fact that his ecoanarchism necessitated the wholesale replacement of his civilization's "in¬stitutional and ethical framework.” He also knew that this was another word for revolution. "I would like to ask," he wrote in 1974, "if the environmental crisis does not have its roots in the very constitution of society as we know it today, if the changes that are needed.., do not require a fundamental, indeed revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines?" 9 It was from this per¬spective that Bookchin, like the deep ecologists whom he antici¬pated, criticized most manifestations of American conservation and even large parts of modern environmentalism. As one of the first of the radical environmentalists, and as an avowed revolutionary, Book-chin remained profoundly suspicious of those who would save the world by banning aerosol cans or staging Earth-Day cleanups. He regretted that by 1980 "ecology is now fashionable, indeed faddish--and with this sleazy popularity has emerged a new type of environ¬mentalist hype." 10 It featured anti-pollution campaigns but did not challenge the mental pollution that Bookchin regarded as the root of the problem. Dismissing charges that environmentalist demands were too radical, he argued "they are not radical enough." Speci¬fically, Bookchin continued, "'environmentalism' does not bring into question the underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate nature; it seeks to facilitate domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by domination.” The only meaningful, long-term solution was to replace the modern world's "odious morality" with a holistic, environmental ethic that had as its basis respect for all people and all nature. Armed with new definitions of right and wrong, ecoanarchists could tear down the old order and erect the new. Unless this happened soon, Bookchin warned, a poisoned, lifeless earth would be "a dead witness to the cosmic failure" of its most advanced life-form.” Murray Bookchin disappointed readers seeking practical programs for action, but his bitter indictment of contemporary ethics and his forthright call for revolutionary changes emboldened the liberators of nature. For more than a century after Karl Marx's manifesto of the 1840s, socialist advocates of universal human liberation said little about the oppression of nature. But in the second half of the twentieth century the rising tide of opposition to the exploitation of nature--and the perception, noted by Bookchin, that it was closely linked to human exploitation--opened many eyes to the possibility of a transcendent libertarianism. For instance, after thirty years of protesting the de¬humanizing effects of capitalism, science, and technology, Herbert Marcuse added nature to the category of subjects deserving freedom. Indeed Marcuse was the first well-known American radical to see na¬ture as humanity's slave and to use the phrase "the liberation of na¬ture.''13 Capitalism, Marcuse continued, reduced both nature and people to raw materials with strictly utilitarian value. But capitalism was in its death throes and the "coming revolution" would bring "universal liberation" including "a new relation between man and nature." Its basis, Marcuse thought, was the recognition, later pub¬licized by the deep ecologists, that everything existed first and fore¬most "for its own sake." This led Marcuse to advocate a reduction of human impact on animals and plants, and he concluded his essay with a widely quoted phrase: "nature, too, awaits the revolution!" As it turned out, some American environmental activists were also waiting to be revolutionaries. 

The K comes first.
Ecology is not neutral but framed by cultural biases which motivate actions.
Dodson et al 98
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Questia http://www.questia.com/read/78933932?title=Ecology
As the beaver example illustrates, understanding the current ecological functioning of a system requires first examining the human history of that system. To understand ecology, one also has to understand the history of the science itself. Ecology, is not merely a collection of details gathered by brave scientists who go off to the Arctic and watch wolves, or who live in the Costa Rican rain forest and study bats. Ecology, like all sciences, reflects a set of views about the world, a set of choices about what is worth observing and measuring. Trying to disassociate ecology from the people asking the questions leads to a skewed view of the science. As the historian of science Peter Bowler put it, science is a process that. . . mediates between the scientists' creative thinking -- stimulated by a host of cultural factors -- and their efforts to observe and interpret the external world. To understand this, think of a person looking out at the world through a pair of eyeglasses or contact lenses. Everyone views nature through lenses, whether their vision needs correction or not. These lenses are made not of glass or plastic, but instead of cultural beliefs, perceptions, ideas, desires, dreams, ethics, religious ideals, and scientific paradigms. These cultural lenses profoundly shape the practice of science and the ways science is used to transform the Earth. Figure 2.10 shows a scientist embedded first within a cultural world and then within a larger natural world. Her perceptions of that natural world are refracted through a set of cultural lenses. Saying that "nature is culturally constructed" does not deny the independence and importance of the larger world. But the scientist cannot know that "real" world directly; what she knows is her perception of it.

Tournament: NFL Quals | Round: 4 | Opponent: Manchester NA Nick Albertazzi | Judge: AJ Harris, Paul Wexler, and idk
Civil society is fundamentally opposed to animals. The human-animal divide is the foundation of modern biopolitics.
Wadiwel 8
Dinesh Wadiwel (Adj researcher at Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies Social Policy Research Group). “Three Fragments from a Biopolitical History of Animals: Questions of Body, Soul, and the Body Politic in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies. 2008.
The civil political sphere – that space where human public politics occurs, where ‘the political is declared,’ often through government, representation, measured participation and the ballot - has inherent limitations that frustrate the project of ending violence towards animals. Animals are “by nature” always, at best, secondary entities, not due the political agency that is naturally bestowed upon humans. In this way a perceived fundamental differentiation undermines any claim for equivalent political agency between human and non human, and assures that animals, even if granted consideration, will always be owed a lesser degree of responsibility.  These limitations very clearly underpin animal welfare approaches, which seek to minimise animal suffering without necessarily changing the frameworks of violence and power that perpetuate this suffering. For example, the notion that slaughter houses are tolerable once perceived pain is eliminated.  Animal rights approaches often fare better in this regard by seeking to demonstrate the existence of unjustifiable speciesism in order to guarantee equal protections. One of their principle arguments is that the life that is held by both non human and human animals alike has an intrinsic value. Yet rights approaches themselves face constraints that reproduce the same fundamental differentiation – the gap – between human and non human. For instance, in the “life boat case,” Tom Reagan stops short of agreeing that the death of an animal would constitute the same harm as the death of a human (2004: 324).  Recent work by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (see 1998, 1999 and 2004) provides an opportunity to consider the place of animals within politics from a different standpoint than other approaches, such as animal rights or animal welfare interventions. Agamben’s focus on the concept of biopolitics, his attention to the relationship of politics to violence and to legitimation and the relation between the human and the non human, make his work worthy of analysis by those interested in the violence perpetrated by humans against non human animal life, even if Agamben’s own conclusions are themselves not aimed at finding solutions to these problems (see Wadiwel, 2003). While this approach differs from animal rights or welfare strategies in that it focuses concern on the nature and meaning of politics itself and its relationship to animality (Agamben understands the political sphere as a space that aims to exclude animal life as its primary activity), this approach does not seek to promote action within the terms of the civil political space. Rather it challenges the very boundaries of this space itself. Thus, although Agamben is no champion of animal rights or welfare, his philosophy offers a different way to conceptualise “the problem of the animal.”  The term “biopolitics” is taken from Michel Foucault’s description of the contemporary focus of power towards biological life, its vicissitudes, its requirements, and its essence. An example of the effect of biopower within contemporary government is the focus upon meeting the broad biological needs of human populations: today government concerns itself with the deployment of resources for education and training, public health, the facilitation of relationships and organisations, fertility and “family” planning, the management of the economy, and the generalised financial well being of populations.  Where Foucault treats biopolitics as a relatively modern form of rationality, tied closely with the emergence of government and the disciplines, Agamben suggests that the connection between biopower and the political space is much more significant and enduring. According to Agamben, biological life is given both place and meaning within the domain of sovereignty through its position of vulnerability in relation to sovereign power. Following Walter Benjamin, Agamben defines the life constituted by exception as “bare life,” which he identifies as the “bearer of the link between life and law” (1998: 65). Bare life represents life contained within the “zone of indistinction” or the sovereign ban, a life which is neither constituted by law, nor by divine justice, where it is licit for sovereign power to “kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice” (83). It is for this reason that Agamben insists in his definition of ‘bare life,’ that sovereignty constitutes life within the context of a power over life and death: in Agamben’s words “human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed” (85). Biopolitical rationales become inseparable from the exceptional character of sovereign power, since the constitution of the political sphere itself necessarily entails the constitution of life (181). Thus, in so far as political sovereignty in the Western tradition defines itself through the capture of biological life, it is biopolitical in origin.  Further, Agamben suggests that this view of political sovereignty assists to resolve the apparent tension between Foucault’s two apparently divergent foci of study: namely, “political techniques” associated with the State and government and “technologies of the self” relating to the disciplines and individuated power (5). In Agamben’s insistence that biopolitics is synonymous with the whole history of politics in the West, he identifies a process that unites the activity of state sovereignty with the evolution of individuated forms of biological control. Agamben remarks: “It can be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (6).  Not only does Agamben identify closely the relation between biology and the political sphere, but he also identifies this process as constitutive of the human / animal divide. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben states: “In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.” (Agamben, 2004: 80). I should be clear here that is not controversial in itself that Agamben should consider animal life within his understanding of biopolitics. After all, Foucault himself was aware of the long philosophical connection between human life and that of animals that gave shape to biopower: thus Foucault states “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault, 1998: 143). But what is interesting in relation to Agamben’s understanding is that the contestation between human and animal should figure as defining of biopolitics itself, rather than a mere feature. Biopower (or politics in the West) is, before any thing else, a question of determining the distinction between human and animal.  What interests me in Agamben’s pronouncements– if we hold them as true - is the possibility not merely of telling a history of biopolitics as the history of politics in the West, but tracing the genealogy of the relationship between the human, the animal and thus the biopolitical. There is an opportunity to revisit the “primal” scenes of Western public politics in order to draw attention to the curious recurrence of the animal within the development of the human political subject, and highlighting the fact that this subject is mapped by threshold points which although operate to formally exclude animal life, also intersect, and are grounded in, the animal. It is after all no coincidence, as I shall discuss, that Aristotle describes “human” as the political animal; that entity that finds its home within the polis; an animal that is at once an animal, yet is also beyond other animals due to its natural residence within political community. This construction of the human political subject illustrates the necessary biopolitical connection of the human to its animal bare existence – its biological soul if you like – that speaks and yet does not speak at the same time as the fully formed human subject. The animal arrives as a necessary burden to the human political subject, the connection to biological life it cannot seem to shake, and in many respects, the destiny that it inescapably returns to.  Below, I provide three fragments on the animal from the classical age. These fragments are not intended to provide definitive statements on the positions of these thinkers on animals. Rather they intend to highlight the curious positioning of the animal with respect to the human, and the implication of this co-deportment for politics in the Western tradition. Thus, the fragments I look at are in many respects taken for what they are; the question I pose throughout is why they are positioned in the way that they are, and in what way do they illustrate something about the intersection of animal and human life, and its relationship to politics. These intertwinings are significant, as they indicate the historical existence of an active process of dividing between the human and the animal, a process that simultaneously defines the frontiers of the civil political space. And the flow on from this intersection, as I shall discuss in the conclusion to this paper, are the inherent limitation of engaging with the civil political space when this same sphere maintains as a principle of its operation a primary exclusion of non human animal life. 

An additional link is cross-ex. He says explicitly that nature only matters because of human gain.

Resource conservation is anthropocentric. Its anthropocentric assumptions risk extinction.
Sivil 1
Richard Sivil (studied at the University of Durban Westville, and at the University of Natal, Durban. He has been lecturing philosophy since 1996). "Why we Need a New Ethic for the Environment.” Cultural Heritage 2(7): 103 – 116. 2001. http://www.crvp.org/book/Series02/II-7/chapter_vii.htm
Three most significant and pressing factors contributing to the environmental crisis are the ever increasing human population, the energy crisis, and the abuse and pollution of the earth’s natural systems. These and other factors contributing to the environmental crisis can be directly linked to anthropocentric views of the world. The perception that value is located in, and emanates from, humanity has resulted in understanding human life as an ultimate value, superior to all other beings. This has driven innovators in medicine and technology to ever improve our medical and material conditions, in an attempt to preserve human life, resulting in more people being born and living longer. In achieving this aim, they have indirectly contributed to increasing the human population. Perceptions of superiority, coupled with developing technologies have resulted in a social outlook that generally does not rest content with the basic necessities of life. Demands for more medical and social aid, more entertainment and more comfort translate into demands for improved standards of living. Increasing population numbers, together with the material demands of modern society, place ever increasing demands on energy supplies. While wanting a better life is not a bad thing, given the population explosion the current energy crisis is inevitable, which brings a whole host of environmental implications in tow. This is not to say that every improvement in the standard of living is necessarily wasteful of energy or polluting to the planet, but rather it is the cumulative effect of these improvements that is damaging to the environment. The abuses facing the natural environment as a result of the energy crisis and the food demand are clearly manifestations of anthropocentric views that treat the environment as a resource and instrument for human ends. The pollution and destruction of the non-human natural world is deemed acceptable, provided that it does not interfere with other human beings. It could be argued that there is nothing essentially wrong with anthropocentric assumptions, since it is natural, even instinctual, to favour one’s self and species over and above all other forms of life. However, it is problematic in that such perceptions influence our actions and dealings with the world to the extent that the well-being of life on this planet is threatened, making the continuance of a huge proportion of existing life forms "tenuous if not improbable" (Elliot 1995: 1). Denying the non-human world ethical consideration, it is evident that anthropocentric assumptions provide a rationale for the exploitation of the natural world and, therefore, have been largely responsible for the present environmental crisis (Des Jardins 1997: 93). Fox identifies three broad approaches to the environment informed by anthropocentric assumptions, which in reality are not distinct and separate, but occur in a variety of combinations. The "expansionist" approach is characterised by the recognition that nature has a purely instrumental value to humans. This value is accessed through the physical transformation of the non-human natural world, by farming, mining, damming etc. Such practices create an economic value, which tends to "equate the physical transformation of ‘resources’ with economic growth" (Fox 1990: 152). Legitimising continuous expansion and exploitation, this approach relies on the idea that there is an unending supply of resources. The "conservationist" approach, like the first, recognises the economic value of natural resources through their physical transformation, while at the same time accepting the fact that there are limits to these resources. It therefore emphasises the importance of conserving natural resources, while prioritising the importance of developing the non-human natural world in the quest for financial gain. The "preservationist" approach differs from the first two in that it recognises the enjoyment and aesthetic enrichment human beings receive from an undisturbed natural world. Focusing on the psychical nourishment value of the non-human natural world for humans, this approach stresses the importance of preserving resources in their natural states. All three approaches are informed by anthropocentric assumptions. This results in a one-sided understanding of the human-nature relationship. Nature is understood to have a singular role of serving humanity, while humanity is understood to have no obligations toward nature. Such a perception represents "not only a deluded but also a very dangerous orientation to the world" (Fox 1990: 13), as only the lives of human beings are recognised to have direct moral worth, while the moral consideration of non-human entities is entirely contingent upon the interests of human beings (Pierce and Van De Veer 1995: 9). Humanity is favoured as inherently valuable, while the non-human natural world counts only in terms of its use value to human beings. The "expansionist" and "conservationist" approaches recognise an economic value, while the "preservationist" approach recognises a hedonistic, aesthetic or spiritual value. They accept, without challenge, the assumption that the value of the non-human natural world is entirely dependent on human needs and interests. None attempt to move beyond the assumption that nature has any worth other than the value humans can derive from it, let alone search for a deeper value in nature. This ensures that human duties retain a purely human focus, thereby avoiding the possibility that humans may have duties that extend to non-humans. This can lead to viewing the non-human world, devoid of direct moral consideration, as a mere resource with a purely instrumental value of servitude. This gives rise to a principle of ‘total use’, whereby every natural area is seen for its potential cultivation value, to be used for human ends (Zimmerman 1998: 19). This provides limited means to criticise the behaviour of those who use nature purely as a warehouse of resources (Pierce and Van De Veer 1995: 184). It is clear that humanity has the capacity to transform and degrade the environment. Given the consequences inherent in having such capacities, "the need for a coherent, comprehensive, rationally persuasive environmental ethic is imperative" (Pierce and Van De Veer 1995: 2). The purpose of an environmental ethic would be to account for the moral relations that exist between humans and the environment, and to provide a rational basis from which to decide how we ought and ought not to treat the environment. The environment was defined as the world in which we are enveloped and immersed, constituted by both animate and inanimate objects. This includes both individual living creatures, such as plants and animals, as well as non-living, non-individual entities, such as rivers and oceans, forests and velds, essentially, the whole planet Earth. This constitutes a vast and all-inclusive sphere, and, for purposes of clarity, shall be referred to as the "greater environment". In order to account for the moral relations that exist between humans and the greater environment, an environmental ethic should have a significantly wide range of focus.

This species-contingent paradigm creates continuous genocidal violence against “dehumanized” forms of life.
Kochi and Ordan 8
tarik and noam, queen’s university and bar llan university, “an argument for the global suicide of humanity”, vol 7. no. 4., bourderlands e-journal
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as an example of ‘evil’, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of ‘evil’ given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity   comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again. However, if we take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was ‘evil’, then one must surely include along side it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human history. Hence, if we are to think of the content of the ‘human heritage’, then this must include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures across the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased from what the people of the ‘West’ generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples’ land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of ‘race war’ that often underlies human social organisation and many of its legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially ‘inferior’ and in some instances that they were closer to ‘apes’ than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view of ‘race’ is in many ways merely an extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing and enslavement of non-human species by humans. Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of differing human ‘races’) and interspecies violence, is well expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s comment that whereas humans consider themselves “the crown of creation”, for animals “all people are Nazis” and animal life is “an eternal Treblinka” (Singer, 1968, p.750).

The alternative is a complete and radical break away from humanism. Only the alt can solve. Nash 89
Roderick Nash, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at UC-SB, 1989 The Rights of Nature p. 164-166
Karl Marx, of course, had studied this last form of hierarchy and proposed a revolutionary remedy. Bookchin began where Marx stopped. He recommended discarding ecological as well as economic class distinctions along with the governments that sanctioned and sustained them. This meant revolution and, here again, Bookchin transcended Marx. The nineteenth-century revolutionary called for a government of and by the working class; Bookchin wanted no gov¬ernment at all. His objective was not to seize power for one group or another but to dissolve  it entirely as an apparatus by which people related to each other and, as a species, to nature. As early as 1965 Bookchin linked anarchism and ecology. Both. perspectives, he be¬lieved, stressed the equal value of every part of the community and the necessity of maximizing individual freedom so that every com¬ponent could fulfill its potential. "I submit," Bookchin wrote in "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (1965), "that an anarchist community would approximate a normal ecosystem; it would be diversified, balanced and harmonious." 6 The means to this end, he explained in his major work, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), was through an "ethics of complementarity" derived from an "ecological vision of nature." Bookchin's utopia was not only based on ecologi¬cal models; it included the ecosystem. He sought a "new and lasting equilibrium with nature" just as he did with other humans. Bookchin was under no illusion about the fact that his ecoanarchism necessitated the wholesale replacement of his civilization's "in¬stitutional and ethical framework.” He also knew that this was another word for revolution. "I would like to ask," he wrote in 1974, "if the environmental crisis does not have its roots in the very constitution of society as we know it today, if the changes that are needed.., do not require a fundamental, indeed revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines?" 9 It was from this per¬spective that Bookchin, like the deep ecologists whom he antici¬pated, criticized most manifestations of American conservation and even large parts of modern environmentalism. As one of the first of the radical environmentalists, and as an avowed revolutionary, Book-chin remained profoundly suspicious of those who would save the world by banning aerosol cans or staging Earth-Day cleanups. He regretted that by 1980 "ecology is now fashionable, indeed faddish--and with this sleazy popularity has emerged a new type of environ¬mentalist hype." 10 It featured anti-pollution campaigns but did not challenge the mental pollution that Bookchin regarded as the root of the problem. Dismissing charges that environmentalist demands were too radical, he argued "they are not radical enough." Speci¬fically, Bookchin continued, "'environmentalism' does not bring into question the underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate nature; it seeks to facilitate domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by domination.” The only meaningful, long-term solution was to replace the modern world's "odious morality" with a holistic, environmental ethic that had as its basis respect for all people and all nature. Armed with new definitions of right and wrong, ecoanarchists could tear down the old order and erect the new. Unless this happened soon, Bookchin warned, a poisoned, lifeless earth would be "a dead witness to the cosmic failure" of its most advanced life-form.” Murray Bookchin disappointed readers seeking practical programs for action, but his bitter indictment of contemporary ethics and his forthright call for revolutionary changes emboldened the liberators of nature. For more than a century after Karl Marx's manifesto of the 1840s, socialist advocates of universal human liberation said little about the oppression of nature. But in the second half of the twentieth century the rising tide of opposition to the exploitation of nature--and the perception, noted by Bookchin, that it was closely linked to human exploitation--opened many eyes to the possibility of a transcendent libertarianism. For instance, after thirty years of protesting the de¬humanizing effects of capitalism, science, and technology, Herbert Marcuse added nature to the category of subjects deserving freedom. Indeed Marcuse was the first well-known American radical to see na¬ture as humanity's slave and to use the phrase "the liberation of na¬ture.''13 Capitalism, Marcuse continued, reduced both nature and people to raw materials with strictly utilitarian value. But capitalism was in its death throes and the "coming revolution" would bring "universal liberation" including "a new relation between man and nature." Its basis, Marcuse thought, was the recognition, later pub¬licized by the deep ecologists, that everything existed first and fore¬most "for its own sake." This led Marcuse to advocate a reduction of human impact on animals and plants, and he concluded his essay with a widely quoted phrase: "nature, too, awaits the revolution!" As it turned out, some American environmental activists were also waiting to be revolutionaries. 

The K comes first.
Ecology is not neutral but framed by cultural biases which motivate actions.
Dodson et al 98
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Questia http://www.questia.com/read/78933932?title=Ecology
As the beaver example illustrates, understanding the current ecological functioning of a system requires first examining the human history of that system. To understand ecology, one also has to understand the history of the science itself. Ecology, is not merely a collection of details gathered by brave scientists who go off to the Arctic and watch wolves, or who live in the Costa Rican rain forest and study bats. Ecology, like all sciences, reflects a set of views about the world, a set of choices about what is worth observing and measuring. Trying to disassociate ecology from the people asking the questions leads to a skewed view of the science. As the historian of science Peter Bowler put it, science is a process that. . . mediates between the scientists' creative thinking -- stimulated by a host of cultural factors -- and their efforts to observe and interpret the external world. To understand this, think of a person looking out at the world through a pair of eyeglasses or contact lenses. Everyone views nature through lenses, whether their vision needs correction or not. These lenses are made not of glass or plastic, but instead of cultural beliefs, perceptions, ideas, desires, dreams, ethics, religious ideals, and scientific paradigms. These cultural lenses profoundly shape the practice of science and the ways science is used to transform the Earth. Figure 2.10 shows a scientist embedded first within a cultural world and then within a larger natural world. Her perceptions of that natural world are refracted through a set of cultural lenses. Saying that "nature is culturally constructed" does not deny the independence and importance of the larger world. But the scientist cannot know that "real" world directly; what she knows is her perception of it.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate AO Andrew ODonahue | Judge: Jonathan Alston and Shadman Zaman
Civil society is fundamentally opposed to animals. The human-animal divide is the foundation of modern biopolitics.
Wadiwel 8
Dinesh Wadiwel (Adj researcher at Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies Social Policy Research Group). “Three Fragments from a Biopolitical History of Animals: Questions of Body, Soul, and the Body Politic in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies. 2008.
The civil political sphere – that space where human public politics occurs, where ‘the political is declared,’ often through government, representation, measured participation and the ballot - has inherent limitations that frustrate the project of ending violence towards animals. Animals are “by nature” always, at best, secondary entities, not due the political agency that is naturally bestowed upon humans. In this way a perceived fundamental differentiation undermines any claim for equivalent political agency between human and non human, and assures that animals, even if granted consideration, will always be owed a lesser degree of responsibility.  These limitations very clearly underpin animal welfare approaches, which seek to minimise animal suffering without necessarily changing the frameworks of violence and power that perpetuate this suffering. For example, the notion that slaughter houses are tolerable once perceived pain is eliminated.  Animal rights approaches often fare better in this regard by seeking to demonstrate the existence of unjustifiable speciesism in order to guarantee equal protections. One of their principle arguments is that the life that is held by both non human and human animals alike has an intrinsic value. Yet rights approaches themselves face constraints that reproduce the same fundamental differentiation – the gap – between human and non human. For instance, in the “life boat case,” Tom Reagan stops short of agreeing that the death of an animal would constitute the same harm as the death of a human (2004: 324).  Recent work by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (see 1998, 1999 and 2004) provides an opportunity to consider the place of animals within politics from a different standpoint than other approaches, such as animal rights or animal welfare interventions. Agamben’s focus on the concept of biopolitics, his attention to the relationship of politics to violence and to legitimation and the relation between the human and the non human, make his work worthy of analysis by those interested in the violence perpetrated by humans against non human animal life, even if Agamben’s own conclusions are themselves not aimed at finding solutions to these problems (see Wadiwel, 2003). While this approach differs from animal rights or welfare strategies in that it focuses concern on the nature and meaning of politics itself and its relationship to animality (Agamben understands the political sphere as a space that aims to exclude animal life as its primary activity), this approach does not seek to promote action within the terms of the civil political space. Rather it challenges the very boundaries of this space itself. Thus, although Agamben is no champion of animal rights or welfare, his philosophy offers a different way to conceptualise “the problem of the animal.”  The term “biopolitics” is taken from Michel Foucault’s description of the contemporary focus of power towards biological life, its vicissitudes, its requirements, and its essence. An example of the effect of biopower within contemporary government is the focus upon meeting the broad biological needs of human populations: today government concerns itself with the deployment of resources for education and training, public health, the facilitation of relationships and organisations, fertility and “family” planning, the management of the economy, and the generalised financial well being of populations.  Where Foucault treats biopolitics as a relatively modern form of rationality, tied closely with the emergence of government and the disciplines, Agamben suggests that the connection between biopower and the political space is much more significant and enduring. According to Agamben, biological life is given both place and meaning within the domain of sovereignty through its position of vulnerability in relation to sovereign power. Following Walter Benjamin, Agamben defines the life constituted by exception as “bare life,” which he identifies as the “bearer of the link between life and law” (1998: 65). Bare life represents life contained within the “zone of indistinction” or the sovereign ban, a life which is neither constituted by law, nor by divine justice, where it is licit for sovereign power to “kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice” (83). It is for this reason that Agamben insists in his definition of ‘bare life,’ that sovereignty constitutes life within the context of a power over life and death: in Agamben’s words “human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed” (85). Biopolitical rationales become inseparable from the exceptional character of sovereign power, since the constitution of the political sphere itself necessarily entails the constitution of life (181). Thus, in so far as political sovereignty in the Western tradition defines itself through the capture of biological life, it is biopolitical in origin.  Further, Agamben suggests that this view of political sovereignty assists to resolve the apparent tension between Foucault’s two apparently divergent foci of study: namely, “political techniques” associated with the State and government and “technologies of the self” relating to the disciplines and individuated power (5). In Agamben’s insistence that biopolitics is synonymous with the whole history of politics in the West, he identifies a process that unites the activity of state sovereignty with the evolution of individuated forms of biological control. Agamben remarks: “It can be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (6).  Not only does Agamben identify closely the relation between biology and the political sphere, but he also identifies this process as constitutive of the human / animal divide. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben states: “In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.” (Agamben, 2004: 80). I should be clear here that is not controversial in itself that Agamben should consider animal life within his understanding of biopolitics. After all, Foucault himself was aware of the long philosophical connection between human life and that of animals that gave shape to biopower: thus Foucault states “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault, 1998: 143). But what is interesting in relation to Agamben’s understanding is that the contestation between human and animal should figure as defining of biopolitics itself, rather than a mere feature. Biopower (or politics in the West) is, before any thing else, a question of determining the distinction between human and animal.  What interests me in Agamben’s pronouncements– if we hold them as true - is the possibility not merely of telling a history of biopolitics as the history of politics in the West, but tracing the genealogy of the relationship between the human, the animal and thus the biopolitical. There is an opportunity to revisit the “primal” scenes of Western public politics in order to draw attention to the curious recurrence of the animal within the development of the human political subject, and highlighting the fact that this subject is mapped by threshold points which although operate to formally exclude animal life, also intersect, and are grounded in, the animal. It is after all no coincidence, as I shall discuss, that Aristotle describes “human” as the political animal; that entity that finds its home within the polis; an animal that is at once an animal, yet is also beyond other animals due to its natural residence within political community. This construction of the human political subject illustrates the necessary biopolitical connection of the human to its animal bare existence – its biological soul if you like – that speaks and yet does not speak at the same time as the fully formed human subject. The animal arrives as a necessary burden to the human political subject, the connection to biological life it cannot seem to shake, and in many respects, the destiny that it inescapably returns to.  Below, I provide three fragments on the animal from the classical age. These fragments are not intended to provide definitive statements on the positions of these thinkers on animals. Rather they intend to highlight the curious positioning of the animal with respect to the human, and the implication of this co-deportment for politics in the Western tradition. Thus, the fragments I look at are in many respects taken for what they are; the question I pose throughout is why they are positioned in the way that they are, and in what way do they illustrate something about the intersection of animal and human life, and its relationship to politics. These intertwinings are significant, as they indicate the historical existence of an active process of dividing between the human and the animal, a process that simultaneously defines the frontiers of the civil political space. And the flow on from this intersection, as I shall discuss in the conclusion to this paper, are the inherent limitation of engaging with the civil political space when this same sphere maintains as a principle of its operation a primary exclusion of non human animal life. 

Sustainable development is anthropocentric. Only radical rejection of Western civilization can solve the environment, so perms fail.
Richardson 98
Dick Richardson. “The politics of sustainable development.” Susan Baker et al. (Eds) The Politics of Sustainable Development. Theory, Policy and Practice within the European Union, pp. 43–60 (London: Routledge). 1998. http://www.vedegylet.hu/okopolitika/Richardson20-20The20Politics20of20SusDev.pdf
At local level, the anthropocentric paradigm is best illustrated through the evolution of Local Agenda 21. In the UK this resulted in the framing of a major report by the UK Local Government Management Board in May 1993. This report went some way towards defining the practical implications of accepting that the world has finite limits. For example, it urged that policy decisions be taken on the precautionary principle, by which there is an assumption against actions whose environmental impact is uncertain, and drew up a list of actions and policies that could be undertaken by both local and central government (UKLGMB 1993: 7, 20-31). At the same time, the thrust of the report, like that of Brundtland, was that sustainability and growth are not incompatible and that continuous environmental improvement is possible provided that natural resources are used more efficiently. Moreover, there was an inherent contradiction in the report, in that it envisaged the poor and disadvantaged having greater access to resources – in other words increasing their consumption of resources – which ran counter to the report’s stated principle of reducing overall consumption levels. Unless, that is, the rich are required to reduce their consumption, a question which is politically difficult and which the report deliberately avoided – just as Brundtland did. It is to avoid the question of making difficult political choices that governments at all levels have taken the anthropocentric approach to the environment. If consumerism, the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth levels and the profligate use of natural resources engender ecological damage on a worldwide basis, they also constitute the basis of the quality of life of Western civilization. It is difficult to envisage the metaphorical man and woman in the street voluntarily accepting reduced standards of living; and it is even more difficult to envisage traditional politicians advocating such a course; thus the current preoccupation with assimilating the anthropocentric approach into the ecological imperative by adopting Brundtland rhetoric and incorporating environmental costs into neo-classical economics. For biocentrists, attempts to mitigate the environmental consequences of treadmill production through so-called weak or strong sustainable development are foredoomed to failure, since the anthropocentric approach to the natural world, despite the terminology of sustainability, is still based on the progressive liquidation of the natural capital that we call planet Earth. Ultimately, industrial economics, founded on expanding consumption and the maximization of production, will deplete the very resource base on which industrial society depends. It will be the author of its own destruction. As Bertolt Brecht put it: And they were sawing off the branches on which they were sitting, and eventually they dropped off and those who watched them shook their heads and kept on sawing (Brecht, quoted in Echlin 1993: 4) The problem is that human economic activity is already exhausting non-renewable resources and expending renewable resources far more quickly than the planet can regenerate them, while producing wastes and pollution beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth. With the continuing population explosion, the economic aspirations of LDCs and underdeveloped regions – in particular the People’s Republic of China – and the even greater aspirations of the industrialized world, the situation can only get worse, not better, unless there is a radical redirection of human effort and understanding. 

2 impacts.

a. Anthropocentrism is epistemically suspect. Alternative forms of knowledge production are key.
Das 14
Satyajit Das (expert on financial derivatives and risk). “Anthropocentricity.” 2014: What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?” Edge. 2014. http://edge.org/response-detail/25391
Parallax describes the apparent change in the direction of a moving object caused by alteration in the observer's position. In the graphic work of M.C. Escher, human faculties are similarly deceived and an impossible reality made plausible. While not strictly a scientific theorem, anthropocentrism, the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective, is deeply embedded in science and culture. Improving knowledge requires abandoning anthropocentricity or, at least, acknowledging its existence. Anthropocentrism's limits derive from the physical constraints of human cognition and specific psychological attitudes. Being human entails specific faculties, intrinsic attitudes, values and belief systems that shape enquiry and understanding. The human mind has evolved a specific physical structure and bio-chemistry that shapes thought processes. The human cognitive system determines our reasoning and therefore our knowledge. Language, logic, mathematics, abstract thought, cultural beliefs, history and memories create a specific human frame of reference, which may restrict what we can know or understand. There may be other forms of life and intelligence. The ocean has revealed creatures that live from chemo-synthesis in ecosystems around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, without access to sunlight. Life forms based on materials other than carbon may also be feasible. An entirely radical set of cognitive frameworks and alternative knowledge cannot be discounted. Like a train that can only run on tracks that determine direction and destination, human knowledge may ultimately be constrained by what evolution has made us. Knowledge was originally driven by the need to master the natural environment to meet basic biological needs—survival and genetic propagation. It was also needed to deal with the unknown and forces beyond human control. Superstition, religion, science and other belief systems evolved to meets these human needs. In the eighteenth century, medieval systems of aristocratic and religious authority were supplanted by a new model of scientific method, rational discourse, personal liberty and individual responsibility. But this did not change the basic underlying drivers. Knowledge is also influenced by human factors—fear and greed, ambition, submission and tribal collusion, altruism and jealousy, as well as complex power relationships and inter-personal group dynamics. Behavioural science illustrates the inherent biases in human thought. Announcing a boycott of certain "luxury" scientific journals, 2013 Nobel laureate Dr. Randy Schekman argued that to preserve their pre-eminence they acted like "fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits…knowing scarcity stokes demand". He argued that science is being distorted by perverse incentives whereby scientists who publish in important journals with a high "impact factor" can expect promotion, pay rises and professional accolades. Understanding operates within these biological and attitudinal constraints. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "every philosophy hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is a mask". Understanding of fundamental issues remains limited. The cosmological nature and origins of the universe are contested. The physical source and nature of matter and energy are debated. The origins and evolution of biological life remain unresolved. Resistance to new ideas frequently restricts the development of knowledge. The history of science is a succession of controversies—a non geo-centric universe, continental drift, theory of evolution, quantum mechanics and climate change. Science, paradoxically, seems to also have inbuilt limits. Like an inexhaustible Russian doll, quantum physics is an endless succession of seemingly infinitely divisible particles. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle posits that human knowledge about the world is always incomplete, uncertain and highly contingent. Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of mathematical logic establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems of arithmetic. Experimental methodology and testing is flawed. Model predictions are often unsatisfactory. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed: "You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations … there is no such thing as a controlled experiment." Challenging anthropocentrism does not mean abandoning science or rational thought. It does not mean reversion to primitive religious dogma, messianic phantasms or obscure mysticism. Transcending anthropocentricity may allow new frames of reference expanding the boundary of human knowledge. It may allow human beings to think more clearly, consider different perspectives and encourage possibilities outside the normal range of experience and thought. It may also allow a greater understanding of our existential place within nature and in the order of things. As William Shakespeare's Hamlet cautioned a friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". But fundamental biology may not allow the required change of reference framework. While periodically humbled by the universe, human beings remain enamoured, for the most part, with the proposition that they are the apogee of development. But as Mark Twain observed in Letters from Earth: "He took a pride in man; man was his finest invention; man was his pet, after the housefly." Writing in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, the late English author Douglas Adams speculated that the earth was a powerful computer and human beings were its biological components designed by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to answer the ultimate questions about the universe and life. To date, science has not produced a conclusive refutation of this whimsical proposition. Whether or not we can go beyond anthropocentrism, it is a reminder of our limits. As Martin Rees, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, at Cambridge and Astronomer Royal, noted:  "Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."  

b. This species-contingent paradigm causes genocide, turns indigenous people.
Kochi and Ordan 8
Queen’s University, Borderlands journal, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no3_2008/kochiordan_argument.pdf
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed as an example of ‘evil’, a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of ‘evil’ given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as one through which humanity   comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again. However, if we take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was ‘evil’, then one must surely include along side it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human history. Hence, if we are to think of the content of the ‘human heritage’, then this must include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures across the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been erased from what the people of the ‘West’ generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been throughout human history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of our legal institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have been founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples’ land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986). Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of ‘race war’ that often underlies human social organisation and many of its legal and ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that events such as the Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the heart of any heritage of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially ‘inferior’ and in some instances that they were closer to ‘apes’ than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view of ‘race’ is in many ways merely an extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing and enslavement of non-human species by humans. Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of differing human ‘races’) and interspecies violence, is well expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s comment that whereas humans consider themselves “the crown of creation”, for animals “all people are Nazis” and animal life is “an eternal Treblinka” (Singer, 1968, p.750).

The alternative is a complete and radical break away from humanism by developing countries. Only the alt can solve. Nash 89
Roderick Nash, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at UC-SB, 1989 The Rights of Nature p. 164-166
Karl Marx, of course, had studied this last form of hierarchy and proposed a revolutionary remedy. Bookchin began where Marx stopped. He recommended discarding ecological as well as economic class distinctions along with the governments that sanctioned and sustained them. This meant revolution and, here again, Bookchin transcended Marx. The nineteenth-century revolutionary called for a government of and by the working class; Bookchin wanted no gov¬ernment at all. His objective was not to seize power for one group or another but to dissolve  it entirely as an apparatus by which people related to each other and, as a species, to nature. As early as 1965 Bookchin linked anarchism and ecology. Both. perspectives, he be¬lieved, stressed the equal value of every part of the community and the necessity of maximizing individual freedom so that every com¬ponent could fulfill its potential. "I submit," Bookchin wrote in "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (1965), "that an anarchist community would approximate a normal ecosystem; it would be diversified, balanced and harmonious." 6 The means to this end, he explained in his major work, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), was through an "ethics of complementarity" derived from an "ecological vision of nature." Bookchin's utopia was not only based on ecologi¬cal models; it included the ecosystem. He sought a "new and lasting equilibrium with nature" just as he did with other humans. Bookchin was under no illusion about the fact that his ecoanarchism necessitated the wholesale replacement of his civilization's "in¬stitutional and ethical framework.” He also knew that this was another word for revolution. "I would like to ask," he wrote in 1974, "if the environmental crisis does not have its roots in the very constitution of society as we know it today, if the changes that are needed.., do not require a fundamental, indeed revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines?" 9 It was from this per¬spective that Bookchin, like the deep ecologists whom he antici¬pated, criticized most manifestations of American conservation and even large parts of modern environmentalism. As one of the first of the radical environmentalists, and as an avowed revolutionary, Book-chin remained profoundly suspicious of those who would save the world by banning aerosol cans or staging Earth-Day cleanups. He regretted that by 1980 "ecology is now fashionable, indeed faddish--and with this sleazy popularity has emerged a new type of environ¬mentalist hype." 10 It featured anti-pollution campaigns but did not challenge the mental pollution that Bookchin regarded as the root of the problem. Dismissing charges that environmentalist demands were too radical, he argued "they are not radical enough." Speci¬fically, Bookchin continued, "'environmentalism' does not bring into question the underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate nature; it seeks to facilitate domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by domination.” The only meaningful, long-term solution was to replace the modern world's "odious morality" with a holistic, environmental ethic that had as its basis respect for all people and all nature. Armed with new definitions of right and wrong, ecoanarchists could tear down the old order and erect the new. Unless this happened soon, Bookchin warned, a poisoned, lifeless earth would be "a dead witness to the cosmic failure" of its most advanced life-form.” Murray Bookchin disappointed readers seeking practical programs for action, but his bitter indictment of contemporary ethics and his forthright call for revolutionary changes emboldened the liberators of nature. For more than a century after Karl Marx's manifesto of the 1840s, socialist advocates of universal human liberation said little about the oppression of nature. But in the second half of the twentieth century the rising tide of opposition to the exploitation of nature--and the perception, noted by Bookchin, that it was closely linked to human exploitation--opened many eyes to the possibility of a transcendent libertarianism. For instance, after thirty years of protesting the de¬humanizing effects of capitalism, science, and technology, Herbert Marcuse added nature to the category of subjects deserving freedom. Indeed Marcuse was the first well-known American radical to see na¬ture as humanity's slave and to use the phrase "the liberation of na¬ture.''13 Capitalism, Marcuse continued, reduced both nature and people to raw materials with strictly utilitarian value. But capitalism was in its death throes and the "coming revolution" would bring "universal liberation" including "a new relation between man and nature." Its basis, Marcuse thought, was the recognition, later pub¬licized by the deep ecologists, that everything existed first and fore¬most "for its own sake." This led Marcuse to advocate a reduction of human impact on animals and plants, and he concluded his essay with a widely quoted phrase: "nature, too, awaits the revolution!" As it turned out, some American environmental activists were also waiting to be revolutionaries.

Tournament: Sunvite RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Daisy Massey | Judge: Ernie Rose and Tillman Huett
The aff’s approach to sustainable development strictly focuses on the material dimension of consumption and thus cannot address the question of capitalism’s control of libidinal energy, or natural human desires. The question of libidinal energy is a prerequisite to any idea of environmental protection. Stiegler 12 writes
Bernard Stiegler (French philosopher at the University of London). “Care.” Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume 1, ed. Tom Cohen. 2012.
We all know that in no case will this new global capitalism be able to develop in reproducing the modes of production and consumption that have been characteristic of Western, Japanese, and Korean industrial democracies. For the exportation of this mode of life is also that of the growth in the rate of production of toxins of all sorts toward the greatest part of the planetary population, and which can result in nothing else but the disappearance of the human race—to say nothing of the phenomena of and the destruction of psychic apparatuses that also create their effects as quickly as “growth” spreads over the world, which is indeed, by this very fact, a stunted growth une mécroissance. The new global capitalism will not be able to renew its energies without inventing a new logic and new objects of investment—and here the word investment must be taken literally and in all its senses: both the sense it has in industrial economy and its sense within libidinal economy. At this stage of my exposé, it is interesting to check for heart murmurs in a text by Jeremy Rifkin which is circulating all over France and Europe. Rifkin, setting his discourse under the watchword of “the end of the age of oil,” asks how we are to assure a “sustainable development” but without ever asking the question of the problem of stunted growth, that is, of a “growth” that destroys desire, and that deindividuates producers as well as consumers, stunting the dynamism of what Max Weber called the spirit of capitalism, a spirit that has to be apprehended as libidinal energy and that can be constituted only in processes of sublimation henceforth annihilated by marketing techniques. While never taking up these questions (which were however the horizon of both his European Dream and The Age of Access), Rifkin insists, apropos the age of oil and more generally of fossil fuels, its growing “external costs” (which in economics is called negative externalities): he thus describes the third limit encountered by a capitalism become an actually globalised technological system of production and of consumption. In this context, he writes, there is a residual stock of fossil energy that we will have to learn to exploit to the hilt, that is, the most economically possible, while at the same time putting into place other processes for the production and consumption of energy: So as to prepare the future, each government will have to exploit new energy sources and establish new economic models. I am myself convinced that the stakes are a change in the economic model. But I do not believe that the heart of the question is the energy of subsistence: the real question is that of an energy of existence that is libidinal energy. Now, by only asking the question of a new production of renewable, sustainable energy of subsistence, founded on the intermediary storage by the technology of the production of hydrogen, Rifkin would have us believe that the energy crisis is a passing one and that it will be able to be surmounted, and along with it the third limit of capitalism, without having to ask the question of libidinal energy, without taking into account this second limit which is the truth of the third one: where the libido has been destroyed, and where the drives it contained, as Pandora’s box enclosing every evil, henceforth are at the helm of beings devoid of attention, and incapable of taking care of their world.

2 impacts. 

a. Capitalism has reached three separate limits, being forced to re-invent itself. Its first two limits have compelled it to alienate the human subject from their libido, bringing us to its third limit of unsustainability. The influence of these three limits on each other culminates in global war. Stiegler 12 writes
Bernard Stiegler (French philosopher at the University of London). “Care.” Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume 1, ed. Tom Cohen. 2012.
It was at the end of the 19th century and at the end of the 20th century that capitalism met with its first two limits: The industrial revolution, as the implementation of the capitalist system of production, is the extension of the process of grammatization whereby and wherein tertiary retentions (which include psychotechniques) are formed by apparatuses of the control of gestures which allow, as machine-tools, the liquidation of workers’ know-how, and, on this basis, the realization of immense gains in productivity, and the development of a new prosperity. However, besides the misery this process engenders in the form of the proletariat, it encounters the limit analysed by Marx as the tendency of diminishing returns. To fight against this limit of capitalist development, the American way of life invented the figure of the consumer whose libido is systematically put to work to counter the problems of excess production, which is the social concretization of this tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This canalization of the libido operated by the capture of attention ends up by liquidating the expertise in living savoir-vivre of consumers, by the massive development of societies of services which let them off the hook of their own existences, that is, of their diverse responsibilities as adults having reached their legal maturity. This is what ends up provoking the liquidation of their own desire, as well as the desire of their own children, to the strict extent that the latter can no longer identify with them, both because these parents no longer know anything, and are no longer responsible for anything, having become themselves big fat children, and because the process of primary identification is short-circuited by psychopower through the psychotechnologies. This destruction of desire (that is to say also the destruction of attention and of care) is a new limit encountered by capitalism, this time not only as mode of production, but also as mode of consumption, way of life, that is, as biopower having become psychopower. A third limit henceforth imposes itself on our attention. It consists in the fact that the development of the industrial way of life, inherited Care 111 from the 19th and 20th centuries, has become not only toxic on the level of minds and of libido, but also on the geophysical and biological level. This third limit will not be able to be raised or effaced before the invention of a mode of life constitutive of a new way of taking care and of paying attention to/of the world by the invention of therapeutics: techniques, technologies and socio-pharmacological apparatuses of the formation of attention corresponding to the organological specificities of our time: to the specificities of the technologies of transindividuation forming the infrastructure of an industrial system itself functioning in an endogenous way as a system of care: making care its “chain of value” that is, its economy, and thereby renewing with the original sense of the word economy, for to economize is to take care. Western societies, in the sway of the exportation of technologies issuing from their mode of production, have engendered industrial competitors (on whom Paul Valéry was already meditating as to their consequences to come) by a movement of financialization that could do nothing but cause a global economic war. In this new form of war, the stakes are a defense of society no longer as an enemy, exterior or interior, but against a process that ruins time, that is, the horizon of the long term, and the possibility of projecting this horizon in giving oneself objects of desire. This process spins out of control at this precise moment when the effects of the three limits of capitalism combine. Global competition fired up by financialization has ended up in the destruction of the complex equilibrium that allowed that capitalism’s development also be the social development of industrial democracies by the Keynesian organization of the redistribution of wealth under the authority of a welfare State, and it is in the context of the economic war which resulted that marketing has become, as Gilles Deleuze put it, “the instrument of social control” in the societies of control, and that the tendency of libidinal energy to self-destruct suddenly worsened. Thus, on the side of consumption, the capitalist mode of life has become at the end of the 20th century an addictive process less and less capable of finding sustainable satisfactions—this has induced great discontent in the civilization of consumption, which has replaced culture, that is, care, if we accept that culture precedes cults of all types, that is, attachments to objects whose ensemble constitutes a system of care. It is in this context that Jenny Uechi could write in Adbusters that: According to surveys conducted recently by the sociologist Juliet Schor, 81 of Americans estimate that their country is too centered on consumption and almost 90 of them consider that it is too materialistic. 

b. Prioritizing the question of relinquishing fossil fuel use is epistemically flawed for it cannot address the destruction of the possibility of true knowledge and desire of the working class. The alternative is an epistemic prerequisite to the aff. Stiegler 12 writes
Bernard Stiegler (French philosopher at the University of London). “Care.” Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Volume 1, ed. Tom Cohen. 2012.
If consummation is that which destroys its object, libido is to the contrary that which, as desire and not as drive, that, as the sublimation intrinsic to desire, takes care of its object. This is why the question of the third limit of capitalism is not that of the relinquishment of fossil fuels but rather the relinquishment of a drive-driven economy and the reconstitution of a libidinal economy, that is, a sustainable one, given that this energy increases with the frequentation of its objects. The third limit of capitalism is not only the destruction of the reserves of fossil fuel, but the limit constituted by the drive to destruction of all objects in general by consumption, in so far as they have become objects of drives, and not objects of desire and attention—the psychotechnological organization of consumption provoking the destruction of attention in all its forms, on the psychic level as well as the collective level. Because he seems to ignore everything involved in the second limit of capitalism and its meaning once the third limit has been reached, Rifkin’s discourse seems to me fraught with dangers: he would have us believe that a drive-driven growth could be sustained owing to the technology of hydrogen. And yet, this discourse is interesting and of import for at least three reasons: 1. it proposes a real alternative to the question of the energy of subsistence with this system founded on hydrogen which would allow a harmful limit to be pushed back; 2. it poses the questions about energy that are never distinct from questions on networks of communication and information, that is, hypomnesic systems and retentional devices of tertiary retentions; 3. finally, and above all, it posits that the network founded on hydrogen must be based on the model of social networks made possible by the World Wide Web and, thus, must get beyond the opposition between production and consumption. An organization based on consumption, and constituted by its opposition to production, is dangerous not only because it produces excess quantities of carbon dioxide, but because it destroys minds. The opposition of production and consumption has as its consequence that both producers and consumers are proletarianized by the loss of their knowledge: they are reduced to an economy of subsistence, and deprived of an economy of their existence—they are deprived of libidinal economy, that is, of desire. This is why the fundamental question opened by the combination of the three limits of capitalism is the overcoming of this opposition and of the proletarinarization it engenders structurally. Now what is extremely interesting in Rifkin’s proposition consists in positing, based on the position set forth in the first lines of the study, the energy systems and information or mnemotechnical systems co-develop, that the most recent system of communication, the Internet, breaks precisely with the opposition of consumption and production and thus constitutes the possibility of implementing a new distributed and decentralized network of sustainable energies where everyone would be producer as well as consumer, by combining the technology of stockage by hydrogen and that of networking along the lines of the Internet model. Confronted with this unprecedented challenge to planetary (planetarianized) humanity—a challenge of practically sublime dimensions, which demands an extraordinary mobilization of the forces of the spirit to meet it: a challenge convoking what Kant called the suprasensible, that is, also the infinite (infinitely renewable)—the temptation of the industrial and capitalist world is to come up with a technological and scientific response in denial of the three limits of capitalism. This temptation borne of denial cannot apprehend: 1. that these three limits, when they combine, produce a systemic evolution at a superior level, that is, a phenomenon of emergence, 2. that we must change industrial models not only to produce a new technical and scientific rationality, but to constitute a new social rationality, productive of motivation, of reasons for living together, that is, of taking care of the world and of those living there, 3. that the fundamental question is here to reorient the financial fluxes toward long-term investments by waging war against speculation, but also against modes of life founded on the short term, of which the most every-day example is the organization of society by a marketing systematically exploiting drives by destroying libido as that which evinces the capable of sustainable investment. Consumption that becomes drive-based is profoundly dangerous for society. If there were no limit to this consumption, and if fossil fuels were inexhaustible, the catastrophe would perhaps be even greater than the one resulting from the deplenishment of fossil fuels. Perhaps this deplenishment is finally a kind of stroke of luck: the opportunity to understand that the true question of energy is not that one, that the energy of subsistence is of interest only insofar as it contributes to an energy of existence—and is such in its capacity to project what I call the plane of consistencies. Now this is the true stake of what is today called, in an ambiguous expression, ascendant innovation.

