2AC – Kritik – Generic

1. Framework

2. case outweighs (link turns, util)

3. impact framing (no PQ)

4. Alt fails
5. permutation
Framework
Framework – TL
 A2 Discuss Racism
Merely identifying racism does nothing to prevent it – broad
struggles against “whiteness” or “racism” depoliticize attempts
to improve racial equality
Adolph Reed 9 , Professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the interim
national council of the Labor Party, “The limits of anti-racism”, http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html
Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be against racism, but
what does the word mean exactly?¶ The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much
more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should
call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized
as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps
that can be taken to combat them . And, no, neither “overcoming racism”
nor “rejecting whiteness ” qualifies as such a step any more than does
waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention . If organizing a
rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace,
that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and
pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation. ¶
This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights
movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically
and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against
the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The
1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific
targets,like employment discrimination in defense production . Black Power
era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities
and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific
programs of redistribution.¶ ¶ Clarity lost¶ Whether or not one considers those goals correct or
appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that “antiracism” simply is not. Sure, those earlier struggles relied on a
discourse of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is only in a period of political
demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have
become smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes
them into timeless abstractions like “the black liberation movement ”—an entity
that, like Brigadoon, sporadically appears and returns impelled by its own logic. ¶ Ironically, as the basis for a politics,
antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in
depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the
social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an
ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or
“intolerance.” (No doubt this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold War and
domestic anticommunism.) Beryl Satter’s recent book on the racialized political economy of “contract buying” in Chicago
in the 1950s and 1960s, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, is a good
illustration of how these processes worked; Robert Self’s book on Oakland since the 1930s, American Babylon, is another.
Both make abundantly clear the role of the real estate industry in creating and recreating housing segregation and
ghettoization.¶ Tasty bunny¶ All too often, “racism” is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is
characterized as an autonomous “force.” In this kind of formulation, “racism,” a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a
material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn’t be given independent life. ¶ I can appreciate such
formulations as transient political rhetoric; hyperbolic claims made in order to draw attention and
galvanize opinion against some particular injustice. But as the basis for social interpretation, and particularly
interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless. Their principal function is to
feel good and tastily righteous in the mouths of those who propound them .
People do things that reproduce patterns of racialized inequality, sometimes with self-consciously bigoted motives,
sometimes not. Properly speaking, however, “racism” itself doesn’t do anything more than the Easter Bunny does. ¶ Yes,
racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along
lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly
simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit
racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has
become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and
whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus the logic of straining to assign guilt by
association substitutes for argument.¶ My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve
said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of

course racism persists , in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are
but from the standpoint of trying to figure
characteristically lumped together under that rubric,
out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and
injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend
itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what
counts as racism.¶ Do what now?¶ And here’s a practical catch-22. In the logic of antiracism,
exposure of the racial element of an instance of wrongdoing will lead to
recognition of injustice, which in turn will lead to remedial action—though not
much attention seems ever given to how this part is supposed to work . I suspect
this is because the exposure part, which feels so righteously yet undemandingly
good, is the real focus. But this exposure convinces only those who are
already disposed to recognize.
 Plan Focus Good
Analysis of policy is particularly empowering
Shulock 99
Nancy, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY --- professor of Public Policy and Administration and director of the
Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy (IHELP) at Sacramento State University, The Paradox of Policy
Analysis: If It Is Not Used, Why Do We Produce So Much of It?, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 18,
No. 2, 226–244 (1999)

