Tournament: Victory Briefs Tournament | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dougherty Valley SZ | Judge: Mark OKrent
JAN/FEB 2014

DISADVANTAGE- DEHUMANIZATION
A. UNIQUENESS
IN THE SQUO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ENJOY PROTECTION FROM GOV. ABUSE
The United Nations. “The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” March 2008. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf
Affirming that indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples, while recognizing the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such, Affirming also that all peoples contribute to the diversity and richness of civilization and cultures, which constitute the common heritage of humankind, Affirming further that all doctrines, policies and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals on the basis of national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences are racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust.

B. LINK
AFF LINKS BECAUSE THE ADVOCACY IMPOSES WESTERN BURDENS ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, WHICH DESTROYS CULTURAL TRADITIONS
Melanie J. Martin. “Advantages and Disadvantages of Instituting Environmental Laws.”
SF Gate. (No publish date is provided). http://homeguides.sfgate.com/advantages-disadvantages-instituting-environmental-laws-78903.html
Environmental laws that impose regulations without considering their impacts on local communities come with a serious disadvantage: lack of local support. For example, a law that commands people to stay out of a protected natural area, without recognizing that people rely on this ecosystem for their own daily needs, may not only constitute a human rights violation, but may actually backfire, says the Center for International Forestry Research. Community participation in ecosystem management helps to ensure compliance with regulations, reports CIFOR.

C. INTERNAL LINK
IMPOSING WESTERN CONSTRUCTS ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLE LEADS TO DEHUMANIZATION
Robert Stuurman. “Aboriginal Identity in Contemporary Society.” 2004. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/2081/1/2081.pdf
When a part of Aboriginal culture is fractured by Western constructs the result manifests
as social problems we see today in many of our communities. This process is enforced in the mainstream societal constructs most of us live in, the acculturation process of the dominate culture, trivializing and marginalising Aboriginal people. This dehumanising process creates feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, self doubt and the constant imposing of Western values, which are at odds with Aboriginal people and we become aliens in our own land and to ourselves. 

D. IMPACT- IS DEHUMANIZATION
DEHUMANIZATION OUTWEIGHS OTHER IMPACTS
Berube, David. Professor. English. University of South Carolina. “Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side.” 1997. http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/faculty/berube/prolong.htm
Assuming we are able to predict who or what are optimized humans, this entire resultant worldview smacks of eugenics and Nazi racial science. This would involve valuing people as means. Moreover, there would always be a superhuman more super than the current ones, humans would never be able to escape their treatment as means to an always further and distant end. This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn: "its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man... (Montagu and Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.

Tournament: Victory Briefs Tournament | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dougherty Valley SZ | Judge: Mark OKrent
JAN/FEB 2014
ECONOMICS NC

I NEGATE.
THE VALUE IS MORALITY
Bernard Gert, “The Definition of Morality,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 14, 2011 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition
Among those who use “morality” normatively, all hold that “morality” refers to a code of conduct that applies to all who can understand it and can govern their behavior by it. In the normative sense, morality should never be overridden, that is, no one should ever violate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral considerations. All of those who use “morality” normatively also hold that, under plausible specified conditions, all rational persons would endorse that code. Moral theories differ in their accounts of the essential characteristics of rational persons and in their specifications of the conditions under which all rational persons would endorse a code of conduct as a moral code. These differences result in different kinds of moral theories. Related to these differences, moral theories differ with regard to those to whom morality applies, that is, those whose behavior is subject to moral judgment. Some hold that morality applies only to those rational beings that have those features of human beings that make it rational for all of them to endorse morality, fallibility, and vulnerability. Other moral theories claim to put forward an account of morality that provides a guide to all rational beings, even if these beings do not have these human characteristics, e.g., God.

THE STANDARD IS UTILITARIANISM
THERE ARE 2 JUSTIFICATIONS
Julia Driver,  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The History of Utilitarianism, March 27, 2009
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/
Utilitarianism is one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy. Though not fully articulated until the 19th century, proto-utilitarian positions can be discerned throughout the history of ethical theory. Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one's own good. The Classical Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, identified the good with pleasure, so, like Epicurus, were hedonists about value. They also held that we ought to maximize the good, that is, bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest number’. Utilitarianism is also distinguished by impartiality and agent-neutrality. Everyone's happiness counts the same. When one maximizes the good, it is the good impartially considered.
THEN
UTILITARIANISM HAS TO BE PREFERRED- SINCE IT IS ENDS-BASED, IT PROVIDES A CLEAR-CUT WAY TO ANALYZE A CASE, AND IS THE BEST WAY TO EVALUATE IMPACTS
Albert Filice, San Jose State University Some Reasons to Favor Utilitarianism
http://www.sjsu.edu/people/albert.filice/courses/phil61/s4/Some20Reasons20to20Favor20Utilitarianism.pdf
Utilitarianism doesn’t rely on vague intuitions or abstract principles such as Kant’s theory.
Instead, you assign plus points to what will bring about happiness and minus points to what will
bring about pain. Once you implement some simple arithmetic, you can determine whether your action will produce more (or less) happiness for the affected population than the alternative actions that are available. Given the simplicity of utilitarianism, people can determine what makes people happy or which policies to promote in order to benefit society as a whole. 