The alternative is to prioritize resource extraction as a form of protest against capitalism. Overidentifying with capitalist consumption is an effective means of criticizing it, so it’s key to reclaiming the political sphere. Uebel 2 writes
Michael Uebel (Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he teaches medieval literature and theory. He has published essays on the relationships among identity, perversion, and culture in medieval literature, and is completing a manuscript on the libidinal politics of masochism in postwar America). “Masochism in America.” Project MUSE. American Literary History 14.2 (2002) 389-411
The masochist changes the world, as Deleuze puts it, to the extent that she "questions the validity of existing reality in order to create a pure ideal reality, an operation which is perfectly in line with the judicial spirit of masochism" ("Coldness" 33). This "judicial spirit" is, in practice, intersubjective (based on contractual relations), judgmental, and assertive. Its power is directed over, even against, others—to educate, to persuade, to bring into agreement. Masochism's judicial spirit becomes most recognizably political when it sweeps the social field in the form of mass fantasy, so that in the case of oppressed groups it often takes the form of a kind of politically idealized suffering in the name of future rewards. 11  Social suffering serves as a prelude to, and in reality a warranty for, the achievement of future satisfaction. It is perhaps Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel who most boldly underscores the political—what she sees as the utopic—force of the so-called counterpleasures, when she associates "historical ruptures which give an inkling of a new world" (293) with the dynamics of perversion. A crucial point to bear in mind here, however, is that, like any tool for change, masochism can be put to both progressive and regressive uses, deployed as a political tactic for utopian change and, conversely, for cultural entrenchment and even gender violence.Deployed in the name of either revolutionary or retrograde causes, masochism works by calling into being the very Law—the limit or penance—that ostensibly blocks access to the ideal by thwarting what Lacan once called the "will to jouissance." So from outside the politico-libidinal matrix of master/slave, it looks as if masochism involves only the sacrifice of one's own enjoyment. However, from within, the masochist reveals the truth of symbolic power: subordination to the exact letter of the Law, thereby exaggerating its obscene dimension, subverts the very meaning of regulation. The potential political value of this is significant, as Reik's example of the masochistic art of resistance reveals: Austrian railroad workers, protesting low wages and long working hours, go on strike, but rather than walk off the job, they carry it out with increased conscientiousness and punctuality, following the railway board's myriad bureaucratic regulations to the letter. The result is a total paralysis of train traffic, and with trains neither arriving nor departing, the company elites are forced to capitulate (108; cf. 154-59). The workers, through radical obedience to the law, are able to turn the misery of their working conditions into a politically satisfying conclusion. Closing the gap between the law and its realization, extreme submission has the precise effect of revealing the fantasmic support of the law in its full inconsistency. 12 As a mode of dissidence, masochism depends on a strategy of "passive resistance," evoking a constellation of other strategies for social change such as the hunger strike, sit-ins, and related forms of nonviolent passive protest. When deployed in these ways to expose the inconsistency of cultural protocols, masochism becomes fully political, a strategy of resistance, wherein "the masochist is a revolutionist of self-surrender" (Reik 156). Given masochism's primary function as defiant submissiveness ("victory through defeat" is Reik's famous formula), there are expedient reasons to conceptualize it across the limits of the sexual or the erotic, into the social.Masochism, despite remaining a slippery (and at times hotly contested) term in psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses, 13 has emerged in recent critical treatments as a particularly flexible, even necessary, form of cultural critique. It is within this context that one of Deleuze's most valuable insights is intelligible as a fully political revelation: "The masochist's apparent obedience conceals a criticism and a provocation" ("Coldness" 88). Remarkably, the fundamentally utopian energy of masochism increases with cultural advancement. If masochism is indeed "unmistakably the most important culturally" among the usual perversions, it is so, to follow Reik, precisely because it is the chief register of culture, developing coterminously with it: as culture progresses, masochism increasingly becomes a psychic necessity (264; cf. 383). 14 But, as Reik himself rather presciently points out, masochism is fast evolving beyond its status as a psychic necessity to become something of a mental luxury, a political option (though admittedly never available to all) replacing what had once End Page 398 been diagnosed strictly as a psychic condition simply suffered by desiring subjects beyond their own will. Despite its status as luxury, masochism appears no less urgent a tool for reimagining or remaking the self and the social. Leaving behind the limited notion of the masochist as a self-destructive subject, one to whom something is done, or on whom something is perpetrated, we are able to see the masochist as an idealizer par excellence, a revolutionary who seeks after a utopic condition that is never merely or only libidinal.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 4 | Opponent: LAMP RR Ruchir Rastogi | Judge: Jonathan Massey
A. Interpretation – The affirmative must defend the cognitive normative judgment that developing countries have more reason to prioritize environmental protection than resource extraction.

B. Violation – the aff interprets the topic as a subjective assertion of the speaker.

C. Standards

1. Ground. I literally have none. His interp forces me to prove that Ruchir does not subjectively believe in EP which is unfalsifiable. That independently means its impossible to prove his contention true, and you negate on presumption.

Implementation-focus is the core of the topic lit. Olivera 2
Jose Antonio Puppim de Olivera (Assistant Director and Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) where he coordinates the Sustainable Urban Futures programme. Previously, he was lecturer and course co-director of MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development at University College London (UK) and was associate professor at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (EBAPE) of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). He is editor of the journal Public Administration and Development (PAD, Wiley-Blackwell). Jose holds a Ph.D. in Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), a Master of Environmental Science from Hokkaido University (Japan) and a degree in Engineering from the Aeronautics Technological Institute (ITA), Brazil. Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration). “Implementation Environmental Policies in Developing Countries Through Decentralization: The Case of Protected Areas in Bahia, Brazil.” ScienceDirect. 2002.
The literature is proficient in describing cases of failures in implementing environmental policies in developing countries, such as in India (Reich and Bowonder, 1992; Vyas and Reddy, 1998), China (Jan, 1995; Ross, 1992), Eastern European countries (Hardi, 1992; Klarer and Francis, 1997), and Latin America (Ames and Keck, 1997; Pichon, 1992). Common explanations for policy failure range from the classical Malthusian paradigm regarding rapid population growth to widespread corruption in political systems (Sham, 1994). Although these explanations may often be true, they do not suggest practical solutions to problems in implementing environmental policies in developing countries. To be useful to policymakers, analyzes must identify the main factors that impede successful implementation and suggest how these obstacles could be overcome. Toward that end, understanding the political economy in which the implementation process occurs is crucial. As Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) recognized, implementation––and we could say especially environmental policy––encompasses the governmental and nongovernmental sector as well as interorganizational links. Thus, scholars have begun to analyze how organizations work together to success- fully implement environmental policy in developing countries (Brinkerhoff, 1996; Lemos, 1998; Lopes, Bastos Filho, Biller, and Bale, 1996). This literature provides practical recommendations to policymakers.

2. Real-World Policy Making Education 

90 of policymaking is deciding on implementation. Elmore 80
Prof. Public Affairs at University of Washington, 1980  PolySci Quarterly 79-80, p. 605,
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 matter 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.

Environmental policy discussions are key to critical thinking and decision-making skills. Pereiro-Munoz et al 2
Jiménez-Aleixandre, professor of education – University of Santiago de Compostela, and Pereiro-Muñoz High School Castelao, Vigo (Spain), ‘2 (Maria-Pilar and Cristina, “Knowledge producers or knowledge consumers? Argumentation and decision making about environmental management,” International Journal of Science Education Vol. 24, No. 11, p. 1171–1190)
If science education and environmental education have as a goal to develop critical thinking and to promote decision making, it seems that the acknowledgement of a variety of experts and expertise is of relevance to both. Otherwise citizens could be unable to challenge a common view that places economical issues and technical features over other types of values or concerns. As McGinn and Roth (1999) argue, citizens should be prepared to participate in scientific practice, to be involved in situations where science is, if not created, at least used. The assessment of environmental management is, in our opinion, one of these, and citizens do not need to possess all the technical knowledge to be able to examine the positive and negative impacts and to weigh them up. The identification of instances of scientific practice in classroom discourse is difficult especially if this practice is viewed as a complex process, not as fixed ‘steps’. Several instances were identified when it could be said that students acted as a knowledge-producing community in spite of the fact that the students, particularly at the beginning of the sequence, expressed doubts about their capacities to assess a project written by experts and endorsed by a government office. Perhaps these doubts relate to the nature of the project, a ‘real life’ object that made its way into the classroom, into the ‘school life’. As Brown et al. (1989) point out, there is usually a difference between practitioners’ tasks and stereotyped school tasks and, it could be added, students are not used to being confronted with the complexity of ‘life-size’ problems. However, as the sequence proceeded, the students assumed the role of experts, exposing inconsistencies in the project, offering alternatives and discussing it with one of its authors. The issue of expertise is worthy of attention and it needs to be explored in different contexts where the relationships among technical expertise, values hierarchies and possible biases caused by the subject matter could be unravelled. One of the objectives of environmental education is to empower people with the capacity of decision making; for this purpose the acknowledging of multiple expertise is crucial. 

3. Textuality
Textuality is a prima facie voter for the neg. It doesn’t matter how fair the aff is; if the case doesn’t affirm the topic, then he hasn’t met the aff burden. Also, textuality link turns other theory standards because it is the basis for claims to predictability and ground. 

Aff violates the word “Resolved.” “Resolved” requires the aff to enact a law.
Words and Phrases 64
Words and Phrases Permanent Edition (Multi-volume set of judicial definitions). “Resolved”. 1964.
Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.

Aff violates EP.
Blacks Law no date defines EP as
Black’s Law Dictionary. “What is Environmental Protection.” No date. http://thelawdictionary.org/environmental-protection/
What is ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION?
Read in: Spanish Environmental guardianship based on policies and procedures. Objectives are (1) the conserving of natural resources, (2) the preserving of the existing natural environment and, (3) where possible, repairing damage and reversing trends.

The aff violates RE. Extraction is “the act or process of getting something by pulling it out, forcing it out, etc. : the act of extracting something”, so he has to defend a change in actions, not subjective assertions.
(Merriam Webster. “Extraction.” No date. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/extraction)

Ruchir isn’t a developing country. Merriam Webster defines country as “ political state or nation or its territory.”
(Merriam Webster. “Country.” No date. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/country)

The topic as a whole clearly mandates a policy. Prefer my ev because it’s the only card that evaluates the entire sentence rather than individual words.
Babb 13
Stephen Babb (has well over a decade's worth of involvement with LD debate, experiencing success as a competitor and coach alike. When debating for TMI in San Antonio, he was the Texas State Champion and twice finished in the top 10 at NFL Nationals. He was invited to the Greenhill and MBA Round Robins and twice broke at both Greenhill and Emory. More recently, he directed the Archer program and has worked with a number of schools including Harvard-Westlake, Brentwood, Grapevine and Highland Park. Babb has also served as a summer instructor at a number of institutes including VBI, UNT, NDF, UT and Stanford. He's worked with elite debaters in every setting and judged thousands of debates. After spending two years blogging about the NBA for Bleacher Report, Babb continues to dabble in writing when he isn't doing debate things), “Topic Analysis by Stephen Babb”, Environment v Resource Extraction, Victory Briefs. 2013.
Fortunately, this topic at least centers around a question with indisputable policy dimensions. It clearly isn't about individual ethics. The fact that topic framers opted for the word "should" instead of "ought" might also be interpreted as reason to eschew broader moral standards in favor of clean-cut utilitarian debate. Moreover, the topic involves multiple countries such that any single nation's laws or constitution can't serve as a normative guide for action. The generality of the topic's wording suggests a need for similarly universal and uncontroversial normative architecture, and there's nothing like utilitarianism to do the job. In general, governments strive to provide for citizens, maintain stability and otherwise make the best of what they have to work with. That's not to say corruption and inefficiencies don't get in the way when it comes to execution, but it's more accurate to describe policy-making as a utilitarian endeavor than it is to associate it with a more particular moral philosophy. Even if there's a time and place for such philosophies—and there almost certainly is—this is a different domain.¶ To be fair, there's certainly a good argument to be made on behalf of certain broadly humanitarian constraints. Even if we generally accept that states behave in utilitarian ways, we also tend to accept that the "good of the many" can't ignore timeless admonitions against the vilest of state actions. Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to find many self-described utilitarians who'd admit that something like genocide could even be done in the name of utility. They'd argue that such practices would (and should) be condemned no matter what, even and especially on utilitarian grounds.¶ My biases aside, there are of course still arguments to be made about whether governments should behave in strictly utilitarian fashion and, if so, what exactly that means. The point here is merely to suggest that they're mostly utilitarian excepting (1) specific constitutional constraints that fly beneath this topic's radar and (2) nearly categorical humanitarian constraints that arguably figure into utilitarian calculations anyway.¶ Applied to the topic, utilitarianism also makes for a good standard because it appeals to plenty of ground on both sides of the debate. The great majority of people are impacted by development and environment alike. Determining which is ultimately more important for those people would make for a good debate. It's not the only normative debate to be sure, but it's a clean one in which both sides have access to sound and strategic positions. It also obviates the need for potentially messy discussions in which debaters attempt to apply ill-fitting ethical paradigms to state policy.

D. Voter – Education comes first because it’s the end goal of debate and the only portable skill. Substance doesn’t matter unless there’s an educational benefit to discussing it. Dropping the argument doesn’t solve because it’s too late to restart from the AC and have an educational debate. Also, the ballot has to set good norms for future rounds because debaters care first and foremost about winning, meaning voting on theory is the only way to deter bad arguments.

Prefer competing interpretations because reasonability is arbitrary and requires judge intervention.

Debating policies is the best method for effecting change in energy policy.
Hager 92 (, professor of political science – Bryn Mawr College, ‘92 (Carol J., “Democratizing Technology: Citizen and State in West German Energy Politics, 1974-1990” Polity, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 45-70)
During this phase, the citizen initiative attempted to overcome its defensive posture and implement an alternative politics. The strategy of legal and technical challenge might delay or even prevent plant construction, but it would not by itself accomplish the broader goal on the legitimation dimension, i.e., democratization. Indeed, it worked against broad participation. The activists had to find a viable means of achieving change. Citizens had proved they could contribute to a substantive policy discussion. Now, some activists turned to the parliamentary arena as a possible forum for an energy dialogue. Until now, parliament had been conspicuously absent as a relevant policy maker, but if parliament could be reshaped and activated, citizens would have a forum in which to address the broad questions of policy-making goals and forms. They would also have an institutional lever with which to pry apart the bureaucracy and utility. None of the established political parties could offer an alternative program. Thus, local activists met to discuss forming their own voting list. These discussions provoked internal dissent. Many citizen initiative members objected to the idea of forming a political party. If the problem lay in the role of parliament itself, another political party would not solve it. On the contrary, parliamentary participation was likely to destroy what political innovations the extraparliamentary movement had made. Others argued that a political party would give the movement an institutional platform from which to introduce some of the grassroots democratic political forms the groups had developed. Founding a party as the parliamentary arm of the citizen movement would allow these groups to play an active, critical role in institutionalized politics, participating in the policy debates while retaining their outside perspective. Despite the disagreements, the Alternative List for Democracy and Environmental Protection Berlin (AL) was formed in 1978 and first won seats in the Land parliament with 7.2 percent of the vote in 1981.43 The founders of the AL were encouraged by the success of newly formed local green parties in Lower Saxony and Hamburg,44 whose evolution had been very similar to that of the West Berlin citizen movement. Throughout the FRG, unpopular administrative decisions affecting local environments, generally in the form of state-sponsored industrial projects, prompted the development of the citizen initiative and ecology movements. The groups in turn focused constant attention on state planning "errors," calling into question not only the decisions themselves, but also the conventional forms of political decision making that produced them.45 Disgruntled citizens increasingly aimed their critique at the established political parties, in particular the federal SPD/ FDP coalition, which seemed unable to cope with the economic, social, and political problems of the 1970s. Fanned by publications such as the Club of Rome's report, "The Limits to Growth," the view spread among activists that the crisis phenomena were not merely a passing phase, but indicated instead "a long-term structural crisis, whose cause lies in the industrial-technocratic growth society itself."46 As they broadened their critique to include the political system as a whole, many grassroots groups found the extraparliamentary arena too restrictive. Like many in the West Berlin group, they reasoned that the necessary change would require a degree of political restructuring that could only be accomplished through their direct participation in parliamentary politics. Green/alternative parties and voting lists sprang up nationwide and began to win seats in local assemblies. The West Berlin Alternative List saw itself not as a party, but as the parliamentary arm of the citizen initiative movement. One member explains: "the starting point for alternative electoral participation was simply the notion of achieving a greater audience for our own ideas and thus to work in support of the extraparliamentary movements and initia-tives,"47 including non-environmentally oriented groups. The AL wanted to avoid developing structures and functions autonomous from the citizen initiative movement. Members adhered to a list of principles, such as rotation and the imperative mandate, designed to keep parliamentarians attached to the grassroots. Although their insistence on grassroots democracy often resulted in interminable heated discussions, the participants recognized the importance of experimenting with new forms of decision making, of not succumbing to the same hierarchical forms they were challenging. Some argued that the proper role of citizen initiative groups was not to represent the public in government, but to mobilize other citizens to participate directly in politics themselves; self-determination was the aim of their activity.48 Once in parliament, the AL proposed establishmento f a temporary parliamentary commission to study energy policy, which for the first time would draw all concerned participants together in a discussion of both short-term choices and long-term goals of energy policy. With help from the SPD faction, which had been forced into the opposition by its defeat in the 1981 elections, two such commissions were created, one in 1982-83 and the other in 1984-85.49These commissions gave the citizen activists the forum they sought to push for modernization and technical innovation in energy policy. Although it had scaled down the proposed new plant, the utility had produced no plan to upgrade its older, more polluting facilities or to install desulfurization devices. With prodding from the energy commission, Land and utility experts began to formulate such a plan, as did the citizen initiative. By exposing administrative failings in a public setting, and by producing a modernization plan itself, the combined citizen initiative and AL forced bureaucratic authorities to push the utility for improvements . They also forced the authorities to consider different technological solutions to West Berlin's energy and environmental problems. In this way, the activists served as technological innovators. In 1983, the first energy commission submitted a list of recommendations to the Land parliament which reflected the influence of the citizen protest movement. It emphasized goals of demand reduction and efficiency, noted the value of expanded citizen participation and urged authorities to "investigate more closely the positive role citizen participation can play in achieving policy goals."50 The second energy commission was created in 1984 to discuss the possibilities for modernization and shutdown of old plants and use of new, environmentally friendlier and cheaper technologies for electricity and heat generation. Its recommendations strengthened those of the first commission.51 Despite the non-binding nature of the commissions' recommendations, the public discussion of energy policy motivated policy makers to take stronger positions in favor of environmental protection. III. Conclusion The West Berlin energy project eventually cleared all planning hurdles, and construction began in the early 1980s. The new plant now conforms to the increasingly stringent environmental protection requirements of the law. The project was delayed, scaled down from 1200 to 600 MW, moved to a neutral location and, unlike other BEWAG plants, equipped with modern desulfurization devices. That the new plant, which opened in winter 1988-89, is the technologically most advanced and environmentally sound of BEWAG's plants is due entirely to the long legal battle with the citizen initiative group, during which nearly every aspect of the original plans was changed. In addition, through the efforts of the Alter-native List (AL) in parliament, the Land government and BEWAG formulated a long sought modernization and environmental protection plan for all of the city's plants. The AL prompted the other parliamentary parties to take pollution control seriously. Throughout the FRG, energy politics evolved in a similar fashion. As Habermas claimed, underlying the objections against particular projects was a reaction against the administrative-economic system in general. One author, for example, describes the emergence of two-dimensional protest against nuclear energy: The resistance against a concrete project became understood simultaneously as resistance against the entire atomic program. Questions of energy planning, of economic growth, of understanding of democracy entered the picture. . . . Besides concern for human health, for security of conditions for human existence and protection of nature arose critique of what was perceived as undemocratic planning, the "shock" of the delayed public announcement of pro-ject plans and the fear of political decision errors that would aggravate the problem.52 This passage supports a West Berliner's statement that the citizen initiative began with a project critique and arrived at Systemkritik.53 I have labeled these two aspects of the problem the public policy and legitimation dimensions. In the course of these conflicts, the legitimation dimen-sion emergd as the more important and in many ways the more problematic. Parliamentary Politics In the 1970s, energy politics began to develop in the direction Offe de-scribed, with bureaucrats and protesters avoiding the parliamentary channels through which they should interact. The citizen groups them-selves, however, have to a degree reversed the slide into irrelevance of parliamentary politics. Grassroots groups overcame their defensive posture enough to begin to formulate an alternative politics, based upon concepts such as decision making through mutual understanding rather than technical criteria or bargaining. This new politics required new modes of interaction which the old corporatist or pluralist forms could not provide. Through the formation of green/alternative parties and voting lists and through new parliamentary commissions such as the two described in the case study, some members of grassroots groups attempted to both operate within the political system and fundamentally change it, to restore the link between bureaucracy and citizenry. Parliamentary politics was partially revived in the eyes of West German grassroots groups as a legitimate realm of citizen participation, an outcome the theory would not predict. It is not clear, however, that strengthening the parliamentary system would be a desirable outcome for everyone. Many remain skeptical that institutions that operate as part of the "system" can offer the kind of substantive participation that grass-roots groups want. The constant tension between institutionalized politics and grassroots action emerged clearly in the recent internal debate between "fundamentalist" and "realist" wings of the Greens. Fundis wanted to keep a firm footing outside the realm of institutionalized politics. They refused to bargain with the more established parties or to join coalition governments. Realos favored participating in institutionalized politics while pressing their grassroots agenda. Only this way, they claimed, would they have a chance to implement at least some parts of their program. This internal debate, which has never been resolved, can be interpreted in different ways. On one hand, the tension limits the appeal of green and alternative parties to the broader public, as the Greens' poor showing in the December 1990 all-German elections attests. The failure to come to agreement on basic issues can be viewed as a hazard of grass-roots democracy. The Greens, like the West Berlin citizen initiative, are opposed in principle to forcing one faction to give way to another. Disunity thus persists within the group. On the other hand, the tension can be understood not as a failure, but as a kind of success: grassroots politics has not been absorbed into the bureaucratized system; it retains its critical dimension, both in relation to the political system and within the groups themselves. The lively debate stimulated by grassroots groups and parties keeps questions of democracy on the public agenda. Technical Debate In West Berlin, the two-dimensionality of the energy issue forced citizen activists to become both participants in and critics of the policy process. In order to defeat the plant, activists engaged in technical debate. They won several decisions in favor of environmental protection, often proving to be more informed than bureaucratic experts themselves. The case study demonstrates that grassroots groups, far from impeding techno-logical advancement, can actually serve as technological innovators. The activists' role as technical experts, while it helped them achieve some success on the policy dimension, had mixed results on the legitimation dimension. On one hand, it helped them to challenge the legitimacy of technocratic policy making. They turned back the Land government's attempts to displace political problems by formulating them in technical terms.54 By demonstrating the fallibility of the technical arguments, activists forced authorities to acknowledge that energy demand was a political variable, whose value at any one point was as much influenced by the choices of policy makers as by independent technical criteria. Submission to the form and language of technical debate, however, weakened activists' attempts to introduce an alternative, goal-oriented form of decision making into the political system. Those wishing to par-ticipate in energy politics on a long-term basis have had to accede to the language of bureaucratic discussion, if not the legitimacy of bureaucratic authorities. They have helped break down bureaucratic authority but have not yet offered a viable long-term alternative to bureaucracy. In the tension between form and language, goals and procedure, the legitima-tion issue persists. At the very least, however, grassroots action challenges critical theory's notion that technical discussion is inimical to democratic politics.55 Citizen groups have raised the possibility of a dialogue that is both technically sophisticated and democratic. In sum, although the legitimation problems which gave rise to grass-roots protest have not been resolved, citizen action has worked to counter the marginalization of parliamentary politics and the technocratic character of policy debate that Offe and Habermas identify. The West Berlin case suggests that the solutions to current legitimation problems may not require total repudiation of those things previously associated with technocracy.56 In Berlin, the citizen initiative and AL continue to search for new, more legitimate forms of organization consistent with their principles. No permanent Land parliamentary body exists to coordinate and con-solidate energy policy making.57 In the 1989 Land elections, the CDU/ FDP coalition was defeated, and the AL formed a governing coalition with the SPD. In late 1990, however, the AL withdrew from the coali-tion. It remains to be seen whether the AL will remain an effective vehi-cle for grassroots concerns, and whether the citizenry itself, now includ-ing the former East Berliners, will remain active enough to give the AL direction as united Berlin faces the formidable challenges of the 1990s. On the policy dimension, grassroots groups achieved some success. On the legitimation dimension, it is difficult to judge the results of grass-roots activism by normal standards of efficacy or success. Activists have certainly not radically restructured politics. They agree that democracy is desirable, but troublesome questions persist about the degree to which those processes that are now bureaucratically organized can and should be restructured, where grassroots democracy is possible and where bureaucracy is necessary in order to get things done. In other words, grassroots groups have tried to remedy the Weberian problem of the marginalization of politics, but it is not yet clear what the boundaries of the political realm should be. It is, however, the act of calling existing boundaries into question that keeps democracy vital. In raising alternative possibilities and encouraging citizens to take an active, critical role in their own governance, the contribution of grassroots environmental groups has been significant. As Melucci states for new social movements in general, these groups mount a "symbolic" challenge by proposing "a different way of perceiving and naming the world."58 Rochon concurs for the case of the West German peace movement, noting that its effect on the public discussion of secur-ity issues has been tremendous.59 The effects of the legitimation issue in the FRG are evident in increased citizen interest in areas formerly left to technical experts. Citizens have formed nationwide associations of environmental and other grassroots groups as well as alternative and green parties at all levels of government. The level of information within the groups is generally quite high, and their participation, especially in local politics, has raised the awareness and engagement of the general populace noticeably.60 Policy concessions and new legal provisions for citizen participation have not quelled grassroots action. The attempts of the established political parties to coopt "green" issues have also met with limited success. Even green parties themselves have not tapped the full potential of public support for these issues. The persistence of legitima-tion concerns, along with the growth of a culture of informed political activism, will ensure that the search continues for a space for a delibera-tive politics in modern technological society.61

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 5 | Opponent: Newark CQ | Judge: Courtney Nunley
A. The aff must defend a developing country as defined by the World Bank.

B. He defends the US.

C. Standards

1. Eurocentrism. We've had a bunch of US topics. This is a unique opportunity to engage with other countries but he chose to defend the US.

2. Strat Skew. The vast majority of my prep was about developing countries defined as per the World Bank, e.g. African and Latin American countries.

D. Fairness is a gateway issue. Drop the debater to deter future abuse.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Newark SS SunHee Simon | Judge: James McElwain, Matt Reichle, Ken Posner
A. Interpretation – In the AC, aff must unconditionally defend implementation of a developing country policy. She doesn’t need a plan to meet the interp. She just needs a stable government action that I can link disads to.

B. Violation – aff refuses to specify a real-world policy.

C. Standards 

Implementation-focus is the core of the topic lit. Olivera 2
Jose Antonio Puppim de Olivera (Assistant Director and Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) where he coordinates the Sustainable Urban Futures programme. Previously, he was lecturer and course co-director of MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development at University College London (UK) and was associate professor at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (EBAPE) of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV). He is editor of the journal Public Administration and Development (PAD, Wiley-Blackwell). Jose holds a Ph.D. in Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), a Master of Environmental Science from Hokkaido University (Japan) and a degree in Engineering from the Aeronautics Technological Institute (ITA), Brazil. Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration). “Implementation Environmental Policies in Developing Countries Through Decentralization: The Case of Protected Areas in Bahia, Brazil.” ScienceDirect. 2002.
The literature is proficient in describing cases of failures in implementing environmental policies in developing countries, such as in India (Reich and Bowonder, 1992; Vyas and Reddy, 1998), China (Jan, 1995; Ross, 1992), Eastern European countries (Hardi, 1992; Klarer and Francis, 1997), and Latin America (Ames and Keck, 1997; Pichon, 1992). Common explanations for policy failure range from the classical Malthusian paradigm regarding rapid population growth to widespread corruption in political systems (Sham, 1994). Although these explanations may often be true, they do not suggest practical solutions to problems in implementing environmental policies in developing countries. To be useful to policymakers, analyzes must identify the main factors that impede successful implementation and suggest how these obstacles could be overcome. Toward that end, understanding the political economy in which the implementation process occurs is crucial. As Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) recognized, implementation––and we could say especially environmental policy––encompasses the governmental and nongovernmental sector as well as interorganizational links. Thus, scholars have begun to analyze how organizations work together to success- fully implement environmental policy in developing countries (Brinkerhoff, 1996; Lemos, 1998; Lopes, Bastos Filho, Biller, and Bale, 1996). This literature provides practical recommendations to policymakers.

2. Real-World Policy Making Education 

Aff forces us to debate about philosophy in the abstract instead of real world implementation concerns. That kills education. 90 of policymaking is deciding on implementation. Elmore 80
Prof. Public Affairs at University of Washington, 1980  PolySci Quarterly 79-80, p. 605,
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 matter 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.

D. Voter – Education comes first because it’s the end goal of debate and the only portable skill. Substance doesn’t matter unless there’s an educational benefit to discussing it. Dropping the argument doesn’t solve because it’s too late to restart from the AC and have an educational debate. Also, the ballot has to set good norms for future rounds because debaters care first and foremost about winning, meaning voting on theory is the only way to deter bad arguments.

Prefer competing interpretations because reasonability is arbitrary and requires judge intervention.

I control the terminal impact of philosophy education. Real-world application is the only way to make philosophy meaningful. Edet 03
“How to Teach Philosophy to Make It Relevant to Nigerian Students,” Mesembe Ita Edet, M.A., Lecturer, Department of Religion and Philosophy, University of Calabar, Nigeria. Complementary Reflection. 2003. http://www.frasouzu.com/Issues20and20Papers/HOW20TO20TEACH20PHILOPHY.htm
Too much class time is occupied with questions like ‘’What did Hegel mean by …?’’ and ‘’What was your third criticism of utilitarianism?’’ While such an approach may have paedeutic value its relevance is nonetheless questionable. The students must be encouraged to develop independent thinking ability and form opinions of their own. Pedagogical techniques, including small group discussions, debates, films and ‘’clever’’ essay examination need to be employed to illustrate the difference between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Also practical computer and information technology (IT) training needs to be made compulsory. The students may be asked to go on a compulsory period of attachment in a computer school and show evidence of successful completion of the training before resuming their philosophical studies.
The point made here is that philosophy must be ‘’problem focused’’ and attempt to be “problem solving” in socially important problems and establish its integrative function with other disciplines. By so doing philosophy will affirm its relevance, significance and value with the fresh insights and perspectives it reveals to these other disciplines. The philosopher’s skills and attitude which makes him far-sighted and extra perceptive will earn him recognition and respect. The non-philosophy major groomed in the inter-disciplinary approach and who has properly cultivated the critical skills and attitude of Philosophy will bring this to bear on his major disciplines and then ultimately come to the realization that habitually and persistently he must keep an open-mind and rethink the possibilities of his discipline, he might well come to accept as legitimate some new ways of relating to other disciplines –ways which would be consistent with and employ insights of the traditions of his major discipline but still would allow a more fruitful complementary existence. The philosophy major properly groomed in the interdisciplinary approach to studying philosophy and having adequately cultivated the necessary skills and attitude is pragmatic, dynamic, mobile and versatile. He it is who can “bake bread’’. It is to this calibre of trained philosophers that Ozumba states, ‘’can work any where’’ (Ozumba;2002:3). Ozumba’s work, A Philosophy Handbook for Beginners: Value Application and Career Opportunities for Philosophers is a ‘’must read’’ for Nigerian undergraduates of philosophy. Conclusion So far I have distinguished between ‘’Ivory tower’’ Philosophy and ‘’market place’’ Philosophy. Ivory tower Philosophy is academic Philosophy which insists that Philosophy must be done in the traditional professional manner with systematicity, analytic rigour, logical coherence, and technicality, mainly addressing problems and issues in the classical traditions of Philosophy. “Market place” Philosophy, on the other hand, though not discountenancing the need for rigorousness and systematicity, maintains that academic Philosophy can be done in the non-traditional manner and made to address concrete existential problems within our cultural circumstance which encourages the professional philosopher to participate in public debate of issues of contemporary relevance. I have also maintained that “ivory tower” philosophy is the reason for the isolation, alienation, marginalization and perceived irrelevance of academic philosophy today. I posit that professionalism in philosophy and its teaching should be reconceived and restructured. I propose that the interdisciplinary strategy for teaching philosophy should be promoted so as to establish the integrative function of philosophy and its integral connection with other disciplines and ultimately interdisciplinary integration. This approach, I maintain, should also stress the utilitarian aspects of the study of philosophy.

Roleplaying as a policy maker is key to create informed political advocates.
Schapp 5
Andrew Schaap, University of Melbourne, Politics, Vol 25 Iss 1, February 2005
Learning political theory is largely about acquiring a vocabulary that enables one to reflect more critically and precisely about the terms on which human beings (do and should) co-operate for and compete over public goods, symbolic and material. As such, political theory is necessarily abstract and general. But, competency in political theory requires an ability to move from the general to the particular and back again, not simply by applying general principles to particular events and experiences but by reflecting on and rearticulating concepts in the light of the particular. Role play is an effective technique for teaching political theory because it requires that students employ political concepts in a particular context so that learning takes place as students try out new vocabularies together with their peers and a lifelong learner in the subject: their teacher.

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: Finals | Opponent: Collegiate AO | Judge: Paul Zhou, Adam Bennett, Monisha Reginald, Jerry Chen, Student Vote
A. Interpretation – Resource extraction is limited to oil, natural gas, and minerals.
Frank 10 writes
Barney Frank (Senator, sponsor of bill). “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.” H. R. 4173. One Hundred Eleventh Congress of the United States of America. 5 January 2010. http://www.workingre.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/APPRAISAL-PROVISIONS-OF-BASE-TEXT.pdf
‘‘(1) DEFINITIONS.—In this subsection— ‘‘(A) the term ‘commercial development of oil, natural gas, or minerals’ includes exploration, extraction, proc- essing, export, and other significant actions relating to oil, natural gas, or minerals, or the acquisition of a license for any such activity, as determined by the Commission; ‘‘(B) the term ‘foreign government’ means a foreign government, a department, agency, or instrumentality of a foreign government, or a company owned by a foreign government, as determined by the Commission; ‘‘(C) the term ‘payment’— ‘‘ means a payment that is— ‘‘(I) made to further the commercial develop- ment of oil, natural gas, or minerals; and ‘‘(II) not de minimis; and ‘‘(ii) includes taxes, royalties, fees (including license fees), production entitlements, bonuses, and other material benefits, that the Commission, con- sistent with the guidelines of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (to the extent practicable), determines are part of the commonly recognized rev- enue stream for the commercial development of oil, natural gas, or minerals; ‘‘(D) the term ‘resource extraction issuer’ means an issuer that— ‘‘ is required to file an annual report with the Commission; and ‘‘(ii) engages in the commercial development of oil, natural gas, or minerals; ‘‘(E) the term ‘interactive data format’ means an elec- tronic data format in which pieces of information are identified using an interactive data standard; and ‘‘(F) the term ‘interactive data standard’ means standardized list of electronic tags that mark information included in the annual report of a resource extraction issuer.

B. Violation – He defends reducing logging in Latin America. 

C. Standards

1. Precise limits. My interp distinguishes extraction from cultivation. Broader definitions make the topic literally limitless.

World Trade Report 10 writes
World Trade Report. “Natural resources: definitions, trade patterns and globalization.” 2010. http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/anrep_e/wtr10-2b_e.pdf
All goods either embody natural resources (e.g. automobiles contain iron ore) or require resources for their production (e.g. food crops require land and water to grow), so all goods could conceivably be classified as natural resources. Such an approach would be logically consistent but otherwise unenlightening. At another extreme, one could choose to focus strictly on resources in their natural state. However, even clear-cut examples of natural resources would be difficult to classify as such under this approach, since most resources require at least some processing before they can be traded or consumed. Regardless of the choice of definition, the line of demarcation between natural resources and other goods will always be somewhat arbitrary. For the purposes of this report we define natural resources as “stocks of materials that exist in the natural environment that are both scarce and economically useful in production or consumption, either in their raw state or after a minimal amount of processing”.1 Note the qualifier “economically useful” in this definition. For example, sea water is a natural substance that covers much of the earth’s surface, but it is of limited intrinsic or direct value for consumption or production. Goods must also be scarce in the economic sense to qualify as natural resources; otherwise people could consume as much as they wanted at no cost to themselves or to others. Air would not be considered a natural resource under this definition because people can obtain it freely simply by breathing. This is not to suggest that air (especially clean air) or for that matter sea water (e.g. as a carbon sink) are without value, but it does mean that they are not commodities that can be traded in markets. In this report, the term “resources” is used interchangeably with “natural resources”. A useful definition should not only identify the nature of natural resources but also distinguish what is and what is not a natural resource. Under the above criteria, it is clear that manufactured goods such as automobiles and computers would not be considered resources, since both are subject to more than a minimal amount of processing. However, this should not be taken to imply that all primary products are covered as natural resources in the report. For example, while most agricultural goods including food are primary products, we do not classify them as natural resources for a number of reasons. To begin with, their production requires other natural resources as inputs, particularly land and water but also various types of fertilizer. More importantly, agricultural products are cultivated rather than extracted from the natural environment.   Two important exceptions in this report relate to fish and forestry products, which are normally classified under agriculture in WTO trade statistics, but which are treated here as natural resources. Both fish and forestry products can be cultivated, for example in aquaculture for fish or through forest management for wood. However, traditionally they have simply been taken from existing natural stocks, and still are for the most part. Unfortunately it is impossible to distinguish between cultivated and non-cultivated varieties of these products in standard databases on international trade, but some effort has been made to identify these in the case of fish. 

Predictable limits are key to fairness and education because I can’t do in depth prep for the specific aff if there are 100s of affs to prepare for. 

Limits are an independent voter. Harris 13 writes
Scott Harris (Director of Debate at U Kansas, 2006 National Debate Coach of the Year, Vice President of the American Forensic Association, 2nd speaker at the NDT in 1981). “This ballot.” 5 April 2013. CEDA Forums. http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4762.0;attach=1655
I understand that there has been some criticism of Northwestern’s strategy in this debate round.  This criticism is premised on the idea that they ran framework instead of engaging Emporia’s argument about home and the Wiz.  I think this criticism is unfair.  Northwestern’s framework argument did engage Emporia’s argument.  Emporia said that you should vote for the team that performatively and methodologically made debate a home.  Northwestern’s argument directly clashed with that contention.  My problem in this debate was with aspects of the execution of the argument rather than with the strategy itself.  It has always made me angry in debates when people have treated topicality as if it were a less important argument than other arguments in debate. Topicality is a real argument.  It is a researched strategy.  It is an argument that challenges many affirmatives.  The fact that other arguments could be run in a debate or are run in a debate does not make topicality somehow a less important argument.  In reality, for many of you that go on to law school you will spend much of your life running topicality arguments because you will find that words in the law matter.  The rest of us will experience the ways that word choices matter in contracts, in leases, in writing laws and in many aspects of our lives.  Kansas ran an affirmative a few years ago about how the location of a comma in a law led a couple of districts to misinterpret the law into allowing individuals to be incarcerated in jail for two days without having any formal charges filed against them.  For those individuals the location of the comma in the law had major consequences.  Debates about words are not insignificant.  Debates about what kinds of arguments we should or should not be making in debates are not insignificant either.  The limits debate is an argument that has real pragmatic consequences.  I found myself earlier this year judging Harvard’s eco-pedagogy aff and thought to myself—I could stay up tonight and put a strategy together on eco-pedagogy, but then I thought to myself—why should I have to?  Yes, I could put together a strategy against any random argument somebody makes employing an energy metaphor but the reality is there are only so many nights to stay up all night researching.  I would like to actually spend time playing catch with my children occasionally or maybe even read a book or go to a movie or spend some time with my wife.  A world where there are an infinite number of affirmatives is a world where the demand to have a specific strategy and not run framework is a world that says this community doesn’t care whether its participants have a life or do well in school or spend time with their families.  I know there is a new call abounding for interpreting this NDT as a mandate for broader more diverse topics.  The reality is that will create more work to prepare for the teams that choose to debate the topic but will have little to no effect on the teams that refuse to debate the topic.  Broader topics that do not require positive government action or are bidirectional will not make teams that won’t debate the topic choose to debate the topic.  I think that is a con job.  I am not opposed to broader topics necessarily.  I tend to like the way high school topics are written more than the way college topics are written.  I just think people who take the meaning of the outcome of this NDT as proof that we need to make it so people get to talk about anything they want to talk about without having to debate against topicality or framework arguments are interested in constructing a world that might make debate an unending nightmare and not a very good home in which to live.  Limits, to me, are a real impact because I feel their impact in my everyday existence.

Default to small limits for LD because (a) the massive number of philosophies means aff has large limits already (b) Massive limits exclude small-school debaters because there is not enough time in the day for one person to cut 100 case negs. 

Turns his discourse impacts because we can’t have effective discourse if one side can’t prep or clash on the issue. Dialogue requires two.

2. No aff ground loss. There’s a topical version of your aff. There’s sick lit about mineral extraction in Africa harming indigenous people. That means discourse doesn’t precede theory because my interp allows for discourse on indigenous people.

3. Stock ground – the core of the literature is on fossil fuels versus sustainability. Bai focusing on a minor reform to a renewable resource, he skirts core neg ground like oil disads, politics, etc.

D. Fairness comes first because it’s a gateway issue to deciding the better debater. Drop the debater because (a) my time was already skewed, (b) losses are key to deterrence, and (c) a 1AR restart with a brand new plan is too late to ensure clash or topic education.

Evaluate T on competing interps because reasonability is arbitrary and requires judge intervention.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate AO Andrew ODonahue | Judge: Jonathan Alston and Shadman Zaman
A. Resource extraction is limited to non-renewable resources.
Pataki and Sagi 13
Eva Pataki (PhD, Polytechnic Engineering College, Serbia) and Andras Sagi (Faculty of Economics, Novi Sad University, Serbia). “Economic Criteria to Optimize the Extraction of Exhaustible Energy Resources.” 2013. http://www.vts.su.ac.rs/docs/expres2013/paper/1120Sagi,20Pataki.pdf
Most production factors are consumed during the use or by the effect of moral usage. Factors can be regenerated by adding investments, and thus they can be increased. The previous statements relate, before all, to the funds of capital goods, machines, plants, equipments, building objects, and so on. The land that has become cultivable soil by investments can also demand investments in order to regenerate or improve it. As for labor as a production factor, investments in its education can be also considered investments in education of the young generation, and net investments in education can be considered investments in the so-called human capital. Production factors that can be renewed and increased should differentiate from factors or resources that are exhaustible. This includes natural resources that are not the result of previous production and their supplies are limited. Among these natural resources, exhaustible energy resources have great importance, firstly fossil energy. The exploitation of these resources decreases these supplies and there is a possibility of exhausting these sources. It is called resource extraction. 

B. Forests are a renewable resource.

C. Standards

1. Textuality.  Textuality is a prima facie voter for the neg. It doesn’t matter how fair or educational the aff is; if the case doesn’t affirm the topic, then he hasn’t met the aff burden. Also, textuality link turns other theory standards because it is the basis for claims to predictability and ground.

He violates “when in conflict.”
a. Prioritizing EP would encourage renewable energy sources.
GS 13
Global Seed. “Renewable Energy Sources and Environmental Protection.” 2013. http://www.globalseed.info/en/renewable-energy-sources.php
Non-renewable energy sources present two major problems which are successfully addressed by the use of renewable sources. Besides the fact that fossil fuel reserves are limited and fast being depleted, they are concentrated in just a few areas of our planet and therefore those countries dependent on imports of fossil fuels are at a disadvantage. A good example is the world’s oil reserves, which are constantly dwindling, while the price of crude oil keeps going up. As a result, according to some estimates, by the mid-21st century this raw material will no longer be commercially viable. The development and use of renewable energy sources, on the other hand, contributes to more effective use of one’s own capacities in the production of energy, as well as to reductions in fossil fuel imports, the development of local industry and the creation of new employment opportunities. Another major issue is environmental pollution. The use of fossil fuels such as lignite, black coal, crude oil and natural gas involves the oxidation of carbon that has been laid down over millions of years in the Earth’s crust. In this process, energy is released, but also carbon dioxide (CO2), which enters the atmosphere and is a cause of global warming and the so-called greenhouse effect. Due to these disturbances to the climate we can expect unusually dry and warm summers, extreme variations in the weather, temperature oscillations, periods of climatic instability and adverse weather conditions such as floods and hail. Renewable energy technology is playing a vital role in reducing the quantities of CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere, and in doing so contributing to a reduction of the greenhouse effect. It is clean and has a much smaller impact on the environment in comparison to conventional energy technologies. 

b. A developing country prioritizing RE would also emphasize efficient use of renewable resources since that’s key to long-term RE. With non-renewable resources, there’s actually a direct tradeoff with EP.

c. Community based forestry in Mexico actually prioritizes RE. Bray agrees.
Wood 8
Lindsey Wood (University of Wisconsin Stevens Point). “Community-Based Natural Resource Management: Case Studies from Community Forest Management Projects in Ghana, Mexico, and United States of America.” Spring 2008. http://www.uwsp.edu/forestry/StuJournals/Documents/IRM/wood.pdf
In relation to the social and economic goals which comprise CFM, Mexico’s community managed forests hold great promise, and, in some cases, have been effective in meeting both. Many communities have been able to do this because of legal institutions that give clear tenure rights, collaboration with external actors for technical and logistical assistance, and strong local institutions. However, ecological considerations for CFM projects in the country are highly variable because management goals differ significantly from community to community. Most of the management on these forests is related to timber extraction, with emphasis on volume and production rather than biodiversity or sustainability (Bray, 2003). 

2.  Precise limits. Specifying renewables explodes the topic – renewable energy comes from numerous distinct sources.
REW 9
Renewable Energy World. “Types of Renewable Energy.” January 6th, 2009. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/tech/home
The United States currently relies heavily on coal, oil, and natural gas for its energy. Fossil fuels are non-renewable, that is, they draw on finite resources that will eventually dwindle, becoming too expensive or too environmentally damaging to retrieve. In contrast, the many types of renewable energy resources-such as wind and solar energy-are constantly replenished and will never run out. Most renewable energy comes either directly or indirectly from the sun. Sunlight, or solar energy, can be used directly for heating and lighting homes and other buildings, for generating electricity, and for hot water heating, solar cooling, and a variety of commercial and industrial uses. The sun's heat also drives the winds, whose energy, is captured with wind turbines. Then, the winds and the sun's heat cause water to evaporate. When this water vapor turns into rain or snow and flows downhill into rivers or streams, its energy can be captured using hydroelectric power. Along with the rain and snow, sunlight causes plants to grow. The organic matter that makes up those plants is known as biomass. Biomass can be used to produce electricity, transportation fuels, or chemicals. The use of biomass for any of these purposes is called bioenergy. Hydrogen also can be found in many organic compounds, as well as water. It's the most abundant element on the Earth. But it doesn't occur naturally as a gas. It's always combined with other elements, such as with oxygen to make water. Once separated from another element, hydrogen can be burned as a fuel or converted into electricity. Not all renewable energy resources come from the sun. Geothermal energy taps the Earth's internal heat for a variety of uses, including electric power production, and the heating and cooling of buildings. And the energy of the ocean's tides come from the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun upon the Earth. In fact, ocean energy comes from a number of sources. In addition to tidal energy, there's the energy of the ocean's waves, which are driven by both the tides and the winds. The sun also warms the surface of the ocean more than the ocean depths, creating a temperature difference that can be used as an energy source. All these forms of ocean energy can be used to produce electricity.

Predictable limits are key to fairness and education because I can’t do in depth prep for the specific aff if there are 100s of affs to prepare for. 

Limits are an independent voter. Harris 13
Scott Harris (Director of Debate at U Kansas, 2006 National Debate Coach of the Year, Vice President of the American Forensic Association, 2nd speaker at the NDT in 1981). “This ballot.” 5 April 2013. CEDA Forums. http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4762.0;attach=1655
I understand that there has been some criticism of Northwestern’s strategy in this debate round.  This criticism is premised on the idea that they ran framework instead of engaging Emporia’s argument about home and the Wiz.  I think this criticism is unfair.  Northwestern’s framework argument did engage Emporia’s argument.  Emporia said that you should vote for the team that performatively and methodologically made debate a home.  Northwestern’s argument directly clashed with that contention.  My problem in this debate was with aspects of the execution of the argument rather than with the strategy itself.  It has always made me angry in debates when people have treated topicality as if it were a less important argument than other arguments in debate. Topicality is a real argument.  It is a researched strategy.  It is an argument that challenges many affirmatives.  The fact that other arguments could be run in a debate or are run in a debate does not make topicality somehow a less important argument.  In reality, for many of you that go on to law school you will spend much of your life running topicality arguments because you will find that words in the law matter.  The rest of us will experience the ways that word choices matter in contracts, in leases, in writing laws and in many aspects of our lives.  Kansas ran an affirmative a few years ago about how the location of a comma in a law led a couple of districts to misinterpret the law into allowing individuals to be incarcerated in jail for two days without having any formal charges filed against them.  For those individuals the location of the comma in the law had major consequences.  Debates about words are not insignificant.  Debates about what kinds of arguments we should or should not be making in debates are not insignificant either.  The limits debate is an argument that has real pragmatic consequences.  I found myself earlier this year judging Harvard’s eco-pedagogy aff and thought to myself—I could stay up tonight and put a strategy together on eco-pedagogy, but then I thought to myself—why should I have to?  Yes, I could put together a strategy against any random argument somebody makes employing an energy metaphor but the reality is there are only so many nights to stay up all night researching.  I would like to actually spend time playing catch with my children occasionally or maybe even read a book or go to a movie or spend some time with my wife.  A world where there are an infinite number of affirmatives is a world where the demand to have a specific strategy and not run framework is a world that says this community doesn’t care whether its participants have a life or do well in school or spend time with their families.  I know there is a new call abounding for interpreting this NDT as a mandate for broader more diverse topics.  The reality is that will create more work to prepare for the teams that choose to debate the topic but will have little to no effect on the teams that refuse to debate the topic.  Broader topics that do not require positive government action or are bidirectional will not make teams that won’t debate the topic choose to debate the topic.  I think that is a con job.  I am not opposed to broader topics necessarily.  I tend to like the way high school topics are written more than the way college topics are written.  I just think people who take the meaning of the outcome of this NDT as proof that we need to make it so people get to talk about anything they want to talk about without having to debate against topicality or framework arguments are interested in constructing a world that might make debate an unending nightmare and not a very good home in which to live.  Limits, to me, are a real impact because I feel their impact in my everyday existence.

Default to small limits for LD because (a) the massive number of philosophies means aff has large limits already (b) Massive limits exclude small-school debaters because there is not enough time in the day for one person to cut 100 case negs. 

3. Stock ground. The core of the literature is on fossil fuels versus sustainability. Bray focusing on a minor reform to a renewable resource, he skirts core neg ground like oil disads, politics, etc.

D. Fairness comes first because it’s a gateway issue to deciding the better debater. Drop the debater because (a) my time was already skewed, (b) losses are key to deterrence, and (c) a 1AR restart with a brand new plan is too late to ensure clash or topic education.

Evaluate T on competing interps because reasonability is arbitrary and requires judge intervention.

Aff only gets RVIs if they concede the violation, the voter, and that theory is evaluated through competing interps. 4 reasons.

1. It’s key to reciprocity because I meets, reject the arg, and reasonability make RVIs a nib for the aff which gives the aff a 4 to 1 advantage on theory.

2. Only offense to a counter-interp can trigger an RVI. If the aff doesn’t win that my interp is worse for debate, then it makes no sense to vote aff to deter it.

3. If the aff is going all in on theory with an RVI, they already have a reciprocal source of offense, so I meets and reasonability aren’t key.

4. Double-bind. If the I meet or reject the arg is false, the aff doesn’t need them. If the I meet or reject the arg is true, aff doesn’t need the RVI.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate AO Andrew ODonahue | Judge: Jonathan Alston and Shadman Zaman
AT I meet -- Forests aren't renewable

Forests are renewable. FL 12
Forest Learning. “Why is timber a renewable resource?” March 12th, 2012. http://www.forestlearning.edu.au/forests-sustainability/wood-renewable/timber-as-a-renewable-resource
Wood is the most widely available building material derived from a renewable source. Sustainable management of forests and plantations is the only efficient way to meet society’s demand for wood in perpetuity. Forests themselves are able to be replenished, since the major inputs that contribute to their growth are sunlight (energy), air, water, and nutrients from soils in which they grow. It is therefore vital that forests are carefully managed to avoid over-harvesting and that man’s intervention does not reduce the sustainable, long term potential of the resource. If we ensure that forests are regenerated after each harvest of wood products, they will be around for future generations to use and enjoy. 

AT Neg must defend policy option

Counter-Interp -- The neg can read a kritik that challenges the human/nature dichotomy.