In my view, none of these radical changes is necessary. As

interesting as our politics might be
with the kinds of changes outlined by proponents of participatory and critical
policy analysis, we do not need these changes to justify our investment in
policy analysis. Policy analysis already involves discourse, introduces
ideas into politics, and affects policy outcomes. The problem is not that policymakers refuse to
understand the value of traditional policy analysis or that policy analysts have not learned to be properly interactive
with stakeholders and reflective of multiple and nontechnocratic perspectives. The problem, in my view, is only that
policy analysts, policymakers, and observers alike do not recognize policy analysis for what it is. Policy
analysis has changed, right along with the policy process, to become the provider of ideas and frames, to
help sustain the discourse that shapes citizen preferences, and to provide the appearance of rationality in an
increasingly complex political environment. Regardless of what the textbooks say, there does not need to be a client in
order for ideas from policy analysis to resonate through the policy environment.10 ¶ Certainly there is room to make
our politics more inclusive. But those critics who see policy analysis as a tool of the
power elite might be less concerned if they understood that analysts are
only adding to the debate —they are unlikely to be handing ready-made policy solutions to elite
decisionmakers for implementation. Analysts themselves might be more contented if they started appreciating the
appropriation of their ideas by the whole gamut of policy participants and stopped counting the number of times their
clients acted upon their proposed solutions. And the cynics disdainful of the purported
objectivism of analysis might relax if analysts themselves would
acknowledge that they are seeking not truth, but to elevate the level of
debate with a compelling, evidence-based presentation of their
perspectives. Whereas critics call, unrealistically in my view, for analysts to
present competing perspectives on an issue or to “design a discourse among multiple
perspectives,” I see no reason why an individual analyst must do this when
multiple perspectives are already in abundance, brought by multiple analysts. If we would acknowledge that policy
analysis does not occur under a private, contractual process whereby hired hands advise only their clients, we would
not worry that clients get only one perspective. ¶ Policy analysis is used, far more extensively
than is commonly believed. Its use could be appreciated and expanded if
policymakers, citizens, and analysts themselves began to present it more
accurately, not as a comprehensive, problem-solving, scientific enterprise, but as a contributor to
informed discourse. For years Lindblom [1965, 1968, 1979, 1986, 1990] has argued that we should
understand policy analysis for the limited tool that it is—just one of several routes to social problem solving, and an
inferior route at that. Although I have learned much from Lindblom on this odyssey from traditional to interpretive
policy analysis, my point is different. Lindblom sees analysis as having a very limited impact on policy change due to
its ill-conceived reliance on science and its deluded attempts to impose comprehensive rationality on an incremental
policy process. I, with the benefit of recent insights of Baumgartner, Jones, and others into the dynamics of policy
change, see that even with these limitations, policy analysis can have a major
impact on policy. Ideas, aided by institutions and embraced by citizens,
can reshape the policy landscape. Policy analysis can supply the ideas.
 A2 Kappeler
Kappeler’s critique crushes individual agency
Gelber 95 [Kath Gelber, Lecturer in Australian Politics and Human Rights at the University of New South Wales,
1995, “The Will To Oversimplify,” Green Left Weekly, Issue 198, August 16, Available Online at
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1995/198/198p26b.htm]
The Will to Violence presents a powerful and one-sided critique of the forces which enable violence between individuals to
occur. Violence between individuals is taken in this context to mean all forms of violence, from personal experiences of
assault to war. Kappeler's thesis is that violence in all these cases is caused in the
final instance by one overriding factor – the individual choice to commit a
violent act. Of course, in one sense that is true . Acknowledging alternative models of human
behaviour and analyses of the social causes of violence, Kappeler dismisses these as outside her subject matter and exhorts
her readers not to ignore the “agent's decision to act as he [sic] did”, but to explore “the personal decision in favour of
violence”. Having established this framework, she goes on to explore various aspects of personal decisions to commit
violence. Ensuing chapters cover topics such as love of the “other”, psychotherapy, ego-philosophy and the legitimation of
dominance. However, it is the introduction which is most interesting. Already on the third page, Kappeler is
dismissive of social or structural analyses of the multiple causes of
alienation, violence and war. She dismisses such analyses for their inability
to deal with the personal decision to commit violence . For example, “some left groups
have tried to explain men's sexual violence as the result of class oppression, while some Black theoreticians have explained
the violence of Black men as a result of racist oppression”. She continues, “The ostensible aim of these arguments may be
to draw attention to the pervasive and structural violence of classism and racism, yet they not only fail to combat such
inequality, they actively contribute to it” [my emphasis]. Kappeler goes on to argue that, “although such oppression is a
very real part of an agent's life context, these `explanations' ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the same
oppression uses violence”, i.e. the perpetrator has decided to violate. Kappeler's aim of course was to establish a
framework for her particular project: a focus on the individual and the psychological to “find” a cause for violence.
However, her rejection of alternative analyses not only as of little use, but as
actively contributing to the problem, frames her own thesis extremely
narrowly. Her argument suffers from both her inability, or unwillingness, to
discuss the bigger picture and a wilful distortion of what she sees as her
opponents' views. The result is less than satisfactory. Kappeler's book reads
more as a passionate plea than a coherent argument. Her overwhelming
focus on the individual, rather than providing a means with which to combat
violence, in the end leaves the reader feeling disempowered . After all, there
must be huge numbers of screwed up and vengeful people in the world to
have chosen to litter history with war, environmental destruction and rape .
Where do we go from here? Those lucky enough to have read Kappeler's
book are supposed to “decide not to use violence ourselves”. A worthy
endeavour, but hardly sufficient to change the world.
STATE BAD ANSWERS
 A2 Military Bad
Even if the military is bad – only engaging it from within can
change policy
Lorelei Kelly 10, national security expert and Director of the New Strategic Security Initiative and the Afghanistan
Congressional Communications Hub, former Senior Associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, holds a B.A. from Grinnell
College and an M.A. from Stanford University and the Air Command and Staff College of the U.S. Air Force, “Afghanistan:
Should We Stay or Should We Go?,” Foreign Policy In Focus, April 14th, Available Online at
http://www.fpif.org/articles/afghanistan_should_we_stay_or_should_we_go, Accessed 09-09-2010
What I'm saying is that if you have a message that always makes the military a malign
actor, I think that you are not going to get inside the room on the policy
debate. Not when most of the money, most of the personnel, and most of the creative
initiatives have come out of the Pentagon. Those things not coming out of the State Department,
which doesn't have the capacity. They're trying, but will they really be part of a huge transformation of our own
government to create a different posture in the world? I don't know. I don't disagree that having some sort of
[outside] mobilization is important. But what I have seen in the last 20 years is that the sort of
mobilize-and-punish relationship with your elected leaders doesn't work.
We spend all our time and effort there, and we're not in the room making the
deals. I can't tell you how good the conservative[s are] at being in the room.
They shape the environment; they're there first. I fear that if progressives aren't gently
and lovingly making the case that the military is not the vehicle to carry out
the policies that are going to make us more prosperous and secure in the
future, we are going to be a country where the only functioning , healthy
institution is the military.
 Ferguson
The state can be repurposed
Ferguson 11, James, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, “The Uses of Neoliberalism”, Antipode, Vol. 41,
No. S1, pp 166–184
If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political struggle— not
only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it—then there is much to be
said for focusing, as I have here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and
politics, even if doing so inevitably puts us on the compromised and
reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high ground of
revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also insist that there is more at stake
in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the

miseries of the chronically poor, or a technically superior method for

relieving the suffering of famine victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its
implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries that would bring the whole
proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the “informal”,
help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic
income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor,¶ in a context where many of the
poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding
the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the
technocrats’ dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit
pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine,
and lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming).¶ My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow
policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that
governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to
they illustrate a process through which specific

may be in the process of being peeled away

associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”)

from that agenda, and put to very different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to
at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of considerable interest.¶ As Steven
Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic
“neoliberal” political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific “neoliberal” techniques, on the other. Close attention
to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case,
fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic “is much more polymorphous and
unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work”, and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact “deployed in relation to diverse political
projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare
social technologies need not have any essential or eternal loyalty to the
states,

political formations within which they were first developed. Insurance rationality at the end of
the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial
Specific ways of solving or posing
measure) because it was available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use.

governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms,

can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social
ends . With social, as with any other sort of technology, it is not the
machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do. Foucault
(2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet another search
through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within
socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked
up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le v́i- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally
intended for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such
If we
tinkering, keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve.

can go beyond seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of
specific governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed,
and put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually

associated with that word. If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first
appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.
 Struggles Contingent [Zanotti]
The aff is a contingent demand on the state that seeks to reform
it from within. Totalizing demonizations of power and
government ignore complexities and uncertainties within power
– exploiting these uncertainties from within challenges power
and is more effective than simple rejection
Laura Zanotti 13, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the University of
Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-
thinking Political Agency in the Global World”, originally published online 30 December, Sage
Unlike positions that adopt governmentality as a descriptive tool and end up embracing the liberal substantialist ontological assumptions and epistemological framework they criticize, positions that embrace an intra-agential (or relational)

nothing ‘‘is’’ but everything is made within specific practices.

ontology, maintain that Governmentality as

a program that explores ‘‘the present as multiply constituted

research , polytemporal . . . and recombinatory . . .

and not just the expression of a singular logic has an important or the resultant of a linear process’’61

role to play as a methodology of inquiry that brings to the foreground the

techniques through which power is practically enacted, and the the ambiguity embedded in its practices,

various tactics for unsettling it that become possible in the context of

multifarious political encounters. Because political power scripts do not stand as substances that preexist the practices of their making and the specific relations that
construct them, the application of a relational ontology and of an archival methodology opens the way for nonidealist, engrained in praxis, analyses of politics and conceptualizations of political agency. In this framework, the space for politics is
rooted on ambiguity and performativity, that is on the making and remaking of meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of agonic relations. What Does This All Matter for Political Agency? I will now turn to elaborating more
specifically on the relevance of scholarly positions that, while not necessarily relying mainly on governmentality as a research program, have imagined both power and subjects in non-substantialist ways and embraced situatedness and ambiguity
as the very constitutive space for politics for conceiving political agency beyond liberal straightjackets. For Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, far from being issues to be resolved or feared in the name of a sovereign universal truth and the
definition of what one’s identity is, ambiguity and uncertainty are indeed political resources to be deployed in sites of struggles where the ‘‘differences between inside and outside are uncertain.’’62 Here political action is not predicated on
asserting ‘‘the life and freedom or some sovereign identity, some community of truth that is victimized and repressed by power.’’63 Instead, resistance is very much about questioning practices of power that attempt ‘‘to impose and fix ways of
knowing and doing that shall be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous being.’’64 For Ashley and Walker, in other words, political action is about questioning assumptions about the unity of identity, the mighty homogeneity of
power, and the stability of categories of thought. Downplaying ambiguity is indeed itself a technique of power. In taking issue with ‘‘descriptive’’ governmentality theories, Jacqueline Best argued representing social events as totally calculable is
itself a governmental strategy, part of government’s very attempts to depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what ‘‘exceeds efforts to govern through risk.’’66 Therefore, one should not be seduced by
contemporary governmental strategies’ own promise of infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the foreground the limits of knowledge and should be included in current analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory
of power, rooted in the nontransparency of language that always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation even in the presence of governmental strategies of regulation. Indeed, pace liberal
institutionalism that looks at norms as ‘‘entities’’ and explanatory variables for institutional behavior, regulations are only a shell and norms are always in context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces within which they are
interpreted. Postcolonial literature has also offered interesting insights of how political agency may be exerted in the face of power’s self representation as a powerful and mighty script. Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial power’s self-
representation as ‘‘unity’’ is a colonial strategy of domination and explored the subversive potential of the mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha, The display of hybridity—its peculiar ‘‘replication’’—terrorizes authority with the
ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its
reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a range of justificatory Western ‘‘civil’’
discourses. 68 Bhabha sees subjection and resistance as intimately related. Political agency is a process of hybridization through transformation of meaning. Thus, ‘‘Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two
different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter
upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.’’69 Political agency is not portrayed as the free subjects’ total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage of power. While (the colonizer’s) power
attempts to reproduce its script by creating the ‘‘mimic men,’’ that is, the ‘‘docile colonial subjects who are ‘almost the same, but not quite’,’’70 it also creates an ambivalence, a contradiction between ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘not quite’’ that can be
appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is easily camouflaged as mockery, with the colonial subject consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the master’s lessons. Instead of producing a controlled imitation or a managed response

Agency is exerted through moves that

from the native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look, a distorted and disturbing echo.71

are imbricated with discourses of power but also recognize and question
them In this way, universal claims are unsettled and power’s purported
.