SOLE CONTENTION: RESOURCE EXTRACTION MUST BE PRIORITIZED BECAUSE OF ITS ECONOMIC BENEFITS

A. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM GHANA PROVES- ECONOMIES THRIVE ON NATURAL RESOURCES
Benjamin N.A. Aryee, Minerals Commission, "Ghana's mining sector: its contribution to the national economy," Resources Policy 27 2001 61-75).
The information presented in this sub-section rep- resents the responses received from 11 gold mines and a bulk mineral–bauxite mine which operated in Ghana during the survey period 1996–98. Table 4 summarises the results of the survey. The survey showed that over the period, of the total revenue of US$1.2 billion generated by the mines, about US$290 million (23) went into making contributions of various sorts to the economy. A total of US$79 million was paid as government revenue in respect of required corporate contributions (corporate income tax, royalties, dividends, customs and excise duties). The most significant of these direct contributions was royalties of US$42 million, followed by dividends of US$19 million and also customs and excise duties of US$17 million. It is noteworthy that 10 of the royalties is recycled to the local communities through the Minerals Development Fund3 (MDF) to supplement the developmental efforts of areas in close proximity to the mines. Indirectly, US$25 million also flowed into the govern- ment chest through PAYE4 payments made by employees of the mines.

B. IT IS CLEAR THAT RESOURCES HELP ECONOMIES
Oxfam. “Lifting the Resource Curse- How poor people can and should benefit from the revenues of extractive industries.” 2009
http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp134-lifting-the-resource-curse-011209.pdf
This situation should, and can, change. For those countries that depend on extractives industries, the income generated by this sector could be transformed into an opportunity if it is used properly. According to estimates by Intermón Oxfam (see Table 3, Annex 29), countries such as Angola, Chad, Nigeria, Ecuador, and Venezuela could use hydrocarbon exports to significantly increase their public spending per capita on education and health by 2015, investing 20 per cent of estimated tax revenues in education and 16 per cent in health. Angola for example, could multiply its spending on health by a factor of between eight and ten. 

C. RESOURCE EXTRACTION PROVIDES EMPLOYMENT TO MILLIONS OF AFRICANS- CRUCIAL TO ECONOMIC WELFARE
Gavin Hilson, School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, The University of Reading, "Small-scale mining, poverty and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa: An Overview, Resources Policy 34. 2009.
In the 1990s, however, the perception of ASM (Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining) began to change. The sector’s rapid expansion, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and accounts of it providing employment to vulnerable groups, including women and children (Hilson, 2008a, 2008b; Hilson and Banchirigah, 2009), suggested that its existence was linked strongly to peoples’ hardship. This forced policymakers to think more dynamically about its existence. In Ghana, for example, as many as one million people (or in the range of five percent of country’s population) could be directly employed in the sector (Banchirigah, 2008). The employment estimates presented for a number of other countries, despite being outdated in many instances, further underscore the sector’s growing economic importance in rural sub-Saharan Africa: Tanzania, 500,000 (Fisher, 2007); Mali, 200,000 (Keita, 2001); Burkina Faso, 200,000 (Gueye, 2001); and Sierra Leone, 500,000 (Maconachie and Binns, 2007). The majority of Africa’s artisanal miners are employed at operations engaged in the extraction of gold but there are also significant ‘pockets’ of people working deposits of alluvial gemstones and diamonds in countries such as Sierra Leone, Madagascar and The Democratic Republic of Congo.