The aff transforms debate into a rigged game. Spanos 11
William V. Spanos, Interview With Kdebate.com, http://www.kdebate.com/spanos.html, Distinguished Professor, English Department, University of Binghamton. (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1964)
The reason I asked you that question is because I've always thought that the debate system is a rigged process, by which I mean, in your terms, it's framed to exclude anything that the frame can't contain and domesticate. To frame also means to "prearrange" so that a particular outcome is assured," which also means the what's outside of the frame doesn't stand a chance: it is "framed" from the beginning. It was, above all, the great neo-Marxist Louis Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" - the perspective or frame of reference fundamental to knowledge production in democratic-capitalist societies -- that enabled me to see what the so called distinterestness of empirical inquiry is blind to or, more accurately willfully represses in its Panglossian pursuit of the truth.  Althusser's analysis of the "problematic" is too complicated to be explained in a few words. (Anyone interested will find his extended explanation in his introduction --"From Capital* to Marx's Philosophy" -- to his and Etienne Balibar's book *Reading Capital*. It will suffice here to say that we in the modern West have been *inscribed* by our culture --"ideological state apparatuses (educational institutions, media, and so on)-- by a system of knowledge production that goes by the name of "disinterested inquiry," but in reality the "truth" at which it arrives is a construct, a fiction, and thus ideological. And this is precisely because, in distancing itself from earthly being --the transience of time --this system of knowledge production privileges the panoptic eye in the pursuit of knowledge. This is what Althusser means by the "problematic": a frame that allows the perceiver to see only what it wants to see. Everything that is outside the frame doesn't exist to the perceiver. He /she is blind to it. It's nothing or, at the site of humanity, it's nobody. Put alternatively, the problematic -- this frame, as the very word itself suggests, *spatializes* or *reifies* time -- reduces what is a living, problematic force and not a thing into a picture or thing so that it can be comprehended (taken hold of, managed), appropriated, administered, and exploited by the disinterested inquirer. 

Strat Skew – Ks are core neg strat because they check back unpredictable affs. I need Ks that can mitigate aff offense because the aff chooses the area debate and thus will always have more specific substantive research. 

The abuse on T outweighs; I was forced into reading a generic K because his aff is so unfair. If the K is abusive, that’s a reason to prefer my interp on T.

?
Their exclusion of the kritik is a form of privileging statist discourse. This polemicism destroys fairness and meaningful education.
Foucault 71
Michel, Prof @ College de France, Foucault Reader,  pp. 381-3
Q. Why is it that you don't engage in polemics? In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more infonnation, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, etc. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse he is tied to what he has said earlier! and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of the other. Questions and answers depend on a game-a game that is at once pleasant and difficult-in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of the dialogue. The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be, not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause she has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied. Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth. Very schematically, it seems to me that today we can recognize the presence in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ig­ nored, or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attach­ ments that establish it as culpable. As in judiciary practice, polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it ex­ amines a case; it isn' t dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the in­ fraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the tru/ th in the form of his judgment and by virtue of the authority he ha? conferred on himself. But it is the political model that is the most powerful today. Polemics defines alliances, recruits par­ tisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests, against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears. Of course, the reactivation, in polemics, of these political, judiciary, or religious practices is nothing more than theater. One gesticulates: anathemas, excommunications, condemna­ tions, battles, victories, and defeats are no ?ore than ways of speaking, after all . And yet, in the order of discourse, they are also ways of acting which are not without consequence. There are the sterilizing effects: Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic? And how could it be otherwise, given that here the interlocutors are incited, not to advance, not to take more and more risks in what they say, but to fall back continually on the rights that they claim, on their legitimacy, which they must defend, and on the affirmation of their innocence? There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one's killer instinct as possible. But it is really dangerous to make anyone believe that he can gain access to the truth by such paths, and thus to validate, even if in a merely symbolic form, the real political practices that could be warranted by it. Let us imagine, for a moment, that a magic wand is waved and one of the two adversaries in a polemic is given the ability to exercise all the power he likes over the other. One doesn't even have to imagine it: one has only to look at what happened during the debates in the USSR over linguistics or genetics not long ago. Were these merely aberrant deviations from what was supposed to be the correct discussion? Not at all: they were the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended. 

Wiki solves predictability. This K is disclosed.

Topic education. This K is key to analyzing the entirety of the topic lit as opposed to superficially assuming the dominance of humanity. This is the most important form of policy education.

Smith 97
Steve Smith, Professor of political science at the University of Wales. Review of International Studies, 1997
In summary, I think that Wallace fundamentally misrepresents the relationship between theory and practice. His article works very effectively, but only because of its internal logical and political structure. By his setting up of two alternatives (cooption or scholasticism) the logical structure of the article performs a disciplining function by placing anyone outside of his logic of the policy–theory relationship in a predefined position of being self-righteous, self-indulgent, opposed to empirical work, too detached from the world of practice and too fond of theory. Note also the very revealing way in which those defined as having to ‘struggle with the dilemmas of power’ are policy-makers; there are massive normative and ethical assumptions at work here, ones that undermine his very notion of theory as explanatory and reveal his political project. The trouble is that Wallace’s logical structure is a textual construction and is therefore never subjected to any self-critical analysis in the article. My worry is that his prescriptions would make academic International Relations a servant of the state, responding to today’s headlines. Agreeing with Wallace means that academics will run the risk of having to work within the agenda of the policy community, of being unable to stand back and examine the moral, ethical and political implications of that choice. Giving policy advice is not the problem; the problem is if those who give it are unaware of the extent to which they are standing on the policy conveyor-belt of the state. It means problem-solving, it means taking the ‘givens’ of policy-makers as the starting points of analysis. It means walking the thin line between influence and fitting the values of policymakers. Clearly the discipline wants and needs to give advice on policy, but to whom? Is doing so for policy-makers a requirement for academics in discharging their responsibility to the state? My worry is that policy advice all too often means talking to governments; unfortunately, they may not be the right people to talk to if one’s concern is really with ‘those who have to struggle with the dilemmas of power’. And, crucially, are policy-makers listening to ideas or are they searching for an intellectual justification for their existing values? Ultimately, Wallace’s picture worries me because he has a very restricted view of politics and its relationship to academia. Politics for Wallace is a far more limited activity than I think it is, and that is why I find no academic activity more political or ethical than showing the epistemological assumptions of International Relations theory. For me it is not so much a question of speaking truth to power as of showing how various versions of the power/truth relationship operate between civil society and the state. In that relationship it may well be that those who espouse a restrictive view of theory are the ones who are hiding behind walls, preaching sermons of self-righteousness, and ultimately acting as the discipliners of the discipline. For all of us interested in international relations, Wallace has raised important questions concerning our responsibilities and our self-awareness. I hope that this reply has shown why the picture is not quite as simple as his beguiling argument suggests and why, ultimately, it may be impossible for ‘truth to speak to power’ in the liberal way that he suggests. After all, if ‘truth’ itself only gets meaning from the regimes of truth within which it operates, then how can it speak to power when it is itself a construction of those same power relationships? How do we know that it is truth rather than power that we speak when we are speaking to policy-makers? Surely the task of academics is to show how these very relationships between truth and power, and between the empirical and the theoretical, operate. That, rather than the search for influence within the policy-making community, is the ultimate ethical and political engagement with the civil society in which we work and to which we are responsible.

Err neg. Aff speaks first and last, and has infinite prep time. Squo theory norms are already aff biased, and EP lit favors the aff.

Critiquing anthropocentrism in educational settings is key to opening up possibilities for new forms of thought. Bell and Russell 2k write
We come to critical pedagogy with a background in environmental thought and education. Of primary concern and interest to us are relationships among humans and the “more-than-human world” (Abram, 1996), the ways in which those relationships are constituted and prescribed in mo- dern industrial society, and the implications and consequences of those constructs. As a number of scholars and nature advocates have argued, the many manifestations of the current environmental crisis (e.g., species extinction, toxic contamination, ozone depletion, topsoil depletion, climate change, acid rain, deforestation) reflect predominant Western concepts of nature, nature cast as mindless matter, a mere resource to be exploited for human gain (Berman, 1981; Evernden, 1985; Merchant, 1980). An ability to respond adequately to the situation therefore rests, at least in part, on a willingness to critique prevailing discourses about nature and to consider alternative representations (Cronon, 1996; Evernden, 1992; Hayles, 1995). To this end, poststructuralist analysis has been and will continue to be invaluable.¶ It would be an all-too-common mistake to construe the task at hand as one of interest only to environmentalists. We believe, rather, that disrupting the social scripts that structure and legitimize the human domination of nonhuman nature is fundamental not only to dealing with environmental issues, but also to examining and challenging oppressive social arrangements. The exploitation of nature is not separate from the exploitation of human groups. Ecofeminists and activists for environ- mental justice have shown that forms of domination are often intimately connected and mutually reinforcing (Bullard, 1993; Gaard, 1997; Lahar, 1993; Sturgeon, 1997). Thus, if critical educators wish to resist various oppressions, part of their project must entail calling into question, among other things, the instrumental exploitive gaze through which we humans distance ourselves from the rest of nature (Carlson, 1995).¶ For this reason, the various movements against oppression need to be aware of and supportive of each other. In critical pedagogy, however, the exploration of questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality has proceeded so far with little acknowledgement of the systemic links between human oppressions and the domination of nature. The more-than-human world and human relationships to it have been ignored, as if the suffering and exploitation of other beings and the global ecological crisis were somehow irrelevant. Despite the call for attention to voices historically absent from traditional canons and narratives (Sadovnik, 1995, p. 316), nonhuman beings are shrouded in silence. This silence characterizes even the work of writers who call for a rethinking of all culturally positioned essentialisms.¶ Like other educators influenced by poststructuralism, we agree that there is a need to scrutinize the language we use, the meanings we deploy, and the epistemological frameworks of past eras (Luke and Luke, 1995, p. 378). To treat social categories as stable and unchanging is to reproduce the prevailing relations of power (Britzman et al., 1991, p. 89). What would it mean, then, for critical pedagogy to extend this investigation and critique to include taken-for-granted understandings of “human,” “animal,” and “nature”?¶ This question is difficult to raise precisely because these understandings are taken for granted. The anthropocentric bias in critical pedagogy manifests itself in silence and in the asides of texts. Since it is not a topic of discussion, it can be difficult to situate a critique of it. Following feminist analyses, we find that examples of anthropocentrism, like examples of gender symbolization, occur “in those places where speakers reveal the assumptions they think they do not need to defend, beliefs they expect to share with their audiences” (Harding, 1986, p. 112).¶ Take, for example, Freire’s (1990) statements about the differences between “Man” and animals. To set up his discussion of praxis and the importance of “naming” the world, he outlines what he assumes to be shared, commonsensical beliefs about humans and other animals. He defines the boundaries of human membership according to a sharp, hier- archical dichotomy that establishes human superiority. Humans alone, he reminds us, are aware and self-conscious beings who can act to fulfill the objectives they set for themselves. Humans alone are able to infuse the world with their creative presence, to overcome situations that limit them, and thus to demonstrate a “decisive attitude towards the world” (p. 90).¶ Freire (1990, pp. 87–91) represents other animals in terms of their lack of such traits. They are doomed to passively accept the given, their lives “totally determined” because their decisions belong not to themselves but to their species. Thus whereas humans inhabit a “world” which they create and transform and from which they can separate themselves, for animals there is only habitat, a mere physical space to which they are “organically bound.”¶ To accept Freire’s assumptions is to believe that humans are animals only in a nominal sense. We are different not in degree but in kind, and though we might recognize that other animals have distinct qualities, we as humans are somehow more unique. We have the edge over other crea- tures because we are able to rise above monotonous, species-determined biological existence. Change in the service of human freedom is seen to be our primary agenda. Humans are thus cast as active agents whose very essence is to transform the world – as if somehow acceptance, appreciation, wonder, and reverence were beyond the pale.¶ This discursive frame of reference is characteristic of critical pedagogy. The human/animal opposition upon which it rests is taken for granted, its cultural and historical specificity not acknowledged. And therein lies the problem. Like other social constructions, this one derives its persuasiveness from its “seeming facticity and from the deep investments individuals and communities have in setting themselves off from others” (Britzman et al., 1991, p. 91). This becomes the normal way of seeing the world, and like other discourses of normalcy, it limits possibilities of taking up and con- fronting inequities (see Britzman, 1995). The primacy of the human enter- prise is simply not questioned.¶ Precisely how an anthropocentric pedagogy might exacerbate the en- vironmental crisis has not received much consideration in the literature of critical pedagogy, especially in North America. Although there may be passing reference to planetary destruction, there is seldom mention of the relationship between education and the domination of nature, let alone any sustained exploration of the links between the domination of nature and other social injustices. Concerns about the nonhuman are relegated to environmental education. And since environmental education, in turn, remains peripheral to the core curriculum (A. Gough, 1997; Russell, Bell, and Fawcett, 2000), anthropocentrism passes unchallenged.1¶ p. 190-192

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: Finals | Opponent: Collegiate AO | Judge: Paul Zhou, Adam Bennett, Monisha Reginald, Jerry Chen, Student Vote
TURN -- Community based forestry kills indigenous solidarity. It leads to internal resistance through tree theft. Klooster 2 writes
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
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.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Bronx GM | Judge: Norberto Romero, Jason Zhou, Devin Kasinki
I begin with a poem by Arrais in 2010 (writes)
Ubuntu is a very peculiar African word
It has so many meanings, as many as the breeds of men
For to know its true meaning, we would have to ask one of them
Of the hundred that left Africa to explore the world
The Adam’s and Eve’s of our age
The mothers and fathers of men

Ubuntu means that a hunter wouldn’t need to ask for food
When passing by the villages of another people
Cause we hunt to survive
But it’s in the sharing, it’s in the kindness to each other
That we actually find that precious feeling
A breeze of joy
A pleasure to be alive

Ubuntu means that no man is an island
That we are like continents, looking to sail back
Looking to unite the shores of our kingdoms
To form once again the Pangaea
A place with no foreigners, no rulers and no slaves
Where roads connect every city and every heart
And nobody see any frontier

Ubuntu means that the age of men is just a blink
In the eyes of eternity
That we are but a link in the web of life
Billions came before us, billions are yet to pass
To walk in the long plains and to climb the hills of Africa
To look at the grass, and the flowers, and the trees
And understand that no daylight is the same
And all things float like dust in gentile wind, unbound
The world goes around

Ubuntu means that no man can live in cages
Be it prisons or dogmas
We must look to discover, to uncover, to enlight
To love and to change, to move millions with thoughts
Like the Gandhis, the Mandelas, the Kings
Cause this world is no kingdom for just one ruler
But we are all rulers of our own lands
We should exchange our knowledge and wisdom
And never bullets and bombs
Ubuntu means that men should work together
Walking beside, holding hands
Facing the horizon like the old hunters
Yet, no more to fight in the war of hunger an dpain
But to reach a precious trophy
The price of self-knowledge
A distinct vision of the true meaning of the world

Poetry is the best form of performance. You should prefer it to the question the aff poses of how we need to live our lives, and instead embrace poetry as part of an ambivalence to life itself. Fernando 10 writes
Jeremy Fernando, The Suicide Bomber and her gift of death, 2010, pg 213 - _, DA: 1/24/12
The poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy – a being who since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. If we recall the words of Paul Cenan, the words that we turned to earlier, that of “poetry does not impose itself, it exposes itself,” one’s instinctive reaction – the thought that comes to mind without thinking, without knowing – is the question ‘expose itself to what?’ Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a naïve question like that, it would be to our detriment if we choose not to attend it, not to attend a possibility that sometimes lies in the simplest of questions, the silly questions, as it were. After all, if one exposes oneself, it can only be so if there was something, or someone to expose oneself to. There has to be a witness to the exposure, otherwise there would not be one at all. Hence, exposure is always a state of establishing a relationality with another. It is not a relationality that seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another. And this is why poetry continues to menace the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge; without an imposition, the borders are not drawn, the limits are not set. And whilst not forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier – yes there are only always rules to seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bounded by grammar – the lack of a boundary also always opens more possibilities than we can account for. One may not even be overstating if one claims that at this point, all accounting systems which are set up to predict, to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities – fail. Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening itself to response, any response, poetry “always risks what it cannot avoid appealing to in reply, namely, recompense and retribution. It risks the exchange that it might expect but is at the same time unable to count on. Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact, one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the poem, is a form of response. It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is going to get. Once the poem is set of, the poet remains completely blind to its effects. Once the bomb is set off, the suicide bomber s completely blind to its effects. It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is usually constituted as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question heard whenever there is an instance of a suicide bombing is ‘why would one give up her life when she has so much to live for? All attempts to provide an answer to the question are banal, as the very person that the answer attempt to address is dead; hence all answers are unverifiable. One has no choice but to admit that all reason eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of one’s cognition, is at the beyond of knowledge. Perhaps the only thing we can say is that she gives up her life in spite of the fact that she has so much to live for; after all, it is she who chooses to do so. Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally understand her, this is all we can say. Perhaps it is the fact that she remains an enigma that is her gift to us. It is the refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be flattened, exchanged, reproduced, that is her gift. And in that same spirit, it is not a gift that can be understood – this is not a gift that one can bring to the return-counter at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something more palatable, something easier, something more comfortable, more comforting. This is a gift that is unknowable, in full potential, always possible; perhaps always a gift that is to come. What continues to trouble us is that this gift – as with all gifts – comes with an obligation to reciprocate, an obligation to respond. So even though this is an objectless gift – and to compound it a gift that we might not even begin to comprehend, or even know is present – we are always already within the realm of reciprocation. This is the point where the eternal question of the serpent, that of what did she mean’, returns to haunt us, along with the other question of responding, and attempting an appropriate response at that; the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then we are back to the situation of effacement. Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting Lenin in and within a situation. If the question of ‘what is to be done’ is a situational question, there can be no answer outside of the situation – at the point of uttering both the question and the answer, we are always immanent to the story, in the making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other – and more than that, each answer is at best a provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that at least momentarily, one must be able to “step back” as it were, be exterior to the question, to situation. Hence, each answer, each definition to the question can only be accomplished as a more or less provisory, more or less violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but never simply interminable or infinite. For a dynamic such as this can only be conceived as a series of highly conflictual determinations, as a movement of ambivalence, in which the other is always being seized as a function of the same, all the while eluding this capture. The other becomes the intimate condition of the possibility of the game, remaining all the while out of bounds. It is the ambivalence that is the key in this provisionary relationship between the question and the situation; a relationship between the question and the situation; a relationality that Sam Weber points out is constantly unsure of itself, as we can never be in a position that is totally ‘immanent’ to the stories we tell because – here as elsewhere – the stories are not immanent to themselves. This is why we cannot be entirely in a game or story, any more than we can be squarely outside the stories we tell. But if in dreams, as in popular narratives, “there is no place one can go to photograph the whole scene,” it is not because, as we read in Just Games, “there is no exteriority,” but because in a certain sense, there is only that; as soon as the unconscious is in play, we are dealing with an exteriority that tries to exclude itself, in other words to internalize, incorporate, appropriate itself, without managing to do it. But if we can never succeed in this impossible effort, neither can we renounce it, and it is precisely this double impossibility that makes the game of unconscious both imprecise (because it is never completely determinable) and ambivalent (because it is always in the process of arresting itself, of revolting around a “fixation”). In all of this, there is always already an echo of the strange pairing of despair and hope in the Beckettian formulation of not being able to go on, but yet having to at the same time. We also hear this strange paradox resound in Wolfgang Schirmacher’s wonderful response to aporia, one that he formulates in his deceptively simple maxim of “Just Living”. This is not a over-arching philosophy to life – one that frames, guides, or attempts to be a framework – but the exact opposite; it is a response to life itself. All you can ever do is choose, respond, life – live your life; live your life; life as a concept, life in general, will take care of itself. In other words, in order to live life, you have to actually distance yourself, at least momentarily, from life as an idea, and actually be ambivalent to life. When one is asked how to life, the only answer – which is at best a provisional response – you just do. And perhaps it is this ambivalence towards the answer – of having to come up with a provisional answer whilst knowing that it is only provisional at the same time – that allows one to maintain a proper distance as it were, towards the answer, towards a final solution. This proper distance is also the space of irony, where one recognizes the multitude of possibilities that rest within every singularity, where each possibility – or meaning – is but one of the multiplicities, where every interpretation like narration, is not simply external… it is also an active participant (while still distorting it). Hence, the story, the tale, is inseparable from a process of interpretation that in turn implies a play (and a relation) of force. In maintaining this proper distance, there is also the maintaining of a certain tension between unity and disunity – that characterizes all games as such. And it is this tension that maintains the space between, the site of negociation, and the continual negotiation; this tension is precisely the tension of relationality itself. When poetry “exposes itself” it is exposing itself to this very tension, to the possibility of relationality, all the while maintaining this ambivalence, and ambiguity, as to the exact nature of that relationality. The significance of this exposure, this ambiguity, comes to light if we recall Jean Baudrillard and his lamentation that ‘the possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere’. This disappearance as he posits, is due to the “viral loss of determinancy” that of transparency, of utter and absolute exchandability; in other words, when everything is like everything lose and one can no longer distinguish between objects any longer. It is this lack of distance between objects that results in them disappearing into each other, into meaninglessness. For, the very name for this ambivalence, this proper distance itself, is metaphor. It is metaphor that allows us to name, to call, and to witness. And it is also metaphor that doesn’t allow the names to sink into one another, doesn’t allow names to equate with each other, prevents them from disappearing into utter nothingness. Perhaps it might be momentarily disturbing to consider the suicide bomber in this lift, as the one that remains to remind us of the impossibility of determining, the impossibility of knowing who or even what (s)he is. But in the spirit of thinking, recalling the bravery needed to think that Georges Bataille invokes, one must be willing to consider this possibility, whilst never resting in any surety, or finality, that this is a solution of any sort. In this sense, all one can do at this point is post the possibility that the suicide bomber is our remainder in these times of instant answers, a reminder of the impossibility of answering. After all, one must never forget that we can only named as such after her death. Hence, she is always already named in absence, named in the absence of all referentiality, where all possibility of legitimizing the name which requires the knowledge of her subjective will – is lost; (s)he is named as a suicide bomber even though there is nothing we can say of her except the fact that she is dead. 

Fernando applied to the aff. He said the AC was a suicide bombing of the topic, and Fernando says the poet is like the suicide bomber.

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Walt Whitman JL | Judge: Grant Weisberg, Mira Chernick
Util is an axiomatic truth which proves coherence isn’t key. Harris 10 writes
Harris, Sam (NYT Bestselling author, BA in phil from Stanford, PhD in neuroscience from UCLA). Toward a Science of Morality.
So, while it is possible to say that one can't move from "is" to "ought," we should be honest about how we get to "is" in the first place. Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down. When I say, "Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place? So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs. 

Thus the standard is maximizing happiness.

Second, morality must take the form of a universal rule. Singer 09 writes
Peter Singer Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton, “The Groundwork of Utilitarian Morals: Reconsidering Hare’s Argument for Utilitarianism,” draft prepared for the Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: “The Foundations of Morality,” NYU Philosophy Department, November 7, 2009, 34.
When I prescribe  something, using moral language, my prescription it commits me to a substantive moral judgment about all relevantly similar cases. This includes hypothetical cases in which I am in a different position from my actual one. So to make a moral judgment, I must put myself in the position of the other person affected by my proposed action – or to be more precise, in the position of all those affected by my action. Whether I can accept the judgment – that is, whether I can prescribe it universally – will then depend on whether I could accept it if I had to live the lives of all those affected by the action.

Universalizability justifies util. Turns coherence because it proves non-util is internally contradictory. Singer 93
Peter Singer, “Practical Ethics,” Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 13-14
The universal aspect of ethics, I suggest, does provide a persuasive, although not conclusive, reason for taking a broadly utilitarian position. My reason for suggesting this is as follows. In accepting that ethical judgments must be made from a universal point of view, I am accepting that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else. Thus my very natural concern that my own interests be looked after must, when I think ethically, be extended to the interests of others. Now, imagine that I am trying to decide between two possible courses of action – perhaps whether to eat all the fruits I have collected myself, or to share them with others. Imagine, too, that I am deciding in a complete ethical vacuum, that I know nothing of any ethical considerations – I am, we might say, in a pre-ethical stage of thinking. How would I make up my mind? One thing that would be still relevant would be how the possible courses of action will affect my interests. Indeed, if we define ‘interests’ broadly enough, so that we count anything people desire as in their interests (unless it is incompatible with another desire or desires), then it would seem that at this pre-ethical stage, only one’s own interests can be relevant to the decision. Suppose I then begin to think ethically, to the extent of recognizing that my own interests cannot count for more, simply because they are my own, than the interests of others. In place of my own interests, I now have to take into account the interests of all those affected by my decision. This requires me to weigh up all these interests and adopt the course of action most likely to maximize the interests of those affected.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 2 | Opponent: Bronx DM | Judge: Emily Massey, Catherine Tarsney

Framework and Poetry were also read, see disclosure vs Bronx GM

War metaphors are coercive ploys that map social reality onto a realm of militarism
Nuri ’09 (Dalia, Political Studies Department, Bar-Ilan University and Hadassah College, Jerusalem, “Friendly fire: war-normalizing metaphors in the Israeli political discourse,” Journal of Peace Education Vol. 6, No. 2, September 2009, 153–169) 

Combining principles of peace education and political discourse analysis, this study dwells on one powerful metaphorical mechanism engaged in by Israeli political leaders. The discursive phenomenon in question is what I call ‘war-normalizing meta- phors’. War-normalizing metaphors are metaphors that contain the potential to naturalize and legitimate the use of military power by creating a systematic analogy between war and objects that are far from the battlefield; for example, WAR IS A GAME, WAR IS SPORT, or WAR IS BUSINESS. The claim is that systematic use of war-normalizing metaphors frames war3 as a ‘normal’ phenomenon that is part of human nature and ordinary life and a situation that does not require any intervention or change. As such, war-normalizing metaphors are ‘discursive landmines’ that inflict harm on a culture of peace and should be eliminated from any political discourse. This article reports the findings of a case study of the war-normalizing metaphors employed by Israeli political leaders during 1967–1973. The metaphors in this case study were taken from a corpus of 40 speeches, articles and interviews authored by prominent Israeli political leaders. This period was characterized by several types of hostilities (two total wars, a War of Attrition and hundreds of terrorist attacks) as well as various kinds of peace initiatives (that all failed). It is important to note that in this period, the Israeli government had a monopoly over radio transmissions and the single national television channel (which began broadcasting in 1969). It also had crucial influence on the press. Political leaders, therefore, had unlimited access to the arenas available for shaping public opinion with respect to peace and conflict. While political discourse on peace and war, as defined here, usually evokes political support or political criticism, this article’s position is completely different. It aims to demonstrate the importance of educating political leaders in order to improve their awareness, sensitivity and rhetorical skills regarding war and peace discourse. Thus, the contribution of this research to the field of peace education is dual. First, it expands the audience targeted for peace education. Traditionally, peace education has favored students still located in the education system (McGlynn et al. 2004), with a focus on special school programs (see for example, Zeiger 2000; Arweck and Nesbitt 2008) or on higher education (see for example, Osborn 2000; Conley Tyler and Bretherton 2006). Teacher education for peace has also aroused scholarly research (see for example Koshmanova and Hapon 2007). In contrast, this study demonstrates the importance of peace education oriented directly toward political leaders. Second, while analysis of peace actions, peace movements and education programs for peace have captured a central place in the field of peace studies in general and in peace education in particular, research on the peace discourse and peace rhetoric has gained momentum only in the last 15 years (e.g., Schaffner and Wenden 1995; Bridgeman 2000; Morke and Pincus 2000; Salomon 2004; Cavin 2006; Friedrich 2007; Wenden 2007).4 Wenden (2003, 171) has succinctly summed up the crucial importance of ‘the linguistic factor’ in promoting a culture of peace: Since ideologies are expressed in text and talk, albeit indirectly, and since discourses also contribute to the construction and confirmation of already-present ideologies, it is essen- tial that we learn to look critically at discourse as a means of identifying these ideologies that challenge the achievement of a culture of peace...the linguistic factor be taken into account by scholars and researchers, policy makers and government planners, educators and activists in their attempts to deal with the problems of social...violence that challenge contemporary societies. The current research fits this orientation. The article opens with an overview of the conceptual framework and continues with a discussion of the concept war-normalizing metaphors. Following the method- ological section, the article analyzes the war-normalizing metaphors used in the Israeli political discourse between 1967 and 1973. Next is a section containing a short comparison of the war-normalizing metaphors applied in the Israeli political discourse during the 2006 Second Lebanon War. In the concluding section I suggest exploring the introduction of a peace-normalizing mechanism having its own metaphors so as to encourage a peace-oriented rhetorical consciousness among political and military leaders. The conceptual framework War and peace discourses function as effective mechanisms for sustaining relations of control within a national entity. The identification of political biases in these discourses opens a window to latent processes by which powerful groups attempt to influence public opinion and promote their agendas, in this case an aggressive political agenda. Researchers, especially critical linguists, have revealed the manipulative power of a line of new and old terms, concepts and metaphors regarding war and warfare e.g., ‘war on terror’ (Mazid 2007), ‘preventive war’ (Ferrari 2007), ‘surgical strike’ (Gavriely-Nuri 2008), ‘targeted killing’ (Silber forthcoming), ‘smart bomb’ (Muchnik forthcoming) and many others. Manipulation is not only a linguistic device: Socially, manipulation is defined as illegitimate domination confirming social inequality. Cognitively, manipulation as mind control involves the interference with processes of understanding, the formation of biased mental models and social representations. Discursively, manipulation generally involves the usual forms and formats of ideological discourse. (Van Dijk 2006) The manipulative powers of political metaphors in general and war metaphors in particular will be discussed below. Metaphors Metaphors have traditionally been studied by scholars in the fields of literature, rhet- oric and linguistics. For many years, this area of study was considered inappropriate for the analysis of social and political events. Curticapean (2006, 17) succinctly described this attitude: ‘They were deemed incompatible with reason (because meta- phors get in the way of clear ideas and plain truth) or, at best, garments of rational thought (ornaments which decorate texts without affecting their meaning).’ Advances in cognitive linguistics altered the narrow perception of metaphors in the latter part of the twentieth century. In their seminal study Metaphors we live by, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) challenged the traditional approach to metaphors and offered a coherent, systematic framework that became known as the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor. This theory essentially altered the status of metaphor from art to instrument, to a crucial device for the formation of concepts and the conceptualization of reality. Metaphor thus came to be perceived as inherent to human reasoning, and more than a figure of speech, it came to be viewed as a mode of thought. Lakoff and Johnson noted that metaphors can ‘create social reality and guide future action’: that they can behave like ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ (1980, 156). What is most relevant for the current study is the understanding that ‘ideological struggles are often a matter of fighting for one set of metaphors to become common- sense and “naturalized” as literal’ (Goatly 2002, 265) or, as often claimed: ‘Military strategists stress the importance of controlling the high ground; political strategists stress the importance of controlling the metaphor’ (Thompson 1996, 190). 

The internalization of militarism leads to pure war and extinction
Borg, Executive Director at Community Consulting Group, Graduate White Institiute Psychoanalystic Program, 2003, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.1 (2003) 57-67

Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer's concept of "pure war"refers to the potential of a culture to destroy itself completely (12). 2 We as psychoanalysts can—and increasingly must—explore the impact of this concept on our practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the inability to repress or dissociate their experience and awareness of the pure war condition. The realization of a patient's worst fears in actual catastrophic events has always been a profound enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, however, catastrophic events not only threaten friends, family, and neighbors; they also become the stuff of endless repetitions and dramatizations on radio, television, and Internet. 3 Such continual reminders of death and destruction affect us all. What is the role of the analyst treating patients who live with an ever-threatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of our cultural veneer? At the end of the First World War, the first "total war," Walter Benjamin observed that "nothing after the war remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body"(84). Julia Kristeva makes a similar note about our contemporary situation, "The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove that horror...can rage absolutely" (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging this same fragility and uncontainability, the French politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the context of World War I that "war is too serious to be confined to the military" (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer 15). Virilio and Lotringer gave the name "pure war"to the psychological condition that results when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments) that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this capacity sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously) to escape inevitable destruction—it requires a way out—but this enforces an irresolvable paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people believe in the external possibility—at least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight of the dread that pure war imposes—pure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state of preparation for absolute destruction and for personal, social, and cultural death. The Pure Warrior The philosophy (or practice) of "pure warriors," that is, of people who are preoccupied with the pure war condition of their society, is based on the perpetual failure within them of the dissociation and repression that allow others to function in a situation that is otherwise completely overwhelming. Joyce was one of those who lived on the border of life and death; she could not escape awareness of that dread dichotomy that most of us are at great pains to dissociate. She manifested the state of perpetual preparation that is the hallmark of pure war culture and of the insufficiently defended pure warrior, and also a constant awareness of the nearness of death in all its various forms. She understood quite well, for instance, that when people are institutionalized (as she had been on numerous occasions), "society is defining them as socially dead, and that at that point the essential task to be carried out is to help inmates to make their transition from social death to physical death" (Miller and Gwynne 74). Against this backdrop, Joyce sought psychoanalysis as a "new world," the place where she would break free from the deathly institutionalized aspects of her self, and begin her life anew. Her search for a "new world" included the possibility of a world that was not a pure war world—a prelapsarian Eden. Virilio and Lotringer state that "war exists in its preparation" (53). And Sun Tsu, who wrote over 2400 years ago and yet is often considered the originator of modern warfare, said in The Art of War, "Preparation everywhere means lack everywhere" (44). This means that when the members of a culture must be on guard on all fronts, the resources of that culture are necessarily scattered and taxed. The more defenses are induced and enacted, the more psychologically impoverished a culture (or a person) will be. In war-torn nations, resources like food, clothing, and materials for shelter may be scarce in the general population because they are shunted off to the military. Similarly, the hoarding of psychological resources and the constant alert status of the defense system are outcomes of existence in a pure war culture. We can see this scattering and scarcity of resources occurring already in the United States as billions of dollars are shunted from social services to war efforts and homeland security. In pure war cultures—that is, in cultures that enact a perpetual preparation for war—the notion of peace is itself a defensive fantasy, although to survive psychically we distract ourselves from such frightening stimuli as widespread terrorist activities and other events that demonstrate our pure war status. Pure war obliterates the distinction between soldier and citizen. We have all been drafted. According to Virilio and Lotringer, "All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it...War happens everywhere, but we no longer have the means of recognizing it" (42).

turns environment
Downey et al ’10 (Liam Downey is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental Degradation,” Organization Environment 2010 23: 417, http://oae.sagepub.com/content/23/4/417)

The evidence presented in this article clearly demonstrates that armed violence is associated with the extraction of many critical and noncritical natural resources, suggesting quite strongly that the natural resource base upon which industrial societies stand is constructed in large part through the use and threatened use of armed violence. The evidence also demonstrates that when armed violence is used to protect resource extraction activities, it is often employed in response to popular protest or rebellion against these activities. These findings, and the theoretical model set forth in this article, extend prior sociological thinking and research on the environment in several impor- tant ways. First, as we previously noted, very few environmental sociologists have examined armed violence and militarism, and those that have done so have generally restricted their atten- tion to the direct environmental consequences of weapons production, military activity, and war. Thus, this article establishes more clearly than prior environmental sociology research the degree to which armed violence underpins the current ecological crisis. Second, in identifying armed violence as an important mechanism promoting ecological unequal exchange, and theorizing that armed violence works in concert with other institutional, organizational, ideological, legal, and technological mechanisms to ensure core nation access to and control over vital natural resources, this study contributes to the literature on ecological unequal exchange, which has focused more attention on establishing the existence of ecological unequal exchange than on identifying the mechanisms responsible for it. Third, this article helps demonstrate that much of the armed violence associated with natural resource extraction is carried out by developing nation governments, mercenaries, and rebels. It also offers a theoretical argument for why developing nations are likely to use armed violence to achieve their resource extraction goals even when doing so promotes ecological unequal exchange and the continued domination of these nations by core nations.19 Thus, this article (a) provides a rationale for why developing nation governments sometimes use armed violence to achieve res- ource extraction goals that contradict their long term interests and (b) suggests that core nations and corporations are able to distance themselves from many violent actions that benefit them, actions that they might otherwise have to take themselves. The ability of core nations and corporations to distance themselves from extraction-related violence is potentially important because it likely allows these nations and corporations to divert blame for this violence (and the human rights abuses associated with it) away from themselves and to present their control over natural resources as the legitimate product of a just and rational world market. As a result, extraction-related armed violence carried out by developing nations may often help to legitimate core nations, core nation corporations, international trade and finance institutions, and the global economic order by stigmatizing developing nations and disas- sociating core nations, core nation corporations, and the institutions they control from the violent underpinnings of the global extractive industry.20 Clearly, more work needs to be done to fully substantiate these claims as well as many of the theoretical claims we make in the article. Nevertheless, as we state in the introduction, our goal in this article was not to empirically examine all of our theoretical claims. Instead, our goal was fourfold: to develop a new theoretical argument that links natural resource extraction, raw material transport, and environmental degradation to armed violence; to demonstrate that this link is theoretically and substantively important; to begin filling in the gaps in the ecological unequal exchange and environmental sociology literatures that we identified in our literature review; and to demonstrate that armed violence plays a critical role in facilitating natural resource extraction, without which ecological unequal exchange could not occur and much environmental degradation would not occur. We have, therefore, achieved the goals we set for ourselves at the begin- ning of the article. More importantly, when one combines the evidence presented in this article with prior sociological research on ecological unequal exchange and the direct environmental consequences of armed violence, militarism, and war, it quickly becomes apparent that armed violence and the environmental degradation associated with it are intimately woven into the everyday lives of core nation citizens through the purchases they make and the fuels they consume.21 It also becomes apparent that armed violence is a key driver of the global ecological crisis and that this is likely the case because other key drivers of natural resource exploitation, such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and global marketplace, cannot, on their own, guarantee core nation access to and control over vital natural resources. This, of course, suggests that armed violence is a serious environmental problem regardless of whether, in any specific instance, it is used, threatened, or merely implied. It also suggests that environmentalists and environmental sociologists have to examine and address armed violence and other resource extraction mechanisms simultaneously and in concert with other macro- and micro-level drivers of ecological degradation if they are to fully understand and solve the global ecological crisis. In addition, because the effective use of armed violence is predicated on the existence of inequality and power differences between social groups and/or nations, it further suggests that inequality and power are key drivers of environmental degradation. This claim is, of course, consistent with much environmental sociology research. Finally, it suggests that the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and global marketplace are violent institutions not just in their effects but also because they require the use and threatened use of armed violence (by others) to achieve their resource extraction and related capital accumulation goals. This has important implications not only for environmental sociology but also for the study of globalization, markets, and the inter- national trade and finance institutions that undergird the global economy.

Rhetoric militarizes even the smallest aspects of society – creates rampant structural warfare
Graham ‘6 (Stephen, Prof. of Cities and Society @ Newcastle U., “Urban metabolism as target: Contemporary war as forced demodernization” In The Nature Of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and The Politics Of Urban Metabolism, pp. 250)

CONCLUSION
Infrastructure—the boring stuff that binds us all—is not irrelevant to the business of fighting terrorism. It is the foundation of our future security.  (Klein 200:23)
Three conclusions are evident from this chapter. The first is that the everyday systems of urban infrastructure upon which all urbanites continuously depend have now become  central sites of geopolitical struggle. From the 9/11, Madrid, and London terrorist attacks;  through the (still largely chimerical) discourses of cyberterror; to the central place of  forced demodernization within contemporary US and Israeli military doctrine: the ability  to use, and pervert, everyday urban technics through political violence has become a  driving force in contemporary political strategy. Forcibly destroying or manipulating the  complex connectivities that urban technics sustain, the doctrines of both terrorists and  state military theorists increasingly centre on the coercive powers of forced  demodernization. Given the central role of urban infrastructures in mediating processes of  urban metabolism—in allowing Nature to be continually metabolized into Society and  Culture—the effects of such targeting, whilst usually less obvious than those of  bombing—are dramatic and deadly.
The proliferation of state infrastructural violence, in particular, forces us to reconsider  the very notion of war. It suggests that potentially boundless and continuous landscapes  of conflict, risk and unpredictable attack are currently emerging, as the everyday technics  of urban life that are so usually taken for granted and ignored become key geopolitical  sites through their use as mechanisms for the projection of organized, structural  demodernization. Increasingly, such interventions are occurring from a distance, as the  infrastructural connections themselves become the site either of violence (as with 9/11,  the Madrid bombs, “cyber-terror”, and state-backed “computer network attack’) or  demodernization (as with the systematic demodernizations in Kosovo, Iraq, and  Palestine). Indeed, there are signs that, in globalizing urban societies, which rely utterly  and continuously on complex, multi-layered and often ignored technical systems, war  becomes a strategy of deliberate “decyborganization” and demodernization through  orchestrated assaults on everyday, networked technics (Luke 2004).
Such notions of war being literally “unleashed” from the boundaries of time and  space—what Paul James has termed “metawar” (2003)—pushes a two-pronged doctrine  to the centre of (particularly US) geopolitical strategy. On the one hand, this centres on  the defence of everyday “critical” infrastructures in the “homeland” through improving  its “resilience” to attack and manipulation and re-inscribing national,and urban, borders  that were previously becoming more and more porous (Kaplan 2003). On the other, it  involves the development of capabilities to systematically degrade, or at least control, the  infrastructural connectivity, modernity, and geopolitical potential of the purported enemy,  again, increasingly from afar. Such a strategy is, in essence:  
war in the most general possible sense;war that reaches into the tiniest  details of daily life, reengineering the most basic arrangements of travel  and communications in a time when everyday life, in a mobile and  interconnected society, is increasingly organized around these very  arrangements.  (Agre 2001:5)
The problem with such strategies, of course, is that they implicitly push for a deepening  militarization of all aspects of contemporary urban societies. Everything from the design  of subways, through the topology of water networks, to the thickness of aeroplane doors  and the software that makes electricity systems work, becomes a site of subtle  militarization. War, in this broadest sense, suggests Phil Agre (2001), becomes a  continuous, distanciated event, without geographical limits, that is relaid live, 24/7, on  TV and the Internet. Here domains of “war” blur into those of “peace”. Instead, replacing  such binaried landscapes are continuous  time-spaces dominated by discourses of  “security”, which saturate, and militarize, the tiniest details of everyday urban life.  Certainly, many US political and military elites are currently perpetuating such  discourses of endless, boundless war as part of the construction of post 9/11 states of  emergency and the so-called “war on terror” (Agamben 2002).
Our second conclusion is that the very real risk here is that the “securitization” of  network-based urban societies against this new notion of war becomes such an  overpowering obsession that it is used to legitimize a re-engineering of the everyday  systems that are purportedly now so exposed to the endless, sourceless, boundless threat.  There is already considerable evidence to support Agamben’s view that “security thus  imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity” (2002:1). He even argues that the  imperative of “security” is beginning to overwhelm other, historic functions of nation  states that were built up over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (such as social  welfare, education, health, economic regulation, planning). “What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth  century”, suggests Agamben, “now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation”  (Agamben 2002:1).
Our final conclusion is that it is imperative that theorists and analysts of the  geographies and geopolitics of contemporary warfare address the intersections of  infrastructural warfare and forced demodernization with much more theoretical and  empirical vigour than has thus been the case. As King and Martin suggest, “work in international relations in political science and related social science disciplines almost  always ignores all but the most direct publichealth implications of military conflict”  (2001:2). The realities of “war on public health”, and the geo-politics of state-backed  efforts to ensure that entire societies endure the immiseration of what Agamben (1998)  has called “bare life,” tend to be overwhelmingly ignored in social, political and media  analyses of war. This is because both media and analytical attention tend to turn, capriciously, to the formal, mediatized, violence, and the most obvious “collateral”  casualties of the “next” war. The wider neglect of networked infrastructures in the social  and political sciences compounds this systematic ignoring of state-backed infrastructural  warfare (Graham and Marvin 2001).

The alternative is to endorse the AC minus the “suicide bomber” war metaphor.

The K comes first. The metaphor controls the framing of the aff
Oppermann and Spencer ’13 (Kai Oppermann, University of Cologne, and, Alexander Spencer Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, “Thinking Alike? Salience and Metaphor Analysis as Cognitive Approaches to Foreign Policy Analysis,” Foreign Policy Analysis (2013) 9, 39–56)

Essentially, the definition one adopts depends very much on what one considers metaphors capable of (Glucksberg 2001:3). While some may consider metaphors to be a purely rhetorical tool which simply replaces one word with another and serves little purpose but to make speech sound nice (Gozzi 1999:9; Beer and De Landtsheer 2004:5), others stress the cognitive process inherent in metaphor use. In particular, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) are among the most influential scholars in this respect as they have managed to export the study of metaphor from cognitive linguistics into other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science and FPA. For them, the ‘‘essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.’’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:5) In their ground-breaking book Metaphors We Live By, they argue that metaphors structure the way people think and that the human con- ceptual system as such is fundamentally metaphorical. ‘‘The way we think, what we experience and what we do everyday is very much a matter of metaphor’’ (1980:297).
In this sense, metaphors can be considered linguistic devices which influence and reflect the cognitive process of decision making by helping people to under- stand abstract events with the aid of more familiar concepts. As its origin in the subject of cognitive linguistics indicates, metaphors are both linguistic devices and cognitive schemata: on the one hand, they are linguistics devices that influ- ence the thought process by framing something in a particular way and on the other hand they are cognitive schemata which give an insight into the cognitive processes of the user.
Metaphors make humans understand one conceptual domain of experience in terms of another by projecting knowledge about the first familiar domain onto the second more abstract domain. Here, metaphors can be understood a ‘‘devices for simplifying and giving meaning to complex and bewildering sets of observations that evoke concern.’’ (Edelman 1971:65) Considering the well- known metaphor ‘‘war on terrorism’’, the central idea is that metaphors map a source domain, for example WAR, onto a target domain, for example TERROR- ISM, and thereby make the target domain appear in a new light (Spencer 2010). Metaphors involve a cognitive transference of something to something else.

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Walt Whitman JL | Judge: Grant Weisberg, Mira Chernick
Oil drilling only affects 0.01 of Yasuni.
LAC News 13 writes
Latin America and Caribbean News. “Ecuador's parliament approves oil drilling in Yasuni preserve.” October 4th, 2013. http://lacnews.com/ecuadors-parliament-approves-oil-drilling-yasuni-preserve
Ecuador's parliament has authorized drilling of the nation's largest oilfields in part of the Amazon rainforest after the failure of President Rafael Correa's plan to have rich nations pay to avoid its exploitation. Correa launched the initiative in 2007 to protect the Yasuni jungle area, which boasts some of the planet's most diverse wildlife, but scrapped it after attracting only a small fraction of the $3.6bn (£2.2bn) sought. On Thursday the government-dominated National Assembly authorized drilling in two areas, but attached conditions to minimize the impact on the environment and local tribes. Correa says the estimated $22bn earnings potential will be used to combat poverty, but there have been protests from indigenous groups and green campaigners. About 680,000 people have signed a petition calling for a referendum. Correa has played down the potential impact of drilling in the area, saying it would affect only 0.01 of the Yasuni basin.

Her impact is junk science. Best experts agree.
Wigmore 2k writes
Barry Wigmore (won reporter of the year in 1978). “Eco-Scientists Deny Amazon’s in Danger.” New York Post. May 30th, 2000. http://archive.is/aPDMd
But now, two of the world's top eco-scientists, Patrick Moore and Philip Stott, say the save-the-rainforest movement is wrong: at best, vastly misleading; at worst, a gigantic con. "All these save-the-forests arguments are based on bad science," says Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace who recently returned from a fact-finding mission to the Amazon. "They are quite simply wrong. We found that the Amazon rainforest is more than 90 percent intact. We flew over it and met all the environmental authorities. We studied satellite pictures of the entire area." TV reporter Marc Morano, who's spent more than a year investigating the rainforest movement's claims for an American Investigator TV program that will be broadcast nationally next month, says he was amazed when he discovered the truth. He says the statistics he found--backed up by satellite imagery of the forests--speak for themselves. "We learned that only 12.5 percent of the original Amazon has been deforested, leaving 87.5 percent intact," he said. "Of the 12.5 percent deforested, one-third to one-half of that land is fallow or in the process of regeneration. That means that at any given moment up to 94 percent of the total Amazon is left to nature. That is not wanton destruction." ... THE rainforest movement started when the environmentally friendly Body Shop company decided to buy nuts from Amazon Indians to put in its lotions. Not to be outdone, Sting took three Amazon tribal chiefs on a world tour in 1989. First stops: the pope and French President Francois Mitterrand. Brazilian environment minister Otavio Moreira Lima was furious. "We see this melancholy spectacle of an Amazon chief in Europe being presented like a prized wild animal in the hands of a rock singer," he said. "This is revolting and I consider it an affront." But he was ignored. Now an increasing number of scientists are siding with the Brazilians, who have for years insisted that while their Amazon policy may have been flawed initially, it has since been corrected. Among them are Moore, a Canadian who helped found Greenpeace, and Stott, professor of biogeography at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies and editor of the Journal of Biogeography. Both started as conventional environmentalists - agreeing with the accepted wisdom that the rainforests are endangered. Moore, in particular, was in the vanguard of Greenpeace's early direct-action campaigns, sailing into nuclear test grounds to get the United States, then France, to stop nuclear testing in the atmosphere. But in the '80s and early '90s the two independently started to dig deeper into the rainforest issue. Separately, they came to remarkably similar conclusions - public opinion is wrong. ‘IF THE rainforest in Amazonia was being destroyed at the rate critics say, it would have all vanished ages ago," Stott says. "One of the simple, but very important, facts is that the rainforests have only been around for between 12,000 and 16,000 years. That sounds like a very long time but, in terms of the history of the earth, it's hardly a pinprick. "Before then, there were hardly any rainforests. They are very young. It is just a big mistake that people are making. "The simple point is that there are now still - despite what humans have done - more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago." "This lungs of the earth business is nonsense; the daftest of all theories," Stott adds. "If you want to put forward something which, in a simple sense, shows you what's wrong with all the science they espouse, it's that image of the lungs of the world. "In fact, because the trees fall down and decay, rainforests actually take in slightly more oxygen than they give out. "The idea of them soaking up carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen is a myth. It's only fast-growing young trees that actually take up carbon dioxide," Stott says. "In terms of world systems, the rainforests are basically irrelevant. World weather is governed by the oceans - that great system of ocean atmospherics. "Most things that happen on land are mere blips to the system, basically insignificant," he says. Both scientists say the argument that the cure for cancer could be hidden in a rainforest plant or animal - while plausible - is also based on false science because the sea holds more mysteries of life than the rainforests. And both say fears that man is destroying this raw source of medicine are unfounded because the rainforests are remarkably healthy. "They are just about the healthiest forests in the world. This stuff about them vanishing at an alarming rate is a con based on bad science," Moore says. 

No impact to warming – history proves.
NIPCC 11
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. Surviving the unprecedented climate change of the IPCC. 8 March 2011. http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/mar/8mar2011a5.html

In a paper published in Systematics and Biodiversity, Willis et al. (2010) consider the IPCC (2007) "predicted climatic changes for the next century" -- i.e., their contentions that "global temperatures will increase by 2-4°C and possibly beyond, sea levels will rise (1 m ± 0.5 m), and atmospheric CO2will increase by up to 1000 ppm" -- noting that it is "widely suggested that the magnitude and rate of these changes will result in many plants and animals going extinct," citing studies that suggest that "within the next century, over 35 of some biota will have gone extinct (Thomas et al., 2004; Solomon et al., 2007) and there will be extensive die-back of the tropical rainforest due to climate change (e.g. Huntingford et al., 2008)." On the other hand, they indicate that some biologists and climatologists have pointed out that "many of the predicted increases in climate have happened before, in terms of both magnitude and rate of change (e.g. Royer, 2008; Zachos et al., 2008), and yet biotic communities have remained remarkably resilient (Mayle and Power, 2008) and in some cases thrived (Svenning and Condit, 2008)." But they report that those who mention these things are often "placed in the 'climate-change denier' category," although the purpose for pointing out these facts is simply to present "a sound scientific basis for understanding biotic responses to the magnitudes and rates of climate change predicted for the future through using the vast data resource that we can exploit in fossil records." Going on to do just that, Willis et al. focus on "intervals in time in the fossil record when atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased up to 1200 ppm, temperatures in mid- to high-latitudes increased by greater than 4°C within 60 years, and sea levels rose by up to 3 m higher than present," describing studies of past biotic responses that indicate "the scale and impact of the magnitude and rate of such climate changes on biodiversity." And what emerges from those studies, as they describe it, "is evidence for rapid community turnover, migrations, development of novel ecosystems and thresholds from one stable ecosystem state to another." And, most importantly in this regard, they report "there is very little evidence for broad-scale extinctions due to a warming world." In concluding, the Norwegian, Swedish and UK researchers say that "based on such evidence we urge some caution in assuming broad-scale extinctions of species will occur due solely to climate changes of the magnitude and rate predicted for the next century," reiterating that "the fossil record indicates remarkable biotic resilience to wide amplitude fluctuations in climate."