unity menaced. Bhabha sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that ‘‘overcoming domination, far from getting rid of it, often occasions its mere reversal.’’72
Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that ‘‘the agent must play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the hegemon, despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires the subaltern.’’73 Purity of identity may not ever have been a possibility, even less
when the very ideas of what accounts for identity and alterity are being rapidly reworked. In relying on Foucault’s understanding of power and on feminist elaborations of Identity,74 Roland Bleiker has embraced a non- substantialist standpoint
and the acceptance of ambiguity as central for conceptualizing human agency and for exploring its actual transformative possibilities. Bleiker questions positions that see agency as a reflection of externally imposed circumstances as well as
traditions that ‘‘bestow the human subject . . . with a relatively large sense of autonomy.’’75 Assumptions of fundamental autonomy (or ‘‘freedom’’) would ‘‘freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’76 As Bleiker puts
it: ‘‘A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one-sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human agency. There is no essence to human agency, no core that can be
brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’77 For Bleiker,

universals are indeed tainted with an imperial flavor This includes the .

imperialism of ideas of identity based on liberty and freedom (rather than imbrication, situatedness, and

as the ontological horizon for understanding human nature and

relationality)

assessing political agency. Non-substantialist positions do not assume the existence of monolithic power scripts or ontologically autonomous subjects; do not establish linear links between
intentions and outcomes, and do not assume that every form of agency needs an identifiable agent. Instead, they call for careful attention to contexts. In this disposition, Bleiker advocates a modest conceptualization of agency, one that relies
upon Michel de Certeau’s operational schemes, Judith Butler’s contingent foundations, or Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomes.78 In a similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has highlighted the problematic aspects of assessing political
agency based upon actors’ intention and focused on contexts as the yardstick for assessing political actions.79 For Steele, ‘‘as actors practice their agency within the space of a public sphere, intentionality—at best—becomes dynamic as new spaces
in that sphere open up. Intentions, even if they are genuine, become largely irrelevant in such a dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm of human interaction.’’80 In shifting attention from ‘‘intention’’ to the context that made some actions possible,

Steele sees agency as a ‘‘redescription’’ of existing conditions, rather than the

total ‘‘rejection’’ of or ‘‘opposition’’ to a totalizing ‘‘script.’’ As a consequence, Steele advocates ‘‘pragmatist humility’’ for
politicians and scholars as well.81 In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifarious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized
engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of power aimed at the construction of new openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which are

is not imagined as a quest for individual authenticity in

always to an extent unpredictable. Political agency here

opposition to a unitary oppressive Leviathan nefarious aimed at the creation of a ‘‘better totality’’ where subjects can float freed of ‘‘oppression,’’ or
a multitude made into a unified ‘‘subject’’ will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with freedom non-substantialist positions open

‘‘pragmatist humility,’’ that is the

the way for conceptualizing political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called for is

patience of playing with the cards that are dealt to us enacting ,

redescriptions and devising tactics for tinkering with what exists in 82

specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist ontologies that

see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay processes of coconstitution and the importance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically
limit the possibility for imagining political agency outside the liberal straightjacket. They represent international liberal biopolitical and governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress ‘‘subjects,’’
 The complexity of
that are in turn imagined as free ‘‘by nature.’’ Transformations of power modalities through multifarious tactics of hybridization and redescriptions are not considered as options.

politics is reduced to homogenizing narratives and political and/or romanticizing

engagements are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary

moments . By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent

Options for resistance to government scripts are not

processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. al

limited to ‘‘rejection, It is found instead

’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order.

in contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of

multifarious and

government rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them.
al

This approach questions oversimplifications of complex political the ities of liberal

rationalities and nurtures skepticism about identifying

and of their interactions with non-liberal political players a radical

universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems.

power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces
International and within these spaces it is

Government as a heuristic
appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. invites ality focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It

careful differentiations rather than overarching demonization

historically situated explorations and s

of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist

and
terms focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of

foster an ethic of political engagement

oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also taken s , to be continuously up

through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention

to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be. Such ethics of ’’83

engagement would not await the revolution Instead, it to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained.

would constantly attempt to twist power by playing with whatever are the working of cards

available and require intense processes of reflexivity on the

would

consequences of political choices . To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which