D. IMPACTS
RESOURCE EXTRACTION PLAYS A ROLE IN DECREASING POVERTY
Eleanor Fisher et al, Centre for Development Studies, Swansea University, "The ladder that sends us to wealth": Artisanal mining and poverty reduction in Tanzania," Resources Policy, 2009.
Economic policies for mineral sector development in Tanzania have historically been isolated from policies for human development and social service provision. Until the 2000s, this remained the case, but change is gradually occurring. The mineral sector is today identified as a priority area for national economic growth and poverty reduction (IDA/IMF/URT, 2005; MEM, n.d.). How this poverty reduction potential is realised is a major question facing the government. The issue of leverage from mineral sector development, to encourage growth in other sectors and to ensure that benefits are broadly shared and poverty reduction potentials realised, is a substantial challenge. This is complicated by the fact that although the mineral sector has recorded the highest level of sectoral growth since 1990, the proportion of GDP remains small (IDA/IMF/URT, 2005). In this respect, the government’s strategy for rural growth and poverty reduction remains focused on agricultural development (IDA/IMF/URT, 2005, p. 26).
AND
IF ECONOMIES COLLAPSED, NUCLEAR EXCHANGE WOULD BE INEVITABLE
Walter Russell, Mead, Senior Fellow – Council on Foreign Relations, New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer, 1992, p. 30
The failure to develop an international system to hedge against the possibility of worldwide depression- will open their eyes to their folly. Hundreds of millions-billions-of people around the world have pinned their hopes on the international market economy.  They and their leaders have embraced market principles-and drawn closer to the West-because they believe that our system can work for them.  But what if it can't?  What if the global economy stagnates, or even shrinks?  In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor.  Russia.  China.  India-these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the 1930's.

Tournament: Victory Briefs Tournament | Round: 4 | Opponent: Los Altos SD | Judge: Allie Woodhouse
JAN/FEB 2014

TOPICALITY- CONFLICT

A. Definition, from Merriam Webster. Conflict- competitive or opposing action of incompatibles:  antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons).

B. Violation The Affirmative team fails to address a situation where the developing country has an internal conflict with the extraction of resources and the wish to be environmentally friendly.
a.) This does not mean that the extraction of resources is environmentally friendly, only that the country of focus does not have any qualms about being environmentally unfriendly.
b.) The Affirmative cannot fiat a conflict in order to make their plan topical.

C. Standards

1. Resolutionality: The Affirmative plan must adhere to every part of the resolution in order to be Topical. It cannot avoid the last few words in order to explode ground on the topic skewing the round in favor of the aff. This is abusive and kills the educational value of the resolution.
   2. Predictability: Plans of the Affirmative do not have to generically predictable, but they must at the very least be predictable under the general wording of the resolution. General predictability is good for debate because it means both sides of the debate will have ground to debate on, leading to better debate over all. When the Aff can run a plan that does not cover the full scope of the resolution it kills the ground of the Negative.
   3. Reasonability: A reasonable interpretation of the resolution is the best for the overall debate of the topic. Before we debate we must agree on the general guidelines of the scope of the debate.  This topic is broad enough, and it is unreasonable to force the Negative team to have to do more research and write more cases to fit the Aff’s incorrect interpretation of the resolution.

D. Voting Issues
Drop the debater over concerns of-

1. Education: In order to have a well rounded debate we must have an accurate and clear definition of terms in order to gain education in this round. Topic Education is limited when the advocacy of the affirmative is not in line with the resolution.
   2. Fairness: Debate should at the very least be fair enough for both of the debaters to have some ground in the debate. The Aff case must as least fall in line with the wording of the resolution.

Tournament: Victory Briefs Tournament | Round: 6 | Opponent: Meadows SV | Judge: Andrew Chang
JAN/FEB 2014

TOPICALITY- COUNTRIES

A. Definition- Since this word is plural, countries means more than one country.

B. Violation- The Affirmative plan only deals with a single country instead of multiple countries as the resolution specifies. The Affirmative plan is untopical because the resolution demands that more than one country prioritize environmental protection.

C. Standards

1. Resolutionality- The resolution specifically asks us to take multiple developing countries into consideration and to say that they should opt for environmental protection. Focusing on one country with its single issue detracts from the full scope of the idea of the resolution. The underlying question being asked has a broad scope, as it asks us to take into account all developing countries. In order to fully grasp what this resolution is trying to get at then we must take into account at the very least more than one country. This is key to fariness because to be fair we need to debate about the actual topic.
   2. Bright Line- There is a clear delineation in the resolution that our cases should address more than one country.

D. Voting Issues
Drop the debater over concerns of-

1. Education: In order to have a well rounded debate we must have an accurate and clear definition of terms in order to gain education in this round. Topic Education is limited when the advocacy of the affirmative is not in line with the resolution.
   2. Fairness: Debate should at the very least be fair enough for both of the debaters to have some ground in the debate. The Aff case must as least fall in line with the wording of the resolution.