Experts agree
Hsu 10
Jeremy Hsu, Live Science Staff, July 19 2010, pg. http://www.livescience.com/culture/can-humans-survive-extinction-doomsday-100719.html

His views deviate sharply from those of most experts, who don't view climate change as the end for humans. Even the worst-case scenarios discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don't foresee human extinction. "The scenarios that the mainstream climate community are advancing are not end-of-humanity, catastrophic scenarios," said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate policy analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Humans have the technological tools to begin tackling climate change, if not quite enough yet to solve the problem, Pielke said. He added that doom-mongering did little to encourage people to take action. "My view of politics is that the long-term, high-risk scenarios are really difficult to use to motivate short-term, incremental action," Pielke explained. "The rhetoric of fear and alarm that some people tend toward is counterproductive." Searching for solutions One technological solution to climate change already exists through carbon capture and storage, according to Wallace Broecker, a geochemist and renowned climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York City. But Broecker remained skeptical that governments or industry would commit the resources needed to slow the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, and predicted that more drastic geoengineering might become necessary to stabilize the planet. "The rise in CO2 isn't going to kill many people, and it's not going to kill humanity," Broecker said. "But it's going to change the entire wild ecology of the planet, melt a lot of ice, acidify the ocean, change the availability of water and change crop yields, so we're essentially doing an experiment whose result remains uncertain."

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Walt Whitman JL | Judge: Grant Weisberg, Mira Chernick
Yasuni drilling is key to Chinese influence in Ecuador. Naher and Pontes 13 writes
Clarissa Neher and Nadia Pontes (staff writers). “China to blame over Yasuni say critics.” Deutsche Welle. September 13th, 2013. http://www.dw.de/china-to-blame-over-yasuni-say-critics/a-17085405
"The decision by Ecuador's President Rafael Correa to cancel the conservation plan is an answer to international pressure," says Jorge Espinoza from the Ecuadorian non-governmental organization, Accion Ecologica. "But not the international pressure to save Yasuni. I mean the international pressure from China." Numbers on Ecuador's debt levels to China are conflicting. The government in Quito says that Ecuador's debts to China amount to 3.4 billion euros ($4.56 billion). But, according to the US financial reporting service Bloomberg, since Correa's progression to President, Ecuador's loans from China have amounted to over 6.4 billion euros. Ecuador's former energy minister Alberto Acosta also believes Beijing is partially responsible for the failure of the deal to save Yasuni. "One of the reasons why our government made this decision is due to the insatiable demand from countries like China, for oil, resources and food," he told DW. Acosta, who helped propose the Yasuni-ITT initiative, said that financial reasons also had an impact on Correa's decision. "The oil will only start flowing in three or four years but the prospective revenue can already be used as a guarantee for credit now." Cofan indigenous women stand near a pool of oil in Ecuador's Amazonian region A pond full of oil in an indigenous settlement in Ecuador's Amazon region - the area is rich in reserves China, the creditor Ecuadorian government officials refused to comment on China's role in the Yasuni mining plans when approached by DW. But, one thing remains clear: Ecuador is heavily dependent on credit and investments from China following President Rafael Correa's declaration of a debt moratorium on the country's foreign loans in 2008. Since then, Ecuador has found it difficult to receive loans from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. In June, Correa announced a historically large investment deal with China. According to the Ecuadorian daily newspaper "El Comercio", as part of the deal the China National Petroleum Company will invest around 9.5 billion euros into modernizing and building refineries in the OPEC member state, Ecuador. The close relationship between China and Ecuador began in 2007, the year Rafael Correa's presidency began. At the time, China was searching for new providers of raw materials and Ecuador was still selling roughly three quarters of its oil to the United States. Today it is estimated that more than half of Ecuador's oil goes to China, a trend that is continuing to increase. 

Latin American oil is key to Chinese energy security.
Xiaoxia 13 writes
Wang Xiaoxia (economic observer) “IN AMERICA'S BACKYARD: CHINA'S RISING INFLUENCE IN LATIN AMERICA.” Worldcrunch. May 6th, 2013. http://www.worldcrunch.com/china-2.0/in-america-039-s-backyard-china-039-s-rising-influence-in-latin-america/foreign-policy-trade-economy-investments-energy/c9s11647/
Initially, China’s activities in Latin America were limited to the diplomatic level. By providing funds and assisting in infrastructure constructions, China managed to interrupt diplomatic ties between poor Latin countries and Taiwan. Since then, with China's economic boom, the supply of energy and resources has gradually become a problem that plagues China -- and its exchanges with Latin America thus are endowed with real substantive purpose. Among the numerous needs of China, the demand for oil has always been the most powerful driving force. In the past 30 years, China has consumed one-third of the world's new oil production and become the world's second-largest oil importer. More than half of China's oil demand depends on imports, which increases the instability of its energy security. Diversification is inevitable. In this context, Latin America and its huge reserves and production capacity naturally became a destination for China.

Chinese energy insecurity causes nuclear war. Brandenburg 11 writes
Colonel James A. Brandenburg (United States Air Force). “China’s Energy Insecurity and the South China Sea Dispute.” USAWC Strategy Research Project, p. 6-7. 2011.
In 2010, China reasserted ownership to nearly 80 percent of the South China Sea, supplementing its claims to the Spratly and Paracel Islands. For China and its neighbors, territorial ownership is integral to state sovereignty and security. However, overlapping EEZs, disputes over ownership of the Spratly and Paracel Islands, and China’s mercantilist approach to securing resources stand to raise the energy security stakes of interested parties including the US.16 Feelings of insecurity of those with competing interests in either the EEZ or the Spratly or Paracel Islands could prove challenging especially if China expands its offshore production of oil/natural gas and extends its control over the vessels or pipelines that deliver them via the South China Sea. Experts suggest energy shortages provide the necessary catalyst for arms races, nuclear proliferation, and other forms of instability… in essence, greater energy insecurity equates to the greater probability of geopolitical rivalry.17 Like the US, as China becomes more dependent on oil imports, its ability to ensure access to energy at an affordable price becomes even more critical and could prove difficult given increasing global market uncertainty. Ultimately, China’s dependence on imports could lead to a vicious cycle as it struggles to find ways to mitigate risks and protect its investments in order to offset its insecurity.18 Given global dependence on China’s economy and the potential impact of shrinking energy supplies, this warrants special consideration in the geo-political realm.

Nuclear war turns environmental harm.
Greene et al. 85 write
Owen Greene (Expert on Security issues, Director of Bradford U. Centre for Int’l Coop and Security, Arms Consultant to UN and EU), Ian Percival (Physics Professor) and Irene Ridge (Biologist). Nuclear Winter: The Evidence and the Risks, New York: Polity Press, 1985, 123-4
Pollution is certain to be a long term problem after nuclear war and the problems we have now pale into insignificance by comparison. Nearly all factories contain stores of toxic chemicals, and some have very large quantities indeed. These could be released in target areas. As cities burned, producing pyrotoxins from plastics, and as volatile liquids escaped from factories, acute pollution of the atmosphere would be the first effect. The death of over 2,500 people in Bhopal, India, late in 1984 is a grim parallel, and this was the result of an accidental release of toxic gas from just one factory. When toxic liquids drained away and dry toxins dispersed as dust, wider pollution of the soil and water could occur. There would also be global pollution by radioactive fallout.

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Walt Whitman JL | Judge: Grant Weisberg, Mira Chernick
Squo extraction solves the environment. Resource extraction in Yasuni is key to solve poverty in Ecuador and poverty harms the environment, turns case.
Cuenca 13 writes
Cuenca High Life (Ecuador news site). “Mayors back Correa on Yasuni drilling; Correa tells Assange to cool it; church and Red Cross host blood drive.” August 31st, 2013. http://www.cuencahighlife.com/post/2013/08/31/Mayors-back-Correa-on-Yasuni-drilling3b-Correa-tells-Assange-to-cool-it3b-church-and-Red-Cross-host-blood-drive.aspx
Ecuador mayors attending the annual meeting of the National Association of Municipalities in Guayaquil voted to support President Rafael Correa’s plan to extract oil from the environmentally sensitive Yasuní preserve. The mayors said oil production must be carried out with the minimum of environmental damage but said they believed Correa’s plan will meet strict standards. Association president Jorge Martinez of Ibarra said that Correa is correct in saying that Ecuador needs funding from oil to eliminate poverty and continue improving national infrastructure. In particular, Martinez said that the plan to install safe drinking water and sewer systems in all of the country’s cantons is a critical step in improving lives in Ecuador. “This is a huge project and it will help us eliminate the worst poverty in Ecuador,” Martinez said. “But it will cost $4 billion to achieve and for this we must use the resources available to us.” Martinez also agreed with Correa that continued poverty will cause more environmental damage than oil drilling. “We have seen it happen all over the world. Desperately poor people destroy the environment to survive. Look at Inida and Haiti and you see that this is true. We have seen some of it in Ecuador too.” The water and sewer upgrades will mean that 95 of the country’s population will have high quality service, according the plan submitted to the mayors by Correa.  

Poverty causes structural violence which causes and outweighs extinction.
Gilligan 96 writes
James Gilligan (Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical and Director of the Center for the Study of Violence). “Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes,” p191-196
The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide-or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000) deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R . (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect. the equivalent of an ongoing, unending in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violence-structural or behavioral-is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.

Tournament: Mardi Gras | Round: 2 | Opponent: Acton-Boxborough AT | Judge: Parent
I negate that political conditions on humanitarian aid are unjust.

I value justice, defined as giving each their due. Justice requires an understanding of morality, since both are ultimately normative.

Utilitarianism is the only moral system available to policy-makers.  Robert Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about public officials and their situations that make it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, they are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allows public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

And, prefer utilitarianism since the ultimate human good is happiness.
Bahaa Darwish 9
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own sake (for instance, highly motivated professionals) find pleasure in both the pursuit and attainment of knowledge, however  exhausted they become in either case. So, granted that knowledge, for  them, is a value that has intrinsic worth in itself, and is thus sought for  itself, because it is a value that yields their pleasure or happiness. The same can be said about the other values. Let’s take autonomy in the sense expressed  by Hooker as “control over one’s own life” as another example. Here one  needs to say no more than that the mere fact that people seek autonomy  explains the satisfaction or the pleasure autonomy brings. Those who  value autonomy, thus seek it for itself, cannot feel happy when their decisions are not in their hands, or when they do not have control over their  own life. In short, they cannot be happy otherwise. Moore, who explicitly differs from the classical utilitarians in holding that pleasure is not the  sole good,  20   says that “the most valuable things… are pleasures of human  intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects,”  21   which seems to mean  that such things are valued for  the pleasures and the enjoyment they  bring. These examples clearly show that though these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Thus my value criterion is maximizing happiness.

My first contention is that political conditions reduce conflicts.
Stephane Pallage 9
Stephane Pallage (École des sciences de la gestion de l'Université du Québec à Montréal). “Recognizing the Political Side of Humanitarian Aid.” 2009. http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Vulgarisation_de_la_recherche/Vulgarisation-Stephane_Pallage_web_en.pdf
In another text published in 2008 in a major political science journal, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Max Blouin and I demonstrate that humanitarian aid agencies could in theory have a very positive impact on conflicts. Indeed, humanitarian relief is an important resource for warlords. We know that in Somalia, over the last decades, an important share of humanitarian aid was misappropriated by warlords (see for instance United Nations, 2008). This did not prevent humanitarian aid agencies from pursuing their work in war zones, as their life-saving mission is too important. If they were free to have belligerents compete with one another for the entry of humanitarian aid in their region, agencies could channel extortion and dictate its conditions. Among these conditions, one can immediately think of a return to peace or a reduction of the intensity of war, especially considering that the greater their greed, the more inclined warlords will be to satisfy the requirements of humanitarian aid agencies. If you’re going to get robbed, you might as well dictate the conditions of the robbery. As a matter of fact, aid agencies could have a major impact on the intensity of conflicts, even on the return to peace. In Blouin and Pallage (2008), we offer a new view of humanitarian relief, that of a real intervention weapon. This implies, of course, that we broaden the view of humanitarian relief to include political considerations and that we give aid agencies the means to operate in the best possible way in a highly strategic and political world. Why tie the hands of our aid agencies with principles of neutrality and independence when they are facing interlocutors who are anything but neutral and independent. The world of humanitarian aid is a game, in the sense of game theory, just like the world of business is a game. Can we decently ask our representatives in this vast political game to forego the right to a strategic reply? Without sacrificing the principles of humanity and impartiality, Canada should reconsider the other two principles, neutrality and independence, and thus untie the hands of the people of goodwill that this country sends to war or famine zones.  In order to do so, we must go beyond what is “politically correct” and convince public opinion of the validity of a strategic behaviour on the part of humanitarian aid workers. It’s certainly a risk worth taking: it may result in a safer world and reduce the need for humanitarian aid. 

My second contention is that political conditions avoid famine.
Stephane Pallage 9 explains the Samaritan’s dilemma
Stephane Pallage (École des sciences de la gestion de l'Université du Québec à Montréal). “Recognizing the Political Side of Humanitarian Aid.” 2009. http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Vulgarisation_de_la_recherche/Vulgarisation-Stephane_Pallage_web_en.pdf
Can a humanitarian aid agency be neutral? Independently of any action on its part, its mere existence modifies the behaviour of political decision-makers in many regions of the world. This is what we call “the Samaritan’s dilemma”, highlighted in the 1970’s by economist James Buchanan in the more general context of mutual aid relationships. According to Buchanan (1975), Samuel’s promise to help Francis in case of need may encourage Francis to put himself in a situation where he might need Samuel’s help. By trying to help, the Samaritan involuntarily creates a request for his their help. By promising our teenager that we will always be there to get him out of trouble, we will likely bring him to make choices that will put him in trouble more often than in the absence of such a promise. That is how helping relationships work, whatever they may be. In the world of humanitarian aid, this dilemma can be particularly severe: it can endanger the lives of thousands of people.  Take for instance a kleptocratic head of state or warlord (there are still a few around the world). As abusive and kleptocratic as he may be, in the absence of humanitarian aid agencies, he finds it in his their interest to maintain his population above the subsistence level. His Their population’s economic production is the source of his their wealth. However, the existence in a distant country of a humanitarian aid agency whose stated objective is to save lives where the need arises will change the situation. The kleptocrat can now further abuse his their population and no longer worry about the subsistence level. Famines will thus be created by the mere fact that humanitarian aid agencies exist. In an article published in 2009, Max Blouin and I demonstrate how humanitarian aid agencies can solve this dilemma and maintain their mission in spite of the pernicious incentives it may create (see Blouin and Pallage, 2009). This often involves questioning their practices; it is nevertheless possible but requires an open mind, since such strategies may sometimes involve paying bribes. My point here is that a humanitarian aid agency is never really neutral and should not be required to be.  Yet, neutrality and independence are at the centre of Canadian humanitarian action, as Canada subscribes to the “Principles and Good Practice of Humanitarian Donorship.” This text was approved in Stockholm in 2003 by the main donating states and deals with the respect of four major humanitarian principles. As stated in the text itself, these principles are “humanity, meaning the centrality of saving human lives and alleviating suffering wherever it is found; impartiality, meaning the implementation of actions solely on the basis of need, without discrimination between or within affected populations; neutrality, meaning that humanitarian action must not favour any side in an armed conflict or other dispute where such action is carried out; and independence, meaning the autonomy of humanitarian objectives from the political, economic, military or other objectives that any actor may hold with regard to areas where humanitarian action is being implemented.” (GHD-2003)  By opting for neutrality and independence, donating states are keeping their humanitarian aid agencies from having a political or strategic behaviour. They place on them a set of constraints that are often in the interest of the warlords or heads of state with whom they must deal. De facto, this deprives them of sometimes imaginative strategies to avoid situations such as the one described above, where the Samaritan’s dilemma can lead to more famines than what nature would dictate.

Tournament: Mardi Gras | Round: 3 | Opponent: Acton-Boxborough CZ Carolyn Zhou | Judge: Parent
Since the international system is anarchic, states must maximize their relative power. John Mearsheimer 1
Mearsheimer, John J. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.
States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those that help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances. But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today’s alliance partner might be tomorrow’s enemy, and today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s alliance partner. For example, the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War II, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

AT Imperialism

US dominance solves war and is essential in an anarchic international system.
Kriesler and Mearshimer 2
Harry Kriesler and John Mearshimer. “Through the Realist Lens: Conversations with John Mearshimer.” April 2002. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Mearsheimer/mearsheimer-con2.html
I agree with Waltz, that structure determines how states behave. In other words, it's the structure of the international system that causes states to compete for power. And it's an anarchical system that they have to operate in. Yes. It's an anarchical system, meaning that there's no higher authority that sits above states. So you have a "911" problem. If a state gets into trouble in the international system, it can't dial 911 because there's nobody on top to come to its rescue. It's this anarchy that pushes states to compete for power. So Waltz and I agree on that. But the fundamental difference between the two of us is that I believe that states seek hegemony. I believe that they're ultimately more aggressive than Waltz portrays them as being. The goal for states is to dominate the entire system. To put it in colloquial terms, the aim of states is to be the biggest and baddest dude on the block. Because if you're the biggest and baddest dude on the block, then it is highly unlikely that any other state will challenge you, simply because you're so powerful. Just take the Western Hemisphere, for example, where the United States is by far the most powerful state in the region. No state -- Canada, Guatemala, Cuba, Mexico -- would even think about going to war against the United States, because we are so powerful. This is the ideal situation to have, to be so powerful that nobody else can challenge you. But Waltz would argue that it's not a good idea to be so powerful, because when you push in that direction, other states balance against you to try and cut you down at the knees.

Tournament: Valley RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: La Jolla RP | Judge: JScogg and Renzi
The aff’s depiction of the state of nature encourages complicity in colonialist oppression of Indigenous peoples. Henderson 98
“The Context of the State of Nature,” James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson. 1998. http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/pdf/chapters/reclaimingind/chap1.pdf
The colonizers argued that the existence of the prerogative treaties in the law of nature and nations had…they did recognize the ability of these cultures to change, they attributed it to Aboriginal imitation of European culture. 104

Colonialism leads to the worst forms of violence and oppression. Henderson 98
“The Context of the State of Nature,” James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson. 1998. http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/pdf/chapters/reclaimingind/chap1.pdf
Four hundred years of colonialism around the Earth was a process of conscious choice supported by,prevent them from developing their human skills to resolve material deprivations. 107 

Vote neg to rethink modern civil society and encourage inclusivity of Indigenous peoples. Henderson 98
“The Context of the State of Nature,” James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson. 1998. http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/pdf/chapters/reclaimingind/chap1.pdf
Certain humans, for example, created modern society. Modern society is a human artifact. It has been derived from an artificial context, an assumption about the “state of nature”…with a new context that would be an ecological or natural context of Indigenous knowledge rather than a refined artificial one.

Tournament: Voices RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Loyola Chris Kymn | Judge: Ben Clancy, Shawn Nadel
Democracy must be called into question. “Rights” granted by democracy hardly protect us from state violence, and instead give it a more powerful foundation.
Agamben 98
Giorgio Agamben (professor of philosophy at University of Verona). “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.” 1998.
The contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden…grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused. Corpus is a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties. 

Elections in democracy are exclusionary of non-citizens. Plascencia 5
Luis Placencia (Philosophy B.A., M.A. at UT Austin). “Constituting Citizens: ‘Mexican Migrants’ and the Discourses and Practices of United States Citizenship.” Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. August 2005. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2005/plascencial42810/plascencial42810.pdf
The case of Texas illustrates the interpretive nature of the voting exclusion in many states: non-citizens are explicitly…as juridical “noncitizens, and, as I will discuss below, the juridical status of non-citizen tends to exclude people from certain forms of livelihood. 

3 impacts.

a. K turns the case. Modern democracy is fundamentally bound by states of exception, which renders democracy useless long-term.
Ross 6
Daniel Ross. “Democracy, Authority, Narcissism: From Agamben to Stiegler.” Contretemps. January 2006.
Giorgio Agamben has shown that, if modern democratic thought begins with the French revolution, ever…of the coming permanent state of exception. 

b. States of exception kill value to life. Agamben 98
Giorgio Agamben (professor of philosophy at university of Verona). “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.” 1998.
3.3. It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain coun¬tries, occupies a substantial position…now dwells in the biological body of every living being. 

You have a moral obligation to reject the devaluation of life behind the state of exception. Status quo systems of ethics are insufficient.
Ziarek 03 writes
Ewa, Hypatia, 18.2, Spring, Project Muse
The effects of Agamben’s “test” are corrosive: step by step, the book demonstrates why it is necessary “to clear away almost all the doctrines tha…speaking in their stead, is the cartographer of this new terra ethica”  (1999, 69).  

?
c. States of exception risk extinction. Thacker 5
Eugene, Associate Professor of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. “Nomos, Nosos and Bios” http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/25/32
There must be some set of principles for allowing, in exceptional…biological existence of the population (and thus nation). The body natural, even as it serves as an analogy for the body politic, is always what is fundamentally at stake in the body politic.

The alternative is to reject the state of exception through what Agamben calls ‘whatever singularity.’ This means denying the legitimacy of rights and democracy, which is key to mobilizing protests outside the state.
Agamben 2k
Giorgio Agamben (Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona). “Means Without Ends.” 2000. Pg. 89.
This has nothing to do with the mere…another Tiananmen and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear again.

The alternative is an epistemic prerequisite to the aff.
The aff’s abstract theorizing about democracy can’t adequately deal with the question of sovereignty. Agamben 10 writes
Giorgio Agamben (Professor of Philosophy at University of Verona). “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy.” Theory and Event. Vol. 13, No. 1, 2010. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/introductory-note-on-the-concept-of-democracy/
If today we witness the overwhelming domination of the government and the economy over a popular sovereignty that has been…every discussion about democracy -as a form of constitution and as a technique of government - risks lapsing into chatter.
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Tournament: Bump | Round: Octas | Opponent: Newark Science Christian Quiroz | Judge: Kyle Trevett, Justin Lee, Jay Cumming
1

Framing mass incarceration as “The New Jim Crow” obscures the extent that African-Americans have supported retribution.

Forman 12
James Forman (Clinical Professor of Law, Yale University). “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond The New Jim Crow.” NYU Law Review. April 2012. http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__law_review/documents/documents/ecm_pro_072216.pdf
Nor were white conservatives such as Nixon and Goldwater alone in demanding more punitive crime policy. In The Politics of Imprisonment, Vanessa Barker describes how, in the late 1960s, black activists in Harlem fought for what would become the notorious Rockefeller drug laws, some of the harshest in the nation. Harlem residents were outraged over rising crime (including drug crime) in their neighborhoods and demanded increased police presence and stiffer penalties. The NAACP Citizens’ Mobilization Against Crime demanded “lengthening minimum prison terms for muggers, pushers, and first degree murderers.”47 The city’s leading black newspaper, The Amsterdam News, advocated mandatory life sentences for the “non-addict drug pusher of hard drugs” because such drug dealing “is an act of cold, calculated, pre-meditated, indiscriminate murder of our community.”48 Rising levels of violent crime and demands by black activists for harsher sentences have no place in the New Jim Crow account of mass incarceration’s rise. As a result, the Jim Crow analogy promotes a reductive account of mass incarceration’s complex history in which, as Alexander puts it, “proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system.”49 IV OBSCURING BLACK SUPPORT FOR PUNITIVE CRIME POLICY The Harlem NAACP’s push for tougher crime laws raises an important question: If many black citizens supported the policies that produced mass imprisonment, how can it be regarded as the New Jim Crow? The Old Jim Crow, after all, was a series of legal restrictions, backed by state and private violence, imposed on black people by the white majority. When given the opportunity, blacks rejected it. Three states—Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina—had black voting majorities during Reconstruction, and all three banned racial segregation in public schools and accommodations.50 The Jim Crow analogy encourages us to understand mass incarceration as another policy enacted by whites and helplessly suffered by blacks. But today, blacks are much more than subjects; they are actors in determining the policies that sustain mass incarceration in ways simply unimaginable to past generations. So what do African Americans think? Various writers have addressed the question of black attitudes toward crime policy, typically through opinion polling.51 But the question yet to be asked is: What sort of crime policies do black-majority jurisdictions enact? After all, if mass incarceration constitutes the New Jim Crow, presumably a black-majority jurisdiction today would rapidly move to reduce its reliance on prisons. Of course, one reason no one has asked this question is that, unlike during Reconstruction, there are no states today with black voting majorities. Still, one jurisdiction warrants scrutiny. Washington, D.C., is the nation’s only majority-black jurisdiction that controls sentencing policy.52 The District is 51 African American.53 Since home rule was established in 1973, all six of its mayors have been black, and the D.C. Council has been majority-black for most of that time.54 The police are locally controlled, and the mayor appoints the police chief. African Americans are overrepresented in the police force: African Americans make up 66 of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD),55 and the MPD has the highest percentage of black officers in supervisory positions of any large majority-black city in the country.56 Because of its unique status, the city assumes both state and municipal functions in many aspects of the criminal process. Most important for purposes of this analysis, the D.C. Council and the mayor operate like a state government in terms of sentencing policy; they determine statutory maximums for all offenses, decide whether to impose mandatory minimums, and so on. Similarly, because the mayor appoints—and the Council confirms—the police chief, local officials exercise significant control over policing practices. This control is important because policing practices are a significant source of racial disparity in incarceration rates.57 I acknowledge that in a number of important ways, D.C. has less autonomy than a state. For example, while the process for selecting judges for D.C. courts includes significant input from a local commission and from the office of D.C.’s elected representative to Congress (currently Eleanor Holmes Norton58), the White House ultimately makes judicial appointments.59 In addition, although local officials prosecute juvenile offenses, the United States Attorney’s Office prosecutes most crimes by adults.60 And yet, despite these external forces, local black elected officials exert considerable power over crime policy and have the ability to push back against federal actors. For example, if the mayor and the Council think that federal prosecutors are targeting too many lowlevel drug offenders, or that federally-appointed judges are imposing excessive sentences for drug offenses, they can lower the maximum penalties for these offenses. The D.C. Council has sometimes pushed for sentencing leniency. In 1982, by a vote of 72 to 28, D.C. residents adopted an initiative providing for mandatory minimum penalties for defendants who distributed controlled substances or who possessed such substances with the intent to distribute them.61 Twelve years later, in December 1994, the D.C. Council voted to abolish mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses.62 Councilmembers defended the move as a recognition that mandatory minimums had “failed to deter drug use and drug sales.”63 If the mayor and Council stray too far from what Congress deems appropriate, Congress retains the authority to overrule them.64 However, Congress has generally respected D.C. autonomy in matters of criminal law.65 When Congress has interfered, its interventions have typically related to hot-button issues such as medical marijuana and needle exchanges for drug addicts.66 In addition, although D.C. officials cannot veto congressional actions, they retain the right to protest, if only symbolically, against those with whom they disagree. In certain areas (most notably the denial of voting rights to D.C. residents) they have done exactly that. Former Mayors Sharon Pratt Kelly, Anthony Williams, and Adrian Fenty, and current Mayor Vincent Gray have all led protests—almost always with Congresswoman Norton—to demand representation or to object to congressional proposals that threaten home rule.67 Mayor Kelly and Councilmember Kevin Chavous were arrested in 1993 as part of a prostatehood rally.68 In 2011, Mayor Gray and five councilmembers were arrested on Capitol Hill while protesting riders to the federal spending bill restricting how D.C. may spend its tax dollars.69 In matters of criminal law, however, they have largely remained silent. There is little evidence that D.C. officials have sought more lenient criminal policies, only to be overruled by Congress. To the contrary, local elected officials have recently pushed for tougher criminal penalties. In 2008, for example, Mayor Fenty introduced an omnibus crime bill that included a variety of provisions sought by prosecutors.70 As Fenty argued, “we are giving the police and the U.S. Attorney more resources to put more people in jail.”71 The D.C. Council passed the law with few modifications.72 So what do incarceration rates look like in this majority-black city with substantial local control over who goes to prison and for how long?73 They mirror the rates of other cities where African Americans have substantially less control over sentencing policy. Washington, D.C. (a majority-black jurisdiction), and Baltimore (a majority-black city within a majority-white state) have similar percentages of young African American men under criminal justice supervision.74 Detroit, an overwhelmingly African American city in a majority-white state,75 has a smaller proportion of adults under criminal justice supervision than Washington, D.C. One in twenty-five Detroit76 adults are in jail or prison, on probation, or on parole, compared to one in twenty-one adults in D.C.77 These data indicate the limits of the Jim Crow analogy, which attributes mass incarceration entirely to the animus78 or indifference of white voters and public officials toward black communities. While racial animus or indifference might explain the sky-high African American incarceration rates in Baltimore and Detroit, they do not explain those in Washington, D.C. 

“New Jim Crow” analogy fails – prison population reflects legitimate increase in crime.

Forman 12
James Forman (Clinical Professor of Law, Yale University). “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond The New Jim Crow.” NYU Law Review. April 2012. http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__law_review/documents/documents/ecm_pro_072216.pdf
But in emphasizing mass incarceration’s racial roots, the New Jim Crow writers overlook other critical factors. The most important of these is that crime shot up dramatically just before the beginning of the prison boom.41 Reported street crime quadrupled in the twelve years from 1959 to 1971.42 Homicide rates doubled between 1963 and 1974, and robbery rates tripled. Proponents of the Jim Crow analogy tend to ignore or minimize the role that crime and violence played in creating such a receptive audience for Goldwater’s and Nixon’s appeals. Alexander, for example, characterizes crime and fear of crime as follows: Unfortunately, at the same time that civil rights were being identified as a threat to law and order, the FBI was reporting fairly significant increases in the national crime rate. Despite significant controversy over the accuracy of the statistics, these reports received a great deal of publicity and were offered as further evidence of the breakdown in lawfulness, morality, and social stability.44 In this account, the stress is not on crime itself but on the FBI’s reporting, about which we are told there is “significant controversy.” But even accounting for problems with the FBI’s crime statistics, there is no doubt that crime increased dramatically.

“New Jim Crow” analogy ignores the involvement of capitalism in fueling oppression from mass incarceration.

Forman 12
James Forman (Clinical Professor of Law, Yale University). “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond The New Jim Crow.” NYU Law Review. April 2012. http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__law_review/documents/documents/ecm_pro_072216.pdf
Indeed, one of the central motivations of Jim Crow was to render class distinctions within the black community irrelevant, at least as far as whites were concerned. For this reason, it was essential to subject blacks of all classes to Jim Crow’s subordination and humiliation. That’s why Mississippi registrars prohibited blacks with Ph.Ds from voting, why lunch counters refused to serve well-dressed college students from upstanding Negro families, and why, as Martin Luther King, Jr. recounts in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” even the most famous black American of his time was not permitted to take his sixyear-old daughter to the whites-only amusement park she had just seen advertised on television.120 Analogizing mass incarceration to Jim Crow tends to suggest that something similar is at work today. This may explain why many—but not all121—of the New Jim Crow writers overlook the fact that mass incarceration does not impact middle- and upper-class educated African Americans in the same way that it impacts lower-income African Americans.122 This is an unfortunate oversight, because one of mass incarceration’s defining features is that, unlike Jim Crow, its reach is largely confined to the poorest, least-educated segments of the African American community.123 High school dropouts account for most of the rise in African American incarceration rates. I noted earlier that a black man born in the 1960s is more likely to go to prison in his lifetime than was a black man born in the 1940s. But this is not true for all African American men; those with college degrees have been spared. As Bruce Western’s research reveals, for an African American man with some college education, the lifetime chance of going to prison actually decreased slightly between 1979 and 1999 (from 6 to 5).124 A black man born in the late 1960s who dropped out of high school has a 59 chance of going to prison in his lifetime whereas a black man who attended college has only a 5 chance.125 Although we have too little reliable data about the class backgrounds of prisoners, what we do know suggests that class, educational attainment, and economic status are powerful indicators for other races as well. Western estimates that for white men born in the late 1960s, the lifetime risk of imprisonment is more than ten times higher for those who dropped out of high school than for those who attended some amount of college.126 Government statistics confirm how few college graduates end up in prison. For example, a 1997 federal survey—the most recent available—found that college graduates comprised 2.4 of state prisoners throughout the country.127 By contrast, college graduates comprised 22 of the population as a whole.128 In Massachusetts—the only state that routinely reports the educational backgrounds of its prisoners— only 1 of state prisoners have college degrees.129 Income data reveal a similar skew—the majority of prisoners in state facilities earned less than $10,000 in the year before entering prison.130 Class differences have always existed within the black community—but never on anything approaching today’s scale.131 Large segments of the black community are in extreme distress. Unemployment rates for young black men are high by any measure, even more so if we factor in incarceration rates.132 In some respects, blacks are no better off than they were in the 1960s, and in others (e.g., proportion of children born to unmarried women)133 they are much worse off. Yet the black middle class has expanded dramatically—and to be clear, I am not talking about the handful of black super-elites. Too many discussions of class differences within the black community adopt a posture of “Obama and Oprah on the one hand, the rest of us on the other.” But that overlooks a crucial part of the story: the substantial growth of the true middle class. Consider that in 1967 only 2 of black households earned more than $100,000; today, 10 of black families earn that amount.134 Going down the income scale from upper middle class to middle class, we also see robust growth. Since 1967, the percentage of black households earning more than $75,000 a year has more than tripled, from 5 to 18 today. The percentage earning $50,000 or more a year has doubled—from 17 in 1967 to 33 today. But the percentages alone do not tell the whole story; it is important to appreciate the sheer numbers of African Americans who have earned the perks of middleclass American existence. By 2009, there were 2.65 million African American households in the upper end of the middle-class range—i.e., earning more than $75,000 a year. The educational attainment numbers reveal a similar pattern. In 1967, 4 of the black population over the age of twenty five had a four-year college degree; today, 20 do.135 Changes of this magnitude require us to modify how we discuss race. Historically, racial justice advocates have been reluctant to acknowledge how class privilege mitigates racial disadvantage. This reluctance is partly a byproduct of the structure of the affirmative action argument. One of the most potent arguments against racebased preferences is the claim that wealthier blacks do not deserve them.136 Affirmative action’s defenders often respond by pointing out the various ways in which even privileged blacks suffer racial discrimination.137 At the same time, racial profiling reinforces the notion that class differences within the black community matter little. After all, racial profiling is the area in which skin color routinely trumps one’s bank account or accumulated graduate degrees. As David Harris argues, “‘driving while black’ is not only an experience of the young black male, or those blacks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. All blacks confront the issue directly, regardless of age, dress, occupation or social station.”138 But as I have shown, Harris’s argument does not apply with equal force to incarceration. Here, increased income and educational attain ment can bring a measure of protection against some of the criminal justice system’s historic anti-black tendencies. Accordingly, in considering mass incarceration, any suggestion that blacks across classes are similarly situated in the face of American racism should be abandoned. Malcolm X’s assertion that a black man with a Ph.D. is still a “nigger” made sense in the context of Jim Crow.139 So did its equivalent in the legal literature. As Mari Matsuda argued, “victims necessarily think of themselves as a group, because they are treated and survive as a group. The wealthy black person still comes up against the color line. The educated Japanese still comes up against the assumption of Asian inferiority.”140 In support of her claim, Matsuda pointed out that Japanese Americans across classes all shared a similar fate in internment camps during World War II.141 But prisons, as we have seen, are precisely the opposite of internment camps in this regard. Scholars concerned with race cannot explore the significance of this reversal until they first acknowledge it—and many still do not.142 For the most part, Alexander avoids this trap. In The New Jim Crow, she reminds us that the primary targets of mass incarceration are poor, uneducated blacks.143 Moreover, she assails the civil rights establishment for focusing its energies on policies that advance the interests of middle-class blacks—such as affirmative action—while overlooking the crisis that mass incarceration represents for the urban poor.144 Yet, despite her awareness, Alexander sometimes allows the analogy, and the attendant pressure to find continuity while denying the reality of change, to obscure this insight. For example, Alexander suggests that perhaps “the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America.”145 Specifically, she says, “Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.”146 This claim reflects the limitations of the Jim Crow analogy. Today nothing “defines the meaning of blackness in America.” In Mississippi in 1950, the totalizing nature of Jim Crow ensured that to be black meant to be second class; there were no blacks free of its strictures. But mass incarceration is much less totalizing. In 2011, no institution can define what it “means to be black” in the way that Jim Crow or slavery once did. 

2

Text: The USFG should provide Pell grants to all inmates in its criminal justice system.

Providing Pell Grants to prisoners challenges racism. It’s key to the social advancement of people of color.

Taylor 08
Jon Marc Taylor, served more than twenty years in prison, during which time he completed undergraduate and graduate university degrees, and recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. “Pell Grants for Prisoners: Why Should We Care?”  Cell Door Magazine. Vol. 8 Issue 1. Fall 2008. http://www.lairdcarlson.com/celldoor/00801/index.htm
According to USA Today editorial:  Like it or not, college has become the new high school. This reality is why forward thinking educators and government officials are looking for ways to ensure more high school graduates go on to get associate, if not bachelor, degrees. That’s especially are important for poor and minority students at risk of falling even further behind and becoming part of a permanent underclass."  On average state invest as much as ($24,000) supporting their students’ public school earned baccalaureates as they spend annually ($25,000) incarcerating their prisoners. The standard return on the states’ higher education investments are approximately $2 million in economic stimulus and $375,000 in state tax revenues during each graduate’s working lifetime. This return on investment in the prisoner-student becomes further manifest when factoring in all the socio-economic savings from significantly reduced criminal behaviors, coupled with the increased state and federal tax revenues, and the productive and consumptive economic stimulus generated by the more highly educated worker. Consider this positive economic outcome as opposed to the all-too-common disruptive anti-social actions and demand for revenue-draining social services that recidivistic offenders can create.  With the primary goal of education and treatment programs to reduce crime, in one of the first assessments of prison college programs nearly thirty-five years ago this holistic benefit was summarized as: "Simply, and aside from humanitarian concerns – it is cheaper in the no-so-long run to pay (adequately) for effective anti-recidivism measures, than to finance law enforcement, justice administration, and penal services and apparatus."  Or as J. Michael Quinlan, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons during the Reagan and Bush Administrations so bluntly put it, "I recognize," the director explains, "that the cost of college is really very insignificant (i.e., 10 of a year of annual cost of incarceration alone) when you compare the cost and damage done by crime."  *In 1930, the rate of African-American incarcerations was three times that of Anglo-Americans. By 1990, that ratio had increased to five times the number of blacks to whites. In 1996, there were eight African-Americans to every Anglo-American incarcerated in proportion to the racial composition of the nation. At the end of the millennium, one-in-three black men aged 20-29 were under some form of correctional supervision. One of the effects of this focused criminal justice effort is that by their thirties, almost twice as many black men will have been cycled through the penal system as have received baccalaureates.  Charles Sullivan, the executive director of the public advocacy group Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE), claimed during the exclusionary legislation debate that it "smacks of racism since the majority of the penal population is composed of minorities." and thus Sullivan reasoned minority groups had been clearly disproportionably affected by banning prisoners from the Pell Grant programs. With more black males in prison than on college campuses, Sullivan wondered, as absurd as the concept was about having to go to prison to receive a college education, were we then going to close off that avenue as well? The answer is apparently yes.  Across the country, the enrollment demographics of prison-college programs supported Sullivan’s contention. The composition of incarcerated collegiate student bodies generally mirrored the makeup of the penal populations. Thus once creating the most generally racially integrated university settings in the nation. Moreover, the racial composition that paid short-and-long term social dividends. Besides experiencing significantly reduced recidivism, these prisoner-students were some of the best behaved and also served as some of the few positive role models in a milieu normally bereft of such.  Robert Powell, the assistant academic affairs officer at Shaw University observed in 1991, "if you want to educate black men, if you want to reclaim that talent out there, you have to go into the prison." Ironically, Shaw University created its own prisoner-student fee-waiver scholarship program that was later negated by the state prison system, because it was in conflict with its’ policies prohibiting such inmate-exclusive funding programs.  

Pell Grants are designed to promote critical pedagogy. Pell Grant-funded prison education encourages prison students to become aware of their material conditions and struggle against their oppression. Yates 09
“Congressional Debates Over Prisoner Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis,” Mark Yates (Department of Educational Policy Studies, GSU). Educational Policy Studies Dissertations. 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038andcontext=eps_diss
The Pell-sponsored education programs, which can range from vocational to liberal arts, provided the students with a degree of agency in that they had the potential to choose what level or kind of education was offered. As will be described later, prisoner students could initiate and help establish educational programs that were relatively autonomous to the institutions where they were housed. Because the student has some control over where she wants to apply her grant, there is a certain level of academic freedom that seems to be almost entirely absent in the Second Chance Act education program. 

…

In the 1970s and 1980s, a trend arose in prisoner education in which prisoners were viewed as active participants in their own learning (Davidson, 1995). It was the inmates themselves who were often at the forefront of initiating a new prison pedagogy that was highly critical of both the criminal justice system as well as the wider social and economic institutions that gave rise to the inequities that constituted the police/penal state. Within this school of thought, prisons are seen as an integral part of a politico/economic system that survives, as Germanotta, (1995) suggests, by “maintaining unequal relations at the level of production. Penal institutions are the ultimate vehicle used to police the borderlines of these unequal relations.” It should not come as a surprise that inmates are at the forefront of the push for a critical prison pedagogy since, “living and working within correctional settings will make this abundantly clear” (p.104). James Morse (2002), a former prisoner in New York State, examines the unequal relations manifest in the Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, Lower East Side, and South Bronx neighborhoods of New York City. These urban sectors are not neighborhoods in the traditionally middleclass sense of socially stable, economically viable residential areas. Owing largely to the polarizing effect of conservative economics during the Reagan/ Bush debacle whereby the rich become super-rich and the poor become super-poor - these sectors are principally pockets of extremely low income and dependency, exhibiting a constant and rapid turnover of residents that establishes social instability as the prevailing norm. Promoting this social instability, and characterizing these enclaves as prisoner specific, is the perpetual outflow and influx of myriads of individuals to and from the state?s prison system.” (p. 129) Educators have described some of the many forms that critical prison pedagogy can take, from inmates becomeing self aware and aware of societal ills through the reading; 179 distribution and analysis of radical literature of the industrial trade unions, Black Power and other resistance movements; to the influx of volunteer educators in the 1970s inspired by the well publicized prisoner resistance activities of that period. Other forms of emancipatory education include self-taught inmate “lawyers” who educate their peers on the vagaries of negotiating the legal system. Another account regards a group of women prisoners who staged a successful protest when their writing workshop was threatened with cancellation (Davidson, 1995). Education of this kind has the potential to help prisoners to become active, involved citizens. Paulo Freire (1970) describes the possibilities of emancipatory education, “people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (p. 83). What better place to facilitate transformational pedagogy than prison? Thom Gehring (2000), a longtime prison educator, describes the potential for innovative programs in the penal environment, “Democratic programs in correctional education are compelling to the human spirit – they conjure up ancient aspirations.” These aspirations include “freedom” and a “just/democratic society” (Eggleston and Gehring, 200, p.310). One means of facilitating emanicipatory education for those incarcerated is by putting into place funding mechanisms that have few curricular strings attached and can allow for innovation. These could give the prisoners themselves, some level of autonomy in choosing what kind of education they would receive. Necessary to the establishment of democratic education is reliable non-program specific funding. An example of such a funding mechanism was the Pell Grant program.180 Prisons are representative of “total institutions,” characterized by authoritarianism and regimentation and close observation of its inhabitants (Goffman, 1961). Thomas James (1988) has suggested that schools can also be totalizing organizations, marked by their ability to cause “dissolution of the self as the corporate identity of the total institution emerges from within and becomes a way of life” (p.2). While authoritarianism provides a common thread between many schools and all prisons, there is one major difference, most schools are day schools, allowing egress on a daily basis. Freedom of movement has the potential to provide access to new ideas through exposure to nonsanctioned media and new associations. Prisons, at least in theory, are set up to strictly regulate both the bodies and the minds of the inmates by controlling whatever passes through the gates. Foucault (1995) suggests that prisons function to create “docile bodies” through continuous observation. Because the gaze tends to be one way, toward the prisoners, they never know when they are being observed. This process tends to discipline the mind as well as the body. The result is to create a compliant person, with a diminution of agency.

The federal ban on Pell Grants for prisoners’ education was engrained in neoliberal logic of economic competitiveness that privileged vocational training over liberal arts education.

Yates 09
“Congressional Debates Over Prisoner Education: A Critical Discourse Analysis,” Mark Yates (Department of Educational Policy Studies, GSU). Educational Policy Studies Dissertations. 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038andcontext=eps_diss
In 1971, Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger spoke at the first National Conference on Corrections, “We know that today the programs of (prisoner) education range from nonexistent to inadequate, with all too few exceptions. However we do it, the illiterate and the unskilled who are sentenced for substantial terms must be given the opportunity, the means, and the motivation to learn his way to freedom” (Burger, 1985 p. 193). Prison-based programs have dated back to the 1800s as reformers sought to extend basic and vocational education, as well as moral education to those who had been convicted of crimes (Welch, 1996). Gehring and Wright (2003) propose that many of these early reformers were not just interested in improving the virtues of the inmates, but also had a sophisticated understanding of the anti-democratic nature of penal systems. They had the progressive notion that prisoners were capable of being agents in their own reformation by taking responsibility for education. Gehring and Wright call the presence of these early radical prison educators, “the hidden heritage of correctional education” (p. 52 5). They suggest this thread of progressiveness extended up through World War II after which Cold War pragmatism resulted in a return to basic education (Gehring and Wright 2003). Much of the programs of the 1960s and 1970s followed a functionalist approach that equated an inmate’s future success as a law-abiding citizen with the knowledge required to obtain lawful employment and negotiate legal society. These skill sets focused primarily on obtaining vocational skills and basic literacy. Howard Davidson describes this theory: “it propounds that crime results from individuals making poor (i.e. criminal) decisions when faced with life?s many problems. Out of neoliberalism comes the market metaphor, in which individuals make rational decisions based on calculating benefits against costs” (Davidson, 1995, p.4). How did the modern functionalist approach to prisoner education take root? Much of the impetus seems to have arisen from human capital theory. One of the primary features of neoliberal thought and practice is the reliance upon human capital theory to explain the purpose of education. Human capital theory has been described by Robert Hart and Thomas Moutos (1995) as an investment of skills training in workers that seeks to balance the costs of training with the return on the investment. Even the proponents of human capital theory describe it as reductionist, mechanical and based upon “homogenized factors.” During the reign of neoliberalism, human capital theory slithered from its manufacturing origins into the corridors of education. Perhaps the most succinct description of the human capital theory of education is provided (without apparent irony) by Joop Hartog and Hessel Oosterbeek (2007): “The basic human capital model of schooling envisages two options (1) go to school for s years and earn an income Ys every year after leaving school, or (2) go to work right away and earn 53 annual income Yo” (p. 7). This reductionist view of the role of schooling does not take into account exogenous factors that can affect income level such as discrimination and availability of jobs in the market (Livingstone, 1997). The role of human capital theory in education reached a high level of urgency among neoliberals as concern arose regarding the United States competiveness in global markets. Chief among the proponents were Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton through the Goals 2000 project which set the priority for education to create the workers who could increase the U.S. efficacy in international capitalism (Briscoe, 2000). A center-piece of the thrust toward implementation of human capital theory in education was the No Child Left Behind legislation which narrowed the focus of educational curricula toward those basic skills required for technical society such as math, reading and science at the expense of those for an active, well-rounded life such as social studies, art, music and physical education. According to Pauline Lipman (2007) No Child Left Behind is “explicitly designed to meet the needs and technical rationality of business… symbolically, as well as practically, national testing constitutes a system of quality control, verifying that those who survive the gauntlet of tests and graduate have the literacies and dispositions business requires” (Lipman, 2007, p. 46). Lipman sees the legislation as a disciplinary process with the end product being docile workers, the ultimate in human capital. Prisoner job training programs fulfilled this need. In the 1970s and 1980s, in part due to the availability of the Pell Grant, a liberal arts curriculum became a major component of many prison education programs in a way that it never had before. According to Mary Wright (2001) the correction education liberal arts programs remained in favor well into the 1990s even as it was de-emphasized in the 54 larger academic world. She gives several reasons, including the slow pace of change in prisons, the lack of flexibility and increased cost of obtaining equipment for technical job training programs. However, in the 1990s, liberal arts in a correctional setting fell into disfavor, and adult basic education and vocational education programs reasserted their primacy in the penal system (Wright, 2001). Vocational programs in prison included plumbing, carpentry, electrical wiring, painting, heating and air conditioning as well as computer literacy. In addition, the emphasis on job training spilled over into the language arts and math programs as they were retooled to focus on technical and applied reading and writing (Steuer, 2001). Between 1995 and 2000, the percentage of state prisons offering college courses decreased from 31 to 26 while those offering basic adult education increased from 76 to 80. State prisons offering vocational education increased from 54 to 55 and in private prisons it increased from 25 to 44 in the same time period (Harlow, 2003). Several reasons are given for this change in addition to the dissolution of prisoner Pell Grants. One is the perceived threat liberal arts curricula pose to the penal institution. Wright (2001) states that “a liberal arts curriculum, which often emphasizes critical thinking, intellectual and moral reasoning and development of an inmate’s sense of self may pose a challenge to the established order of a correctional facility” (p. 13). In addition, with Pell Grants gone, prisoner education programs became more dependent upon outcome-based funding. Performance-based management of these programs, like the parallel evolution in public schools, led to “school report cards” that evaluated the effectiveness of the programs in turning out their product (Linton, 2005). Curricula that can lend to empirical studies, such as testing in basic adult education, were given priority 55 over liberal arts, which seemingly has more nebulous outcomes. According to John Linton (2005) of the U.S. Department of Education?s Correction Education division: “The current climate requires that expenditure of public funds be restricted to „scientifically proven? effective interventions” (p. 91). Job training fits well to this regime because the results of the program could be measured empirically through the numbers of the test group who are able to obtain work. In addition, recidivism rates could be obtained. Numerous studies have pointed to the inverse relationship between vocational technical programs and recidivism (Hall and Bannatyne, 2000; Mattuci and Johnson, 2003; Young and Mattuci, 2006, Gordon and Weldon, 2003). Empirical studies focusing strictly on recidivism as a measurement of achievement have not been without their faults. In his examination of the more recent works, Charles Ubah (2002) has found a tendency for the inmates to self-select into the programs. These participants were probably more motivated, as a whole, to succeed upon their release, than those who did not participate (Ubah, 2002). Ubah?s findings bring up another important question: What about those who slip through the cracks in the empirical studies? An example may be found in Robert Mattuci?s (2003) description of the vocational program that he set up in a New York state prison. It consisted of an eight session program to teach the students basic plumbing skills in order to increase their employment prospects upon release. Mattuci, who had a bachelor?s degree in education and twenty years experience as a plumber, appeared to incorporate a well-thought out system of pedagogy. He relates that “many inmates have never known a positive schooling experience so they lack the needed confidence to succeed at learning something new. A key to the program is therefore validating their differences as 56 individuals and accommodating their multiple learning styles” (p. 16). Mattuci had them work in groups for all hands-on activities and encouraged group brainstorming and problem solving. Yet, despite the care in which the teacher took in order to facilitate a sense of community on the shop floor, there were a significant number of inmates who did not take to the class. “Especially for the younger inmates, gang activity is very evident. The dropout rate of the male youth in three of the groups was 90. For those influenced by gangs, there is a total lack of respect for the process of setting goals and working toward them” (Mattuci and Johnson, 2003, p. 17). A conventional vocational program may not reach this group of inmates who, as dropouts of the program are more likely to return to prison. While recidivism is an important issue, it must be understood within context of the many variables that exist both within the inmates and, just as importantly, the conditions that exist once they are released. Barriers to post-release employment include lack of current job skills in a rapidly changing market, lack of available jobs in a tight market, the large hole in the employment history created by incarceration, and perhaps most significantly, the criminal record. With the rise of the information society, even jobs considered “menial,” require criminal background checks. The perceived and actual impediments to employment can decrease the seeker?s motivation and self image (Pavis, 2002). Combined with conditions that facilitated a life of crime in the first place: poverty, discrimination, substance abuse, the deck is stacked against the average inmate. Conventional job training in itself is clearly not going to arm these people against the challenges of life on the outside. The attributes previously described that led some 57 prisons to reject liberal arts education; the “critical thinking, intellectual and moral reasoning” leading to a “sense of self,” must be cultivated (p. 1). Friere (2004), Giroux (2006) and others have called for a pedagogy that is freed from the bonds of the “bottom-line.” Mike Cole (2005) puts it succinctly, calling for schools to become sites where “teachers, other school workers and pupils/students not only agitate for changes within the classroom and within the institutional context of the school, but also support a transformation in the objective conditions in which students and their parents labor” (p. 16). In this vision, there is no room for docile workers. Schools would be transformed into emancipatory institutions where workers would not only be provided basic literacy, vocational skills and liberal arts, but would also learn to advocate for a better world. I explore this possibility further in Chapter 5.