is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
 Role-playing [Williams]
I’ll impact turn their state bad args – state engagement
allows revolutionaries to learn the techniques of state
oppression and infiltrate the oppressor from within
Williams 70 [1970, Robert F. Williams, interviewed by The Black Scholar, “Interviews,”, Vol. 1, No. 7, BLACK
REVOLUTION (May 1970), pp. 2-14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41163455]
Williams: It is erroneous to think that one can isolate oneself completely from
institutions of a social and political system that exercises power over the
environment in which he resides. Self-imposed and premature isolation, initiated by the
oppressed against the organs of a tyrannical establishment, militates against
revolutionary movements dedicated to radical change. It is a grave error for
militant and just-minded youth to reject struggle-serving opportunities to join the man's
government services, police forces, peace corps and vital organs of the power
structure. Militants should become acquainted with the methods of the
oppressor. Meaningful change can be more thoroughly effectuated by militant
pressure from within as well as without. We can obtain valuable know-how
from the oppressor. Struggle is not all violence. Effective struggle requires tactics,
plans, analysis and a highly sophisticated application of mental aptness. The forces of oppression and
tyranny have perfected a highly articulate system of infiltration for undermining and
frustrating the efforts of the oppressed in trying to upset the unjust status quo. To a
great extent, the power structure keeps itself informed as to the revolutionary
activity of freedom fighters. With the threat of extermination looming menacingly before black
Americans, it is pressingly imperative that our people enter the vital organs of the
establishment. Infiltrate the man's institutions.
 Crenshaw
Efforts at change can and must use dominant ideology by
exposing its internal contradictions to create change
Kimberle Crenshaw 88, Law @ UCLA, “RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION
AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW”, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331, lexis
One wonders, however, whether a demand for shelter that does not employ rights rhetoric is likely to succeed in America
today. The underlying problem, especially for African-Americans, is the
question of how to extract from others that which others are not
predisposed to give. As Tushnet has said himself, rights are a way of saying that a society is what it is, or that it
ought to live up to its deepest commitments. 135 This is essentially what all groups of dispossessed people say when they
use rights rhetoric. As demonstrated in the civil rights movement, engaging in rights rhetoric can be an
attempt to turn society's "institutional logic" '136 against itself - to redeem some of the
rhetorical promises and the self-congratulations that seem to thrive in American political discourse. ¶ NOTE 136
BEGINS… ¶ 136 Cf. F. PIVEN & R. CLOWARD, POOR PEOPLE'S MOVEMENTS 22-23 (I977) (noting that " the
opportunities for defiance are structured by features of institutional life ").
NOTE 136 ENDS. ¶ Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of
limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling,
even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems
to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate.
Furthermore, trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences
of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine
the wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal
protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize
law because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has
made law receptive to certain demands in this area. The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation
leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse
itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their focus on
delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more
productive strategy for change, one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such
strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights movement,
popular struggles are a reflection of institutional ly determined logic and a
challenge to that logic . 137¶ FOOTNOTE 137 BEGINS… ¶ 137 See id. at 22-25. The observation
concerning the inability to bring about change in some non-legitimating fashion does not, of course, rule out the
possibility of armed revolution. For most oppressed peoples, however, the costs of such a
revolt are often too great. That is, the oppressed cannot realistically hope to
overcome the "coercive" components of hegemony . More importantly, it is not clear
that such a struggle, although superficially a clear radical challenge to the coercive force of the status quo,
would be a lesser reinforcement of the ideology of America n society (i.e., the
consensual components of hegemony). ¶ FOOTNOTE 137 Ends.¶ People can only
demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions that they are
challenging. 138 Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic --
that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be
ineffective. 139¶ FOOTNOTE 139 BEGINS… ¶ 139 Reforms necessarily come from an
existing repertoire of options. As Piven and Cloward note, "if impoverished southern blacks had
demanded land reform, they would probably have still gotten the vote." Id. at 33. ¶ FOOTNOTE 139 ENDS. ¶ The
possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of
legitimation, which is triggered by crisis. Powerless people can sometimes
trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by using
its own logic against it. 140 Such crisis occurs when powerless people force
open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their
reality. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment --
an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political
consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent
contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to
the civil rights movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims
that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology.
Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions --
the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial
subordination. Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American
citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors proceeded
as if American citizenship were real , and demanded to exercise the
“rights” that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect
American mythology, Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically
inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights. Although it
is the need to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the
dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for
change is both created and limited by legitimation. The central issue that the Critics fail to address, then, is
how to avoid the "legitimating" effects of reform if engaging in reformist
discourse is the only effective way to challenge the legitimacy of the social
order . Perhaps the only situation in which powerless people may receive any favorable response is where there is a
political or ideological need to restore an image of fairness that has somehow been tarnished. Most efforts to
change an oppressive situation are bound to adopt the dominant discourse
to some degree .142 ¶ FOOTNOTE 142 BEGINS… 142 This engagement is apparently
required of successful efforts at change . See F. PIVEN & R. CLOWARD, supra note 136, at I-32. ¶
FOOTNOTE 142 ENDS.
 Judge Choice
Just one of our representations is sufficient to vote aff---still proves
the plan’s a good idea---that’s key to plan focus which is the nexus of
debate and key to education
Util/Case OW
 War
African conflict is structural violence – it’s frequent, kills
thousands, and destroys communities and institutions that
promote well-being
 Greater Horn
Must engage with concrete realities in the context of the Greater
Horn – anything else fails responsibility to the suffering
Costantinos 15 [Costantinos Berhutesfa, PhD, Professor of Public Policy, School of Graduate Studies, College
of Business & Economics, AAU) State building: Greater Horn & Great Lakes of Africa
Lecture and Think Piece – No. CXII – MMXV,
Institute for Advanced Research, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, African Union Headquarters, Addis Ababa] AT
The tragedy, which took such a heavy toll on life over the past years, has highlighted
the fundamental weakness of the peace, security, and development
strategies. Many conventional and preconceived notions have been questioned and new ideas proposed. Efforts
have also been made to improve one‘s understanding of vulnerabilities, to
estimate the risks resulting there from more accurately and to make
adequate preventive measures against insecurity, ahead of time. In this sense, the
traditional role of humanitarian agencies and development organizations has been tested harshly, even cruelly tested.
The need for collective learning about responses, and the responsibility to
those whose suffering provided the basis for that learning will never be