?
AT Erma Faye Stewart Narrative

Seth Ferranti in 2002 ====explains his story as an inmate denied Pell Grants====
Seth Ferranti (ex-prisoner). “Restrictive Society: A Correlation between prison and the real world.” Cell-Door Magazine. December 2002. http://www.lairdcarlson.com/celldoor/00402/
In 1995 when I first entered the Bureau of Prisons, I heard a lot about Club Fed and the country club environment. When I was at the Alexandria County jail, all the Virginia state prisoners looked on me with envy, "You going to the Feds, Joe." They thought it was something special. Still today in 2002, people coming in have the impression that the Feds are special or different, that it is the top line of prisons. Well, I'm here to tell you that it's not. Prison sucks and as our society turns into a police state, the BOP mirrors every move. During my nine years of incarceration in the feds, things have only got worse and more restrictive. After getting sentenced at the Alexandria federal courthouse, I was designated to FCI Manchester, a medium-to-high security level prison in the hills of Kentucky. It was a brand new prison built in 1992. So, in effect, I was opening it up along with 800 other prisoners. Half of the population had come down from the USP's (federal penitentiaries), a lot from Terre Haute, and some from Atlanta or Lewisburg. FCI Manchester was new and clean, resembling a fortified college campus. Welcome to Club Fed, I thought. But like most rumors you hear in prison, the jokers who spread the country club line were full of shit. When I think of a country club, I imagine pools, tennis courts, and golf courses. I imagine exquisite food and luxuries. FCI Manchester had none of that, though at the time they had prison staples: weights, no top of the line like Gold's Gym, but adequate, laid out in the recreation yard like you would see in any prison movie. They had band rooms with electric guitars, drums, amps; everything you needed to have a rock, blues, Latin, reggae, jazz, or R and B band. There was an inmate organization that sponsored banquets, prize bingos, and weekly movies. In the unit you could watch the institutional movies, HBO, or Showtime. Plus they showed the pay-per-view boxing and wrestling events. All of this was paid for by the inmate organization and the inmate trust fund. There were many recreational activities and plenty to keep you busy. You could order recreational equipment, shoes, or sweats from Eastbay catalogs or Glenn's Sporting Goods through recreation. Dudes in prison would be decked out in the latest kicks from the street and would be styling Champion sweat suits with hoods in a variety of colors. Prisoners had Diadora shorts, Nike socks, Addidas shirts and hats or whatever they could or wanted to order. Education sponsored a college program through the University of Eastern Kentucky, funded by Pell grants; prisoners were getting their college degrees. It wasn’t Club Fed, but at least we were living a little. At one point in FCI Manchester, I had an acoustic guitar, a Sony Walkman, cassette tapes, and a typewriter in my room. I had all name brand sweats, shoes, shirts, and shorts in multiple styles and colors. As my time went on, I would look back on these days longingly because at that time the BOP let us have an identity. There was an effort to keep us occupied, and we had a chance for rehabilitation. And all the prisoners who had been anywhere else in the system said that FCI Manchester sucked. They talked of FCI "Dream" Mckean where you could get packages from the street, have family days in the yard, July 4th cookouts, and order pizza from Dominos once a month. They talked about FCI Fort Dix where you could get anything you wanted from the street. They talked about the USP's with the all-you-can-eat chow halls boasting ice cream machines and steaks. I heard all this talk, and I wanted to live a little more also. I was trying to transfer to FCI Fort Dix, which was a low, when my security level dropped. I was taking college courses, occupying my time, and trying to rehabilitate myself. But then around ‘95 things took a turn for the worse. The crack riots erupted in federal prisons nationwide, and the BOP enforced a system wide lockdown and weeded out the instigators, shipping them to "who knows where," diesel therapy, and all that shit. The BOP was unprepared for the riots, and congress was outraged. Instead of looking into the real reasoning for the riots, the crack cocaine- powder cocaine disparity, the feds decided to lock it down and make prison more restrictive. A succession of changes occurred after that. First was the No Frills Prison Act or the Zimmerman Bill, which said prisoners were living in luxury. This bill, which didn't even pass in congress, was adopted by the BOP verbatim as policy. This was in ‘96, and it was the beginning of the end for human rights in prison and foreshadowed the changes happening in society today. Pell grants were abolished for federal prisoners, thus there were no post secondary or college educational programs because most dudes couldn’t afford to pay for their educations. Weights and electronic music equipment were prohibited. Whatever existed was grandfathered in, but no new equipment of this type could be purchased. There were severe restrictions put on personal property; no more personal musical instruments, name brand or colored clothing items, or excessive recreational equipment were allowed. I remember the prison staff coming around to every cell that year and telling you what you could and couldn't keep. They literally stripped prisoners of everything they had such as guitars, keyboards, shoes, socks, sweat suits, shorts, and racquetball rackets, anything that was considered excess or contraband, and made them send it home. . The inmate organizations were abolished. Movie stations like HBO and Showtime were cancelled. Only basic cable was kept. All of a sudden the BOP told us, grown adults, that we couldn't view R rated movies anymore. It was crazy. So much for Club Fed or even for Club Motel Six. At the end of ’96, I was transferred to FCI Beckley in West Virginia. A brand new, just built federal correctional institution that was totally in compliance with the No Frills Prison Act. There were no weights, no musical instruments, no inmate organizations, no college programs, and no R-rated movies. What was a prisoner to do? You could run the track, do bar work, play sports, and watch TV. They had vocational training courses, but let me tell you, most of them were a joke. As was the GED program. The education department just wanted bodies to make their programs look good and to justify their jobs. In reality, hardly anyone was learning anything or graduating. This was the first big strip of rights and individual liberties in the federal system. It was sort of like a test run for the locking down of America. Out went the spring-bunk beds and in came the metal ones. Out went the wooden doors and in came the metal. Bars were placed over every window. Metal detectors were at every entryway. The BOP fortified the prisons. They would not get caught unprepared again. There would be no more crack riots like ’ 95. Nationwide the BOP made their prisons lockdown ready, riot proof. And just to show the prisoners who the boss was, they took away every so-called luxury item. They said that in prison you only deserved the bare necessities. It didn't matter that they already took decades of your life away from your family, away from your friends, away from society. Now they wanted to strip your individuality, too. No one would stick out. All would be the same. Grey clothes, white shoes, no colors, to go along with the brown khaki institution issued uniforms: nondescript, monotonous, boring. Did somebody mention Club Fed? More like prison. And I don't mean the Wise Guy's prison either. That shit is out the window. It's all cruel and unusual punishment now. I'm talking Alcatraz. What is happening in today’s society mirrors what has happened in federal prison; the tightening up of security, the restriction of rights, the constant surveillance and scrutiny. Everything I do in federal prison is monitored. Kind of like the real world. Yes? And I don't mean MTV. Granted you have more freedoms, but how much has been taken away? In here it seems that every day they take away something else. Is that happening to you also? Around 1999 the BOP started throttling federal prisoners more. It's almost getting hard to breathe now. I guess oxygen will be the next restriction. The Ensign Amendment was passed that year and made publications like Hustler, Club, Playboy, and Private illegal for government employees to handle. So prisoners in the BOP can't receive those types of magazines anymore. Crazy, yes? You have hundreds of thousands of men locked up for decades of their lives, and they can't look at pictures of naked women. I hope you have a vivid and lasting memory of that last night you spent with your girlfriend. Also the BOP has put the clamps on outside communication by limiting phone calls to 300 minutes per month, which is exactly 20 15-minute calls a month. And don’t say something that the prison administrators don't like on the phone because if you do, they will take your phone privileges away for six months or maybe years even if it is your first mistake or violation. These feds are not playing around. They want total and absolute control. There is no Club Fed - there never was - but at least before you could live a little. Now it is nothing but frustration. The BOP has their prisoners walking a tightrope. It’s eerily similar to what is happening in the real world with the checkpoints, airport security, homeland defense team, and the ongoing war on drugs. You tell me what is the difference? It seems we are all locked up now; me in my fortified prison and you in your police state. I am trapped by fences, barbed razor wire, locked doors, and armed guards, and you are trapped in the free world by your job, car payments, house payments, and credit card bills. Every aspect of both of our lives is monitored. There are security cameras here, everywhere, except in my cell, and now in the police state of America, there are security cameras everywhere except in your house. But who knows, maybe your dad is watching, or your mom, or your husband, or wife, or even your kids. Maybe they are reporting all your activities to the government. I'm just saying to be careful, or you might end up in here like me on 25 lockdown with one phone call a month and breakfast in bed and all that. Maybe if I were a model inmate who worked in Unicor and watched Jerry Springer, I could go back to the compound, but because I write and have an opinion about life, the BOP is afraid of me. Terrified, really. So be careful with your opinions out there because the constitution is on shaky grounds. Like me, your rights are dwindling, and it’s all in the name of freedom and safety. Be careful because Big Brother is watching you. 

Case
Prefer the method of the counter-plan.

Rejection must be coupled with analysis of specific policies.

McClean 1
David. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope” www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/20012520Conference/Discussion2520papers/david_mcclean.htm+foucault+habermas+slapped+cudandhl=enandgl=usandct=clnkandcd=1 2001GBS-JV
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."

Discussing the state is not the same as agreeing with it. Policy-oriented debate is key to reclaim the political and bridge the citizen-expert divide.

Kulynych 97
Jessica, Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, “Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation”, 30(2) Winter, p. 344-345

When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between expert policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients. The disruptive potential of the energy commissions continues to defy technical bureaucracy even while their decisions are non-binding.

Engaging the government is the only way to solve global problems.

Gates 7
Bill Gates (college dropout). “Using technology.” 9 January 2007. CNN Money. http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/09/magazines/fortune/Gates_philanthropy.fortune/index3.htm
But no foundation alone can solve the health problems of the developing world. We need businesses and governments as partners. That means we need to get these issues on the political agenda, and we need to tap into market forces to get the private sector involved. It means we all need to embrace a broader definition of responsibility. We must be willing to look at the failure of collective action and see how we can change it. Because these problems are so complex, government has to be involved in solving them. The Gates Foundation accounts for 1 percent of the giving in America. If we spent all of our endowment on education, it would amount to just half of what the state of California spends on education each year. If we used it to fill the gap between the amount of money that's available for health in developing countries and the amount that's needed, it would barely last one year. Do the right thing, the right way But as soon as we say not just that we won't accept these diseases in our neighborhood or in our country, but that we won't accept them in our world, then we start the wheels of collective action turning. We start by giving our governments permission to spend more on these challenges. And that will unleash the potential for sweeping change.

Tournament: CFLs | Round: 3 | Opponent: Idk | Judge: Idk
Read alongside the first two contentions

Prioritizing national security over liberty has historically led to abuses of power. Professor Adam Moore 11 writes
Adam Moore (associate professor, Information School at University of Washington). “Privacy, Security, and Government Surveillance: Wikileaks and the New Accountability.” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol 25, No 2, April 2011. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1980812
Arguably, there are good reasons to distrust this method of establishing an appropriate balance between privacy and security. Justice Brandeis, dissenting in Olmstead v. United States, wrote: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”5 Brandeis, like Lord Acton quoted in the opening, worries about human corruptibility and the incremental debasing of liberty and privacy. In a crisis, even the most noble among us are susceptible to favoritism, stubbornness, and suspect reasoning. While the cases noted below are based in US history and law, the point being made is more general. Consider President Abraham Lincoln’s situation at the start of the Civil War. Lincoln declared a state of emergency and suspended the legal rights of citizens in the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. “In addition to using federal troops to intimidate state legislators and influence their decisions, Lincoln imprisoned 13,000 civilians and suspended the writ of habeas corpus so that no inquiry could be made into the validity of their detainment.”6 Lincoln also arrested nineteen members of the Maryland state legislature and encouraged civilians in Missouri to disperse gatherings of those who supported the Confederate cause. Additionally, the president established military tribunals that tried and punished civilians who offered aid and comfort to Southern sympathizers — thus denying these individuals the constitutional guarantees of a public trial by an impartial jury. The appropriate test, Lincoln argued, was whether the president should “risk . . . losing the Union that gave life to the Constitution because that charter denied him the necessary authority to preserve the Union.”7 Arguably, the notion of a president exercising “emergency powers” in a time of crisis based on his own subjective assessment of the issues at stake sets a bad precedent. But why, you may ask. Lincoln was not an “unthinking” man of zeal and it could be argued that he adopted an appropriate policy – one that saved the Union. First, it is not clear that suspending the writ of habeas corpus in the Border States was necessary to save the Union. Second, even if the states had split, it does not follow that we would have been thrown into a condition of worse security compared to the history that actually happened. It is not as if the Union and the Confederate States would have reneged on protecting individual rights.8 Third, even if Lincoln got it right we should not feel good about it. Liberty and privacy rights were suspended based on the subjective evaluation of a politician – hardly a process that anyone would endorse ahead of time. Consider what could have happened if Lincoln had been severely depressed or if he had simply killed off individuals who advocated separation. Several other cases also deserve mention. In February 1942 President Roosevelt authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Over a hundred thousand people of Japanese descent were rounded up and incarcerated. Several Japanese- Americans who protested the internment and several who tried to escape were shot and killed.9 The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act10 in 1947 and the McCarran Act11 in 1950 provided justification for the “red scare” and the ensuing McCarthyism of the early 1950s. Reaffirming the “clear and present danger” test established in Schenk v. United States (1919),12 the Supreme Court maintained that “mere membership in the Communist Party was sufficient to justify government action.”13 Thus began one of the worst periods of government abuse. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s the FBI engaged in numerous operations designed to infiltrate, disrupt, and if possible eliminate groups that were deemed to be enemies of the American way of life. After a lengthy investigation of COINTELPRO operations, the Church Committee noted numerous abuses including: attempting to get individuals fired for their political beliefs; trying to destroy the marriages of intelligence targets; indiscriminately opening citizens’ first class mail; and warrantless break-ins.14 A federal court, in Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General,15 found that “COINTELPRO was responsible for at least 204 burglaries by FBI agents, the use of 1,300 informants, the theft of 12,600 documents, 20,000 illegal wiretap days and 12,000 bug days.”16 More recent cases come from abuses related to the US Patriot Act and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — for example, Sami al-Hussayen’s detainment for more than a year related to “providing expert advice and assistance” to terrorist organizations, the incarceration of numerous individuals without trial at Guantanamo Naval Base, or the acts of rendition carried out by the CIA.17 In each of these cases, in hindsight and after cool reflection, few would maintain that the balance between security and liberty or privacy was appropriately struck.

Tournament: CFLs | Round: 1 | Opponent: Idk | Judge: Idk
I negate today’s resolution.

As “ought” is “used to express duty or moral obligation” according to Random House Dictionary, the paramount value is morality.
Random House Dictionary. “Ought.” No date. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ought

To achieve the value of morality, the value criterion is exposing government hypocrisy. 

Exposing government hypocrisy is an essential moral imperative. The Vietnam War is a clear example.
Historian Howard Zinn 70 writes
Howard Zinn (historian, taught political science at BU, activist during the civil rights movement and peace movement during the Vietnam War). “Vietnam: The Moral Equation.” The Politics of History (1970). The Indispensible Zinn, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy, 2010.
A worldwide revolution is taking place, aiming to achieve the very values that all major countries, East and West, claim to uphold: self-determination, economic security, racial equality, freedom. It takes many forms—Castro’s, Mao’s, Nasser’s, Sukarno’s, Senghor’s, Kenyatta’s. That it does not realize all its aims from the start makes it hardly more imperfect than we were in 1776. The road to freedom is stony, but people are going to march along it. What we need to do is improve the road, not blow it up. The United States government has tried hard to cover its moral nakedness in Vietnam. But the signs of its failure grow by the day. Facts have a way of coming to light. Also, we have recently had certain experiences which make us less naïve about governments while we become more hopeful about people: the civil rights movement, the student revolt, the rise of dissent inside the Communist countries, the emergence of fresh, brave spirits in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and in our own country. It is not our job, as citizens, to point out the difficulties of our military position (this, when true, is quite evident), or to work our clever bases for negotiating (the negotiators, when they must, will find a way), or to dissemble what we know is true in order to build a coalition (coalitions grow naturally from what is common to a heterogenous group, and require each element to represent its colors as honestly as possible to make the mosaic accurate and strong). As a sign of the strange “progress” the world has made, from now on all moral transgressions take the form of irony, because they are committed against officially proclaimed values. The job of citizens, in any society, any time, is simply to point this out. 

Contention 1 is Democracy

Prioritizing national security concerns furthers disconnect between government and the people.
Howard Zinn 7 concludes
Howard Zinn (historian, taught political science at BU, activist during the civil rights movement and peace movement during the Vietnam War). “Patriotism.” A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (2007). The Indispensible Zinn, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy, 2010.
It then becomes crucial for democracy to understand this difference of interest between government and people and to see expressions like “the national interest,” “national security,” “national defense” as ways of obscuring that difference and of enticing the citizens into subservience to power. It becomes important, then, to be wary of those symbols of nationhood which attempt to unite us in a false “patriotism” that works against the interests of the country and its people. 

Contention 2 is Civil Liberties

National security surveillance has undermined freedom of the press.
Sarah Lazare 5-2 writes
Sarah Lazare (independent journalist). “Report: Crackdown On National Security Reporting Tanked US Press Freedom.” Mint Press News. May 2nd, 2014. http://www.mintpressnews.com/report-crackdown-national-security-reporting-tanked-us-press-freedom/190012/
U.S. press freedom has suffered its steepest decline in a decade due to the government’s efforts to block reporting on the NSA spying scandal exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, obstruction of information, and the decimation of media diversity. This is according to global index on media freedom (pdf) released Thursday by U.S.-based Freedom House. Filed annually since the 1980s, the 2014 report finds that the U.S. suffered a “significant negative shift” from 2013: on a scale where countries are ranked from zero to 100, with lower numbers representing greater freedom, the U.S. dropped from 18 to 21 points. “The U.S.’s score suffered its largest year-on-year decline in a decade,” Jennifer Dunham, Senior Research Analyst at Freedom House, told Common Dreams. “In other years, the U.S. may have declined (or improved) one or two points, but never 3.” The report cites “attempts by the government to inhibit reporting on national security issues” as the number one reason for this plummet. Factors include “government attempts to control official information flows, particularly concerning national security–related issues; the legal harassment of journalists with regard to protection of sources; and revelations of surveillance that included both the bulk collection of communications data by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the targeted wiretapping of media outlets.” Responding to the report, Betty Yu from the Center for Media Justice told Common Dreams, “In the U.S., the government has tried to suppress and downplay the severity of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations in the press. To many of us in the social justice movement, we know that surveillance and eavesdropping on communities of color and progressive movements is not new. But his revelations exposed that every person in the U.S. is being spied on. Fighting digital surveillance and the right to privacy is absolutely a freedom of the press issue. We need to be allowed to communicate and share information freely.” According to the report, “Ongoing challenges include the threat to media diversity stemming from poor economic conditions for the news industry. Researchers also slam the “limited willingness of high-level government officials to provide access and information to members of the press,” including failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act Requests. Yu says that the current fight to save the open internet ties directly to issues of media diversity and freedom: “Based on this report, countries with the greatest improvement in freedom of the press are those with a growing diversity in media ownership and access to online media outlets. This sheds light on the importance of having a unfettered and open Internet protected by net neutrality.” She added, “Currently the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is considering rules that would threaten our ability to communicate freely and essentially limit our free speech. The FCC is expected to vote on May 15 to formally start this process of considering Wheeler’s proposal that would end net neutrality. Now is the time for the journalists, activists, the general public to raise their voices.” According to the report, which identifies a global decline in press freedom, the UK also dropped its ranking due to “negative developments stemmed from the government’s response to the revelations of surveillance by the NSA and its British counterpart.” While Freedom House has been criticized for producing politically biased indexes that favor U.S. allies, its findings on the decline of U.S. press freedoms is backed by numerous other reports. The 2014 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, released in February, found that the United States suffered a “major decline” due to the “hunt for leaks and whistleblowers.” Furthermore, a report released last October by the Committee to Protect Journalists charged that President Barack Obama has overseen an all-out war on journalism: attacking sources, conducting surveillance, creating a climate of fear, and prosecuting double the amount of cases for alleged leaks of classified information as all previous administrations combined.

Tournament: CFLs | Round: 3 | Opponent: Idk | Judge: Idk
Read alongside the first two contentions

Surveillance stifles the free expression of people including artists, writers, and church participants. Advisor for Amnesty International Naureen Shah 14 writes
Naureen Shah (advocacy advisor, Amnesty USA). “‘A Person Under Surveillance is No Longer Free’: Why We Care About Obama’s Speech Today.” Amnesty International. January 17th , 2014. http://blog.amnestyusa.org/us/a-person-under-surveillance-is-no-longer-free-why-we-care-about-obamas-speech-today/
Who does U.S. surveillance impact? Millions of people around the world, including activists, scholars, artists and journalists. Not only can the U.S. government can keep their emails, phone calls and other activities under watch, but it can share that information with other governments – including governments that target and retaliate against anyone they view as a political dissenter. The result: a climate of fear, where people worry that their emails or phone calls could endanger themselves or anyone with whom they communicate.  Journalists GREECE-SOCIAL-NAOMI KLEIN Journalists like Naomi Klein interview political activists around the world for articles that expose repressive governments and corporations. “Some of my sources will decline to share information with me if they believe their communications are being monitored by the United States,” Klein wrote in a 2008 affidavit for the lawsuit Amnesty v. Clapper, which challenged U.S. surveillance law. Klein said some of her sources feared that by communicating with her, they risked retaliation by the U.S. government – denials of visas or placement on a “watchlist.” More often, Klein said, these political activists feared “that the United State will share information about them…and that their own governments will retaliate as a result.” Protesters G8 Summit Starts In Northern Ireland Protesters and activists around the world are vulnerable to U.S. spying on the content of their emails and Internet activity. That’s because U.S. law – under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – permits surveillance “to acquire foreign intelligence information” of people reasonably believed to be outside the United States. But the law does not require the government to demonstrate that surveillance targets are foreign agents, engaged in criminal activity, or connected even remotely with a designated “terrorist organization” or “terrorist.” Surveillance need only be for the purpose of gathering “foreign intelligence information,” a term that’s so broadly defined that it can include any information that relates to U.S. “foreign affairs.” That could include emails about peaceful protests outside international meetings, human rights conferences, or activists’ meetings on just about any issue with a connection to U.S. foreign policy. Artists Chinese Dissident and Artist Ai Weiwei Mass surveillance like the kind authorized under current U.S. law creates a climate of fear, where creative thinking and expression are stunted. As Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei put it: “When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That’s dangerous for human development.” Ai Wei Wei was arrested in China in 2011 and detained without charge, but later released. “Privacy is a basic human right, one of the very core values. There is no guarantee that China, the U.S. or any other government will not use the information falsely or wrongly,” he recently wrote. Writers book Surveillance undermines freedom of expression by making people afraid to speak out or share their ideas – including writers and authors. A recent PEN America study found that 85 of its members who responded to the survey feared government surveillance. Nearly a quarter had deliberately avoided certain topics in phone or email conversations, and another 9 percent had seriously considered it. As an open letter signed by Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetze, and hundreds of other authors put it: “A person under surveillance is no longer free.” Worshipers Palestinian Greek Orthodox Christians attend Christmas mass Everyone has the right to associate freely – and without arbitrary government snooping. But the U.S. government can use section 215 of the USA PATRIOT ACT to collect phone records of religious, political and activist organizations and their members – to learn who they are talking to, when and for how long. Collection of this “metadata” can create a chilling effect. As Rev. Rick Hoyt of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, who joined a lawsuit, put it: “Our church members and our neighbors who come to us for help should not fear that their participation in the church might have consequences for themselves or their families. This spying makes people afraid to belong to our church community.” You If your emails, online chats or Skype calls mention a person or topic of “foreign intelligence” interest – say, Pussy Riot’s release or Pope Francis – they may be surveilled even if the U.S. government doesn’t believe you yourself have any “intelligence” value. That’s because section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits surveillance of emails and other communications about a target - not just those to or from a target. So if you aren’t a U.S. citizen or permanent resident – and even if you are - you are susceptible to surveillance based on your beliefs and interests. And we are still talking about spying without any notice, let alone a day in court to challenge these invasions of your right to privacy. Mass surveillance threatens human rights and human dignity – that’s why we need President Obama to put human rights at the center of surveillance reform. Read more about Amnesty International’s letter to President Obama.

Tournament: Bump | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Collegiate Nathan Ewing-Crystal | Judge: Ben Koh, Jake Shaner, Devin Kasinki
1

CIR will pass now because of Chamber of Commerce support.

Reuters 11-15
Reuters. “US Business Leader Confident Boehner Will Seek Immigration Reform.” Voice of America News. November 15th, 2013.
The head of the biggest U.S. business group, a traditional ally of Republicans, said on Thursday that he remains confident that the top Republican in Congress will push to enact comprehensive immigration reform. Donohue said he supports Boehner’s decision to take a step-by-step approach, with smaller measures to fix the nation’s broken immigration system, as opposed to the broader, comprehensive approach favored by Democrat leaders in the Senate. “I believe it will get done,” Donohue said at a news conference attended by business, religious and law enforcement leaders, all of whom echoed his determination and optimism. A landmark bill to bolster border security, help business get needed workers and provide a pathway to U.S. citizenship for up to 11 million undocumented immigrants won Senate approval in June. However, thus far, the House has passed only a handful of limited bills, most dealing with enforcement and none providing a pathway to U.S. citizenship. Donohue promised to help Boehner get the votes to pass a series of bills to provide comprehensive reform, including a pathway to citizenship. He said such legislation would be good for business, labor and the country, and that he expects final congressional approval in the first half of next year. “We’re not going away,” said Donohue, whose business group, along with organized labor, helped craft the Senate bill. “We’re just getting warmed up.” Boehner drew fire on Wednesday when he said that the House will not negotiate with the Senate to resolve differences between the Senate bill and what the House ends up passing. “We have made it clear that we are going to move in a common sense, step-by-step approach,” the speaker said, repeating his opposition to the Senate legislation. “We have no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill,” he continued. Some read Boehner’s comments to mean that he was walking away from comprehensive reform. Donohue, whose Chamber of Commerce represents more than 3 million businesses, said he didn’t see it that way. “I’m not upset with Boehner,” Donohue said, adding that he believes Congress will end up doing what needs to be done to overhaul the U.S. immigration system. “We will get there,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me what music they play for the dance.” Objection to Pathway The Chamber of Commerce, and much of the business community, has long been allies of Republicans, largely because of the party’s anti-tax, anti-regulatory positions. Yet many Republicans have balked at the Senate bill because of the pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Critics say the pathway would provide “amnesty” to law breakers and encourage more illegal immigration. Supporters disagree. Instead, they argue, it would bring millions of illegal immigrants out of the shadows and end their exploitation. Donohue said he remains confident Congress will enact a comprehensive immigration overhaul, largely because polls show more than 70 percent of Americans back it.

Any legislative restrictions on corporate ACP lead to serious Chamber of Commerce backlash.

Sullivan 8
Julie R O Sullivan (Professor at Georgetown University Law Center). DOES DOJ’S PRIVILEGE WAIVER POLICY THREATEN THE RATIONALES UNDERLYING ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE AND WORK PRODUCT DOCTRINE? APRELIMINARY “NO”. VOLUME 45. Fall 2008. Number 4. Published by the Georgetown University Law Center.
Mr. Holder’s memo was updated in 2003 by then-Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, in major part to emphasize that prosecutors ought to scrutinize carefully the authenticity of a corporation’s cooperation, but with no change to the substance of the above-stated policy. Fairly read, the Holder/Thompson policy on its face does not “require” or even encourage corporate privilege waivers. The defense bar’s objection, then, was not so much to the language of the policy as to what they viewed as the policy’s implicit invitation to prosecutors to “request” privilege waivers in virtually every case—an invitation the bar contends prosecutors accepted with uniform alacrity. It is important to note that there is a serious contest over the issue of the frequency of waiver requests. In this regard, the government and the defense appear to be practicing in different worlds, and both sides present surveys attesting to their particular reality.11 According to defense practitioners, “waiver of the privilege is now a routine part of discussing a corporate resolution” of a criminal investigation.12 Indeed, even Mr. Holder, no win private practice, has complained that “t0day, it’s maddening . . . . You’ll go into a prosecutor’s of?ce . . . and ?fteen minutes into our ?rst meeting they say, ‘Are you going to waive?”’13 Predictably, DOJ responds, just as emphatically, that its prosecutors have been judicious in requesting privilege waivers, 14 doing so only where necessary to determine the underlying facts and to test the completeness of corporate efforts to cooperate. Reacting to what its members viewed as an inappropriate and counter-productive assault on the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine, a self-described “Coalition to Preserve the Attorney-Client Privilege” commenced an aggressive campaign for a legislative “?x”: the proposed “Attorney-Client Protection Act.” The Coalition includes in its membership an impressive array of political muscle: the American Bar Association, the US. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Roundtable, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Association of Corporate Counsel. This Coalition has worked hard for its bill, and has enlisted such “A” list lawyers as former US. Attorneys General Richard Thornburg and Edwin Meese to support it. The success of the Coalition in gaining the attention of lawmakers pressured DOJ to adopt a revised policy, re?ected in the so-called “McNulty Memo,” in December 2006.15 This Memo—authored by then-Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty—continued to contemplate requests for corporate privilege waivers, but required prosecutors to weigh identi?ed factors before requesting waivers, was more detailed regarding the types of materials that could be requested, and mandated that requests be considered (and in some cases) approved at the highest levels of Main Justice.16 The ink was barely dry on the McNulty Memo before American Bar Association President Karen J. Mathis issued a press release stating that these guidelines “fall far short of what is needed to prevent further erosion of fundamental attorney-client privilege, work product, and employee protections during government investigations?” A few practitioners issued faint praise,18 While others expressed signi?cant reservations19 or ?at-out rejected DOJ’s olive branch.20 The Coalition continued its lobbying and, as a consequence, the Attorney-Client Privilege Protection Act of 2007 sailed through House committee consideration a month after its introduction and was passed with virtually no objection three months later, on November 12, 2007.21 Because DOJ promised to again revise its policy, potentially obviating a legislative solution, the Senate held off on a similar bill. When DOJ was perceived to be dragging its feet, Senator Arlen Specter, and twelve co-sponsors, introduced on June 26, 2008 a bill similar to that passed by the House, entitled “Attorney- Client Protection Act of 2008.” With this not-so-subtle reminder of congressional concern, DOJ, in the person of Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, ?nally issued another revision of its policy in August 2008.22 This third iteration of DOJ policy on the substance and effect of corporate “cooperation” in criminal charging decisions in ?ve years is now referred to as the “Filip Memo.”23 The Filip Memo seems to simplify matters considerably, at least measured against the detailed—-and now apparently obsolete—guidelines and approval requirements embedded in the McNulty policy. Its bottom line is clear: (1) privilege waivers are not (and assertedly have never been) a prerequisite for cooperation credit or for declination of criminal charges; (2) a corporation may freely waive its privileges if it wishes;(3) but that waiver may not be considered when a prosecutor decides whether to give a corporation credit for its cooperation in charging; (4) rather, the critical determinant is whether the entity has provided prosecutors with the facts necessary for them to investigate the matter fairly and responsibly.24 Some in practice have correctly summarized the ultimate DOJ message as: “we don’t care if you waive, just provide the relevant facts,” leaving it to practitioners to sort out if and how that can be achieved while maintaining the privilege protections.25 Although the above appears to respond to the proposed legislation, the revised policy does not institute Congress’s proposed bar on prosecutorial requests for waivers. The policy seemingly permits prosecutors to ask for waivers of “fact” work product and privileged communications, but it does provide that corporations “need not produce, and prosecutors may not request,” such “core” work product and attorney-client privileged materials as attorneys’ notes of witness interviews and advice given to the client concerning the legal implications of the putative misconduct at issue “as a condition for the corporation’s eligibility to receive cooperation credit.”26 Such is the status of the debate regarding DOJ waiver policy to date. As of this writing, it is too soon to judge whether DOJ’s latest efforts will foreclose Senate action on the proposed “Attorney-Client Privilege Protection Act of 2008.”27 Due to the vagaries of publishing deadlines, this article cannot await the resolution of the DOJ-Senate stand-off. I hope this means that time remains to affect the outcome because I believe that the participants in this lengthy controversy are concentrating on the wrong issue. Thus, in this article, I ?rst address at some length whether the articulated rationale for this legislation holds weight: that is, whether DOJ’s waiver policy actually undermines the policies served by the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine in corporate investigations. Second, having answered that question, at least preliminarily because of the absence of good empirical data, in the negative, I will try to divine why the bar has spent so much time and political capital insisting otherwise.

CIR is key to agriculture.

Abou-Diwan 13
Antoine Abou-Diwan. “Bipartisan immigration proposal acknowledges agriculture's needs.” Imperial Valley Press. January 28, 2013
Bipartisan immigration proposal acknowledges agriculture's needs The bipartisan proposal unveiled Monday paves the way to legalization of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants with a program described as “tough but fair.” It also addresses the concerns of the agricultural industry, whose labor pool by some estimates is composed of some 50 to 70 percent unauthorized workers. “Agricultural workers who commit to the long-term stability of our nation’s agricultural industries will be treated differently than the rest of the undocumented population because of the role they play in ensuring that Americans have safe and secure agricultural products to sell and consume,” states the proposal. Total farmworkers in Imperial County fluctuated between 8,000 and 11,000 in 2012, according to data from the Employment Development Department. “There’s definitely recognition that agriculture will be taken care of,” said Steve Scaroni, a Heber farmer who has lobbied Washington extensively on immigration reform. The proposal is based on four broad principles: a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, reform of the system to capitalize on characteristics that strengthen the economy, the creation of an effective employment verification system and improving the immigration process for future workers. The principles are broad and many details need to be worked out. “The principles acknowledge that the situation in agriculture is distinct and requires different treatment,” said Craig Regelbrugge, chairman of the Agricultural Coalition for Immigration Reform, a group that represents the landscape and nursery industry. said Access to a legal and stable work force is vital, Regelbrugge said, as is a workable program that eliminates or reduces hurdles for a future work force. “We would like to see the agriculture legalization program attractive so there are incentives for them to work in the sector,” Regelbrugge noted. The proposals also acknowledge that the United States immigration system is broken, and address criticism that not enough is being done to enforce existing immigration laws. To that end, Monday’s proposals are contingent on secure borders. But, the acknowledgement of the agriculture sector’s needs allows for some optimism. “As long as the labor supply solutions are there, we can support the enforcement solutions,” Regelbrugge said. 

Agriculture decline causes extinction.

 Lugar 2k
Richard Lugar (US Senator from Indiana, is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a member and former chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee). “Calls for a new green revolution to combat global warming and reduce world instability.” pg online @ http://www.unep.org/OurPlanet/imgversn/143/lugar.html
In a world confronted by global terrorism, turmoil in the Middle East, burgeoning nuclear threats and other crises, it is easy to lose sight of the long-range challenges. But we do so at our peril. One of the most daunting of them is meeting the world’s need for food and energy in this century. At stake is not only preventing starvation and saving the environment, but also world peace and security. History tells us that states may go to war over access to resources, and that poverty and famine have often bred fanaticism and terrorism. Working to feed the world will minimize factors that contribute to global instability and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. With the world population expected to grow from 6 billion people today to 9 billion by mid-century, the demand for affordable food will increase well beyond current international production levels. People in rapidly developing nations will have the means greatly to improve their standard of living and caloric intake. Inevitably, that means eating more meat. This will raise demand for feed grain at the same time that the growing world population will need vastly more basic food to eat. Complicating a solution to this problem is a dynamic that must be better understood in the West: developing countries often use limited arable land to expand cities to house their growing populations. As good land disappears, people destroy timber resources and even rainforests as they try to create more arable land to feed themselves. The long-term environmental consequences could be disastrous for the entire globe. Productivity revolution To meet the expected demand for food over the next 50 years, we in the United States will have to grow roughly three times more food on the land we have. That’s a tall order. My farm in Marion County, Indiana, for example, yields on average 8.3 to 8.6 tonnes of corn per hectare – typical for a farm in central Indiana. To triple our production by 2050, we will have to produce an annual average of 25 tonnes per hectare. Can we possibly boost output that much? Well, it’s been done before. Advances in the use of fertilizer and water, improved machinery and better tilling techniques combined to generate a threefold increase in yields since 1935 – on our farm back then, my dad produced 2.8 to 3 tonnes per hectare. Much US agriculture has seen similar increases. But of course there is no guarantee that we can achieve those results again. Given the urgency of expanding food production to meet world demand, we must invest much more in scientific research and target that money toward projects that promise to have significant national and global impact. For the United States, that will mean a major shift in the way we conduct and fund agricultural science. Fundamental research will generate the innovations that will be necessary to feed the world. The United States can take a leading position in a productivity revolution. And our success at increasing food production may play a decisive humanitarian role in the survival of billions of people and the health of our planet.

2

Lawyers are uniquely vulnerable to cyber-spying now, risking terrorism and killing competitiveness.

ABA 13
American Bar Association (They raise the bar.). “Report to the House of Delegates.” Cybersecurity Legal Task Force. 2013. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/law_national_security/resolution_118.authcheckdam.pdf
II. Background A. Increasing Cyber Attacks on Lawyers and Law Firms As American businesses and government agencies become increasingly reliant upon electronic communications, they grow more vulnerable to information security attacks. Such attacks are increasingly sophisticated and target critical infrastructure and national security assets as well as personal information. Criminals, terrorists, and nation states all see potential gains from attacking information systems. These threats to highly sensitive information trigger concerns from the national security community, privacy advocates, and industry leaders alike. The Director of the National Security Agency estimates that the United States loses $250 billion each year due to cyber-espionage and other malicious attacks on information systems.1 Confidentiality, integrity, and availability are the three cornerstone goals that every data security program is designed to achieve. Malicious attacks exploiting security vulnerabilities take a number of forms. A common attack affecting “availability” and information access is a “distributed denial of service” (“DDoS”) attack, whereby servers are overwhelmed when malicious attackers flood the bandwidth or other resources of the targeted system with external communications requests. Attacks on “integrity” cause improper modification of information by inserting, deleting, or changing existing data. In an attack affecting “confidentiality,” an eavesdropper can gain access to sensitive data whenever it leaves a secure area or is transmitted in an unsecure fashion (i.e., unencrypted). New and increasingly elaborate methods are being developed for accessing confidential information. By using “phishing” or “spear phishing” attacks, intruders attempt to acquire information, such as login credentials. Masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication, they entice users to open an e-mail attachment or click on a link to a website containing malicious software that will infect a network’s computers and report sensitive information back to the intruders.2 These programs often remain undetected for months. 3 Attacks on confidential information on private networks can pose a direct threat to the economic and national security interests of the United States as well as the security of individuals and companies. Data collected by government agencies and by private information security experts over the past half-decade indicate a serious rise in state-sponsored hacking activities.4 “Attribution” techniques—which allow investigators to detect where cyber attacks originate— have improved, and information security experts have linked many recent attacks on private organizations to state-sponsored actors.5 A 2013 National Intelligence Estimate identified state-sponsored hacking as a chief threat to the country’s economic competitiveness.6 The report represents the consensus view of the United States intelligence community and describes a wide range of sectors that have been the focus of hacking over the past five years, including the financial, information technology, aerospace, and automotive sectors.7 As security experts in aggressively targeted sectors have ramped up security efforts, the information security firm Mandiant reports that state-sponsored hackers have broadened their sights to include outside vendors and the business partners of high-value targets.8 Mandiant’s comprehensive report on information security in the private sector points to an increase in attacks on the networks of firms engaging in outsourced tasks, such as information technology, human resources, financial, and legal services.9 Because law firms work with thousands of clients across numerous industry sectors, cyber intruders see law firms as lucrative storehouses of sensitive information.10 Companies seek counsel when they are engaged in deeply sensitive and highly expensive matters, which tend to generate information that is potentially of great value to third parties. Financial details concerning a merger or acquisition can give any interested outside entity an advantage in future negotiations. Similarly, lawyers have access to details about an organization’s inner workings in the midst of litigation. Such information enables competitors to assess the financial stability of an organization and gain other tactical information. Furthermore, a firm’s litigation strategy is often outlined in various intra-firm communications. These documents provide significant advantage to opposing parties or interested third parties when networks are successfully breached. Law enforcement authorities in the United States, Canada, and the UK have all noted the rise in threats to law firm information systems. In November 2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) convened 200 large law firms in New York City to urge them to review their cybersecurity policies. In 2012, the Director General of the British MI-5 informed the 300 largest companies in the UK that their information was as likely to be stolen from the computers of their attorneys and international consultants as from their own. The FBI does not track individual breaches or keep statistics on the types of businesses attacked, but a 2012 Mandiant report estimated that 80 of the 100 largest United States law firms were subject to successful data breaches by malicious intruders in 2011 alone.11
?

Strong commitment by the USFG to the ACP is key to defending against cyber-threats and turns legitimacy.

ABA 13
American Bar Association (They raise the bar.). “Report to the House of Delegates.” Cybersecurity Legal Task Force. 2013. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/law_national_security/resolution_118.authcheckdam.pdf
Consistent with its commitment to client protection, the ABA is committed to defending the confidentiality of lawyer-client communications against these new threats. Protecting confidences is imperative for both ethical and practical reasons. Preservation of client confidentiality is widely recognized as fundamental to the ability of lawyers to successfully represent their clients’ interests. Clients must be secure in their ability to share confidential information with their lawyers, and the preservation of the confidentiality of lawyer-client communications is crucial to public confidence in the legal system. The legal profession, the legal system, and foreign and domestic actors should not ignore this important facet of the attorney-client relationship. The involvement of nation states in targeting confidential legal information is particularly troubling. Basic principles of due process and even human rights may be violated when confidential communications are breached by such intrusions. As protectors of the rule of law and the integrity of those who practice law, the ABA and the United States legal community condemn such intrusions and the organizations and nations engaged in this conduct. III. A Strong United States and International Response  Widespread intrusions into the computer networks of law firms deeply threaten clients, the legal profession and our system of justice. The United States has acknowledged that private actors and foreign governments disregard this essential aspect of legal representation when they systemically steal information, threaten access to information, or improperly modify information to the disadvantage of clients. The ABA urges the United States government and international community to speak out against these intrusions and to counter them with decisive action. In addition, the ABA urges not just the federal government, but state, local, territorial, and tribal governmental bodies as well, to examine, and if necessary, amend or supplement, any existing laws as may be necessary to deter and punish those who launch these unauthorized, illegal intrusions into the computer networks of lawyers and law firms. 

Violating the ACP kills effectiveness of cyber-security investigations by creating a chilling effect on communications.

ABA 13
American Bar Association (They raise the bar.). “Report to the House of Delegates.” Cybersecurity Legal Task Force. 2013. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/law_national_security/resolution_118.authcheckdam.pdf
Confidential client information should be protected during any cyber intrusion investigation, consistent with ethics rules and to prevent the erosion of the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine. Assisting such government investigations is important, but law enforcement should seek ways to conduct investigations without breaching confidentiality. If private investigators are going through compromised networks instead of government investigators, they too must take steps to avoid disclosing the client’s information. Guidelines should also ensure client confidences are not used in unrelated investigations, unless the privilege or work product protection is waived by the client’s consent. Privileged and confidential client information from law firm networks should not be permitted to be used in prosecutions or civil enforcement cases against the client and third parties. This protection should also extend to government agency inquiries related to intelligence or national security.  Government efforts to combat cyber attacks should comport with ABA’s long-standing commitment to the principle of attorney-client confidentiality. Both parties suffer when the foundation of the attorney-client relationship is threatened. The exposure of information to government agencies or private parties creates a chilling effect on client-attorney communication and reduces client candor. Such exposure also discourages voluntary legal compliance and information-sharing in cybercrime investigations. This is especially problematic as companies conducting internal investigations increasingly rely on law firms’ attorney-client privilege.37 

Cyber-terror attack on the US provokes retaliation which causes extinction.

Lawson 9
Sean, Assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, Cross-Domain Response to Cyber Attacks and the Threat of Conflict Escalation, May 13th 2009, http://www.seanlawson.net/?p=477
Introduction At a time when it seems impossible to avoid the seemingly growing hysteria over the threat of cyber war,1 network security expert Marcus Ranum delivered a refreshing talk recently, “The Problem with Cyber War,” that took a critical look at a number of the assumptions underlying contemporary cybersecurity discourse in the United States. He addressed one issue in partiuclar that I would like to riff on here, the issue of conflict escalation–i.e. the possibility that offensive use of cyber attacks could escalate to the use of physical force. As I will show, his concerns are entirely legitimate as current U.S. military cyber doctrine assumes the possibility of what I call “cross-domain responses” to cyberattacks. Backing Your Adversary (Mentally) into a Corner Based on the premise that completely blinding a potential adversary is a good indicator to that adversary that an attack is imminent, Ranum has argued that “The best thing that you could possibly do if you want to start World War III is launch a cyber attack. ... When people talk about cyber war like it’s a practical thing, what they’re really doing is messing with the OK button for starting World War III. We need to get them to sit the f-k down and shut the f-k up.” 2 He is making a point similar to one that I have made in the past: Taking away an adversary’s ability to make rational decisions could backfire. 3 For example, Gregory Witol cautions that “attacking the decision maker’s ability to perform rational calculations may cause more problems than it hopes to resolve… Removing the capacity for rational action may result in completely unforeseen consequences, including longer and bloodier battles than may otherwise have been.” 4 Cross-Domain Response So, from a theoretical standpoint, I think his concerns are well founded. But the current state of U.S. policy may be cause for even greater concern. It’s not just worrisome that a hypothetical blinding attack via cyberspace could send a signal of imminent attack and therefore trigger an irrational response from the adversary. What is also cause for concern is that current U.S. policy indicates that “kinetic attacks” (i.e. physical use of force) are seen as potentially legitimate responses to cyber attacks. Most worrisome is that current U.S. policy implies that a nuclear response is possible, something that policy makers have not denied in recent press reports. The reason, in part, is that the U.S. defense community has increasingly come to see cyberspace as a “domain of warfare” equivalent to air, land, sea, and space. The definition of cyberspace as its own domain of warfare helps in its own right to blur the online/offline, physical-space/cyberspace boundary. But thinking logically about the potential consequences of this framing leads to some disconcerting conclusions. If cyberspace is a domain of warfare, then it becomes possible to define “cyber attacks” (whatever those may be said to entail) as acts of war. But what happens if the U.S. is attacked in any of the other domains? It retaliates. But it usually does not respond only within the domain in which it was attacked. Rather, responses are typically “cross-domain responses”–i.e. a massive bombing on U.S. soil or vital U.S. interests abroad (e.g. think 9/11 or Pearl Harbor) might lead to air strikes against the attacker. Even more likely given a U.S. military “way of warfare” that emphasizes multidimensional, “joint” operations is a massive conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) response against the attacker in all domains (air, land, sea, space), simultaneously. The possibility of “kinetic action” in response to cyber attack, or as part of offensive U.S. cyber operations, is part of the current (2006) National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations 5: Of course, the possibility that a cyber attack on the U.S. could lead to a U.S. nuclear reply constitutes possibly the ultimate in “cross-domain response.” And while this may seem far fetched, it has not been ruled out by U.S. defense policy makers and is, in fact, implied in current U.S. defense policy documents. From the National Military Strategy of the United States (2004): “The term WMD/E relates to a broad range of adversary capabilities that pose potentially devastating impacts. WMD/E includes chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and enhanced high explosive weapons as well as other, more asymmetrical ‘weapons’. They may rely more on disruptive impact than destructive kinetic effects. For example, cyber attacks on US commercial information systems or attacks against transportation networks may have a greater economic or psychological effect than a relatively small release of a lethal agent.” 6 The authors of a 2009 National Academies of Science report on cyberwarfare respond to this by is saying, “Coupled with the declaratory policy on nuclear weapons described earlier, this statement implies that the United States will regard certain kinds of cyberattacks against the United States as being in the same category as nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and thus that a nuclear response to certain kinds of cyberattacks (namely, cyberattacks with devastating impacts) may be possible. It also sets a relevant scale–a cyberattack that has an impact larger than that associated with a relatively small release of a lethal agent is regarded with the same or greater seriousness.” 7 Asked by the New York Times to comment on this, U.S. defense officials would not deny that nuclear retaliation remains an option for response to a massive cyberattack: “Pentagon and military officials confirmed that the United States reserved the option to respond in any way it chooses to punish an adversary responsible for a catastrophic cyberattack. While the options could include the use of nuclear weapons, officials said, such an extreme counterattack was hardly the most likely response.” 8 The rationale for this policy: “Thus, the United States never declared that it would be bound to respond to a Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional invasion with only American and NATO conventional forces. The fear of escalating to a nuclear conflict was viewed as a pillar of stability and is credited with helping deter the larger Soviet-led conventional force throughout the cold war. Introducing the possibility of a nuclear response to a catastrophic cyberattack would be expected to serve the same purpose.” 9 Non-unique, Dangerous, and In-credible? There are a couple of interesting things to note in response. First is the development of a new acronym, WMD/E (weapons of mass destruction or effect). Again, this acronym indicates a weakening of the requirement of physical impacts. In this new definition, mass effects that are not necessarily physical, nor necessarily destructive, but possibly only disruptive economically or even psychologically (think “shock and awe”) are seen as equivalent to WMD. This new emphasis on effects, disruption, and psychology reflects both contemporary, but also long-held beliefs within the U.S. defense community. It reflects current thinking in U.S. military theory, in which it is said that U.S. forces should be able to “mass fires” and “mass effects” without having to physically “mass forces.” There is a sliding scale in which the physical (often referred to as the “kinetic”) gradually retreats–i.e. massed forces are most physical; massed fire is less physical (for the U.S. anyway); and massed effects are the least physical, having as the ultimate goal Sun Tzu’s “pinnacle of excellence,” winning without fighting. But the emphasis on disruption and psychology in WMD/E has also been a key component of much of 20th century military thought in the West. Industrial theories of warfare in the early 20th century posited that industrial societies were increasingly interdependent and reliant upon mass production, transportation, and consumption of material goods. Both industrial societies and the material links that held them together, as well as industrial people and their own internal linkages (i.e. nerves), were seen as increasingly fragile and prone to disruption via attack with the latest industrial weapons: airplanes and tanks. Once interdependent and fragile industrial societies were hopelessly disrupted via attack by the very weapons they themselves created, the nerves of modern, industrial men and women would be shattered, leading to moral and mental defeat and a loss of will to fight. Current thinking about the possible dangers of cyber attack upon the U.S. are based on the same basic premises: technologically dependent and therefore fragile societies populated by masses of people sensitive to any disruption in expected standards of living are easy targets. Ultimately, however, a number of researchers have pointed out the pseudo-psychological, pseudo-sociological, and a-historical (not to mention non-unique) nature of these assumptions. 10 Others have pointed out that these assumptions did not turn out to be true during WWII strategic bombing campaigns, that modern, industrial societies and populations were far more resilient than military theorists had assumed. 11 Finally, even some military theorists have questioned the assumptions behind cyber war, especially when assumptions about our own technology dependence-induced societal fragility (dubious on their own) are applied to other societies, especially non-Western societies (even more dubious). 12 Finally, where deterrence is concerned, it is important to remember that a deterrent has to be credible to be effective. True, the U.S. retained nuclear weapons as a deterrent during the Cold War. But, from the 1950s through the 1980s, there was increasing doubt among U.S. planners regarding the credibility of U.S. nuclear deterrence via the threat of “massive retaliation.” As early as the 1950s it was becoming clear that the U.S. would be reluctant at best to actually follow through on its threat of massive retaliation. Unfortunately, most money during that period had gone into building up the nuclear arsenal; conventional weapons had been marginalized. Thus, the U.S. had built a force it was likely never to use. So, the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s saw the development of concepts like “flexible response” and more emphasis on building up conventional forces. This was the big story of the 1980s and the “Reagan build-up” (not “Star Wars”). Realizing that, after a decade of distraction in Vietnam, it was back in a position vis-a-viz the Soviets in Europe in which it would have to rely on nuclear weapons to offset its own weakness in conventional forces, a position that could lead only to blackmail or holocaust, the U.S. moved to create stronger conventional forces. 13 Thus, the question where cyber war is concerned: If it was in-credible that the U.S. would actually follow through with massive retaliation after a Soviet attack on the U.S. or Western Europe, is it really credible to say that the U.S. would respond with nuclear weapons to a cyber attack, no matter how disruptive or destructive? Beyond credibility, deterrence makes many other assumptions that are problematic in the cyber war context. It assumes an adversary capable of being deterred. Can most of those who would perpetrate a cyber attack be deterred? Will al-Qa’ida be deterred? How about a band of nationalistic or even just thrill-seeker, bandwagon hackers for hire? Second, it assumes clear lines of command and control. Sure, some hacker groups might be funded and assisted to a great degree by states. But ultimately, even cyber war theorists will admit that it is doubtful that states have complete control over their armies of hacker mercenaries. How will deterrence play out in this kind of scenario?

Empirics prove that competitiveness creates economic hegemony which solves global conflict.

Hubbard 10
Hegemonic Stability Theory: An Empirical Analysis By: Jesse Hubbard Jesse Hubbard Program Assistant at Open Society Foundations Washington, District Of Columbia International Affairs Previous National Democratic Institute (NDI), National Defense University, Office of Congressman Jim Himes Education PPE at University of Oxford, 2010
Research into the theoretical underpinnings of this topic revealed that there are two main subfields within the literature on hegemonic stability. One line of study, an avenue pursued by prominent theorists such as Kindleberger, Keohane, and Ikenberry focuses primarily on questions of related to the economic system. The other avenue, pursued by theorists such as Gilpin, looks at the role of hegemonic governance in reducing violent conflict. In my research, I focus on this aspect of hegemonic stability – its implications for military conflict in the international system. To research this question, I undertook a broad quantitative study that examined data from both the American and British hegemonic epochs, focusing on the years of 1815-1939 in the case of British hegemony, and 1945 to 1999 in the case of American hegemony. I hypothesized that hegemonic strength was inversely correlated with levels of armed conflict in the international system. Using the data from the Correlates of War Project, I was able to perform a number of statistical analyses on my hypothesis. To measure hegemonic strength, I used the Composite Index of National Capability, a metric that averages together six different dimensions of relative power as a share of total power in the international system. I then matched this data with data cataloging all conflicts in the international system since 1815. I organized this data into five-year increments, in order to make statistical analysis more feasible. Regression analysis of the data revealed that there was a statistically significant negative correlation between relative hegemonic power and conflict levels in the international system. However, further statistical tests added complications to the picture of hegemonic governance that was emerging. Regression analysis of military actions engaged in by the hegemon versus total conflict in the system revealed a highly positive correlation for both American and British hegemony. Further analysis revealed that in both cases, military power was a less accurate predictor of military conflict than economic power. There are several possible explanations for these findings. It is likely that economic stability has an effect on international security. In addition, weaker hegemons are more likely to be challenged militarily than stronger hegemons. Thus, the hegemon will engage in more conflicts during times of international insecurity, because such times are also when the hegemon is weakest. Perhaps the most important implication of this research is that hegemons may well be more effective in promoting peace through economic power than through the exercise of military force. II. Research Question In examining hegemonic stability theory, there are several important questions to consider. First of all, an acceptable definition of what constitutes a hegemon must be established. Secondly, a good measure of what constitutes stability in the international system must be determined. Certainly, the frequency and severity of interstate conflict is an important measure of stability in the international system. However, other measures of stability should also be taken into account. Conflict in the international system takes on a wide range of forms. While military conflict is perhaps the most violent and severe dimension, it is only one of many forms that conflict can take. Conflict need not be confined to wars between traditional states. Terrorism, piracy, and guerilla warfare are also types of conflict that are endemic to the international system. Economic conflict, exemplified by trade wars, hostile actions such as sanctions, or outright trade embargos, is also an important form of conflict in the international system. States can also engage in a range of less severe actions that might be deemed political conflict, by recalling an ambassador or withdrawing from international bodies, for example. Clearly, “stability” as it pertains to the international system is a vast and amorphous concept. Because of these complexities, a comprehensive assessment of the theory is beyond the purview of this research. However, completing a more focused analysis is a realistic endeavor. Focusing on international armed conflicts in two select periods will serve to increase the feasibility the research. I will focus on the period of British hegemony lasting from the end of the Napoleonic wars to 1939 and the period of American hegemony beginning after the Second World War and continuing until 1999, the last year for which reliable data is available. The proposed hypothesis is that in these periods, the hegemon acted as a stabilizing force by reducing the frequency and severity of international armed conflict. The dependent variable in this case is the frequency and severity of conflict. The primary independent variable is the power level of the hegemon. This hypothesis is probabilistic since it posits that the hegemon tended to reduce conflict, not that it did so in every single possible instance. One way to test this hypothesis would be through a case-study method that examined the role of Britain and the United States in several different conflicts. This method would have the advantage of approaching the problem from a very feasible, limited perspective. While it would not reveal much about hegemony on a broader theoretical level, it would help provide practical grounding for what is a highly theoretical area of stuffy in international relations. Another method would be to do a broader quantitative comparison of international conflict by finding and comparing data on conflict and hegemonic strength for the entire time covered by British and American hegemony. The hypothesis is falsifiable, because it could be shown that the hegemon did not act as a stabilizing force during the years of study. It also avoids some of the pitfalls associated with the case study method, such as selection bias and the inherently subjective nature of qualitative analysis.

Tournament: Yale | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Timothy Christian DL | Judge: Fred Ditzian, Dave McGinnis, Henry Zhang
Congress will ultimately compromise to avert shutdown – GOP divisions make it more likely, not less
Tom Cohen, 9-20-2013, “Congress: will it be a government shutdown or budget compromise?” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/19/politics/congress-shutdown-scenarios/index.html?utm_source=feedburnerandutm_medium=feedandutm_campaign=Feed3A+rss2Fcnn_allpolitics+(RSS3A+Politics)
There hasn't been a government shutdown in more than…provide Boehner and House Republicans with political cover to back it.

CV kills Obama’s polcap.
Keaney and Rogers 6
Emily Keaney and Ben Rogers (writers for the IPPR). “A Citizen’s Duty: Voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout.” The Institute for Public Policy Research is the UK’s leading progressive think tank and was established in 1988. May 2006. http://www.ippr.org/ecomm/files/a_citizen27s_duty.pdf

The little polling that has been done on the public’s attitude to compulsory turnout… very groups the measure is meant to support – those that currently turn out in very low numbers. 

Independently, political capital is finite and any new policies would wreck the deal  
Moore, 9/10 --- Guardian's US finance and economics editor
(Heidi, 9/10/2013, “Syria: the great distraction; Obama is focused on a conflict abroad, but the fight he should be gearing up for is with Congress on America's economic security,” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/10/obama-syria-what-about-sequester))

Before President Obama speaks to the nation about Syria…President should have judged his options better. As it is, he should now judge his actions better.
This will destroy the U.S. and global economy
Davidson, 9/10 (Adam - co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money” 9/10/2013, “Our Debt to Society,” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/our-debt-to-society.html?pagewanted=alland_r=0))

This is the definition of a deficit, and it illustrates why the government…would benefit from America’s diminished status. When you make the base risk-free asset more risky, the entire global economy becomes riskier and costlier. 

The impact is global nuclear war
Freidberg and Schonfeld, 8 --- *Professor of Politics and IR at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, AND senior editor of Commentary and a visiting scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton (10/21/2008, Aaron and Gabriel, “The Dangers of a Diminished America”, Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)

With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America's geostrategic dominance…no substitute for America on the world stage. The choice we have before us is between the potentially disastrous effects of disengagement and the stiff price tag of continued American leadership.

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: Finals | Opponent: Lexington PC Preetham Chippada | Judge: Elijah Smith, Dave McGinnis, Jenn Melin, Ben Koh, Mark Gorthey, Abhi Elisetty, Student Vote
Formatted version here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5155563/Finals20Neg.docx

1

First off, the ethical framework

Util is axiomatic. Harris 10 writes
Harris, Sam (NYT Bestselling author, BA in phil from Stanford, PhD in neuroscience from UCLA). Toward a Science of Morality. HuffPo. 7 May 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html
So, while it is possible to say that one…is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs. 

Thus the standard is maximizing happiness.

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9 writes
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.…what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

2

Authorization of military strikes on Syria will pass by a narrow margin due to Obama’s push.
Zengerle and Oweis 9-4 write
Patricia Zengerle and Khaled Yacoub Oweis (staff writers). “U.S. resolution on Syria strike passes first hurdle in Senate.” Reuters. September 4th, 2013. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE97K0EL20130904
(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obamaand#39;s effort…expected to vote against a resolution, placing the final outcome in doubt. 

Polcap’s key. Lewis 8-31 writes
Paul Lewis (Washington, DC correspondent for The Guardian, won 10 major journalism prizes including the European Press Prize in 2013). “Battle looms in Congress as Obama makes Syria a vast political gamble.” The Guardian. August 31st, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/31/barack-obama-syria-congress-vote
Barack Obama has taken a potentially…and#34;every ounce of political capital that he has to sell thisand#34;. 

CV kills Obama’s polcap.
Keaney and Rogers 6 write
Emily Keaney and Ben Rogers (writers for the IPPR). “A Citizen’s Duty: Voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout.” The Institute for Public Policy Research is the UK’s leading progressive think tank and was established in 1988. May 2006. http://www.ippr.org/ecomm/files/a_citizen27s_duty.pdf
The little polling that has been done on the public’s attitude to compulsory turnout…those that currently turn out in very low numbers. 

Syria strike is key to deter Iranian prolif.
Lobe 9-5 writes
Jim Lobe (American journalist and the Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service). “Pro-Israel groups mix Iran into Syria debate.” Asia Times. September 5th, 2013. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-050913.html
Brackets in original. WASHINGTON - With the US…do it in a way that is seen as being effective and meaningful and serious,and#34; he added. ?
Iran prolif leads to global spillover. The NPT will break down. McCoy 11 writes
 Ronald McCoy (President of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War). “Iran’s nuclear aspirations: A poisoned chalice.” January 29th, 2011. http://www.kafkapizechust.com/irans-nuclear-aspirations-a-poisoned-chalice/2247/
Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General…lead to a nuclear free-for-all and a cascade of proliferation. 

Prolif is the largest existential threat. Miller 2 writes
James D. Miller, professor of economics, Smith College, NATIONAL REVIEW, January 23, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-miller012302.shtml, AD: 7-31-09
The U.S. should use…refocus her foreign policy to prioritize protecting us all from atomic, biological, and chemical weapons.

3

Next off, the coercion disad.

Compulsory voting isn’t key to high turnout. Squo solves. CV just kills limited government. Vallicella 6 writes
Bill Vallicella (taught philosophy at various universities in the US and abroad before abandoning a tenured position to live the life of an independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert). “Vote ‘No’ on Mandatory Voting.” Original version written in August 2006 on Powerblogs, re-dacted in 2011. http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/11/mandatory-voting.html
I support the right of those…not every duty should be legally mandated.  

Maintaining limited government is a utility-maximizing rule and key to accountability.
Weinberger No Date
Joshua Weinbarger (Electrical Engineering graduate of dual-degree Masterand#39;s program with interest in speech and language processing, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Experience in speech and language processing, in experimental design and setup, algorithm development and implementation, data acquisition and analysis, statistics). “On Utilitarian Government.” No Date. http://tparis23.tripod.com/government.html
A broader reason for a right to privacy…decreasing the greatest happiness.  Thus governments should be limited in scope.

Accountability is independently key to avoiding extinction.
Boggs 97 writes
Carl Boggs, National University, 1997, Theory and Society, December, Volume 26, Number 6, p. 773-4
The decline of the public sphere…vanished from civil society.75 

Turns the case, three reasons.

A. Empirics prove that corruption kills turnout but inequality doesn’t.
Scruggs and Stockemer 9 write
Lyle Scruggs and Daniel Stockemer (Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut). “The impact of inequality on turnout – New evidence on a burgeoning debate.” Paper prepared for presentation at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 2-
We present the OLS estimates of regression models…no longer statistically significant. (Income is negatively correlated with corruption.). 

B. Rawls devolves to libertarianism.
Vallier 12 writes
Kevin Vallier (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University). “Neo-Rawlsian Libertarianism: Two Principles of Justice for Bleeding Hearts.” 12 April 2012. http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/04/neo-rawlsian-libertarianism-two-principles-of-justice-for-bleeding-hearts/
Here’s the later Rawls’s statement of his first principle:…. sustain a society’s basic structure.

C. Extinction first under Rawls. Adopt a double-level theory that accounts for very bad consequences as well as liberty.

Korsgaard 86 writes
Korsgaard, Christine (never violates side constraints). 1986. The right to lie: Kant on dealing with evil. Philosophy and Public Affairs 15, no. 4: 325-349. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3200670/Korsgaard_RighttoLie.pdf?sequence=2
In his A Critique of Utilitarianism20, Bernard Williams…we have done what is clearly the right thing. 22

4

Next of the constitution counter-plan.

Text: The US will enshrine a non-binding duty to vote in the constitution.

Solves the case. A constitutional duty creates a precedent that spills over to future reforms to solve civic engagement.

Birch 9 writes
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf
The ?rst alternative to formally…a civic duty in the electoral law (Article 3) but not in the constitution. 

Independently solves turnout. Enforcement’s not key. HLR 7 writes
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

Regardless of the enforcement scheme,…in the United States in other contexts.

Tournament: George Mason | Round: 3 | Opponent: Stefanie Pousolides | Judge: Allan Cartwright
I negate today’s resolution, Resolved: In the United States criminal justice system, truth seeking ought to take precedence over the attorney-client privilege.

My value is ====morality====, as “ought” in the resolution denotes moral obligation.

Morality must be grounded on a conception of absolute good.

Professor Patrick Lee 8 writes
“The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity,” Patrick Lee, John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics, Institute of Bioethics @ Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University. Ratio Juris. Vol. 21 No. 2 June 2008 (173–93)
The basis of this point can be explained, at least in part, in the following way. When one chooses an actsion, one chooses it for a reason, that is, for the sake of some good one thinks this action will help to realize. That good may itself be a way of realizing some further good, and that good a means to another, and so on. But the chain of instrumental goods cannot be in?nite. So, there must be some ultimate reasons for one’s choices, some goods which one recognizes as reasons for choosing which need no further support, which are not mere means to some further good. 

The ultimate good is the value of humans as ends in themselves.

Philosopher Thomas Hill 91 writes
Hill, Thomas. Jr. “Self-regarding suicide: A modified Kantian view” in Autonomy and Self-Respect. Cambridge University Press. 1991. Pg. 102-103.
The second argument is roughly this: Most valuable things have value only because valued by human beings. Their value is derivative from the fact that they serve our interests and desires. Even pleasure, which we value for its own sake, has only derivative value, that is, value dependent on the contingent on the fact that human beings want it. Now if valuers confer derivative value on things by their preferences and choices, those valuers must themselves have value. In fact, they must have value independent of, and superior to, the derivative values they create. The guiding analogy is how we value ends. We value certain means because they serve certain intermediate ends, which in turn we value because they contribute finally to our ultimate ends, that is, what we value for its own sake. The value of the means and the intermediate ends is derivative from the value of the ultimate ends; unless we value the ultimate end, the means and intermediate ends would be worthless to us. So, it seems, the source of derivative value must itself be valuable for its own sake. Since the ultimate source of the value of our contingent ends, such as health, wealth, and even pleasure, is their being valued by human beings, human beings, as valuers, must be valued for their own sakes.

Therefore my criterion is ====respecting human worth====. 

Also prefer the criterion since violating human worth disrespects individuality, which morality must uphold.

Warren Quinn 89 explains
Quinn, Warren S. “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing.” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 3, (Jul., 1989), pp. 287-312. JSTOR.
Whether we are speaking of ownership or more fundamental forms of possession, something is, morally speaking, his only if his say over what may be done to it (and thereby to him) can override the greater needs of others. A person is constituted by his body and mind. They are parts or aspects of him. For that very reason, it is fitting that he have primary say over what may be done to them-not because such an arrangement best promotes overall human welfare, but because any arrangement that denied him that say would be a grave indignity. In giving him this authority, morality recognizes his existence as an individual with ends of his own—an independent being. Since that is what he is, he deserves this recognition. Were morality to withhold it, were it to allow us to kill or injure him whenever that would be collectively best, it would picture him not as a being in his own right but as a cell in the collective whole. This last point can be illustrated not by thinking of bodies or minds but of lives. The moral sense in which your mind or body is yours seems to be the same as that in which your life is yours. And if your life is yours then there must be decisions concerning it that are yours to make-decisions protected by negative rights. One such matter is the choice of work or vocation. We think there is something morally amiss when people are forced to be farmers or flute players just because the balance of social needs tips in that direction. Barring great emergencies, we think people's lives must be theirs to lead. Not because that makes things go best in some independent sense but because the alternative seems to obliterate them as individuals. This obliteration, and not social inefficiency, is one of the things that strikes us as appalling in totalitarian social projects for example, in the Great Cultural Revolution. None of this, of course, denies the legitimate force of positive rights. They too are essential to the status we want as persons who matter, and they must be satisfied when it is morally possible to do so. But negative rights, for the reasons I have been giving, define the terms of moral possibility. Their precedence is essential to the moral fact of our lives, minds, and bodies really being ours.

My thesis is that truth-seeking hurts due process and long-term truth seeking.

JD candidate Michael Hartman 8 writes
Michael Hartman (JD candidate, University of Pennsylvania Law School; B.A., 2003, George Washington University). “Yes, Martha Stewart Can Even Teach Us About The Constitution. Why Constitutional Considerations Warrant An Extension Of The Attorney-Client Privilege In High-Profile Criminal Cases.” Journal of Constitutional Law. May 2008.
Brackets in original. On its face, the Fifth Amendment offers perhaps the clearest support for the attorney-client privilege. One author has noted that "early American criminal courts and legal scholars viewed the attorney- client privilege as an outgrowth of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. 22 The link is clear. The benefits associated with the attorney-client privilege arise from its ability to facilitate open attorney-client communications.23 These benefits would cease to exist if a client's preexisting Fifth Amendment rights were forfeited merely because he or she divulged incriminating information to counsel.24 Some scholars have even gone so far as to argue that the federal government's growing attempts to circumvent the attorney- client privilege' may lead to the evisceration of Fifth Amendment rights.2 6 Additionally, the Fifth Amendment supports a constitutional attorney- client privilege for reasons beyond self-incrimination issues. For example, courts have suggested that the due process component" of the Fifth Amendment "includes the right of one accused of crime to have the effective and substantial aid of counsel." 28 The attorney client privilege is necessary to give this right substance because it would be impossible for a lawyer to counsel a client effectively or substantially without the level of frank and open communications ensured by the privilege.2 9 This relationship between the due process requirement and the attorney-client privilege coincides with one widely accepted justification for the attorney-client privilege: it should result in the client sharing more information with the attorney, who, in turn, gives more informed and effective advice to the client. 0 Although the privilege may ultimately prevent full discovery in a criminal matter, it promotes due process by fostering better informed counsel, more efficient judicial processes, and greater obedience to the law. The Fifth Amendment rights implicated by the attorney-client privilege feed off of the assistance of counsel right provided by the Sixth Amendment. Unless a citizen had a right to the assistance of counsel, there would be no need to preserve his or her Fifth Amendment rights in the face of consultations with counsel. 32 While scholars may debate whether the Fifth Amendment alone provides a constitutional basis for the attorney-client privilege,3 few dispute that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel would have little meaning without the privilege. 4 Indeed, some authors have referred to the privilege as the "cornerstone of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.0 5 By contrast, the Supreme Court has not had much occasion to pontificate on the correlation between the Sixth Amendment and the privilege, 36 though former Chief Justice Rehnquist observed on one occasion that "the Sixth Amendment, of course, protects the confidentiality of communications between the accused and his attorney.'' 1 Other courts have weighed in on the matter, finding that Sixth Amendment rights are ensured by the privilege. For example, the Third Circuit, in United States v. Levy, explained: The fundamental justification for the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is the presumed inability of a defendant to make informed choices about the preparation and conduct of his defense. Free two-way communication between client and attorney is essential if the professional assistance guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment is to be meaningful. The purpose of the attorney-client privilege is inextricably linked to the very integrity and accuracy of the fact finding process itself. Other circuits have also expressly found a Sixth Amendment foundation for the attorney-client privilege.3 9 Accordingly, while it is not entirely settled, there appears to be ample support for the notion that the attorney-client privilege is indispensable to the right to effective counsel. 

Due process is essential to human worth.

Professor of Public Law Trevor Allan 98 writes
Allan, Trevor R.S. (Professor of Public Law and Jurisprudence, University of Cambridge). Procedural Fairness and the Duty of Respect. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 497-515. Oxford University Press. Accessed JSTOR.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/764676.
The analogy between fair hearings, in legal and administrative proceedings, and participation in political affairs shows why the connection between procedures and outcomes is not merely instrumental. Just as democratic participation cannot guarantee the enactment of good laws, so fair hearings cannot always ensure the accurate application of authoritative legal standards. In each case, however, the process affords moral grounds for accepting the outcome, even when it is otherwise unjust. It is not merely that procedures are inherently imperfect, so that the correct outcome can never be guaranteed. More fundamentally, the right outcome is itself usually a matter of controversy: divergent views can reasonably be taken both about the justice of (actual or proposed) legal rules and the appropriateness of their application in the particular case. These matters are, of course, closely connected because any particular case can raise questions about the meaning and scope of the general rule and, ultimately, in so far as there is no room left for argument over meaning and scope, questions about whether it should ever be applied at all. When procedures allow genuine participation, in the sense that questions of justice can be raised and answered, and where every rule is ultimately open to challenge and, accordingly, modification, the citizen is treated with the respect which his dignity deserves.

My second contention is that truth-seeking is self-incriminating.

Professor of Law at Georgetown David Luban 5 writes
David Luban (professor of law at Georgetown). “Lawyers as Upholders of Human Dignity (When They Aren’t Busy Assaulting It).” U. Ill. L. Rev. 815-845 (2005). http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164andcontext=facpub
So far, then, we have discovered only reasons to abandon confidentiality and the attorney-client privilege, not to defend them. Let us try again. Suppose that the attorney-client privilege and the duty of confidentiality were eliminated from the legal system. Then consider the situation faced by a client with something to hide. The client faces a trilemma of unpleasant choices. First, he can elect not to tell his story to his lawyer because he is afraid that the lawyer might be compelled to reveal it. Second, he can lie to his lawyer. Either way, silence or lies, the client loses much of the benefit that having an advocate was supposed to provide. Or, finally, he can reveal the story to his lawyer, knowing that doing so amounts to revealing it to the world at large. If the story con-cerns a crime he has committed, revealing it to his lawyer amounts to vicarious self-incrimination, because without the attorney-client privilege, the lawyer can be compelled to testify about whatever the client has told her. All three choices are disastrous: the first two abrogate the right to counsel, while the third abandons the right against self-incrimination.
 

Self-incrimination goes against human dignity.

David Luban 5 continues
David Luban (professor of law at Georgetown). “Lawyers as Upholders of Human Dignity (When They Aren’t Busy Assaulting It).” U. Ill. L. Rev. 815-845 (2005). http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164andcontext=facpub
In both practices, the humiliation lies in enlisting a person's own will in the process of punishing her, and thereby splitting her against herself. To see this, begin with the actual language of the self-incrimination clause, which states that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself._{67 The crucial phrase "witness against himself" indicates a kind of splitting or division within the self-one half, the person with an interest in evading condemnation; the other, the witness who disinterestedly provides whatever information the state requires. A witness fulfills a civic obligation. Even if it is unpleasant or inconvenient to testify, she must do so for the good of the community, if need be under compulsion of subpoena. Temporarily, at any rate, the witness becomes the eyes and ears of the community, and aims at a collective, rather than a personal or individual, good. To be a witness against yourself means to assume this disinterested outsider's stance toward your own condemnation. This is an extraordinary kind of self-alienation, as if the only interest you have in the matter is the state's interest in ascertaining the truth and apportioning blame. Being a witness against yourself divides you in two, one half the individual with an interest in evading condemnation, the other half, the state's representative; and compelling you to be a witness against yourself subordinates the former to the latter. In effect, it treats the individual as insignificant- as if his subjectivity simply doesn't exist or matter. Even if humiliation is not the purpose of compelling someone to be a witness against himself, as it is in forcing someone to administer his own punishment, humiliation is the outcome.}

Tournament: Bronx | Round: 1 | Opponent: USchool AF | Judge: Mark Gorthey
The affirmative’s modern approach to truth is meaningless; it seeks to impose order on a fundamentally chaotic universe. Gough 5
Noel Gough (Faculty of Education, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia). “Postmodernist Perspectives: Key Concepts.” 2005. http://www.corwin.com/upm-data/9737_035889ch36.pdf

Some literary critics see the detective story as the characteristic genre of modernist storytelling. For example, Brian McHale argues that modernist ?ction usually involves ‘a quest for a missing or hidden item of knowledge’ (1992: 146) and that ‘a modernist novel looks like a detective story’, centrally concerned with ‘problems of the accessibility and circulation of knowledge, the individual mind’s grappling with an elusive or occluded reality’ (1992: 147). The detective is the archetypal modernist subject, a quest(ion)ing ‘cognitive hero’, an ‘agent of recognitions . . . reduced synecdochically to the organ of visual perception, the (private) eye’ (1992: 147), seeking to understand a uni?ed and objective world. The postmodern turn in detective ?ction (which may have preceded an analogous transformation of social research) is signalled by the emergence of ‘anti-detective’ stories that evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ in order to frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime. One of the most celebrated anti-detective stories is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983) which takes some well-known examples of generic detective ?ction as its intertextual models, but – as Eco himself puts it – ‘is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated’ (1984: 54). In The Name of the Rose, Eco uses the form of detective ?ction to deconstruct, disrupt and undermine the rationality of the models of conjecture conventionally provided by the form – which is why, as Eco writes, his ‘basic story (whodunit?) rami?es into so many other stories, all stories of other conjectures, all linked with the structure of conjecture as such’ (1984: 57). Eco provides a physical model of conjecturality in the abbey’s labyrinthine library but also demonstrates that his detective – William of Baskerville – cannot decipher the complex social milieu of the abbey by assuming that it has a comparably logical (albeit complicated) structure. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Eco likens ‘the structure of conjecture’ to the in?nite networks of a rhizome rather than to the ?nite and hierarchical roots and branches of a tree: The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially in?nite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space . . . the world in which William realizes he is living already has a rhizome structure: that is, it can be structured but is never structured de?nitively . . . it is impossible for there to be a story. (1984: 57–8) Thus the anti-detective story not only subverts the rationality of the investigatory methods modelled by conventional detective ?ction but also denies the defensibility of the dominant cultural expectations that animate such enquiries, namely ‘the longing for ‘‘one true story’’ that has been the psychic motor for modern Western science’ (Harding, 1986: 193). Eco’s story of William’s ‘failure’ as a (modernist) detective is riddled with implicit and explicit references to postmodernist inquiry strategies, as in the following conversation between William and his ‘Watson’, Adso: ‘What I did not understand was the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.’ ‘But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something . . .’ ‘What you say is very ?ne Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.’ (1983: 492) The Name of the Rose is itself such an ‘erroneous order’, which Eco emphasizes by using meta?ctional narrative strategies to expose its status as ?ction and draw attention to the processes by which it is constructed both as a world to be explored and the means of its own exploration. Thus the more appropriate models for postmodernist social researchers are not detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Philip Marlowe or Kate Fansler, but authors like Umberto Eco. Our work is to fathom the mysteries we inscribe. 

The aff’s idea that we can have a priori understanding of the world confuses the task of ontology with the task of morality. Only the alternative recognizes that knowledge is an intervention into reality. Rorty 80
Richard Rorty. “Method, social science, and social hope.” Delivered at a conference at Berkeley, March 1980. The postmodern turn: New perspectives on social theory. ed. Steven Seidman, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

As long as we think of knowledge as representing reality rather than coping with it, mind or language will continue to seem numinous, and 'materialism,' 'behaviorism' and the Galilean style will seem morally dubious. We shall be stuck with this notion of 'representing' or 'corresponding to' reality as long as we think that there is some analogy between calling things by their 'right' - i.e., their conventional - names and finding the 'right' - i.e., Nature's Own - way of describing them. But if we could abandon this metaphor, and the vocabulary of representation which goes with it - as Kuhn and Dewey suggest we might - then we would not find language or mind mysterious, nor 'materialism' or 'behaviorism' particularly dangerous. If the line I am taking is right, we need to think of our distinctive moral status as just that, rather than 'grounded' on our possession of mind, language, culture, feeling, intentionality, textuality, or anything else. All these numinous notions are just expressions of our awareness that we are members of a moral community, phrased in one or another pseudo-explanatory jargon. This awareness is something which cannot be further 'grounded' - it is simply taking a certain point of view on our fellow-humans. The question of whether it is an 'objective' pint of view is not to any point. This can be made a bit more concrete as follows. I said that, pace Taylor, it was a mistake to think of somebody's own account of his behavior or culture as epistemically privileged. He might have a good account of what he's doing or he might not. But it is not a mistake to think of it as morally privileged. We have a duty to listen to his account, not because Method, social science, and social hope 57 he has privileged access to his own motives but because he is a human being like ourselves. Taylor's claim that we need to look for internal explanations of people or cultures or texts takes civility as a methodological strategy. But civility is not a method, it is simply a virtue. The reason why we invite the moronic psychopath to address the court before being sentenced is not that we hope for better explanations than expert psychiatric testimony has offered. We do so because he is, after all, one of us. By asking for his own account in his own words, we hope to decrease our chances of acting badly. What we hope form the social sciences is that they will act as interpreters for those how to talk to whom we are not sure. This is the same thing we hope for from our poets and dramatists and novelists. Just as I argued in the previous section of this paper that it is a mistake to think that there is a principled distinction between explanation and understanding, or between two methods, one appropriate for nature and the other for man, I have been arguing in this section that the notion that we know a priori that nature and man are distinct sorts of objects is a mistake. It is a confusion between ontology and morals. There are lots of useful vocabularies which ignore the nonhuman-human or thing-person distinctions. There is at least one vocabulary - the moral - and possibly many more, for which these distinctions are basic. Human beings are no more 'really' described in the latter sort of vocabulary than in the former. Objects are not 'more objectively' described in any vocabulary that in any other. Vocabularies are useful or useless, good or bad, helpful or misleading, sensitive or coarse, and so on; but they are not 'more objective' or 'less objective' nor more or less 'scientific.’

Modernity’s superimposition of order is what Lyotard calls a ‘metanarrative.’ Academic spaces are poisoned by a humanist ethic that ignores the socially situated nature of reason. It’s what society lets us say that is conflated with objective representation. Peters 95
Peters, Michael. "Legitimation problems: Knowledge and education in the postmodern condition." Education and the postmodern condition (1995): 21-38.

Lyotard then defines postmodern as "incredulity toward metanarratives," a distrust of "stories" that purport to justify certain practices or institutions by grounding them upon a set of transcendental, ahistorical, or universal principles. This incredulity is a product, Lyotard maintains, of progress in the sciences, specifically, a change in the way we practice science. Here Lyotard is linking up and referring in an anecdotal way to the crisis in metaphysical philosophy, pointed to in the English-speaking world by the historical theories of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. It seems, however, that Lyotard takes such theories as indicating that we actually conduct scientific research in a way different from the one used by those who practiced science in the Newtonian period, rather than thinking of the recent debunking of the empiricist model of science as simply repudiating a bad account. 32  The metanarrative provided by the "crowning" science of speculative philosophy legitimated the university institution that was modeled along principles of emancipationist humanism. Youth from the liberal élite-"the heroes of knowledge"--were trained in the great task of pursuing good ethico-political ends and leading their countries toward social progress. This is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment narrative now under scrutiny: "To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it." 33  The crisis of metaphysical philosophy and the bankruptcy of ahistorical theories of justification are linked up, by way of an aesthetic thematic in Lyotard's work, with the so-called crisis of representation, in which an essentially realist epistemology based on a mirror theory of knowledge and art conceives of representation as the reproduction of an external reality. English-speaking readers will recognize the theme as it has been recently explored by the American "pragmatist" Richard Rorty in his reworking of the history of modern analytic philosophy. 34 Beginning his interpretation with a quotation from Wittgenstein Vermischte Bemerkungen, which likens progress in philosophy to the finding of a remedy for itching, a physicianlike Rorty diagnoses modern analytic philosophy as simply one more variant of Kantian philosophy that is distinguished from its parent predecessor by its thinking of representation in linguistic terms and of philosophy of language as exhibiting the "foundations of knowledge." Significantly, Rorty argues for a position termed "epistemological behaviorism," which explains rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say rather than vice versa. Divested of the captivating mirror imagery, philosophy can then be seen simply as part of the social practice of conversation. 

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3 impacts. 

a. The aff’s approach to philosophy is self-undermining; in its abstraction, modern philosophy is subordinated to existing power structures based on grand narratives of efficiency. The kritik is not a rejection of truth, rather modernity’s abstract understanding of it, divorced from social context. Peters 95
Peters, Michael. "Legitimation problems: Knowledge and education in the postmodern condition." Education and the postmodern condition (1995): 21-38.

A similar scenario can be plotted for education--the transmission of knowledge--which is also to be legitimated in terms of the performative (i.e., efficiency) criterion. It is at this point that Lyotard answers the questions that pertain to a university policy (mentioned in the introduction of this article). The goal for the university becomes its optimal contribution to the best performance of the social system. This goal demands the creation of two kinds of skills indispensable to the maintenance of the social system: Those necessary to enhance competitiveness in the world market and those necessary for fulfilling the need for its internal cohesion. The first, Lyotard predicts, will lead to the growth of demand for middlemanagement executives in leading sectors and priority in education being given to any discipline that can demonstrate an applicability to training in "telematics" (computer science, sybernetics, mathematics, and so on). The second, within the context of delegitimation, will no longer regard the transmission of knowledge as the training of an elite capable of guiding society toward its emancipation but will simply "supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions." 60  Accordingly, two categories of students will emerge more strongly, those who reproduce the technical and the professional intelligentsia. In addition to its professionalist function, the university will come also to improve the system's performance through an increasing role in the realms of job retraining and continuing education. There is a changing emphasis from transmitting knowledge en bloc to young people before they join the workforce to one that serves working adults, à la carte, to help them improve their skills and widen occupation horizons. 35 The general effect of the performativity principle is to subordinate the institutions of higher learning to the existing power, that is, in terms of legitimating myths, subordinating truth (as it figures in the emancipatory narrative) to efficiency and power. Lyotard writes: The notion of "university franchise" now belongs to a bygone era. The "autonomy" granted the universities after the crisis of the late 1960's has very little meaning given the fact that practically nowhere do teachers' groups have the power to decide what the budget of their institution will be; all they can do is allocate the funds that are assigned to them, and only then as the last step in the process. 61  New technologies will alter the medium of the transmission of knowledge--almost a truism in the postmodern age--and elementary training in informatics may become a compulsory requirement in the same way as a foreign language proficiency was/is a requirement in the modern university. Replacement of teachers by machines and technicians is only repugnant within the old master narrative of emancipationist humanism: The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professional student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer "Is it true?" but "What use is it?" In the context of the mercantilisation of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: "Is it saleable?" And in the context of power-growth: "Is it efficient?" 62  

This lends way to technocracy, which homogenizes the world and guarantees violence. Technocracy is epistemologically problematic; it relies on a false objectivity.
Lyotard 79
Jean-Francois Lyotard (French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist). The Postmodern Condition. 1979. http://www.futuroscopio.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Lyotard-the_postmodern_condition_a.pdf

At risk of scandalizing the reader, I would also say that the system can count severity among its advantages. Within the framework of the power criterion, a request (that is, a form of prescription) aims nothing in legitimacy by virtue of being based on the hardship of an unmet need. Rights do not flow from hardship, but from the fact that the alleviation of hardship improves the system's performance. The needs of the most underprivileged should not be used as a system regulator as a matter of principle: since the means of satisfying them is already known, their actual satisfaction will not improve the system's performance, but only increase its expenditures. The only counterindication is that not satisfying them can destabilize the whole. It is against the nature of force to be ruled by weakness. But it is in its nature to induce new requests meant to lead to a redefinition of the norms of "life."218 In this sense, the system seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity. The technocrats declare that they cannot trust what society designates as its needs; they "know" that society cannot know its own needs since they are not variables independent of the new technologies.219 Such is the arrogance of the decision makers-and their blindness. What their "arrogance" means is that they identify themselves with the social system conceived as a totality in quest of its most performative unity possible. If we look at the pragmatics of science, we learn that such an identification is impossible: in principle, no scientist embodies knowledge or neglects the "needs" of a research project, or the aspirations of a researcher, on the pretext that they do not add to the performance of "science" as a whole. The response a researcher usually makes to a request is: "We'll have to see, tell me your story.” In principle, he does not prejudge that a case has already been closed or that the power of "science" will suffer if it is reopened. In fact, 'the opposite is true. Of course, it does not always happen like this in reality. Countless scientists have seen their "move" ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, because it too abruptly destabilized the accepted positions, not only in the university and scientific hierarchy, bur also in the problematic.221 The stronger the "move," the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which consensus had been based. But when the institution of knowledge functions in this manner, it is acting like an ordinary power center whose behavior is governed by a principle of homeostasis. Such behavior is terrorist, as is the behavior of the system described by Luhmann. By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing), The decision makers' arrogance, which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists in the exercise of terror. It says: "Adapt your aspirations to our ends-or else.” 

b. Modernity makes extinction inevitable. Their metanarrative of progress is disastrous for the biosphere. The alternative allows for rethinking our understanding of the environment. White 98
Daniel Ray White. “Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution, and Play.” Published by SUNY Albany. 1998. Google Books.

The project of modernity – from the Gaian viewpoint of Lovelock, the colonization of the earth – conceivably entails no less than splitting the biosphere itself, and so human extinction, as the final product of progress. As Bateson argues, we can destroy the world with the best of intentions. Consider the ecological notion, articulated by Bateson, that the “unit of survival” is not, as Darwinism postulates, the individual organism, or species, as social Darwinism would have it, entrepreneur, or enterprise or nation or class – a view that leads to the further, modernist assumption that the survival unit, “man,” must struggle against and attempt to dominate nature, or “we” must overcome “them,” using the most efficient means at his/our disposal. What tenaciously lives is, instead, a heterogenous pattern involving both “organism” and “environment,” “us” and “them.” At Bateson argues, “the unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its environment” (457). Or, as Heidegger would say, living is “being open”, Dasein. What does not live for long in evolutionary ecology is a “species” that embodies the modernist paradigm: It is now empirically clear that Darwinian evolutionary theory contained a very great error in its identification of the unit of survival under natural selection. The unit which was believed to be crucial and around which the theory was set up was either the breeding individual or the family line or the sub-species or some similar homogenous set of conspecifics. Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its “progress” ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself. (457) The word “species” is the English form of the Latin species, which is in turn the translation of the Greek idea, the word, often rendered in English as “Form,” as the basis of Plato’s theory of Forms and of Aristotle’s natural kinds. The Forms are the objects of knowledge as well as the organizing divisions of the world, the archetypes or in modern terms “geno-types” on which the phenotypes of natural entities are patterned. A rational account of nature was called logos, and indeed Aristotle formalized the principles of correct reasoning as “logic.” The Socratic intellect evident in Plato’s Dialogues subjected the “storis” (muthoi, “myths”) of the Homeric tradition, to rational analysis, subordinating mythos to logos, or myth to logic (see Nestle, Havelock). Stories, or myths, are arguably encoded in a fashion similar to the ecologies of organisms and, though some Darwinists might scoff, evolution might be described, so Bateson thinks, as a kind of story. 

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c.  The aff’s normative visions are utopian. Their speech act is one of mastery of knowledge, but promotion of rational understanding has failed to save us from violence and oppression. As long as we cling to the aff’s linear and simplistic understanding of history and progress, modernity’s latent side-effects can’t be addressed.
Best and Kellner 98
Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner. "Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future," New Political Science , Volume 20, Number 3, September 1998: 283 -299. 

Generally characterized, the project of modern politics was to define and implement universal goals like freedom, equality, and justice, in an attempt to transform institutional structures of domination. Modern politics emerged from the Enlightenment project of subjecting to critique by the norms of reason all forms of authority and all existing institutions. Modern politics presupposed a democratic public sphere where individuals and social groups could discuss political problems and choices, and intervene practically in public affairs. Modern politics involved attempts to discern basic human rights, the common good and universal values, and to provide institutional guarantees that allow democratic rights, discussion, and consensus. Thus, the American Revolution declared the universal rights of "all people" to be "self-evident truths" as revealed by the light of Reason. The French Revolution championed the universal "Rights of Man" on the basis of liberty, egality, fraternity and Mary Wollstonecraft published a treatise Vindication of the Rights of Women shortly thereafter .2 Attempting to realize these universal appeals beyond the limiting context of bourgeois class relations, Marx urged that the "Workers of the World Unite!" to create an international politics of solidarity designed to overthrow bourgeois property forms. In the Americas and then in Africa, Asia, and throughout the non-Western world, national liberation movements emerged which challenged colonialism and sought to bring the promises of modern democracy and liberty to areas of the world sunk in oppression. Simon Bolivar's struggles for Latin American freedom, the slave revolts of the Caribbean, and Jose Marti's vision of Nuestra America , free of colonial domination, articulated the yearnings unleashed by the modern project and attempts to realize its promises, where later liberation movements claimed that only socialism can redeem the sufferings of the "wretched of the earth" and realize the promises of modernity. Yet the promises and yearnings of modernity and modern politics were seldom realized. Workers were exploited throughout the modern epoch by rapacious capital; women were only able to gain full democratic rights by the early decades of the 20th century and continued to suffer patriarchal domination; people of color were systematically discriminated against by the forces of racism; and the developing countries continued to be oppressed by the imperialist powers. Despite war, poverty, hunger, economic depression, and fierce forms of subjugation and suffering, modern politics was optimistic in its outlook; indeed, it was often religious in its teleological faith that the progressive logic of history would soon be realized. Enlightenment faith in a better future inspired liberalism and Marxism alike. Thus, modern politics was informed by strong normative values and utopian visions of a world of universal freedom, equality, and harmony.

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The alternative is to embrace language games. Prescriptive statements within the debate space cannot be considered foundationally true representations but “moves” in a game that change the game itself. This is the only way to resist the worst forms of technocratic violence. Peters 95
Peters, Michael. "Legitimation problems: Knowledge and education in the postmodern condition." Education and the postmodern condition (1995): 21-38.

It is clear that at the heart of Lyotard's position is a playful reading of the later Wittgenstein, which emphasizes the pluralistic nature of language games. Each of the various types of utterance--denotative, prescriptive, performative, and so on--comprises a language game with its own body of rules defining its properties and uses. The rules are irreducible, and there exists an incommensurability among different games. Lyotard adds three further observations about language games. First, the rules do not have a bedrock justification, nor do they carry with themselves their own legitimation. Where Wittgenstein might say that they are constituted by agreement in practice, Lyotard says they are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players. Second, "if there are no rules there is no game"; and third, "every utterance should be thought of as a 'move' in a game." 41 Two principles underlie the method as a whole: "To speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics." 42 As Fredric Jameson explains, utterances are not conceived of either as a process of the transmission of information or messages, or a network of signs, or signifying systems (structuralism, semiotics); rather, they are seen as an agonistics of language, as an unstable exchange between communicational adversaries. 43 The example Lyotard uses is that of playing cards: a "move" in the game is like the taking (or trumping) of a trick. The second principle elevates this conflictual view of language as a model for understanding the nature of the social bond (and science itself). While there are many different language games, Lyotard asserts, and each of us lives at the intersection of many of these, the decision makers proceed on the assumption that there is commensurability and common ground among them and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimising the system's performance--efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear. 44  In a later work, Lyotard more openly acknowledges his intellectual debt to the later Wittgenstein. Taking his cue from Theodor Adorno, he champions the "micrologic" in opposition to the speculative--the grand narrative of Hegelian philosophy--and asserts that "another perspective has been opened up through which it may be possible to measure up to the crisis of metaphysics and the reflective response it demands. This perspective is pointed to notably in the Philosophische Untersuchungen and Zettel, under the programmatical name of Sprachsielen." 45  Lyotard proceeds to argue for his interpretation and to enumerate characteristics of the language game: The concept has its home in the language game; the language game is to be taken in the plural (they are "numerous, even unnumerable"); the rules of various language games are irreducible to one another; a sentence is a move in the game and can establish a new rule (and so a new game). He claims, "We are worlds away from necessary linkages, but are at the heart of equivocity," an equivocity "such that the task of expressing it . . . runs into an indefinite number of series of other moves belonging to an irreducibly heteronomous multiplicity of games." 46  Lyotard's interpretation of the language games as heteronomous ("the untranslatability of one game into another") and paralogous ("the search for the limit between the tolerable and the intolerable by way of moves lacking any given model") shatters the grand legitimating metanarrative of science as the supreme voice of reason. Lyotard writes: "Science plays its own game; it is incapable of legitimating the other language games. The game of prescription, for example, escapes it. But above all it is incapable of legitimating itself, as speculation assumed it could." 47  For Lyotard there is no principle of unitotality; there is no universal metalanguage. The reality is that there are many languages and, as Wittgenstein argued ( Lyotard notes), new languages are added to the old ones, like suburbs of an old town. Lyotard acknowledges Wittgenstein's examples of the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of infinitesimal calculus. Less than fifty years on, he argues, we can substantially add to the list: Lyotard mentions the growth of machine languages, the matrices of game theory, new systems of musical notation, systems of notation for nondenotative forms of logic, the language of the genetic code, graphs of phonological structures, and so on. 48  The proliferation and splintering of language games, which prevents an overall mastery, allows him to claim that "speculative or humanistic philosophy is forced to relinquish its legitimation duties, which explains why philosophy is facing a crisis wherever it persists in arrogating such functions and is reduced to the study of systems of logic or the history of ideas where it has been realistic enough to surrender them." 49  

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The alternative is not a form of nihilism but improves upon Enlightenment ideals, so it’s a comparatively better way of engaging in moral reasoning.  
Best and Kellner 98
Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner. "Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future," New Political Science , Volume 20, Number 3, September 1998: 283 -299. 

According to Mouffe, Enlightenment universalism was instrumental in the emergence of democratic discourse, but "it has become an obstacle in the path of understanding those new forms of politics, characteristic of our societies today, which demand to be approached from a nonessentialist perspective. Hence, the necessity of using the theoretical tools elaborated by the different currents of what can be called the postmodern in philosophy and of appropriating their critique of rationalism and subjectivism."6 Universal values are not entirely abandoned -- e.g., the concept that everyone has certain rights -- but they enter into a "new kind of articulation" with particular values and a logic of irreducible difference. Yet for this postmodern politics, the rejection of essentialism and lack of solid "foundations" does not entail nihilism or the abandonment of the global political project. As Laclau puts it: Abandonment of the myth of foundations does not lead to nihilism, just as uncertainty as to how an enemy will attack does not lead to passivity. It leads, rather, to a proliferation of discursive interventions and arguments that are necessary, because there is no extradiscursive reality that discourse might simply reflect. Inasmuch as argument and discourse constitute the social, their open- ended character becomes the source of a greater activism and a more radical libertarianism. Humankind, having always bowed to external forces -- God, Nature, the necessary laws of History -- can now, at the threshold of postmodernity, consider itself for the first time the creator and constructor of its own history. The dissolution of the myth of foundations -- and the concomitant dissolution of the category `subject' -- further radicalizes the emancipatory possibilities offered by the Enlightenment and Marxism.7 The shift to a postmodern logic, in other words, leads to "an awareness of the complex strategic-discursive operations implied by the defense" of Enlightenment values.8 Thus, for Laclau and Mouffe postmodern philosophy and social theory do not entail a rejection of key political commitments to modernity itself. For them, nothing in the radical political project is lost with the rejection of foundationalism and everything is gained through the liberating effects of a new logic of difference and contingency. In Mouffe's words, "far from seeing the development of postmodern philosophy as a threat, radical democracy welcomes it as an indispensable instrument in the accomplishment of its goals."9 To speak ironically, we could say that the postmodern critique puts the modern project on even firmer "grounds" than Enlightenment rationality, insofar as its values are not simply dogmatically stated, but are given pragmatic and consensual grounds of justification. Hence, their approach is very similar to that of Habermas, who sees the Enlightenment as an "unfinished project" and seeks communicative grounds of normative justification, with the key difference that Laclau and Mouffe believe that postmodern theory has radical democratic potential, whereas Habermas believes that it weakens the Enlightenment tradition and aids irrationalist, conservative, traditions.

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You should adopt a mindset of epistemic suspicion toward the aff’s totalizing moral claims. Epistemic suspicion prioritizes the question of the kritik over the advocacy of the affirmative. This approach is best because it leads to a pragmatic ethics which revitalizes the public sphere.
Seidman 94
Seidman, Steven, ed. The postmodern turn: New perspectives on social theory. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

This epistemic suspicion is at the core of postmodernism. Postmodernists challenge the charge of theory as a foundational discourse. The postmodern critique does not deny the possibility of success in the quest for foundations. I urge only that from the standpoint of the history of such foundational efforts, and from the vantage point of modern consciousness, which itself has generated this relentless epistemic doubt, this project does not seem compelling or credible. Aside from this epistemic doubt, there are practical and moral reasons to consider in assessing the value of the foundational project. Postmodernists view such discourses as exhibiting a bad faith: concealed in the will to truth is a will to power. To claim that there are universal and objective reasons to warrant a social discourse, to claim that a discourse speaks the language of truth, is to privilege that discourse, its carriers, and its social agenda. Insofar as we believe that social discourses are social practices which, like other social forces, shape social life and history, privileging a discourse as true authorizes its social values and agenda (Brown 1990). Social discourses, especially the broad social narratives of development produced by sociological theorists, but also the specialized discourses produced by demographers, criminologists, organizational sociologists, and so on, shape the social world by creating normative frameworks of racial, gender, sexual, national, and other types of identity, social order, and institutional functioning that carry the intellectual and social authority of science. A discourse that bears the stamp of scientific knowledge gives its normative concepts of identity and order an authority while discrediting the social agendas produced by other (scientific and nonscientific) discourses. To claim to have discovered the true language of society delegitimates rival paradigms - now described as merely ideological or, at best, as precursors - and their social agendas and carriers. It entails a demand to marginalize or withdraw privilege and its rewards from these rivals. Indeed, to claim epistemic privilege for a social discourse is to demand social authority not only for its social agenda but also for its producers and carriers. To assert that a social discourse speaks a universally valid language of truth confers legitimacy on its social values and its carriers. In a word, the politics of epistemology is bound up with social struggles to shape history. When one appeals solely to the truth of a discourse to authorize it intellectually and socially, one represses reflection on its practical-moral meaning and its social consequences. A discourse that justifies itself solely by epistemic appeals will not be compelled to defend its conceptual decisions on moral and political grounds. The practical and moral significance of the discourse will go unattended or else will be considered only in the most cursory way. On the other hand, if theorists - as postmodernists - believe that all appeals to universal standards or justificatory strategies are not ultimately compelling, they will be forced to offer "local" moral, social, and political reasons for their conceptual decisions. Disputes between rival theories or conceptual strategies would not concern epistemic first principles - e.g., individualism versus holism, materialism versus idealism, micro-versus macro-level analysis, instrumental versus normative concepts of action and order. Instead theorists would argue about the intellectual, social, moral, and political consequences of choosing one conceptual strategy or another. A pragmatic turn has distinct advantages. It expands the number of parties who may participate more or less as equals in a debate about society. Where a discourse is redeemed ultimately by metatheoretical appeals, experts step forward as the authorities. This situation contributes to the enfeeblement of a vital public realm of moral and political debate because social questions are deemed the domain of experts. By contrast, when a discourse is judged by its practical consequences or its moral implications, more citizens are qualified to assess it by considering its social and moral implications. A pragmatic move, in principle, implies an active, politically engaged citizenry participating in a democratic public realm. Postmodernism contests a representational concept of science whose legitimacy hinges on an increasingly cynical belief in science's enlightening 126 Steven Seidman and empowering role. This Enlightenment legitimation obscures the social entanglement of the disciplines and permits them to abandon moral responsibility for their own social efficacy. Postmodernism underscores the practical and moral character of science. It sees the disciplines as implicated in heterogeneous struggles around gender, race, sexuality, the body, and the mind, to shape humanity.

Tournament: Bump | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Scarsdale Tomer Cherki | Judge: Devin Kasinki, Henry Curtis, David Yastremzski

Truth-seeking in the CJS is contextual to socially situated interests. There are no universal or ahistorical truths that can be discovered.

Menkel-Meadow 96
Carrie Menkel-Meadow (Professor of Law, Georgetown and UCLA Law Schools and Co-Director, UCLA
Center for Conflict Resolution). “The Trouble With The Adversary System In A Postmodern, Multicultural World.” William and Mary Law Review, Vol. 38, Issue 1, Article 3. 1996.
Despite the longevity and robustness of adversarialism as a mode of human discourse,38 even some philosophers and epistemologists have questioned its value as the best way to understand the world. 9 It is this feature of postmodernism that I want to apply critically to the adversary system as we know it in the legal system. In general terms, a variety of philosophers, literary critics, art and architecture critics, social scientists, and legal scholars have questioned whether any "truth" exists out there that is knowable and stable.4 ° Postmodernism expresses some skepticism, if not cynicism, in the belief that there are immutable, universal, global, and discoverable facts or interpretations of facts.4' Whether by literary deconstruction,42 feminist epistemology,43 philosophical or linguistic decompositions of language,44 or in our own field, critical legal studies' exposure of the indeterminancies of our laws,45 the legacy of postmodernism is that truth is not fixed, meanings are "located" provisionally, not "discovered,"46 and people who "find" truth, whether judges, juries, critics, or, yes, even scientists, have interests- social, economic, political, racial, gender-that affect how they see the world. In addition to interpretations of texts, meanings, and facts, postmodernists have questioned the very notion of a unified self having a stable set of characteristics, values, and attributes with which to process information.4" Because we occupy multiple roles in modern society, being powerful in some-for example, the role of "father"--but subordinated in others-for example, the role of "worker"-the multiplicity of our social roles structures and filters our knowledge. Context- both present and our own personal and group histories- also deeply affects our knowledge. If we believe any of this (and I believe enough of it to consider the impact it might have on the finding of facts, the interpretation of law, and the production of "legal knowledge"), we must therefore ask how the legal system can assess truth and assign remedies confidently. 

Marxism relies on a grand metanarrative which ignores the multifaceted nature of identity construction.

Best and Kellner 98
Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner. "Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future," New Political Science , Volume 20, Number 3, September 1998: 283 -299.
Yet classical Marxism also advanced an reductionist and essentialist view of politics that is repudiated by postmodern politics. Marx theorized labor as a "universal class" which by emancipating itself will emancipate all other oppressed groups. On Marx's scheme, subjectivity is constituted as a class identity and all social antagonisms devolve around production as the essence of the social. Later Marxists continued with this policy, subsuming other key social issues to the "woman question," "race question," "national question," and so on, failing to see how race, gender, nationality, and other forms of identity were crucial and often more directly relevant for many different groups of people, just as nationalism proved a far more powerful identity than did international workers' solidarity for various European workers during the first World War. 

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The aff’s idea that we can have a priori understanding of the world confuses the task of ontology with the task of morality. Only the alternative recognizes that knowledge is an intervention into reality.

Rorty 80
Richard Rorty. “Method, social science, and social hope.” Delivered at a conference at Berkeley, March 1980. The postmodern turn: New perspectives on social theory. ed. Steven Seidman, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
As long as we think of knowledge as representing reality rather than coping with it, mind or language will continue to seem numinous, and 'materialism,' 'behaviorism' and the Galilean style will seem morally dubious. We shall be stuck with this notion of 'representing' or 'corresponding to' reality as long as we think that there is some analogy between calling things by their 'right' - i.e., their conventional - names and finding the 'right' - i.e., Nature's Own - way of describing them. But if we could abandon this metaphor, and the vocabulary of representation which goes with it - as Kuhn and Dewey suggest we might - then we would not find language or mind mysterious, nor 'materialism' or 'behaviorism' particularly dangerous. If the line I am taking is right, we need to think of our distinctive moral status as just that, rather than 'grounded' on our possession of mind, language, culture, feeling, intentionality, textuality, or anything else. All these numinous notions are just expressions of our awareness that we are members of a moral community, phrased in one or another pseudo-explanatory jargon. This awareness is something which cannot be further 'grounded' - it is simply taking a certain point of view on our fellow-humans. The question of whether it is an 'objective' pint of view is not to any point. This can be made a bit more concrete as follows. I said that, pace Taylor, it was a mistake to think of somebody's own account of his behavior or culture as epistemically privileged. He might have a good account of what he's doing or he might not. But it is not a mistake to think of it as morally privileged. We have a duty to listen to his account, not because Method, social science, and social hope 57 he has privileged access to his own motives but because he is a human being like ourselves. Taylor's claim that we need to look for internal explanations of people or cultures or texts takes civility as a methodological strategy. But civility is not a method, it is simply a virtue. The reason why we invite the moronic psychopath to address the court before being sentenced is not that we hope for better explanations than expert psychiatric testimony has offered. We do so because he is, after all, one of us. By asking for his own account in his own words, we hope to decrease our chances of acting badly. What we hope form the social sciences is that they will act as interpreters for those how to talk to whom we are not sure. This is the same thing we hope for from our poets and dramatists and novelists. Just as I argued in the previous section of this paper that it is a mistake to think that there is a principled distinction between explanation and understanding, or between two methods, one appropriate for nature and the other for man, I have been arguing in this section that the notion that we know a priori that nature and man are distinct sorts of objects is a mistake. It is a confusion between ontology and morals. There are lots of useful vocabularies which ignore the nonhuman-human or thing-person distinctions. There is at least one vocabulary - the moral - and possibly many more, for which these distinctions are basic. Human beings are no more 'really' described in the latter sort of vocabulary than in the former. Objects are not 'more objectively' described in any vocabulary that in any other. Vocabularies are useful or useless, good or bad, helpful or misleading, sensitive or coarse, and so on; but they are not 'more objective' or 'less objective' nor more or less 'scientific.’

Modernity’s superimposition of order is what Lyotard calls a ‘metanarrative.’ Academic spaces are poisoned by a humanist ethic that ignores the socially situated nature of reason. It’s what society lets us say that is conflated with objective representation.

Peters 95
Peters, Michael. "Legitimation problems: Knowledge and education in the postmodern condition." Education and the postmodern condition (1995): 21-38.
Lyotard then defines postmodern as "incredulity toward metanarratives," a distrust of "stories" that purport to justify certain practices or institutions by grounding them upon a set of transcendental, ahistorical, or universal principles. This incredulity is a product, Lyotard maintains, of progress in the sciences, specifically, a change in the way we practice science. Here Lyotard is linking up and referring in an anecdotal way to the crisis in metaphysical philosophy, pointed to in the English-speaking world by the historical theories of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. It seems, however, that Lyotard takes such theories as indicating that we actually conduct scientific research in a way different from the one used by those who practiced science in the Newtonian period, rather than thinking of the recent debunking of the empiricist model of science as simply repudiating a bad account. 32  The metanarrative provided by the "crowning" science of speculative philosophy legitimated the university institution that was modeled along principles of emancipationist humanism. Youth from the liberal élite-"the heroes of knowledge"--were trained in the great task of pursuing good ethico-political ends and leading their countries toward social progress. This is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment narrative now under scrutiny: "To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it." 33  The crisis of metaphysical philosophy and the bankruptcy of ahistorical theories of justification are linked up, by way of an aesthetic thematic in Lyotard's work, with the so-called crisis of representation, in which an essentially realist epistemology based on a mirror theory of knowledge and art conceives of representation as the reproduction of an external reality. English-speaking readers will recognize the theme as it has been recently explored by the American "pragmatist" Richard Rorty in his reworking of the history of modern analytic philosophy. 34 Beginning his interpretation with a quotation from Wittgenstein Vermischte Bemerkungen, which likens progress in philosophy to the finding of a remedy for itching, a physicianlike Rorty diagnoses modern analytic philosophy as simply one more variant of Kantian philosophy that is distinguished from its parent predecessor by its thinking of representation in linguistic terms and of philosophy of language as exhibiting the "foundations of knowledge." Significantly, Rorty argues for a position termed "epistemological behaviorism," which explains rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say rather than vice versa. Divested of the captivating mirror imagery, philosophy can then be seen simply as part of the social practice of conversation. 

2 impacts. 

a. ====Truth-seeking in the CJS relies on a false objectivity. The alternative is an epistemological pre-requisite to the aff.====
Menkel-Meadow 96
Carrie Menkel-Meadow (Professor of Law, Georgetown and UCLA Law Schools and Co-Director, UCLA
Center for Conflict Resolution). “The Trouble With The Adversary System In A Postmodern, Multicultural World.” William and Mary Law Review, Vol. 38, Issue 1, Article 3. 1996.
Let me illustrate the particular dilemma of oppositional, binary thinking at trial when linked with recent work in cognitive psychology and trial practice. If we take seriously the recent studies demonstrating that facts presented to fact finders are processed through "schemas," "filters," or common narratives,'5 then the presentation of two oppositional stories or conclusions may color how all of the facts are heard. Consider how the framing of a story by both sides then colors how each piece of evidence is interpreted. The oppositional story may work well when the fact finder has an off/on, guilt/innocence determination to make," though it still carries the danger that all the fact finders will process incremental facts through a preexisting frame, 7 but will not work as well when polycentric factual findings, legal conclusions, and mixed fact/law questions are at issue: comparative negligence, business necessity defenses, excuse and justification in criminal law, and the best interest of the child, are a few examples. My argument here is that the "false" or "exaggerated "representation" of oppositional stories may oversimplify the facts59 and not permit adequate consideration of fact interpretations or conclusions that either fall somewhere in between, or are totally outside of, the range of the lawyers' presentations." Indeed, one version of postmodernism could read the adversary system as totally and arbitrarily imposing order through its binary decision making process where no order exists, and where we cannot determine relevance rationally."' An implicit, but sometimes explicit, aspect of all postmodernism is a skepticism about both objectivity and neutrality. This has serious implications for our adversary system, not only for the advocate's role, but for the so-called neutral, passive judge as well. Critical legal scholars have advanced most explicitly the skeptical argument of postmodernism by demonstrating both the law's linguistic contingency-its indeterminance- and its manipulation by particularized interests, such as economic, or class (in critical legal theory), or race-based interests in critical race theory, and gender-based interests in feminist legal thought.62 Most critical legal scholars' work has focused on the law and rules-the "texts" of the legal system.63 The attacks on certainty, legal knowledge, and neutrality, however, have clear and dangerous implications for legal process, and for the adversary system." A neutral judge, either as a passive umpire of a trial process or as a more active fact-finder, likely will be predisposed to favor one side of the story over the other or to favor his or her own interpretation of the story.65 Party-initiated presentation of evidence might not uncover a judge's predisposition when the lawyers cannot learn the judge's own story. Some use this postmodern strategy to critique the false claims of objectivity and neutrality; others suggest that we simply should acknowledge the difference in values and accept that we may not have total unanimity over "fundamental interests." 6 The latter group of postmoderns argue that we should make explicit the appeal to fact finders' different values, beliefs, or emotions.6 7 More than "two stories" may thus exist in the courtroom if litigants attempt to deal with the variety of values or emotional "frames" that could influence a fact finder. In my view, this reflects the reality of life in a postmodern, multicultural world-a recognition that if "truth" is to be arrived at, it is best done through multiple stories and deliberations rather than through only two.69 How this will be structured in a litigation system, which is still based on oppositional evidence presentation, remains to be seen.

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b. ====The aff’s normative visions are utopian. Tomer’s speech act is one of mastery of knowledge, but promotion of rational understanding has failed to save us from violence and oppression. As long as we cling to the aff’s linear and simplistic Hegelian dialectics, modernity’s latent side-effects can’t be addressed.====
Best and Kellner 98
Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner. "Postmodern Politics and the Battle for the Future," New Political Science , Volume 20, Number 3, September 1998: 283 -299.
Generally characterized, the project of modern politics was to define and implement universal goals like freedom, equality, and justice, in an attempt to transform institutional structures of domination. Modern politics emerged from the Enlightenment project of subjecting to critique by the norms of reason all forms of authority and all existing institutions. Modern politics presupposed a democratic public sphere where individuals and social groups could discuss political problems and choices, and intervene practically in public affairs. Modern politics involved attempts to discern basic human rights, the common good and universal values, and to provide institutional guarantees that allow democratic rights, discussion, and consensus. Thus, the American Revolution declared the universal rights of "all people" to be "self-evident truths" as revealed by the light of Reason. The French Revolution championed the universal "Rights of Man" on the basis of liberty, egality, fraternity and Mary Wollstonecraft published a treatise Vindication of the Rights of Women shortly thereafter .2 Attempting to realize these universal appeals beyond the limiting context of bourgeois class relations, Marx urged that the "Workers of the World Unite!" to create an international politics of solidarity designed to overthrow bourgeois property forms. In the Americas and then in Africa, Asia, and throughout the non-Western world, national liberation movements emerged which challenged colonialism and sought to bring the promises of modern democracy and liberty to areas of the world sunk in oppression. Simon Bolivar's struggles for Latin American freedom, the slave revolts of the Caribbean, and Jose Marti's vision of Nuestra America , free of colonial domination, articulated the yearnings unleashed by the modern project and attempts to realize its promises, where later liberation movements claimed that only socialism can redeem the sufferings of the "wretched of the earth" and realize the promises of modernity. Yet the promises and yearnings of modernity and modern politics were seldom realized. Workers were exploited throughout the modern epoch by rapacious capital; women were only able to gain full democratic rights by the early decades of the 20th century and continued to suffer patriarchal domination; people of color were systematically discriminated against by the forces of racism; and the developing countries continued to be oppressed by the imperialist powers. Despite war, poverty, hunger, economic depression, and fierce forms of subjugation and suffering, modern politics was optimistic in its outlook; indeed, it was and often religious in its teleological faith that the progressive logic of history would soon be realized. Enlightenment faith in a better future inspired liberalism and Marxism alike. Thus, modern politics was informed by strong normative values and utopian visions of a world of universal freedom, equality, and harmony.

The alternative is to embrace language games. Prescriptive statements within the debate space cannot be considered foundationally true representations but “moves” in a game that change the game itself. This is the only way to resist the worst forms of technocratic violence.

Peters 95
Peters, Michael. "Legitimation problems: Knowledge and education in the postmodern condition." Education and the postmodern condition (1995): 21-38.
It is clear that at the heart of Lyotard's position is a playful reading of the later Wittgenstein, which emphasizes the pluralistic nature of language games. Each of the various types of utterance--denotative, prescriptive, performative, and so on--comprises a language game with its own body of rules defining its properties and uses. The rules are irreducible, and there exists an incommensurability among different games. Lyotard adds three further observations about language games. First, the rules do not have a bedrock justification, nor do they carry with themselves their own legitimation. Where Wittgenstein might say that they are constituted by agreement in practice, Lyotard says they are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players. Second, "if there are no rules there is no game"; and third, "every utterance should be thought of as is a 'move' in a game." 41 Two principles underlie the method as a whole: "To speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics." 42 As Fredric Jameson explains, utterances are not conceived of either as a process of the transmission of information or messages, or a network of signs, or signifying systems (structuralism, semiotics); rather, they are seen as an agonistics of language, as an unstable exchange between communicational adversaries. 43 The example Lyotard uses is that of playing cards: a "move" in the game is like the taking (or trumping) of a trick. The second principle elevates this conflictual view of language as a model for understanding the nature of the social bond (and science itself). While there are many different language games, Lyotard asserts, and each of us lives at the intersection of many of these, the decision makers proceed on the assumption that there is commensurability and common ground among them and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimising the system's performance--efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear. 44  In a later work, Lyotard more openly acknowledges his intellectual debt to the later Wittgenstein. Taking his cue from Theodor Adorno, he champions the "micrologic" in opposition to the speculative--the grand narrative of Hegelian philosophy--and asserts that "another perspective has been opened up through which it may be possible to measure up to the crisis of metaphysics and the reflective response it demands. This perspective is pointed to notably in the Philosophische Untersuchungen and Zettel, under the programmatical name of Sprachsielen." 45  Lyotard proceeds to argue for his interpretation and to enumerate characteristics of the language game: The concept has its home in the language game; the language game is to be taken in the plural (they are "numerous, even unnumerable"); the rules of various language games are irreducible to one another; a sentence is a move in the game and can establish a new rule (and so a new game). He claims, "We are worlds away from necessary linkages, but are at the heart of equivocity," an equivocity "such that the task of expressing it . . . runs into an indefinite number of series of other moves belonging to an irreducibly heteronomous multiplicity of games." 46  Lyotard's interpretation of the language games as heteronomous ("the untranslatability of one game into another") and paralogous ("the search for the limit between the tolerable and the intolerable by way of moves lacking any given model") shatters the grand legitimating metanarrative of science as the supreme voice of reason. Lyotard writes: "Science plays its own game; it is incapable of legitimating the other language games. The game of prescription, for example, escapes it. But above all it is incapable of legitimating itself, as speculation assumed it could." 47  For Lyotard there is no principle of unitotality; there is no universal metalanguage. The reality is that there are many languages and, as Wittgenstein argued ( Lyotard notes), new languages are added to the old ones, like suburbs of an old town. Lyotard acknowledges Wittgenstein's examples of the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of infinitesimal calculus. Less than fifty years on, he argues, we can substantially add to the list: Lyotard mentions the growth of machine languages, the matrices of game theory, new systems of musical notation, systems of notation for nondenotative forms of logic, the language of the genetic code, graphs of phonological structures, and so on. 48  The proliferation and splintering of language games, which prevents an overall mastery, allows him to claim shows that "speculative or humanistic philosophy is forced to relinquish its legitimation duties, which explains why philosophy is facing a crisis wherever it persists in arrogating such functions and is reduced to the study of systems of logic or the history of ideas where it has been realistic enough to surrender them." 49 

The alternative entails prioritizing the attorney-client privilege over truth-seeking. This is key to shifting away from the aff’s metanarratives.

Menkel-Meadow 96
Carrie Menkel-Meadow (Professor of Law, Georgetown and UCLA Law Schools and Co-Director, UCLA
Center for Conflict Resolution). “The Trouble With The Adversary System In A Postmodern, Multicultural World.” William and Mary Law Review, Vol. 38, Issue 1, Article 3. 1996.
II. THE PITFALLS OF ADVERSARIAL / BINARY THINKING IN A POSTMODERN WORLD Although I cannot, in this limited time or space, review the full history and sources of this country's particular approach to adversarialism, I note that the Anglo-American legal system didBoth classical philosophical discourse 5 and medieval scholastic disputations 6 exhibit the belief that contested, oppositional presentations of "facts" will best reveal the truth. At this point we should note quickly one important error in the defense of the legal adversary system drawn from this tradition. Whatever the flaws of oppositional thinking discussed below, philosophers and others using this form of logic, at least, are committed theoretically to a genuine search for the truth. This is not the motivating ideal when an ethics regime that places duty to the client at least as high, if not higher than, the duty to truth harnesses the adversary system to the legal system." Although philosophers may seek the truth, lawyers seek to achieve their client's interests and to "win," which may entail simply obfuscating the other side's case-as in the "creation" of reasonable doubt in the criminal case-or leaving out important facts if they are deemed harmful. Even if the particular use of the oppositional/adversary model can be defended as a procedure of knowledge and truthfinding in other settings, as used in legal settings it lacks an important quality: the genuine search for truth. 

You should adopt a mindset of epistemic suspicion toward the aff’s totalizing moral claims. Epistemic suspicion prioritizes the question of the kritik over the advocacy of the affirmative. This approach is best because it leads to a pragmatic ethics which revitalizes the public sphere.

Seidman 94
Seidman, Steven, ed. The postmodern turn: New perspectives on social theory. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
This epistemic suspicion is at the core of postmodernism. Postmodernists challenge the charge of theory as a foundational discourse. The postmodern critique does not deny the possibility of success in the quest for foundations. I urge only that from the standpoint of the history of such foundational efforts, and from the vantage point of modern consciousness, which itself has generated this relentless epistemic doubt, this project does not seem compelling or credible. Aside from this epistemic doubt, there are practical and moral reasons to consider in assessing the value of the foundational project. Postmodernists view such discourses as exhibiting a bad faith: concealed in the will to truth is a will to power. To claim that there are universal and objective reasons to warrant a social discourse, to claim that a discourse speaks the language of truth, is to privilege that discourse, its carriers, and its social agenda. Insofar as we believe that social discourses are social practices which, like other social forces, shape social life and history, privileging a discourse as true authorizes its social values and agenda (Brown 1990). Social discourses, especially the broad social narratives of development produced by sociological theorists, but also the specialized discourses produced by demographers, criminologists, organizational sociologists, and so on, shape the social world by creating normative frameworks of racial, gender, sexual, national, and other types of identity, social order, and institutional functioning that carry the intellectual and social authority of science. A discourse that bears the stamp of scientific knowledge gives its normative concepts of identity and order an authority while discrediting the social agendas produced by other (scientific and nonscientific) discourses. To claim to have discovered the true language of society delegitimates rival paradigms - now described as merely ideological or, at best, as precursors - and their social agendas and carriers. It entails a demand to marginalize or withdraw privilege and its rewards from these rivals. Indeed, to claim epistemic privilege for a social discourse is to demand social authority not only for its social agenda but also for its producers and carriers. To assert that a social discourse speaks a universally valid language of truth confers legitimacy on its social values and its carriers. In a word, the politics of epistemology is bound up with social struggles to shape history. When one appeals solely to the truth of a discourse to authorize it intellectually and socially, one represses reflection on its practical-moral meaning and its social consequences. A discourse that justifies itself solely by epistemic appeals will not be compelled to defend its conceptual decisions on moral and political grounds. The practical and moral significance of the discourse will go unattended or else will be considered only in the most cursory way. On the other hand, if theorists - as postmodernists - believe that all appeals to universal standards or justificatory strategies are not ultimately compelling, they will be forced to offer "local" moral, social, and political reasons for their conceptual decisions. Disputes between rival theories or conceptual strategies would not concern epistemic first principles - e.g., individualism versus holism, materialism versus idealism, micro-versus macro-level analysis, instrumental versus normative concepts of action and order. Instead theorists would argue about the intellectual, social, moral, and political consequences of choosing one conceptual strategy or another. A pragmatic turn has distinct advantages. It expands the number of parties who may participate more or less as equals in a debate about society. Where a discourse is redeemed ultimately by metatheoretical appeals, experts step forward as the authorities. This situation contributes to the enfeeblement of a vital public realm of moral and political debate because social questions are deemed the domain of experts. By contrast, when a discourse is judged by its practical consequences or its moral implications, more citizens are qualified to assess it by considering its social and moral implications. A pragmatic move, in principle, implies an active, politically engaged citizenry participating in a democratic public realm. Postmodernism contests a representational concept of science whose legitimacy hinges on an increasingly cynical belief in science's enlightening 126 Steven Seidman and empowering role. This Enlightenment legitimation obscures the social entanglement of the disciplines and permits them to abandon moral responsibility for their own social efficacy. Postmodernism underscores the practical and moral character of science. It sees the disciplines as implicated in heterogeneous struggles around gender, race, sexuality, the body, and the mind, to shape humanity. ?

Tournament: NSD | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Tyler Gamble | Judge: NubelHughesCastillo
8 off irony-strat, one of which included a serious theory shell

See Open Source

Tournament: NSD | Round: Octas | Opponent: Valley GS Gina Scorpiniti | Judge: MoernerMassacShmikler
Law NC and Case Answers

See Open Source

Tournament: NSD | Round: 2 | Opponent: Justin Kim | Judge: Paul Zhou
See Open Source

Law NC
Roko's Basilisk CP
Elections DA

Tournament: NSD | Round: 3 | Opponent: Evan ODonnell | Judge: Salim Damerdji
Freire CP
Law NC

See Open Source

Tournament: NSD | Round: 3 | Opponent: Evan ODonnell | Judge: Salim Damerdji
Freire CP
Law NC

See Open Source

Tournament: Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Mountain View MH | Judge: Ryan Davis
Secular ethical theories all reduce to virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is the only way to make morality motivational. Jason Kawall 9 writes
“In Defense of the Primacy of Virtues,” Jason Kawall. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. Vol 3, Num. 2. 2009.
One of the major problems that ethical theories … understanding of his or her moral environment.

Fostering virtue requires role models. Therefore, a moral agent ought to emulate virtuous people. Rebecca Carhart 9 writes
Carhart, Rebecca (Philosophy Major @ Taylor University). “Pacifism and Virtue Ethics.” LYCEUM. Volume XI, No. 1 (Fall 2009)http://lyceumphilosophy.com/?q=node/126
Another strength of virtue ethics is that it emphasizes …is valuable in making practical decisions.

Jesus is the best role model. He represents the perfection of all virtues.

Mahatma Gandhi writes
Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi (virtuous person). No date. Reprinted in Favorite Heroes and Holy People: Chosen by People from All Walks of Life. Compiled by Deborah Cassidi. Continuum Books: London and New York (2008).

 All ellipses were in the original text. Love is the strongest force … beautiful example, I thought, of the perfect man.

Thus the standard is what would Jesus do?

I contend that Jesus would not favor compulsory voting. 

Scripture proves. Jesus condemns participation in human governments. The Kingdom of God will come to Earth and is the true government of Christians.
Pack 8 writes
David Pack (founder of the Renewed Church of God). “Should Christians Vote?” 2008.  http://rcg.org/books/scv.html
Proof TWO involves a famous “conversation.” In John 18, … now just ahead. It comes only when Jesus returns. 

Prefer my evidence. The author is an Apostle of Jesus.
Schurter 12 writes
Dale Schurter (minister of the RCG, declared by David Pack as the world’s foremost authority on agriculture). “Dale Schurter Speaks Out: UCG Resignation Letter.” January 7th, 2012. http://www.rcgtruth.com/2012/01/dale-l-schurter-resignation-letter_06.html
We have found and confirmed to ourselves … do this digging are “ungodly men.” Will you believe the lies… or seek out The Truth?

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: WDM Valley TJ Foley | Judge: Chris Palmer, Mark Gorthey
NC Long Shell

The aff echoes the worry of the modern Left that not enough people are voting. This is a Trojan horse for capitalism which not only has its grip on the state but is the real reason individuals are alienated by civil society. Tietze 11
Tad Tietze (co-editor (with Guy Rundle and Elizabeth Humphrys) ofOn Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. He blogs at Left Flank and tweets as @Dr_Tad. Lives in Australia and campaigns for the Green Party). “Compulsory voting: More to do with legitimating state rule than democracy.” Left Flank. January 23rd, 2011. http://left-flank.org/2011/01/23/compulsory-voting-more-to-do-with-legitimating-state-rule-than-democracy/
I think the real issue is around...caused (fundamentally) by the state’s class nature. 

Compulsory voting has historically been a tool of upper class politicians to crush working class political action to maintain their elite status. Tietze 11
Tad Tietze (co-editor (with Guy Rundle and Elizabeth Humphrys) ofOn Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. He blogs at Left Flank and tweets as @Dr_Tad. Lives in Australia and campaigns for the Green Party). “Compulsory voting: More to do with legitimating state rule than democracy.” Left Flank. January 23rd, 2011. http://left-flank.org/2011/01/23/compulsory-voting-more-to-do-with-legitimating-state-rule-than-democracy/
That is why we shouldn’t be surprised…high informal vote and significant non-enrolment. 

Democracy prevents the radical change key to combat capitalism. Dean 5
Democracy today is not the living breathing, activity of…elections—we have instead a democratic fundamentalism that renders change unthinkable. 

3 impacts.

a. Capitalism relies on a false objectivity by superimposing the interests of the dominant on everyone else. The alternative is an epistemological prerequisite to the aff.
Marcuse 64
Herbert Marcuse (Marxist dude, critical theorist). “One-Dimensional Man - Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.” First Edition. 1964. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/one-dimensional-man.pdf
This is a goal within the capabilities of advanced industrial civilization,…claim the authority of decision?

b. Capitalism makes extinction inevitable. Only engagement in critical analysis of industrial society solves.
Marcuse 64
Herbert Marcuse (Marxist dude, critical theorist). “One-Dimensional Man - Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.” First Edition. 1964. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/one-dimensional-man.pdf
Does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which could…are the standards for such a critique? 

c. Capitalism imposes a particular way of thinking about the world, making their abstract philosophical conclusions meaningless.
Marcuse 64
Herbert Marcuse (Marxist dude, critical theorist). “One-Dimensional Man - Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.” First Edition. 1964. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/one-dimensional-man.pdf
In the last analysis, the question of what are…only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.
The alternative is to withdraw from the logic of capital and embrace acts of protest against the State, instead of compulsory voting. Voting in elections will just be a vote for capitalism; true forms of politics need to be set on the terms of individuals.
Tietze 11
Tad Tietze (co-editor (with Guy Rundle and Elizabeth Humphrys) ofOn Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. He blogs at Left Flank and tweets as @Dr_Tad. Lives in Australia and campaigns for the Green Party). “Compulsory voting: More to do with legitimating state rule than democracy.” Left Flank. January 23rd, 2011. http://left-flank.org/2011/01/23/compulsory-voting-more-to-do-with-legitimating-state-rule-than-democracy/
Despite claims that CV strengthens working class…on the terms set by our rulers. 

You have an obligation to resist capitalist ideology under any moral theory. Status quo modes of thought only serve to legitimize the system. Zizek and Daly 4
Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Zizek, 2004 page 14-16
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this…within a culture of differential affirmation.

Thus the Role of the Ballot

This 1NC is an act of protest. I use the debate space to challenge the status quo neoliberal order. Voting Aff doesn’t actually make voting compulsory, but the ballot can be instrumental to eluding the grip of capital in everyday life. This is key to examining our assumptions about ethics, so it’s an epistemological prerequisite. Arab Spring proves this is a fight we can win. Protest transcends physical location, so the K spills over outside the round. Greene and Kuswa 12
Ronald Walter Greene (Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota) and Kevin Douglas Kuswa (Department of Communication Studies, California State, Fresno, CA). “‘From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow’: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. June 11th, 2012.
A Korean Wobbly, the living memory of the…across the world’’ can fold protest into ‘‘the Global Spring’’ (#Global Spring). 

?
Studies Link

Aff’s prioritization of studies is grounded in a capitalist focus on calculability. DiCristina 2k
Bruce DiCristina (Department of Criminal Justice, University of North Dakota). “Prediction, Policy, and Quantitative Inquiry: A Reply to Worrall.” HeinOnline. Journal of Criminal Justice Education Vol 11. (2000).
The issue of criminal justice policy, as it appears…the latter situation and attempt to account for the inconsistency.

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate NE Nathan Ewing-Crystal | Judge: Sheryl Kaczmerek, Josh Anderson
The aff appeals to working within the State which proactively encourages a fixed legal order, leaving no room for creative expression of subjectivity. Deuchars 11
Deuchars, Robert. “Creating Lines of Flight and Activating Resistance: Deleuze and Guattari’s War
Machine.” AntePodium, Victoria University Wellington, 2011.
Deleuze and Guattari use the example of chess..a hangover from Anti-Oedipus, perhaps? 

Modern democratic political structures are a ruse for fascism. Murphy 5
Timothy Murphy (University of Oklahoma, English). “Becoming Multitude: Toward a Theory and Practice of Absolute Democracy.” April 16th, 2005. http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/BecomingMultitude.pdf
At the very beginning of their..aristocratic of philosophers like Nietzsche (WP 108) 

2 impacts.

a. Normalization is the tool of Eurocentric powers to alienate knowledge production that opposes oppression. This guarantees violence. Djunatan 11
Djunatan, Stephanus. The Principle of Affirmation An Ontological and Epistemological Ground of Interculturality. Diss. Erasmus University, 2011. Rotterdamn: Erasmus University, 2011,
Deleuze and Guattari uncover the real intent…realization of the power and the capital representation by means of violence.

Eurocentric subjectification is predicated on a false objectivity. The alternative is an epistemological prerequisite to the aff. Djunatan 11
Djunatan, Stephanus. The Principle of Affirmation An Ontological and Epistemological Ground of Interculturality. Diss. Erasmus University, 2011. Rotterdamn: Erasmus University, 2011,
The example above also articulates…the usage of the real language and speech.543  

b. The desire to normalize and order life makes extinction inevitable. Only the alternative solves. Guattari 2k
Felix Guattari (French dude, also Deleuze’s brother from another mother). “The Three Ecologies.” English Edition. 2000. http://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Guattari_Felix_The_Three_Ecologies.pdf
The Earth is undergoing a period of intense…the global marketplace and of military-industrial complexes. 

The alternative is to embrace the agency of the schizophrenic by no longer viewing individuals as unitary subjects. Since identity is not static or unified, opening up space for more authentic forms of being should be the starting point of ethics.
Deleuze and Guattari 83
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 1983. http://1000littlehammers.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/anti-oedipus-fixed.pdf
A schizophrenic out for a walk…interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. 

Reject the aff’s appeals to internal reforms that make the State seemingly less normalizing. We cannot rely on the State to solve global problems. Also, the perm fails. Complete rethinking of the State and democracy is key.
Deleuze and Foucault 72
Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault (off-the-chain French intellectuals). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard. 1972. http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
FOUCAULT: It seems to me that…reckoning takes place at another level. 

Thus the Role of the Ballot

This 1NC is an act of protest. I use the debate space to challenge the normalization that the status quo State enables. Voting Aff doesn’t actually make the CJS rehabilitative, but the ballot can be instrumental to eluding State norms in everyday life. This is key to examining our assumptions about ethics, so it’s an epistemological prerequisite. Arab Spring proves this is a fight we can win. Protest transcends physical location, so the K spills over outside the round. Greene and Kuswa 12
Ronald Walter Greene (Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota) and Kevin Douglas Kuswa (Department of Communication Studies, California State, Fresno, CA). “‘From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow’: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. June 11th, 2012.
A Korean Wobbly, the living memory of the…justice and real democracy across the world’’ can fold protest into ‘‘the Global Spring’’ (#Global Spring). 

Acts of protest are key to breaking down the State’s constraints on identity and problematizing the status quo. True politics doesn’t come from waiting for the State to solve our problems, but action for real change on an individual level.
Touza 08
L. Sebastián Touza (BA, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 1994, MA, McGill University, 1997). “Antipedagogies for Liberation Politics, Consensual Democracy and Post-Intellectual Interventions.” Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy @ Simon Fraser University. Spring 2008.
Colectivo Situaciones’s self-marginalization from…exist in the concrete situation” (Colectivo Situaciones Hipótesis 162).

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate NE Nathan Ewing-Crystal | Judge: Sheryl Kaczmarek, Josh Anderson
The aff appeals to working within the State which proactively encourages a fixed legal order, leaving no room for creative expression of subjectivity. Deuchars 11
Deuchars, Robert. “Creating Lines of Flight and Activating Resistance: Deleuze and Guattari’s War
Machine.” AntePodium, Victoria University Wellington, 2011.
Deleuze and Guattari use the example of chess..a hangover from Anti-Oedipus, perhaps? 

Modern democratic political structures are a ruse for fascism. Murphy 5
Timothy Murphy (University of Oklahoma, English). “Becoming Multitude: Toward a Theory and Practice of Absolute Democracy.” April 16th, 2005. http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/BecomingMultitude.pdf
At the very beginning of their..aristocratic of philosophers like Nietzsche (WP 108) 

2 impacts.

a. Normalization is the tool of Eurocentric powers to alienate knowledge production that opposes oppression. This guarantees violence. Djunatan 11
Djunatan, Stephanus. The Principle of Affirmation An Ontological and Epistemological Ground of Interculturality. Diss. Erasmus University, 2011. Rotterdamn: Erasmus University, 2011,
Deleuze and Guattari uncover the real intent…realization of the power and the capital representation by means of violence.

Eurocentric subjectification is predicated on a false objectivity. The alternative is an epistemological prerequisite to the aff. Djunatan 11
Djunatan, Stephanus. The Principle of Affirmation An Ontological and Epistemological Ground of Interculturality. Diss. Erasmus University, 2011. Rotterdamn: Erasmus University, 2011,
The example above also articulates…the usage of the real language and speech.543  

b. The desire to normalize and order life makes extinction inevitable. Only the alternative solves. Guattari 2k
Felix Guattari (French dude, also Deleuze’s brother from another mother). “The Three Ecologies.” English Edition. 2000. http://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Guattari_Felix_The_Three_Ecologies.pdf
The Earth is undergoing a period of intense…the global marketplace and of military-industrial complexes. 

The alternative is to embrace the agency of the schizophrenic by no longer viewing individuals as unitary subjects. Since identity is not static or unified, opening up space for more authentic forms of being should be the starting point of ethics.
Deleuze and Guattari 83
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 1983. http://1000littlehammers.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/anti-oedipus-fixed.pdf
A schizophrenic out for a walk…interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. 

Reject the aff’s appeals to internal reforms that make the State seemingly less normalizing. We cannot rely on the State to solve global problems. Also, the perm fails. Complete rethinking of the State and democracy is key.
Deleuze and Foucault 72
Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault (off-the-chain French intellectuals). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard. 1972. http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
FOUCAULT: It seems to me that…reckoning takes place at another level. 

Thus the Role of the Ballot

This 1NC is an act of protest. I use the debate space to challenge the normalization that the status quo State enables. Voting Aff doesn’t actually make votign compulsory, but the ballot can be instrumental to eluding State norms in everyday life. This is key to examining our assumptions about ethics, so it’s an epistemological prerequisite. Arab Spring proves this is a fight we can win. Protest transcends physical location, so the K spills over outside the round. Greene and Kuswa 12
Ronald Walter Greene (Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota) and Kevin Douglas Kuswa (Department of Communication Studies, California State, Fresno, CA). “‘From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow’: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. June 11th, 2012.
A Korean Wobbly, the living memory of the…justice and real democracy across the world’’ can fold protest into ‘‘the Global Spring’’ (#Global Spring). 

Acts of protest are key to breaking down the State’s constraints on identity and problematizing the status quo. True politics doesn’t come from waiting for the State to solve our problems, but action for real change on an individual level.
Touza 08
L. Sebastián Touza (BA, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 1994, MA, McGill University, 1997). “Antipedagogies for Liberation Politics, Consensual Democracy and Post-Intellectual Interventions.” Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy @ Simon Fraser University. Spring 2008.
Colectivo Situaciones’s self-marginalization from…exist in the concrete situation” (Colectivo Situaciones Hipótesis 162).

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: 5 | Opponent: Brentwood Kelsey Allen-Niesen | Judge: Chetan Hertzig and Davis Turner
Morality cannot be predicated upon objective moral values because objective values do not exist. Mackie 77
Mackie, John Leslie. Fellow of University College, Oxford. Ethics Inventing Right and Wrong. 1977. Chp 1: “The subjectivity of Values”. P 38.
Even more important and certainly more generally… answer, but it is the one to which the clear-headed objectivist is compelled to resort. 

Moreover, the possibility of objective value is empirically disproven by the fact that no one can agree on what it is. Mackie 77
Mackie, John Leslie. Fellow of University College, Oxford. Ethics Inventing Right and Wrong. 1977. Chp 1: “The subjectivity of Values”. P 38.
The argument from relativity has as…perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values. 

?
Only rational self-interested contractarianism saves morality from a skeptical conclusion. Gauthier 7
Gauthier, David (David GO-tee-ay). “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.

Morality faces a foundational crisis. Contractarianism offers the only plausible resolution of this crisis….we need suppose is that moral justification does not plausibly survive conflict with it. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths. Gauthier 7
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an…opportunity costs of what you could have done otherwise.

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: 7 | Opponent: Amy Geller | Judge: Abhi Elisetty, Erik Legried
1

Util is the only moral system available to policy-makers.  Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2
My larger argument turns on the proposition that… to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

The state cannot adhere to side-constraints because state action requires value trade-offs. Woller 97
Woller, Gary. Professor of Public Management @ Brigham Young University. A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics in Restructuring Environmental Policy and Law for the Next Century. Policy Currents 7.2. p. 10-11. June 1997.
Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources,…are somehow to the overall advantage of society.

Act-omission distinction doesn’t apply to states.
Sunstein and Vermuele 5
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life?Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.
The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals… not adequately or fully discourage it.

Thus the standard is maximizing happiness.
2

Authorization of military strikes on Syria will pass by a narrow margin due to Obama’s push.
Zengerle and Oweis 9-4 write
Patricia Zengerle and Khaled Yacoub Oweis (staff writers). “U.S. resolution on Syria strike passes first hurdle in Senate.” Reuters. September 4th, 2013. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE97K0EL20130904
(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's effort…expected to vote against a resolution, placing the final outcome in doubt. 

Polcap’s key. Lewis 8-31
Paul Lewis (Washington, DC correspondent for The Guardian, won 10 major journalism prizes including the European Press Prize in 2013). “Battle looms in Congress as Obama makes Syria a vast political gamble.” The Guardian. August 31st, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/31/barack-obama-syria-congress-vote
Barack Obama has taken a potentially…"every ounce of political capital that he has to sell this". 

CV kills Obama’s polcap.
Keaney and Rogers 6
Emily Keaney and Ben Rogers (writers for the IPPR). “A Citizen’s Duty: Voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout.” The Institute for Public Policy Research is the UK’s leading progressive think tank and was established in 1988. May 2006. http://www.ippr.org/ecomm/files/a_citizen27s_duty.pdf
The little polling that has been done on the public’s attitude to compulsory turnout…those that currently turn out in very low numbers. 

Syria strike is key to deter Iranian prolif.
Lobe 9-5
Jim Lobe (American journalist and the Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service). “Pro-Israel groups mix Iran into Syria debate.” Asia Times. September 5th, 2013. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-050913.html
WASHINGTON - With the US…do it in a way that is seen as being effective and meaningful and serious," he added. ?

Iran prolif leads to global spillover. The NPT will break down. McCoy 11
Ronald McCoy (President of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War). “Iran’s nuclear aspirations: A poisoned chalice.” January 29th, 2011. http://www.kafkapizechust.com/irans-nuclear-aspirations-a-poisoned-chalice/2247/
Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General…lead to a nuclear free-for-all and a cascade of proliferation.
?
Prolif is the largest existential threat. Miller 2
James D. Miller, professor of economics, Smith College, NATIONAL REVIEW, January 23, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-miller012302.shtml, AD: 7-31-09
The U.S. should use… to prioritize protecting us all from atomic, biological, and chemical weapons.

3

Text: The USFG should allocate $1 billion per election to lotteries for all eligible voters who vote in any future federal primary and general election. I reserve the right to clarify.

Lottery ticket incentives solve turnout and avoid politics.
Ornstein 12
Norman Ornstein (resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute). “The Mega Millions Solution.” New York Times. April 23rd, 2012. http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/the-mega-millions-solution/
The Mega Millions lottery last month with its…because he or she did not vote.

Tournament: Bump | Round: 2 | Opponent: Bronx EF | Judge: Josh Melnick

The law is not neutral or objective. It is a contradictory body of principles exploited to further political agendas. The aff criticizes the law yet works within it, rendering their claims about “legitimacy” subject to the same biases they criticize.

Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
Imagine that Arnie and Ann have completed their first year at Harvard and coincidentally find themselves in the same second-year class on employment discrimination law. During the portion of the course that focuses on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, (8) the class is asked to determine whether § 2000e-2(a)(1), which makes it unlawful "to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin," permits an employer to voluntarily institute an affirmative action program giving preferential treatment to African-Americans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Arnie strongly believes that affirmative action programs are morally wrong and that what the country needs are color-blind, merit-based employment practices. In researching the problem, he encounters the following principle of statutory construction: When the words are plain, courts may not enter speculative fields in search of a different meaning, and the language must be regarded as the final expression of legislative intent and not added to or subtracted from on the basis of any extraneous source. (9) In Arnie's opinion, this principle clearly applies to this case. Section 2000e-2(a)(1) prohibits discrimination against any individual because of his race. What wording could be more plain? Since giving preferential treatment to African-Americans discriminates against whites because of their race, Arnie concludes that § 2000e-2(a)(1) prohibits employers from voluntarily instituting affirmative action plans. Perhaps equally unsurprisingly, Ann has a strong belief that affirmative action is moral and is absolutely necessary to bring about a racially just society. In the course of her research, she encounters the following principle of statutory construction: "It is a familiar rule, that a thing may be within the letter of a statute and yet not within the statute because not within its spirit, nor within the intention of its makers"'; (10) and that an interpretation which would bring about an end at variance with the purpose of the statute must be rejected. (11) Upon checking the legislative history, Ann learns that the purpose of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is to relieve "the plight of the Negro in our economy" and "open employment opportunities for Negroes in occupations which have been traditionally closed to them." (12) Since it would obviously contradict this purpose to interpret § 2000e-2 to make it illegal for employers to voluntarily institute affirmative action plans designed to economically benefit African-Americans by opening traditionally closed employment opportunities, Ann concludes that § 2000e-2 does not prohibit such plans. The next day, Arnie presents his argument for the illegality of affirmative action in class. Since Ann has found a sound legal argument for precisely the opposite conclusion, she knows that Arnie's position is untenable. However, having gotten to know Arnie over the last year, this does not surprise her in the least. She regards him as an inveterate reactionary who is completely unprincipled in pursuit of his conservative (and probably racist) agenda. She believes that he is advancing an absurdly narrow reading of the Civil Rights Act for the purely political end of undermining the purpose of the statute. Accordingly, she volunteers, and when called upon, makes this point and presents her own argument demonstrating that affirmative action is legal. Arnie, who has found a sound legal argument for his conclusion, knows that Ann's position is untenable. However, he expected as much. Over the past year he has come to know Ann as a knee-jerk liberal who is willing to do anything to advance her mushy-headed, left-wing agenda. He believes that she is perversely manipulating the patently clear language of the statute for the purely political end of extending the statute beyond its legitimate purpose. Both Arnie and Ann know that they have found a logically sound argument for their conclusion. But both have also committed the fallacy of legal reasoning by assuming that under the law there is a uniquely correct resolution of the case. Because of this assumption, both believe that their argument demonstrates that they have found the objectively correct answer, and that therefore, the other is simply playing politics with the law. The truth is, of course, that both are engaging in politics. Because the law is made up of contradictory rules that can generate any conclusion, what conclusion one finds will be determined by what conclusion one looks for, i.e., by the hypothesis one decides to test. This will invariably be the one that intuitively "feels" right, the one that is most congruent with one's antecedent, underlying political and moral beliefs. Thus, legal conclusions are always determined by the normative assumptions of the decisionmaker. The knowledge that Kingsfield possesses and Arnie and Ann have not yet discovered is that the law is never neutral and objective. 

The law is inherently vague and indeterminate. Insistence on the ability to find within the legal frame a clear, non-political answer to legal questions is self-defeating and never agenda-neutral.

Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
I have suggested that because the law consists of contradictory rules and principles, sound legal arguments will be available for all legal conclusions, and hence, the normative predispositions of the decisionmakers, rather than the law itself, determine the outcome of cases. It should be noted, however, that this vastly understates the degree to which the law is indeterminate. For even if the law were consistent, the individual rules and principles are expressed in such vague and general language that the decisionmaker is able to interpret them as broadly or as narrowly as necessary to achieve any desired result. To see that this is the case, imagine that Arnie and Ann have graduated from Harvard Law School, gone on to distinguished careers as attorneys, and later in life find, to their amazement and despair, that they have both been appointed as judges to the same appellate court. The first case to come before them involves the following facts: A bankrupt was auctioning off his personal possessions to raise money to cover his debts. One of the items put up for auction was a painting that had been in his family for years. A buyer attending the auction purchased the painting for a bid of $100. When the buyer had the painting appraised, it turned out to be a lost masterpiece worth millions. Upon learning of this, the seller sued to rescind the contract of sale. The trial court granted the rescission. The question on appeal is whether this judgment is legally correct. Counsel for both the plaintiff seller and defendant buyer agree that the rule of law governing this case holds that a contract of sale may be rescinded when there has been a mutual mistake concerning a fact that was material to the agreement. The seller claims that in the instant case there has been such a mistake, citing as precedent the case of Sherwood v. Walker. (13) In Sherwood, one farmer sold another farmer a cow which both farmers believed to be sterile. When the cow turned out to be fertile, the seller was granted rescission of the contract of sale on the ground of mutual mistake. (14) The seller argues that Sherwood is exactly analogous to the present controversy. Both he and the buyer believed the contract of sale was for an inexpensive painting. Thus, both were mistaken as to the true nature of the object being sold. Since this was obviously material to the agreement, the seller claims that the trial court was correct in granting rescission. The buyer claims that the instant case is not one of mutual mistake, citing as precedent the case of Wood v. Boynton. (15) In Wood, a woman sold a small stone she had found to a jeweler for one dollar. At the time of the sale, neither party knew what type of stone it was. When it subsequently turned out to be an uncut diamond worth $700, the seller sued for rescission claiming mutual mistake. The court upheld the contract, finding that since both parties knew that they were bargaining over a stone of unknown value, there was no mistake. (16) The buyer argues that this is exactly analogous to the present controversy. Both the seller and the buyer knew that the painting being sold was a work of unknown value. This is precisely what is to be expected at an auction. Thus, the buyer claims that this is not a case of mutual mistake and the contract should be upheld. Following oral argument, Arnie, Ann, and the third judge on the court, Bennie Stolwitz, a non-lawyer appointed to the bench predominantly because the governor is his uncle, retire to consider their ruling. Arnie believes that one of the essential purposes of contract law is to encourage people to be self-reliant and careful in their transactions, since with the freedom to enter into binding arrangements comes the responsibility for doing so. He regards as crucial to his decision the facts that the seller had the opportunity to have the painting appraised and that by exercising due care he could have discovered its true value. Hence, he regards the contract in this case as one for a painting of unknown value and votes to overturn the trial court and uphold the contract. On the other hand, Ann believes that the essential purpose of contract law is to ensure that all parties receive a fair bargain. She regards as crucial to her decision the fact that the buyer in this case is receiving a massive windfall at the expense of the unfortunate seller. Hence, she regards the contract as one for an inexpensive painting and votes to uphold the trial court's decision and grant rescission. This leaves the deciding vote up to Bennie, who has no idea what the purpose of contract law is, but thinks that it just doesn't seem right for the bankrupt guy to lose out, and votes for rescission. Both Arnie and Ann can see that the present situation bodes ill for their judicial tenure. Each believes that the other's unprincipled political manipulations of the law will leave Bennie, who is not even a lawyer, with control of the court. As a result, they hold a meeting to discuss the situation. At this meeting, they both promise to put politics aside and decide all future cases strictly on the basis of the law. Relieved, they return to court to confront the next case on the docket, which involves the following facts: A philosophy professor who supplements her academic salary during the summer by giving lectures on political philosophy had contracted to deliver a lecture on the rule of law to the Future Republicans of America (FRA) on July 20, for $500. She was subsequently contacted by the Young Socialists of America, who offered her $1000 for a lecture to be delivered on the same day. She thereupon called the FRA, informing them of her desire to accept the better offer. The FRA then agreed to pay $1000 for her lecture. After the professor delivered the lecture, the FRA paid only the originally stipulated $500. The professor sued and the trial court ruled she was entitled to the additional $500. The question on appeal is whether this judgment is legally correct. Counsel for both the plaintiff professor and defendant FRA agree that the rule of law governing this case holds that a promise to pay more for services one is already contractually bound to perform is not enforceable, but if an existing contract is rescinded by both parties and a new one is negotiated, the promise is enforceable. The FRA claims that in the instant case, it had promised to pay more for a service the professor was already contractually bound to perform, citing Davis and Co. v. Morgan (17) as precedent. In Davis, a laborer employed for a year at $40 per month was offered $65 per month by another company. The employer then promised to pay the employee an additional $120 at the end of the year if he stayed with the firm. At the end of the year, the employer failed to pay the $120, and when the employee sued, the court held that because he was already obligated to work for $40 per month for the year, there was no consideration for the employer's promise; hence, it was unenforceable. (18) The FRA argues that this is exactly analogous to the present controversy. The professor was already obligated to deliver the lecture for $500. Therefore, there was no consideration for the FRA's promise to pay an additional $500 and the promise is unenforceable. The professor claims that in the instant case, the original contract was rescinded and a new one negotiated, citing Schwartzreich v. Bauman-Basch, Inc. (19) as precedent. In Schwartzreich, a clothing designer who had contracted for a year's work at $90 per week was subsequently offered $115 per week by another company. When the designer informed his employer of his intention to leave, the employer offered the designer $100 per week if he would stay and the designer agreed. When the designer sued for the additional compensation, the court held that since the parties had simultaneously rescinded the original contract by mutual consent and entered into a new one for the higher salary, the promise to pay was enforceable. (20) The professor argues that this is exactly analogous to the present controversy. When the FRA offered to pay her an additional $500 to give the lecture, they were obviously offering to rescind the former contract and enter a new one on different terms. Hence, the promise to pay the extra $500 is enforceable. Following oral argument, the judges retire to consider their ruling. Arnie, mindful of his agreement with Ann, is scrupulously careful not to let political considerations enter into his analysis of the case. Thus, he begins by asking himself why society needs contract law in the first place. He decides that the objective, nonpolitical answer is obviously that society needs some mechanism to ensure that individuals honor their voluntarily undertaken commitments. From this perspective, the resolution of the present case is clear. Since the professor is obviously threatening to go back on her voluntarily undertaken commitment in order to extort more money from the FRA, Arnie characterizes the case as one in which a promise has been made to pay more for services which the professor is already contractually bound to perform, and decides that the promise is unenforceable. Hence, he votes to overturn the trial court's decision. Ann, also mindful of her agreement with Arnie, is meticulous in her efforts to ensure that she decides this case purely on the law. Accordingly, she begins her analysis by asking herself why society needs contract law in the first place. She decides that the objective, nonpolitical answer is obviously that it provides an environment within which people can exercise the freedom to arrange their lives as they see fit. From this perspective, the resolution of the present case is clear. Since the FRA is essentially attempting to prevent the professor from arranging her life as she sees fit, Ann characterizes the case as one in which the parties have simultaneously rescinded an existing contract and negotiated a new one, and decides that the promise is enforceable. Hence, she votes to uphold the trial court's decision. This once again leaves the deciding vote up to Bennie, who has no idea why society needs contract law, but thinks that the professor is taking advantage of the situation in an unfair way and votes to overturn the trial court's ruling. Both Arnie and Ann now believe that the other is an incorrigible ideologue who is destined to torment him or her throughout his or her judicial existence. Each is quite unhappy at the prospect. Each blames the other for his or her unhappiness. But, in fact, the blame lies within each. For they have never learned Professor Kingsfield's lesson that it is impossible to reach an objective decision based solely on the law. This is because the law is always open to interpretation and there is no such thing as a normatively neutral interpretation. The way one interprets the rules of law is always determined by one's underlying moral and political beliefs. 

The aff’s appeals to a stable legal order empower conservative ideologues. Agreement among judges is a false objectivity.

 Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
I have been arguing that the law is inherently indeterminate, and further, that this may not be such a bad thing. I realize, however, that you may still not be convinced. Even if you are now willing to admit that the law is somewhat indeterminate, you probably believe that I have vastly exaggerated the degree to which this is true. After all, it is obvious that the law cannot be radically indeterminate. If this were the case, the law would be completely unpredictable. Judges hearing similar cases would render wildly divergent decisions. There would be no stability or uniformity in the law. But, as imperfect as the current legal system may be, this is clearly not the case. The observation that the legal system is highly stable is, of course, correct, but it is a mistake to believe that this is because the law is determinate. The stability of the law derives not from any feature of the law itself, but from the overwhelming uniformity of ideological background among those empowered to make legal decisions. Consider who the judges are in this country. Typically, they are people from a solid middle- to upper-class background who performed well at an appropriately prestigious undergraduate institution; demonstrated the ability to engage in the type of analytical reasoning that is measured by the standardized Law School Admissions Test; passed through the crucible of law school, complete with its methodological and political indoctrination; and went on to high-profile careers as attorneys, probably with a prestigious Wall Street-style law firm. To have been appointed to the bench, it is virtually certain that they were both politically moderate and well-connected, and, until recently, white males of the correct ethnic and religious pedigree. It should be clear that, culturally speaking, such a group will tend to be quite homogeneous, sharing a great many moral, spiritual, and political beliefs and values. Given this, it can hardly be surprising that there will be a high degree of agreement among judges as to how cases ought to be decided. But this agreement is due to the common set of normative presuppositions the judges share, not some immanent, objective meaning that exists within the rules of law. In fact, however, the law is not truly stable, since it is continually, if slowly, evolving in response to changing social mores and conditions. This evolution occurs because each new generation of judges brings with it its own set of "progressive" normative assumptions. As the older generation passes from the scene, these assumptions come to be shared by an ever-increasing percentage of the judiciary. Eventually, they become the consensus of opinion among judicial decisionmakers, and the law changes to reflect them. Thus, a generation of judges that regarded "separate but equal" as a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (31) gave way to one which interpreted that clause as prohibiting virtually all governmental actions that classify individuals by race, which, in turn, gave way to one which interpreted the same language to permit "benign" racial classifications designed to advance the social status of minority groups. In this way, as the moral and political values conventionally accepted by society change over time, so too do those embedded in the law. The law appears to be stable because of the slowness with which it evolves. But the slow pace of legal development is not due to any inherent characteristic of the law itself. Logically speaking, any conclusion, however radical, is derivable from the rules of law. It is simply that, even between generations, the range of ideological opinion represented on the bench is so narrow that anything more than incremental departures from conventional wisdom and morality will not be respected within the profession. Such decisions are virtually certain to be overturned on appeal, and thus, are rarely even rendered in the first instance. Confirming evidence for this thesis can be found in our contemporary judicial history. Over the past quarter-century, the "diversity" movement has produced a bar, and concomitantly a bench, somewhat more open to people of different racial, sexual, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. To some extent, this movement has produced a judiciary that represents a broader range of ideological viewpoints than has been the case in the past. Over the same time period, we have seen an accelerated rate of legal change. Today, long-standing precedents are more freely overruled, novel theories of liability are more frequently accepted by the courts, and different courts hand down different, and seemingly irreconcilable, decisions more often. In addition, it is worth noting that recently, the chief complaint about the legal system seems to concern the degree to which it has become "politicized." This suggests that as the ideological solidarity of the judiciary breaks down, so too does the predictability of legal decisionmaking, and hence, the stability of the law. Regardless of this trend, I hope it is now apparent that to assume that the law is stable because it is determinate is to reverse cause and effect. Rather, it is because the law is basically stable that it appears to be determinate. It is not rule of law that gives us a stable legal system; it is the stability of the culturally shared values of the judiciary that gives rise to and supports the myth of the rule of law.

2 impacts.

a. ====Even if the legal system could be determinate and consistent, it shouldn’t be. Rigid rule of law makes the legal system less fair.====
Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
Let us assume that I have failed to convince you of the impossibility of reforming the law into a body of definite, consistent rules that produces determinate results. Even if the law could be reformed in this way, it clearly should not be. There is nothing perverse in the fact that the law is indeterminate. Society is not the victim of some nefarious conspiracy to undermine legal certainty to further ulterior motives. As long as law remains a state monopoly, as long as it is created and enforced exclusively through governmental bodies, it must remain indeterminate if it is to serve its purpose. Its indeterminacy gives the law its flexibility. And since, as a monopoly product, the law must apply to all members of society in a one-size-fits-all manner, flexibility is its most essential feature. It is certainly true that one of the purposes of law is to ensure a stable social environment, to provide order. But not just any order will suffice. Another purpose of the law must be to do justice. The goal of the law is to provide a social environment which is both orderly and just. Unfortunately, these two purposes are always in tension. For the more definite and rigidly- determined the rules of law become, the less the legal system is able to do justice to the individual. Thus, if the law were fully determinate, it would have no ability to consider the equities of the particular case. This is why even if we could reform the law to make it wholly definite and consistent, we should not. Consider one of the favorite proposals of those who disagree. Those who believe that the law can and should be rendered fully determinate usually propose that contracts be rigorously enforced. Thus, they advocate a rule of law stating that in the absence of physical compulsion or explicit fraud, parties should be absolutely bound to keep their agreements. They believe that as long as no rules inconsistent with this definite, clearly-drawn provision are allowed to enter the law, politics may be eliminated from contract law and commercial transactions greatly facilitated. Let us assume, contrary to fact, that the terms "fraud" and "physical compulsion" have a plain meaning not subject to interpretation. The question then becomes what should be done about Agnes Syester. (25) Agnes was "a lonely and elderly widow who fell for the blandishments and flattery of those who" ran an Arthur Murray Dance Studio in DesMoines, Iowa. (26) This studio used some highly innovative sales techniques to sell this 68-year-old woman 4,057 hours of dance instruction, including three life memberships and a course in Gold Star dancing, which was "the type of dancing done by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astair only about twice as difficult," (27) for a total cost of $33,497 in 1960 dollars. Of course, Agnes did voluntarily agree to purchase that number of hours. Now, in a case such as this, one might be tempted to "interpret" the overreaching and unfair sales practices of the studio as fraudulent (28) and allow Agnes to recover her money. However, this is precisely the sort of solution that our reformed, determinate contract law is designed to outlaw. Therefore, it would seem that since Agnes has voluntarily contracted for the dance lessons, she is liable to pay the full amount for them. This might seem to be a harsh result for Agnes, but from now on, vulnerable little old ladies will be on notice to be more careful in their dealings. Or consider a proposal that is often advanced by those who wish to render probate law more determinate. They advocate a rule of law declaring a handwritten will that is signed before two witnesses to be absolutely binding. They believe that by depriving the court of the ability to "interpret" the state of mind of the testator, the judges' personal moral opinions may be eliminated from the law and most probate matters brought to a timely conclusion. Of course, the problem then becomes what to do with Elmer Palmer, a young man who murdered his grandfather to gain the inheritance due him under the old man's will a bit earlier than might otherwise have been the case. (29) In a case such as this, one might be tempted to deny Elmer the fruits of his nefarious labor despite the fact that the will was validly drawn, by appealing to the legal principle that no one should profit from his or her own wrong. (30) However, this is precisely the sort of vaguely-expressed counter-rule that our reformers seek to purge from the legal system in order to ensure that the law remains consistent. Therefore, it would seem that although Elmer may spend a considerable amount of time behind bars, he will do so as a wealthy man. This may send a bad message to other young men of Elmer's temperament, but from now on the probate process will be considerably streamlined. The proposed reforms certainly render the law more determinate. However, they do so by eliminating the law's ability to consider the equities of the individual case. This observation raises the following interesting question: If this is what a determinate legal system is like, who would want to live under one? The fact is that the greater the degree of certainty we build into the law, the less able the law becomes to do justice. For this reason, a monopolistic legal system composed entirely of clear, consistent rules could not function in a manner acceptable to the general public. It could not serve as a system of justice.

b. ====Faith in a strong rule of law is the root cause of violent state oppression.====
Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
This raises an interesting question. If it has been known for 100 years that the law does not consist of a body of determinate rules, why is the belief that it does still so widespread? If four generations of jurisprudential scholars have shown that the rule of law is a myth, why does the concept still command such fervent commitment? The answer is implicit in the question itself, for the question recognizes that the rule of law is a myth and like all myths, it is designed to serve an emotive, rather than cognitive, function. The purpose of a myth is not to persuade one's reason, but to enlist one's emotions in support of an idea. And this is precisely the case for the myth of the rule of law; its purpose is to enlist the emotions of the public in support of society's political power structure. People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God's plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law. People who believe they live under "a government of laws and not people" tend to view their nation's legal system as objective and impartial. They tend to see the rules under which they must live not as expressions of human will, but as embodiments of neutral principles of justice, i.e., as natural features of the social world. Once they believe that they are being commanded by an impersonal law rather than other human beings, they view their obedience to political authority as a public-spirited acceptance of the requirements of social life rather than mere acquiescence to superior power. In this way, the concept of the rule of law functions much like the use of the passive voice by the politician who describes a delict on his or her part with the assertion "mistakes were made." It allows people to hide the agency of power behind a facade of words; to believe that it is the law which compels their compliance, not self-aggrandizing politicians, or highly capitalized special interests, or wealthy white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, or _ (fill in your favorite culprit). But the myth of the rule of law does more than render the people submissive to state authority; it also turns them into the state's accomplices in the exercise of its power. For people who would ordinarily consider it a great evil to deprive individuals of their rights or oppress politically powerless minority groups will respond with patriotic fervor when these same actions are described as upholding the rule of law. Consider the situation in India toward the end of British colonial rule. At that time, the followers of Mohandas Gandhi engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience by manufacturing salt for their own use in contravention of the British monopoly on such manufacture. The British administration and army responded with mass imprisonments and shocking brutality. It is difficult to understand this behavior on the part of the highly moralistic, ever-so-civilized British unless one keeps in mind that they were able to view their activities not as violently repressing the indigenous population, but as upholding the rule of law. The same is true of the violence directed against the nonviolent civil rights protestors in the American South during the civil rights movement. Although much of the white population of the southern states held racist beliefs, one cannot account for the overwhelming support given to the violent repression of these protests on the assumption that the vast majority of the white Southerners were sadistic racists devoid of moral sensibilities. The true explanation is that most of these people were able to view themselves not as perpetuating racial oppression and injustice, but as upholding the rule of law against criminals and outside agitators. Similarly, since despite the . 60s rhetoric, all police officers are not "fascist pigs," some other explanation is needed for their willingness to participate in the "police riot" at the 1968 Democratic convention, or the campaign of illegal arrests and civil rights violations against those demonstrating in Washington against President Nixon's policies in Vietnam, or the effort to infiltrate and destroy the sanctuary movement that sheltered refugees from Salvadorian death squads during the Reagan era or, for that matter, the attack on and destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. It is only when these officers have fully bought into the myth that "we are a government of laws and not people," when they truly believe that their actions are commanded by some impersonal body of just rules, that they can fail to see that they are the agency used by those in power to oppress others. The reason why the myth of the rule of law has survived for 100 years despite the knowledge of its falsity is that it is too valuable a tool to relinquish. The myth of impersonal government is simply the most effective means of social control available to the state.

?

The alternative is a free-market legal system, where law is not supplied by the state. The alt has unlimited potential, so engaging in static thinking about what it looks like is disingenuous.

 Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
I am aware that this explanation probably appears as initially unconvincing as was my earlier contention that the law is inherently political. Even if you found my Monosizea parable entertaining, it is likely that you regard it as irrelevant. You probably believe that the analogy fails because shoes are qualitatively different from legal services. After all, law is a public good which, unlike shoes, really is crucial to public welfare. It is easy to see how the free market can adequately supply the public with shoes. But how can it possibly provide the order-generating and maintaining processes necessary for the peaceful coexistence of human beings in society? What would a free market in legal services be like? I am always tempted to give the honest and accurate response to this challenge, which is that to ask the question is to miss the point. If human beings had the wisdom and knowledge-generating capacity to be able to describe how a free market would work, that would be the strongest possible argument for central planning. One advocates a free market not because of some moral imprimatur written across the heavens, but because it is impossible for human beings to amass the knowledge of local conditions and the predictive capacity necessary to effectively organize economic relationships among millions of individuals. It is possible to describe what a free market in shoes would be like because we have one. But such a description is merely an observation of the current state of a functioning market, not a projection of how human beings would organize themselves to supply a currently non-marketed good. To demand that an advocate of free market law (or Socrates of Monosizea, for that matter) describe in advance how markets would supply legal services (or shoes) is to issue an impossible challenge. Further, for an advocate of free market law (or Socrates) to even accept this challenge would be to engage in self-defeating activity since the more successfully he or she could describe how the law (or shoe) market would function, the more he or she would prove that it could be run by state planners. Free markets supply human wants better than state monopolies precisely because they allow an unlimited number of suppliers to attempt to do so. By patronizing those who most effectively meet their particular needs and causing those who do not to fail, consumers determine the optimal method of supply. If it were possible to specify in advance what the outcome of this process of selection would be, there would be no need for the process itself. Although I am tempted to give this response, I never do. This is because, although true, it never persuades. Instead, it is usually interpreted as an appeal for blind faith in the free market, and the failure to provide a specific explanation as to how such a market would provide legal services is interpreted as proof that it cannot. Therefore, despite the self-defeating nature of the attempt, I usually do try to suggest how a free market in law might work. So, what would a free market in legal services be like? As Sherlock Holmes would regularly say to the good doctor, "You see, Watson, but you do not observe." Examples of non-state law are all around us. Consider labor-management collective bargaining agreements. In addition to setting wage rates, such agreements typically determine both the work rules the parties must abide by and the grievance procedures they must follow to resolve disputes. In essence, such contracts create the substantive law of the workplace as well as the workplace judiciary. A similar situation exists with regard to homeowner agreements, which create both the rules and dispute settlement procedures within a condominium or housing development, i.e., the law and judicial procedure of the residential community. Perhaps a better example is supplied by universities. These institutions create their own codes of conduct for both students and faculty that cover everything from academic dishonesty to what constitutes acceptable speech and dating behavior. In addition, they not only devise their own elaborate judicial procedures to deal with violations of these codes, but typically supply their own campus police forces as well. A final example may be supplied by the many commercial enterprises that voluntarily opt out of the state judicial system by writing clauses in their contracts that require disputes to be settled through binding arbitration or mediation rather than through a lawsuit. In this vein, the variegated "legal" procedures that have recently been assigned the sobriquet of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) do a good job of suggesting what a free market in legal service might be like. (35) Of course, it is not merely that we fail to observe what is presently all around us. We also act as though we have no knowledge of our own cultural or legal history. Consider, for example, the situation of African-American communities in the segregated South or the immigrant communities in New York in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Because of prejudice, poverty and the language barrier, these groups were essentially cut off from the state legal system. And yet, rather than disintegrate into chaotic disorder, they were able to privately supply themselves with the rules of behavior and dispute-settlement procedures necessary to maintain peaceful, stable, and highly structured communities. Furthermore, virtually none of the law that orders our interpersonal relationships was produced by the intentional actions of central governments. Our commercial law arose almost entirely from the Law Merchant, a non-governmental set of rules and procedures developed by merchants to quickly and peacefully resolve disputes and facilitate commercial relations. Property, tort, and criminal law are all the products of common law processes by which rules of behavior evolve out of and are informed by the particular circumstances of actual human controversies. In fact, a careful study of Anglo-American legal history will demonstrate that almost all of the law which facilitates peaceful human interaction arose in this way. On the other hand, the source of the law which produces oppression and social division is almost always the state. Measures that impose religious or racial intolerance, economic exploitation, one group's idea of "fairness," or another's of "community" or "family" values virtually always originate in legislation, the law consciously made by the central government. If the purpose of the law really is to bring order to human existence, then it is fair to say that the law actually made by the state is precisely the law that does not work. Unfortunately, no matter how suggestive these examples might be, they represent only what can develop within a state-dominated system. Since, for the reasons indicated above, it is impossible to out-think a free market, any attempt to account for what would result from a true free market in law would be pure speculation. However, if I must engage in such speculation, I will try to avoid what might be called "static thinking" in doing so. Static thinking occurs when we imagine changing one feature of a dynamic system without appreciating how doing so will alter the character of all other features of the system. For example, I would be engaging in static thinking were I to ask how, if the state did not provide the law and courts, the free market could provide them in their present form. It is this type of thinking that is responsible for the conventional assumption that free market legal services would be "competing governments" which would be the equivalent of organized gang warfare. Once this static thinking is rejected, it becomes apparent that if the state did not provide the law and courts, they simply would not exist in their present form. This, however, only highlights the difficulty of describing free market order-generating services and reinforces the speculative nature of all attempts to do so. One thing it seems safe to assume is that there would not be any universally binding, society-wide set of "legal" rules. In a free market, the law would not come in one-size-fits-all. Although the rules necessary to the maintenance of a minimal level of order, such as prohibitions against murder, assault, and theft, would be common to most systems, different communities of interest would assuredly adopt those rules and dispute-settlement procedures that would best fit their needs. For example, it seems extremely unlikely that there would be anything resembling a uniform body of contract law. Consider, as just one illustration, the differences between commercial and consumer contracts. Commercial contracts are usually between corporate entities with specialized knowledge of industrial practices and a financial interest in minimizing the interruption of business. On the other hand, consumer contracts are those in which one or both parties lack commercial sophistication and large sums do not rest upon a speedy resolution of any dispute that might arise. In a free market for legal services, the rules that govern these types of contracts would necessarily be radically different. This example can also illustrate the different types of dispute-settlement procedures that would be likely to arise. In disputes over consumer contracts, the parties might well be satisfied with the current system of litigation in which the parties present their cases to an impartial judge or jury who renders a verdict for one side or the other. However, in commercial disputes, the parties might prefer a mediational process with a negotiated settlement in order to preserve an ongoing commercial relationship or a quick and informal arbitration in order to avoid the losses associated with excessive delay. Further, it is virtually certain that they would want mediators, arbitrators, or judges who are highly knowledgeable about commercial practice, rather than the typical generalist judge or a jury of lay people. The problem with trying to specify the individuated "legal systems" which would develop is that there is no limit to the number of dimensions along which individuals may choose to order their lives, and hence no limit to the number of overlapping sets of rules and dispute resolution procedures to which they may subscribe. An individual might settle his or her disputes with neighbors according to voluntarily adopted homeowner association rules and procedures, with co-workers according to the rules and procedures described in a collective bargaining agreement, with members of his or her religious congregation according to scriptural law and tribunal, with other drivers according to the processes agreed to in his or her automobile insurance contract, and with total strangers by selecting a dispute resolution company from the yellow pages of the phone book. Given the current thinking about racial and sexual identity, it seems likely that many disputes among members of the same minority group or among women would be brought to "niche" dispute resolution companies composed predominantly of members of the relevant group, who would use their specialized knowledge of group "culture" to devise superior rules and procedures for intra-group dispute resolution. (36)

The K comes first. The AC conflates status quo law with order, ignoring that the state’s monopoly on the law isn’t key to peaceful social relations. Important alternatives are rendered unthinkable by the way in which they frame the law.

 Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
The problem with this suggestion is that most people are unable to understand what it could possibly mean. This is chiefly because the language necessary to express the idea clearly does not really exist. Most people have been raised to identify law with the state. They cannot even conceive of the idea of legal services apart from the government. The very notion of a free market in legal services conjures up the image of anarchic gang warfare or rule by organized crime. In our system, an advocate of free market law is treated the same way Socrates was treated in Monosizea, and is confronted with the same types of arguments. The primary reason for this is that the public has been politically indoctrinated to fail to recognize the distinction between order and law. Order is what people need if they are to live together in peace and security. Law, on the other hand, is a particular method of producing order. As it is presently constituted, law is the production of order by requiring all members of society to live under the same set of state-generated rules; it is order produced by centralized planning. Yet, from childhood, citizens are taught to invariably link the words "law" and "order." Political discourse conditions them to hear and use the terms as though they were synonymous and to express the desire for a safer, more peaceful society as a desire for "law and order." The state nurtures this confusion because it is the public's inability to distinguish order from law that generates its fundamental support for the state. As long as the public identifies order with law, it will believe that an orderly society is impossible without the law the state provides. And as long as the public believes this, it will continue to support the state almost without regard to how oppressive it may become. The public's identification of order with law makes it impossible for the public to ask for one without asking for the other. There is clearly a public demand for an orderly society. One of human beings' most fundamental desires is for a peaceful existence secure from violence. But because the public has been conditioned to express its desire for order as one for law, all calls for a more orderly society are interpreted as calls for more law. And since under our current political system, all law is supplied by the state, all such calls are interpreted as calls for a more active and powerful state. The identification of order with law eliminates from public consciousness the very concept of the decentralized provision of order. With regard to legal services, it renders the classical liberal idea of a market-generated, spontaneous order incomprehensible. I began this Article with a reference to Orwell's concept of doublethink. But I am now describing the most effective contemporary example we have of Orwellian "newspeak," the process by which words are redefined to render certain thoughts unthinkable. (34) Were the distinction between order and law well-understood, the question of whether a state monopoly of law is the best way to ensure an orderly society could be intelligently discussed. But this is precisely the question that the state does not wish to see raised. By collapsing the concept of order into that of law, the state can ensure that it is not, for it will have effectively eliminated the idea of a non-state generated order from the public mind. Under such circumstances, we can hardly be surprised if the advocates of a free market in law are treated like Socrates of Monosizea. 

Thus the Role of the Ballot

Genealogy of the rule of law is a key starting point. Failure to contest the supposed “impartiality” of the law perpetuates imperialist violence.

 Dossa 99
Shiraz, Department of Political Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, “Liberal Legalism: Law, Culture and Identity,” The European Legacy, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 73-87,1
Law's imperial reach, it massive authority, in liberal politics is a brute, recurring fact. In Law's Empire, Dworkin attests to its scope and power with candour: "We live in and by the law. It makes us what we are" (vii). But he fails to appreciate that law equally traduces others, it systematically unmakes them. For Dworkin, a militant liberal legalist, law is the insiders' domain: legal argument has to be understood internally from the "judge's point of view"; sociological or historical readings are irrelevant and "perverse".2 Praising the decencies of liberal law is necessary in this world: rule of law, judicial integrity, fairness, justice are integral facets of tolerable human life. Lawfulness is and ought to be part of any decent regime of politics. But law's rhetoric on its own behalf systematically scants law's violent, dark underside, it skillfully masks law's commerce with destruction and death. None of this is visible from the internalist standpoint, and Dworkin's liberal apologia serves to mystify the gross reality of law's empire. In liberal political science, law's presumed, Olympian impartiality, is thus not a contested notion. Liberals still presuppose as a matter of course the juristic community's impartiality and neutrality, despite empirical evidence to the contrary.3 One consequence of the assumed sanctity of the judicial torso within the body politic, has been that law's genealogy, law's chronological disposition towards political and cultural questions, have simply not been of interest or concern to most liberal scholars. A further result of this attitude is the political science community's nearly total ignorance of liberal law's complicity in western imperialism, and in shaping western attitudes to the lands and cultures of the conquered natives. Liberal jurisprudence's subterranean life, its invidious consciousness is, however, not an archaic, intermittent annoyance as sensitive liberals are inclined to think: indeed law is as potent now as it has been in last two centuries in articulating a dismissive image of the native Other.
?
AT Perms

The perms fail.
Reform that seeks a “true rule of law” has zero chance of solving.
Hasnas 95
John Hasnas (Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University). “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. 1995. http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
I have been arguing that the law is not a body of determinate rules that can be objectively and impersonally applied by judges; that what the law prescribes is necessarily determined by the normative predispositions of the one who is interpreting it. In short, I have been arguing that law is inherently political. If you, my reader, are like most people, you are far from convinced of this. In fact, I dare say I can read your thoughts. You are thinking that even if I have shown that the present legal system is somewhat indeterminate, I certainly have not shown that the law is inherently political. Although you may agree that the law as presently constituted is too vague or contains too many contradictions, you probably believe that this state of affairs is due to the actions of the liberal judicial activists, or the Reaganite adherents of the doctrine of original intent, or the self-serving politicians, or the _ (feel free to fill in your favorite candidate for the group that is responsible for the legal system's ills). However, you do not believe that the law must be this way, that it can never be definite and politically neutral. You believe that the law can be reformed; that to bring about an end to political strife and institute a true rule of law, we merely need to create a legal system comprised of consistent rules that are expressed in clear, definite language. It is my sad duty to inform you that this cannot be done. Even with all the good will in the world, we could not produce such a legal code because there is simply no such thing as uninterpretable language. Now I could attempt to convince you of this by the conventional method of regaling you with myriad examples of the manipulation of legal language (e.g., an account of how the relatively straightforward language of the Commerce Clause giving Congress the power to "regulate Commerce . . . among the several States" (21) has been interpreted to permit the regulation of both farmers growing wheat for use on their own farms (22) and the nature of male-female relationships in all private businesses that employ more than fifteen persons (23)). However, I prefer to try a more direct approach. Accordingly, let me direct your attention to the quiz you completed at the beginning of this Article. Please consider your responses. If your response to question one was "True," you chose to interpret the word "no" as used in the First Amendment to mean "some." If your response to question two was "False," you chose to interpret the word "Congress" to refer to the President of the United States and the word "law" to refer to an executive order. If your response to question three was "False," you chose to interpret the words "speech" and "press" to refer to the exhibition of photographs and paintings. If your response to question four was "True," you have underscored your belief that the word "no" really means "some." If your response to question five was "False," you chose to interpret the words "speech" and "press" to refer to dancing to rock and roll music. If your response to question six was "False," you chose to interpret the word "Congress" to refer to the Internal Revenue Service and the word "law" to refer to an IRS regulation. If your response to question seven was "False," you chose to interpret the words "speech" and "press" to refer to the act of burning a flag. Unless your responses were: 1) False, 2) True, 3) True, 4) False, 5) True, 6) True, and 7) True, you chose to interpret at least one of the words "Congress," "no," "law," "speech," and "press" in what can only be described as something other than its ordinary sense. Why did you do this? Were your responses based on the "plain meaning" of the words or on certain normative beliefs you hold about the extent to which the federal government should be allowed to interfere with citizens' expressive activities? Were your responses objective and neutral or were they influenced by your "politics"? I chose this portion of the First Amendment for my example because it contains the clearest, most definite legal language of which I am aware. If a provision as clearly drafted as this may be subjected to political interpretation, what legal provision may not be? But this explains why the legal system cannot be reformed to consist of a body of definite rules yielding unique, objectively verifiable resolutions of cases. What a legal rule means is always determined by the political assumptions of the person applying it.

Tournament: Bump | Round: 5 | Opponent: Monticello Lucas Smith | Judge: Kyle Trevett

The aff’s normative claims are grounded in Western metaphysics, establishing a binary between that which represents capital-T truth and that which embodies difference, and is thus “false.” This hierarchical way of thinking is fundamentally colonialist, an assimilation of the Other that is invisible to our insistence on the Truth.

Spanos 2k
William V. Spanos (Heideggerian literary critic). “America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire.” 2000.
As its binarism suggests, the foundational privileging of Identity over difference in metaphysical thinking means operationally that it enables the inquirer to read the temporal process as a system of evanescent or always changing signatures, fragments, enigmas, shadows, phantasms, and so on. It enables him/her to address the differential dynamics of 12 The Ontological Origins of Occidental Imperialism time as a spectral subaltern surface (an adulterated or "fallen," and thus worthless, but always threatening Other) that obscures — or, rather, reveals as in a glass darkly — a prior informing luminous presence (an abiding or universal or permanent meaning) that a willed penetration will reveal. Plato, for example, in the Phaedrus, called the partial temporal body into which the soul had fallen a "polluted... walking sepulchre" that only the recollection (anamnesis) of a prior "pure" and "whole" state vaguely shadowed in this corrupt and partial body could redeem.12 However that "otherly" surface is represented, whether as shadow (as in Plato) or as signature (as in St. Augustine and the Church Fathers) or as negation (as in Hegel) or as fragment (as in modern empirical science), the metaphysical mode of inquiry assumes that the difference the inquirer encounters is not an irresolvable contradiction or contingency, but a problem that can and must be solved in the name of the truth. It assumes the Other to be a mere appearance: a recalcitrant agency of concealment and instability that must yield what it conceals to the stabilizing truth of Identity, of the One, of the End, of Presence. In short, metaphysical inquiry represents that which is Other than its truth not simply as a negative term (specter or spirit), but, as such, as that which corroborates its Identity (Spirit) and endows its Truth with power. Thus perceiving meta-ta-physika produces and validates the essential logic of the ontotheological tradition. This is, of course, the hierarchized binary logic that enables the first, "major" term — the term representing a self-present and plenary object — to demonize the second, "minor" or "subaltern," term: the term representing an entity that is not present to itself. This binary logic, in other words, empowers the privileged term to represent the Other as nonbeing (spectral), as some kind of arbitrary threat to Being — the benign total order to which the first term is committed — and thus to subdue and appropriate this Other to the latter's essential truth. It is in this sense that one can say that Western metaphysical thinking is essentially a colonialism. By this, I do not simply mean, as does much postcolonial discourse that acknowledges in some degree the polyvalency of the imperial project, a metaphor appropriated to the thought of being (or of any site on the continuum of being other than the economic or political) from another "more practical and fundamental" — "real" — domain of reference.13 In identifying Western metaphysical thought with colonialism, I am positing a literal and precise definition of the process of metaphysical inquiry. The binary logic endemic to the very idea of the West had its origins, according to Heidegger, in late antiquity with the Romans' colonization of Greek (the vestiges of pre-Socratic) thinking, with, that is, their reduction of the originative thinking of the latter to a derivative (conThe Ontological Origins of Occidental Imperialism 13 structed) understanding of truth. More specifically, the provenance of this logic lies in the imperial Romans' politically strategic translation of a-letheia to veritas, truth as always already un-concealment to truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei, the correspondence of mind and thing.14 This epochal reduction of an originative to a re-presentational mode of thinking — a thinking that places the force of being before one as a thing to be looked at — was calculatively determined by a relatively conceptualized understanding of the operations of metaphysical perception. In decisively establishing the binary opposition between the true and the false as the ground of thinking, this reduction also decisively established the ground for the eventual assimilation of an infinite relay of different but analogous oppositions into the totalized epistemic binary logic of the Western tradition. Under the aegis of the doctrine of the adaequatio, it was not only the binary opposition between Truth and falsehood that empowered the correction or appropriation or reformation or disciplining or accommodation or civilizing, which is to say, the colonization, of the "errant" or "deformed" or "wasteful" or "excessive" or "immature" (uncultivated) or "barbarous" or "feminine" force named in the second, demonized term. As the very metaphors used to characterize the "false" suggest, that opposition was simply one — no doubt the most fundamental — of a whole series of binary oppositions inhering, however asymmetrically developed, in History, in, that is, the founding Occidental representation of temporal being-as-a-whole by way of perceiving "it" meta-ta-physika: Being and time, Identity and difference, the Word and words, Being and nonbeing, Subject and object, Sanity and madness, Culture and anarchy, Civilization and barbarism, Man and woman, the White race and the colored races, the West and the east, the North and the south, and so on. What this emphatically suggests is that an oppositional criticism that would be adequate to the task of resisting imperialism must cease to think the imperial project in the disciplinary terms endemic to and mandated by the Occident's compartmentalization of being and knowledge. ?

Tournament: Voices RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lynbrook Dhruv Walia | Judge: Ryan Fink, Jordan Lamothe
Obama is pushing for a deal with Republicans on the shutdown now.
Acosta et al. 10-9
Jim Acosta, Deirdre Walsh, and Tom Cohen (CNN analysts). “Obama says he'd talk on GOP's terms -- if they raise debt ceiling, fund government.” CNN. October 9th, 2013. http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/08/politics/shutdown-showdown/index.html
Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama is ready to talk even on Republicans'…go through this stuff every three months, it seems like. And Lord knows, I'm tired of it. But at some point we've got to break these habits." 

Polcap’s key.
WSJ 10-2
"A GOP Shutdown Strategy," http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303464504579107720562837270.html
President Obama defaulted to his usual strategy Tuesday of denouncing Republicans…Pressure will build on Republicans to break ranks in the kind of unruly retreat that would demoralize their own voters. A long shutdown followed by surrender would be the worst possible result.

CV kills Obama’s polcap.
Keaney and Rogers 6 write
Emily Keaney and Ben Rogers (writers for the IPPR). “A Citizen’s Duty: Voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout.” The Institute for Public Policy Research is the UK’s leading progressive think tank and was established in 1988. May 2006. http://www.ippr.org/ecomm/files/a_citizen27s_duty.pdf
The little polling that has been done on the public’s attitude to compulsory turnout suggests that…that currently turn out in very low numbers. 

Any new policies undermine constant pressure on the GOP Obama needs to get a compromise passed. Milbank 9-27
Dana, Washington Post Opinion Writer, “Obama should pivot to Dubya’s playbook” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-obama-should-try-pivoting-to-george-bushs-playbook/2013/09/27/c72469f0-278a-11e3-ad0d-b7c8d2a594b9_story.html
If President Obama can stick to his guns, he will win his October standoff…will embolden his opponents and demoralize his supporters.

Shutdown kills NASA space probes. Moskowitz 11
Clara, Senior Writer, How Would a Government Shutdown Affect NASA?, http://www.space.com/10995-government-shutdown-budget-nasa.html
President Obama and Congress have two more weeks to pass a new budget before the U.S. government shuts down for lack of fundin… includes much of NASA, which is currently managing the space shuttle Discovery's final mission to the International Space Station. Discovery launched Feb. 24, carrying six astronauts on an 11-day voyage. The crew is not set to return to Earth until March 8. Photos of Shuttle Discovery's Final Launch

?
Robotic space probes are key to asteroid deflection. Murph 7
Darren, Associate Editor at Engadget, “Explosive data mining robots could be sent to hazardous asteroids” http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/22/explosive-data-mining-robots-could-be-sent-to-hazardous-asteroid
Sending robotic creatures into space has become somewhat of a worldwide pastime, but sending explosive robots to…and launched to its destination "relatively cheaply," and if things go as planned, we could see the first of these gizmos gettin' dirty by 2011. 

Asteroid collision is the strongest existential threat. Stone 5
Michael, JD, University of Connecticut School of Law, 2005; Bachelor of Arts, Binghamton University, BOOK NOTE: Anti-PrognosticationCatastrophe: Risk and Response. By Richard A. Posner., 59 U. Miami L. Rev. 435, lexis
Among the natural catastrophes, Posner claims that the catastrophic risk with the greatest potential… sunlight required for crops and other plant life" (p. 25).

Government shutdown kills intel gathering key to fight terror. NSA director confirms.
Klein and Soltas 10-3 writes
Ezra and Evan, Wash Post, "Wonkbook: Why the shutdown will be so hard to end, in one perfect quote," http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/03/wonkbook-why-the-shutdown-will-be-so-hard-to-end-in-one-perfect-quote/
Shutdown makes U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attacks… workforce has been temporarily sent home, creating holes in virtually every agency and department." Greg Miller in The Washington Post.

NSA surveillance is key to solve terrorism. Expert testimony confirms.
Dozier 6-18
Kimberley Dozier (Associated Press). 18 June 2013. “NSA: Surveillance Programs Foiled Some 50 Terrorist Plots Worldwide.” HuffPo. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/nsa-surveillance_n_3460106.html
The director of the National Security Agency insisted on Tuesday that the government's sweeping surveillance…noninvasive to people with no terror ties – something he hoped to discuss with the privacy and civil liberties board he'd formed. The senior administration official said the president would be meeting with the new privacy board in the coming days. 

Terrorism is the most likely existential threat

Rhodes 9
RICHARD RHODES He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, and currently he is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Rhodes is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. It was the first of four volumes he has written on the history of the nuclear age. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007), and The Twilight of the Bombs (forthcoming in autumn 2010) are the others. Reducing the nuclear threat: The argument for public safety 14 DECEMBER 2009
The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF…
that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message.

Tournament: Voices RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lynbrook Dhruv Walia | Judge: Ryan Fink, Jordan Lamothe
Obama is pushing for a deal with Republicans on the shutdown now.
Acosta et al. 10-9
Jim Acosta, Deirdre Walsh, and Tom Cohen (CNN analysts). “Obama says he'd talk on GOP's terms -- if they raise debt ceiling, fund government.” CNN. October 9th, 2013. http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/08/politics/shutdown-showdown/index.html
Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama is ready to talk even on Republicans'…go through this stuff every three months, it seems like. And Lord knows, I'm tired of it. But at some point we've got to break these habits." 

Polcap’s key.
WSJ 10-2
"A GOP Shutdown Strategy," http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303464504579107720562837270.html
President Obama defaulted to his usual strategy Tuesday of denouncing Republicans…Pressure will build on Republicans to break ranks in the kind of unruly retreat that would demoralize their own voters. A long shutdown followed by surrender would be the worst possible result.

CV kills Obama’s polcap.
Keaney and Rogers 6 write
Emily Keaney and Ben Rogers (writers for the IPPR). “A Citizen’s Duty: Voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout.” The Institute for Public Policy Research is the UK’s leading progressive think tank and was established in 1988. May 2006. http://www.ippr.org/ecomm/files/a_citizen27s_duty.pdf
The little polling that has been done on the public’s attitude to compulsory turnout suggests that…that currently turn out in very low numbers. 

Any new policies undermine constant pressure on the GOP Obama needs to get a compromise passed. Milbank 9-27
Dana, Washington Post Opinion Writer, “Obama should pivot to Dubya’s playbook” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-obama-should-try-pivoting-to-george-bushs-playbook/2013/09/27/c72469f0-278a-11e3-ad0d-b7c8d2a594b9_story.html
If President Obama can stick to his guns, he will win his October standoff…will embolden his opponents and demoralize his supporters.

Shutdown kills NASA space probes. Moskowitz 11
Clara, Senior Writer, How Would a Government Shutdown Affect NASA?, http://www.space.com/10995-government-shutdown-budget-nasa.html
President Obama and Congress have two more weeks to pass a new budget before the U.S. government shuts down for lack of fundin… includes much of NASA, which is currently managing the space shuttle Discovery's final mission to the International Space Station. Discovery launched Feb. 24, carrying six astronauts on an 11-day voyage. The crew is not set to return to Earth until March 8. Photos of Shuttle Discovery's Final Launch

?
Robotic space probes are key to asteroid deflection. Murph 7
Darren, Associate Editor at Engadget, “Explosive data mining robots could be sent to hazardous asteroids” http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/22/explosive-data-mining-robots-could-be-sent-to-hazardous-asteroid
Sending robotic creatures into space has become somewhat of a worldwide pastime, but sending explosive robots to…and launched to its destination "relatively cheaply," and if things go as planned, we could see the first of these gizmos gettin' dirty by 2011. 

Asteroid collision is the strongest existential threat. Stone 5
Michael, JD, University of Connecticut School of Law, 2005; Bachelor of Arts, Binghamton University, BOOK NOTE: Anti-PrognosticationCatastrophe: Risk and Response. By Richard A. Posner., 59 U. Miami L. Rev. 435, lexis
Among the natural catastrophes, Posner claims that the catastrophic risk with the greatest potential… sunlight required for crops and other plant life" (p. 25).

Government shutdown kills intel gathering key to fight terror. NSA director confirms.
Klein and Soltas 10-3 writes
Ezra and Evan, Wash Post, "Wonkbook: Why the shutdown will be so hard to end, in one perfect quote," http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/03/wonkbook-why-the-shutdown-will-be-so-hard-to-end-in-one-perfect-quote/
Shutdown makes U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attacks… workforce has been temporarily sent home, creating holes in virtually every agency and department." Greg Miller in The Washington Post.

NSA surveillance is key to solve terrorism. Expert testimony confirms.
Dozier 6-18
Kimberley Dozier (Associated Press). 18 June 2013. “NSA: Surveillance Programs Foiled Some 50 Terrorist Plots Worldwide.” HuffPo. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/nsa-surveillance_n_3460106.html
The director of the National Security Agency insisted on Tuesday that the government's sweeping surveillance…noninvasive to people with no terror ties – something he hoped to discuss with the privacy and civil liberties board he'd formed. The senior administration official said the president would be meeting with the new privacy board in the coming days. 

Terrorism is the most likely existential threat

Rhodes 9
RICHARD RHODES He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, and currently he is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Rhodes is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. It was the first of four volumes he has written on the history of the nuclear age. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007), and The Twilight of the Bombs (forthcoming in autumn 2010) are the others. Reducing the nuclear threat: The argument for public safety 14 DECEMBER 2009
The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF…
that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message.

Tournament: Yale | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Timothy Christian DL | Judge: Fred Ditzian, Dave McGinnis, Henry Zhang
Social death theory of slavery is wrong and outdated—attending to historical difference is crucial to moving beyond the essentializing and demeaning black pathology theory espoused by Wilderson
Brown 2009 (Vincent, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery, December)
Although the deaths of slaves could inspire such active and…academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concept’s reemergence in some im- portant new studies of slavery.

Wilderson’s conception of social death is based off of a flawed methodology which interrupts the transformative potential of the African Diaspora
BÂ 2011 – Portsmouth University (SAËR MATY, “The US Decentred: From Black Social Death to Cultural Transformation,” Cultural Studies Review, volume 17 number 2 September 2011)

A few pages into Red, White and Black, I feared that it would just be a matter of time before Wilderson’s black?as?social?death idea and multiple attacks on issues and scholars he disagrees with run (him) into (theoretical) trouble…there seems to be no way back. It is therefore hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both his sustained bashing of blacks and anti? Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a bad Hollywood film’s badly planned sequel: ‘How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle approaches with its answers in tow.’ (340) 

This logic of social death replicates the violence of the middle passage – rejection is necessary to honor the dead
Brown 2009 – professor of history and of African and African American Studies specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf)
But this was not the emphasis of Patterson’s argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his exposition of…struggles are slavery’s bequest to us. 

His assumption of ontological blackness essentializes blackness as a racial category subservient to whiteness
Welcome 2004 – completing his PhD at the sociology department of the City University of New York's Graduate Center (H. Alexander, "White Is Right": The Utilization of an Improper Ontological Perspective in Analyses of Black Experiences, Journal of African American Studies, Summer-Fall 2004, Vol. 8, No. 1 and 2, pp. 59-73)
In many of the studies of blacks, the experiences of whites, not blacks, are used as the backing for…prominence of the "white is right" perspective can be traced to attempts to create an "order," or a way of thinking. Foucault's theoretical lens supports the hypothesis that the privileging of white experiences and the use of these experiences as an ontological framework for the analyses of black experiences is an effect of power imbalances.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Randolph SS | Judge: Henry Zhang
NC Instrumental

Versace (Drake ft. Migos)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnOmj34jZiw

NR Instrumental

Bugatti (Ace Hood ft. Future and Rick Ross)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2KF2JbrQ94

Tournament: Yale | Round: 3 | Opponent: Walt Whitman DM | Judge: Abhi Elisetty
Revisionary intuitionism leads to util.

Yudkowsky 8 writes
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy…that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

Thus the standard is maximizing happiness. There are eight additional warrants.

First is doxastic freedom. 

Belief formation is not voluntary. We have no freedom over our long-term beliefs. Alston 89
William P. Alston. “The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification.” Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, 1989. http://www.ditext.com/alston/deontological.html
Let's turn now to a critical examination of the basic control…ordinary belief formed by introspection, memory, and simple uncontroversial inferences. 

Doxastic unfreedom undermines deontology and justifies util.
Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf
These problems should sound like special cases of more general…moral responsibility for the crime.18 

Second, reductionism.

Brain studies prove that there’s no such thing as personal identity.
Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence…and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the…Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Fourth, the ultimate human good is happiness. Darwish 09
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own…these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Fifth, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals…give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Sixth, util is the only moral system available to policy-makers.  Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something…allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

Eighth, there’s no act-omission distinction. Gewirth 82 writes  
Gewirth (Department of Philosophy, Univ. of Chicago) 82 Alan, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications pg 183
To be responsible for inflicting lethal harms, a person need not…attributed to persons who have informed control over other persons’ suffering the lethal harms of cancer.

Err aff on framework.
Default to util absent a clear reason to reject it. Sinnot-Armstrong 11 writes
 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, "Consequentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/consequentialism/.
Even if consequentialists can accommodate or explain away common moral…consequences alone seem to determine what is morally right or wrong, just as consequentialists claim

Thus the plan: The USFG should model Australia’s system of compulsory voting. I reserve the right to clarify.

?
Advantage 1 is Polarization

Compulsory voting solves polarization in politics. Shineman 11 writes
Victoria Shineman (Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University, PhD from NYU). “More on Mandatory Voting, Which Does *Not* Necessarily Make Electorate Less Informed.” 28 November 2011. The American Prospect. http://www.billmadden.com/activist360/2011/11/more-on-mandatory-voting-which-does-not-necessarily-make-electorate-less-informed/
The information effect also ties into the polarization…increase the participation among moderates.

Polarization kills concern for warming in politics. Guber 13 writes
Deborah Lynn Guber (University of Vermont). “A Cooling Climate for Change? Party Polarization and the Politics of Global Warming.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol. 57, No. 1. January 2013. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/1/93.full.pdf+html
The history of global warming as a political issue is at least…is key to winning policy debates (Luntz Research Companies, 2002; McCright and Dunlap, 2000). 

Ocean studies prove warming causes extinction. Sify 10 writes
Citing Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, Professor @ University of Queensland and Director of the Global Change Institute AND Citing John Bruno, Associate Professor of Marine Science @ UNC (Sify News, “Could unbridled climate changes lead to human extinction?,” June 19th, http://www.sify.com/news/could-unbridled-climate-changes-lead-to-human-extinction-news-international-kgtrOhdaahc.html
Sydney: Scientists have sounded alarm bells about how growing…upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail', he added. 

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9 writes
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one…current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

I don’t need to win that weighing values is possible. Extinction precludes all values, so it is wrong under any moral code. Seeley 86
In moral reasoning prediction of consequences is nearly always impossible. One balances the…nuclear war utterly impermissible under any sane moral code.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90 writes
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is…to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Hunter College BL | Judge: Grant Weisberg
Moral statements cannot have a truth-value because morality arises from natural selection, not a priori rational deduction. Evolutionary psychology best explains why humans develop moral intuitions. 4 warrants.  Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
There is an enormous amount of recent work…account of moral intuition is nearly as promising or exhibits the same range of virtues.

Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at objective moral truth because moral dilemmas are the result of natural processes. Hales 9 writes
Steven D. Hales (Department of Philosophy, Bloomsburg University). “Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology.” Synthese, volume 66, number 2, 2009. Pp. 431-448. http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/moralrelativism.pdf
To this point I have argued that natural selection produces two…moral truths (and concomitantly our knowledge of them) is relative to doxastic perspective; that is, it is relative to the data we use to develop our moral theory. Agent-neutral theories are true, relative to the perspective of the agent neutral intuitions about cases that are used as the foundational basis for those theories. Agent centered-theories are likewise true, mutantis mutandis. 

This creates a dilemma because any moral system not grounded in moral truths would seem to be arbitrary and give persons no reason to adhere to it. Only self-interested contractarianism escapes this dilemma; we follow moral rules because it is in our mutual self-interest to do so. Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
I shall not rehearse at length an argument that is now familiar to…this agreement is the basis of morality. 

Other moral theories fail to guide action because they do not ground ethics in norms that we would willingly follow but rather in empty moral truths.
Gauthier 7 writes
Gauthier, David. “Why Contractarisnism?”, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Ethical Theory: An Anthology, (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 620-630.
This rationale for agreed constraint…effects of interaction with other agents. 

Therefore, the standard is adhering to mutually self-interested agreements.

I contend that compulsory voting is not conducive to mutual self-interest. 

Voting isn’t conducive to rational self-interest.
Ruescas 12 writes
David Ruescas (software engineer, architect, and entrepreneur. Bachelor in Physics at Imperial College, London.) “Why vote? The so called Paradox of Voting.” June 2nd, 2012. http://davidruescas.com/2012/02/06/why-vote-the-so-called-paradox-of-voting/
Someone asked me to formalize an argument I made some time…what you could have done otherwise. 

?
Policies that aim for fairness are not in the rational self-interest of individuals and also fail the categorical imperative.
Kaplow and Shavell 4 write
Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. "Reply to Ripstein: Notes on welfarist versus deontological principles." Economics and Philosophy 20 (1):209-215 (2004.  http://philpapers.org/rec/KAPRTR

Our first theme is that pursuit of notions of fairness results in…they accordingly fail the tests of the Golden Rule and these constructs.

Tournament: Valley RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: La Jolla RP | Judge: Stephen Renzi, John Scoggin
Compulsory voting is blind to its historically conditioned approach to politics. In perpetuating the myth of democratic freedom, it locks individuals into meaningless forms of subversion.
Daly 10 writes
Daly, G. (2010) Causes for concern: Zizek's politics of loving terror. International Journal of Žižek Studies. 4(2), pp. 1-23. 1751-8229.
In Defense can be seen as a full-blooded attempt to transcend, or perhaps break out of, this impass… (acceptable) participatory critique and subversion that sustains the dynamic life of a totality. 

Democratic contestation is co-opted by the state to maintain its structural violence.
Daly 10 writes
Daly, G. (2010) Causes for concern: Zizek's politics of loving terror. International Journal of Žižek Studies. 4(2), pp. 1-23. 1751-8229.
But is this distinction so clear cut? Badiou, for example, argues convincingly that what is called the political cannot be universalized…pressing task for today’s left, and one which Žižek continues to undertake.

The all-pervasiveness of the democratic order perpetuates global violence and exclusion.
Badiou 10 writes
Alain Badiou. “The Democratic Emblem.”  English translation. 2010. http://m.friendfeed-media.com/dc12e5e2dcff77882e43dd0242a8e7b5ee25e11a
Despite all that is devaluing the word democracy day after day and in front of our eyes, there is no doubt that this word remains the dominant emblem of contemporary political society. An emblem is the "untouchable" in a symbolic system, a third rail…democracy is no more than a particular form of State. But both Ptattf and Lenin are more interested in the subjective impact of this State form than they are in its objective status. Thought must shift the focus from the legal framework to the emblem or from democracy to the democrat. The capacity of the democratic emblem to do harm lies in the subjective type it molds; and, not to mince words, the crucial traits of the democratic type are egoism and desire for petty enjoyments. 

Structural violence transcends ethics. It pervades our thought processes and leads us to exclude others and consider violence against them acceptable.
Winter and Leighton 99 write
Deborah DuNann Winter (Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology) and Dana C. Leighton (PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and justice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice) “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5
Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why…the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it.

The alternative is to de-identify ourselves with the democratic process. This is an essential starting point for alternative forms of resistance against the system.  
Daly 10 writes
Daly, G. (2010) Causes for concern: Zizek's politics of loving terror. International Journal of Žižek Studies. 4(2), pp. 1-23. 1751-8229.
It is in this context that we can make sense of Žižek’s reference to the Melville character, Bartleby, and his ‘I would prefer not to’. Thus what is being is affirmed…possibility and political choice. 15 Through subtlety, force and inspiration the modal logics themselves become subject to a radical historicity. This marks the approach to what Lacan calls the act, and to what Badiou identifies as the evental.