more urgent than it is now. Unfortunately, such lessons, which may be learned through the shocks
administered by an uncompromising reality, are rarely translated quickly into personal or organizational memories and
the inherent will to change. The reasons for this are sometimes rooted in human inertia, weakness, and self-interest and
often the products of genuine confusion about how to act effectively in an environment that seems to grow more complex
(Costantinos, 1997).. To every human problem in Africa, there is always a solution that is smart, simple, and immoral.
States tend to have a linear way of thinking, inadequate to unravel the complex inter-relationships underlying people‘s
insecurity. It is neither popular nor scientific. The need for the fundamental change on how the global community deals
with the internecine crises and human insecurity must change. In response to this dilemma, nations must be
encouraged to take, within the premises of Human Security Framework, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
and the Right to Assistance (R2A) appropriate action for promoting and man- aging an
enabling environment for human development, mainstreaming peace,
security, and a developmental response in the drive for popular
participation. Such is a process within which people, acting as citizens of a
political society, can reinforce their ownership of security and livelihood
continuity. (Costantinos, 1996 & 1996b), The fact is that supporters of state-building often do not efficiently realize
the potential of the ideas and goals they promote. The volume of their interventions is not nearly proportional to their
impact raises the issue of whether the ideas in question may be fundamentally constrained at the moment of their
conception by the very institutions and technocratic structures that ground their articulation. The supply of ideas may be
artifi- cially deflated by particular mechanisms used by incumbents to manage entire reform processes. Conceptual
possibilities may be left unrealized, or sub-optimally realized, insofar as
governing elite are preoccupied with filling out those spaces of uncertainty
in political thought, discourse and action that alternative parties would Draft occupy in the course of their own
engagement, thus allowing free expression of diverse ideas and beliefs and permitting unrestricted taking of positions by
citizens on issues (Ibid). There is more to elections than the constitutional provision and electoral laws and codes.
Primarily, the mode of elections in Africa is poised to obtain a nominal legality. To adversaries, it is a mode of resistance to
hegemonic oppression, only to replace it with their own. Others resist it and the form it embodies and represents. For this
lat- ter group, the election is, more than anything else, a gesture of negating the status quo, it is a talking back to pow- er,
an utterance of societal pain long suppressed and contained. It is a way of sustaining expression of grief, yet an- other
reminder that all is not well. For the protagonists, especially for the ruling incumbents, election is merely war by other
means, a mode of entrenching its power by eliminating opponents through the machinery of election that has little to do
with the desired transformation of the state-society relations (Ararssa, 2015:1). It has to do with creating conditions for
the existence of the broadest possible range of opinions and sentiments, which brings up the questions: Are all ideas and
values allowed to contend? Are there laws or unwritten “codes” which prevent or hinder intellectual and cultural freedom?
Do perspectives of opposition groups have significant and legitimate place in state-building processes? Is good faith
criticism of a particular governing stratum construed by the ruling stratum in question as negation of its idea as such?
(Costantinos, 1996) Questions such as these are important in examining and assessing the ideological basis for state-
building. However, as important as it is, this is only one context, level, or analysis of the breadth and depth of the pro- cess
on the terrain of ideology. There is another level of analysis, concerned with the extent
and na- ture of openness of distinct ideological constructs to one another,
with modes of articulation of giv- en sets of ideas and values and of
representations of specific issues relative to others. The concern here is not so much the
number and diversity of ideas, values and opinions allowed to gain currency during the discourse, as opposed to the
modes of their competitive and cooperative articulation. Hence, the focus is on the strength, weaknesses and opportunities
of state-building initiatives di- rected at institutional transformation, responsive organizational structure, proactive
leadership, favourable percep- tion by the public, clear legal mandate, efficient and effective utilization of resource and
capable of measuring re- sults. Thus, state-building here entails conceptualization in
global categories that are invested with varying local meanings that are
themselves in part actualization of trends in political (and development) thought.
Openness, transparency and complexity will depend on the extent to which and how global and local levels or dimensions
are articulated with each other. This means that the attempt to subsume this by some particular political agenda or
ideological intention must, therefore, limit rather than enhance openness the process. If what explicit general forms
signify is no particular strategy but the very process of itself, then any particular agenda or intention must, to the extent it
is democratic, allow general forms to work themselves out through it. Conversely, strategies must take on generic
elements, dimensions and functions of state-building process (Ibid:239), In order to have significant
constitutive or regulative effects on the plenitude of particular repre-
sentations, the process must be allowed to attain coherence and integrity
even as it comes into play in varied contexts of activity. While it may be tied to the
initiatives of the leadership in its emergence and development, it nonetheless gains currency as a relatively autonomous
system that other, com- peting; organizations can also participate in and operate. As a set of distinctly general categories
and mecha- nisms of state-building thought, discourse and practice, the process takes the diversity of particular ideas and
activities into itself and makes them a vital part of its conceptual and institutional economy. It mediates and channels
specific actors by means of an objectification and generalization that works on and through them (Ibid). Whether
democracy in Burundi, CAR, DRC, Eritrea, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan
is defined in terms of individual freedom or collective rights, government
policy or citizen action, private value or public norm, the upshot of the
relative inattention to problems of articulation of open state-building
systems and processes inherently makes state-building at once the most
concrete of idea systems. Within current projects of political reform,
democracy is either conventionalised or sterilized on terrain of theory and often
vacuously formalized on the ground of practice. It enters African politics
and society in relatively abstract and plain form, yet is expected to land itself to
immediate and vital African polity‟s socio-political experience. It suggests
itself, seems within reach only to elude, and appears readily practicable only to resist realization.
 Woller
Util is the only governmental ethic—tradeoffs
Woller 97 [Woller, Gary BYU Prof., “An Overview by Gary Woller”, A Forum on the Role of Environmental
Ethics, June 1997, pg. 10]
Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's
gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the
public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by
invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as
environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably
entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to
the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and
losers, the policymakers' duty to the public interest requires them to
demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are
somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems
have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only
general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies,
and at worst, they create
a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while
failing to adequately address the problem[.] or actually making it worse. For example, a moral
obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as
there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any
number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That
deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that
most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian
manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy
and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental
preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse
outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins
and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome.
The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public
policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the
consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a
specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It
therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a
plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they
address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing
problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and
moral piety are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy
 ---1AR
Prefer our account of morality – it’s the only one applicable by
governments, which have to make decisions justifiable to the
public
RHONHEIMER 5 [Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.
“THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC
REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp.
1-70]
It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy
is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and
belongs to ethics, which
aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the
concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and
action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical
contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political
philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be
trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic).
Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political
philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding
knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the
necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action.
Moreover, unlike moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person
—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of thepolitical is characterized by acts like
framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions
but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state
power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both
actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 15
Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while
others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the
“political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving
after the same good [despotism] and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is
over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the
exercised
common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such
political rule, therefore, needs
justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but
who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
 Equality
Util is a prerequisite for equality
Rakowski 93 Eric Rakowski [Taking and Saving Lives Author(s): Eric Rakowski
Source: Columbia Law Review, Vol. 93, No. 5, (Jun., 1993), pp. 1063-1156 Published by:
Columbia Law Review Association, Inc. Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1122960]
individuals' status as moral equals
On one side, it presses toward the consequentialist view that
requires that the number of people kept alive be maximized. Only in this
way, the thought runs, can we give due weight to the fundamental equality of
persons; to allow more deaths when we can ensure fewer is to treat some
people as less valuable than others. Further, killing some to save others, or
letting some die for that purpose, does not entail that those who are killed or left to their
fate are being used merely as means to the well-being of others, as would be
true if they were slain or left to drown merely to please people who would
live anyway. They do, of course, in some cases serve as means. But they do not act merely
as means. Those who die are no less ends than those who live. It is because
they are also no more ends than others whose lives are in the balance that
an impartial decision-maker must choose to save the more numerous group,
even if she must kill to do so.
 Tannsjo
Prioritize existence because value is subjective and could
improve in the future
Torbjörn Tännsjö 11 , the Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011,
“Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing,” online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf
I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living,
then according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an
end to humanity. But this does not mean that, each of us should commit
suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism should be
applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people
rarely commit suicide. Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as
evidence for the claim that people live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may
avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself. It is also a possibility that, even
if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if some may
believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future
lives will be better. They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future.¶ From
the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age
to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary
people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from psychology, should warn us that we
may come to believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My strong belief is that most of us live
lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living.
But then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too
optimistic.¶ Let us just for the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not
worth living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we should all kill ourselves.
As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should do, each one of
us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill
myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ... suicide
“survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the
belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability
to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of
vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates
many popular perceptions of suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning , if they do,
does not mean that others will follow my example. They will go on with their lives and their
false expectations — at least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake, to
go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in my
life).
 Bostrom Uncertainty
Ethical uncertainty means we should prevent existential risk to
ensure the future has value regardless of true moral theory.
Bostrom 11 [Nick Bostrom. “Existential Risk Prevention As the Most Important Task for Humanity”, 2011,
Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford]
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at
Our
existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶
present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know
— at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be
able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about
our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and
ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future
accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers
and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the
probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any
existential catastrophe.
 Bostrom Math
Reducing existential risk by even a tiny amount outweighs
Nick Bostrom 11, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director of the Future of
Humanity Institute, and Director of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford,
recipient of the 2009 Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement, holds a Ph.D. in
Philosophy from the London School of Economics, 2011 (“The Concept of Existential Risk,” Draft of a Paper published on
ExistentialRisk.com, Available Online at http://www.existentialrisk.com/concept.html, Accessed 07-04-2011)
Holding probability constant, risks become more serious as we move toward the upper-right region of figure 2. For any
fixed probability, existential risks are thus more serious than other risk categories.
But just how much more serious might not be intuitively obvious. One might think we could get a grip on how bad an
existential catastrophe would be by considering some of the worst historical disasters we can think of—such as the two
world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic, or the Holocaust—and then imagining something just a bit worse. Yet if we look at
global population statistics over time, we find that these horrible events of the past century fail to register (figure 3).
[Graphic Omitted] Figure 3: World population over the last century. Calamities such as the Spanish flu pandemic, the two
world wars, and the Holocaust scarcely register. (If one stares hard at the graph, one can perhaps just barely make out a
slight temporary reduction in the rate of growth of the world population during these events.) But even this reflection fails
to bring out the seriousness of existential risk. What makes existential catastrophes especially bad is not
that they would show up robustly on a plot like the one in figure 3, causing a precipitous drop in world population or
average quality of life. Instead, their significance lies primarily in the fact that they would
destroy the future. The philosopher Derek Parfit made a similar point with the following thought experiment: I
believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think.
Compare three outcomes: (1) Peace. (2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing
population. (3) A nuclear war that kills 100%. (2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than
(2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I
believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater. … The Earth will remain habitable
for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not
destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the
whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this
tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only
a fraction of a second. (10: 453-454) To calculate the loss associated with an existential catastrophe, we must consider how
much value would come to exist in its absence. It turns out that the ultimate potential for Earth-
originating intelligent life is literally astronomical. One gets a large number
even if one confines one’s consideration to the potential for biological human beings
living on Earth. If we suppose with Parfit that our planet will remain habitable for at least
another billion years, and we assume that at least one billion people could live on it sustainably, then the potential
exist for at least 1018 human lives. These lives could also be considerably better than
the average contemporary human life, which is so often marred by disease, poverty, injustice, and various biological
limitations that could be partly overcome through continuing technological and moral progress. However, the relevant
figure is not how many people could live on Earth but how many descendants we could have in total. One lower bound of
the number of biological human life-years in the future accessible universe (based on current cosmological estimates) is
1034 years.[10] Another estimate, which assumes that future minds will be mainly implemented in computational
hardware instead of biological neuronal wetware, produces a lower bound of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective life-
years (or 1071 basic computational operations).(4)[11] If we make the less conservative assumption that future
civilizations could eventually press close to the absolute bounds of known physics (using some as yet unimagined
technology), we get radically higher estimates of the amount of computation and memory storage that is achievable and
thus of the number of years of subjective experience that could be realized.[12] Even if we use the most
conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and
software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater
than the value of 1018 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing
existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least ten
times the value of a billion human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 1054
human-brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 1052 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly.
Even if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically
a mere 1% chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of
mature civilization
reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one
percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion
human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential
risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any
“ordinary” good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the
indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost
certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.[13]
 Suffering is Bad
Phenomenal introspection means you prioritize the suffering of
humans
Neil Sinhababu 8 [“The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism.” Assistant Professor at Department of Philosophy
in National University of Singapore. PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2008. http://philpapers.org/profile/259] AJ
We can form a variety of beliefs on the basis of phenomenal introspection . For
example, we can judge that we are having sound experiences of particular noises and visual experiences of different shades
of color. as we look upon a lemon and consider the phenomenal states that are yellow
experiences, we can make some judgments about their intrinsic features. We can judge,
for example, that they are bright experiences. And as we consider our experiences
of pleasure, we can make some judgments about their intrinsic features. We can judge that they
are good experiences. Just as one can look inward at one's yellow experiences and appreciate their brightness,
one can look inward at one's pleasure and appreciate its goodness. xx When I consider a situation of
increasing pleasure, and ask myself whether things are now better than they
were before, it seems to me that they clearly are, just as things are brighter as
black is replaced by yellow in my visual field. And when I have a sudden experience of intense
pain, it seems to me that things are much worse than they were before. What we discover through introspection is that
pleasure is the sort of thing that makes a positive contribution to the goodness of a state of affairs, just as pain detracts
from this sort of goodness. We cannot discover, just by introspecting on a pleasant experience, that we are in a total state
of affairs that is better overall, because there are many other things going on in the world outside our phenomenology that
may also contribute to the goodness of the total state of affairs we are in. If someone starts to undergo torture just as I
start to eat some delicious food, the badness of the torture will exceed the goodness of the eating. But what I can
discover through phenomenal introspection on my pleasure is that things
are pro tanto better as there is 22 more pleasure. Similarly, I can discover through phenomenal
introspection that things are pro tanto [and] worse as there is more pain. Philosophers have
advanced a variety of different views of pleasure, and one might ask which of these I intend to pick out by my use of the
word. Here it is useful to look at what the argument, as it has been developed so far, would support. If phenomenal
introspection is reliable, and we are therefore justified in accepting its claims when it tells us that some element of our
subjective experience is good, the natural referent of “pleasure” for the purposes of this argument would be the
good feeling that at times is part of our subjective experience. There are many different kinds of
pleasant experiences. There are sensory pleasures, like the pleasure of tasting delicious food, receiving a massage, or
resting your tired limbs in a soft bed after a hard day. There are the pleasures that arise when we see that our desires are
satisfied, like the pleasure of winning a game, getting a promotion, or seeing a friend succeed. There are many ways in
which all these experiences differ, just as the experiences we have when looking at
lemons, oranges, and the sky on a sunny day differ. But it seems to me that just as
our experiences in looking at [those things] lemons, oranges, and the sky on a sunny day have
brightness in common, these experiences have a certain good feeling in
common. As this analogy with brightness suggests, the notion of pleasure being invoked here is a
very thin one that picks out nothing more than a sort of felt goodness. One of the natural ways of
using “pleasure” is as a term for this kind of felt goodness.
 1AR—Body Count/A2 Exclusionary
They critique how util is used, not the logic of util itself – the
logic is sound which means you should use it, but not discount
impacts to ___. Prioritizing their impacts commits the same
error they critique by framing only some impacts as mattering –
a body count is the only objective metric that escapes biases.
That body count goes aff
Nick Bostrom 11, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director of the Future of
Humanity Institute, and Director of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford,
recipient of the 2009 Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement, holds a Ph.D. in
Philosophy from the London School of Economics, 2011 (“The Concept of Existential Risk,” Draft of a Paper published on
ExistentialRisk.com, Available Online at http://www.existentialrisk.com/concept.html, Accessed 07-04-2011)
Holding probability constant, risks become more serious as we move toward the upper-right region of figure 2. For any
fixed probability, existential risks are thus more serious than other risk categories.
But just how much more serious might not be intuitively obvious. One might think we could get a grip on how bad an
existential catastrophe would be by considering some of the worst historical disasters we can think of—such as the two
world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic, or the Holocaust—and then imagining something just a bit worse. Yet if we look at
global population statistics over time, we find that these horrible events of the past century fail to register (figure 3).
[Graphic Omitted] Figure 3: World population over the last century. Calamities such as the Spanish flu pandemic, the two
world wars, and the Holocaust scarcely register. (If one stares hard at the graph, one can perhaps just barely make out a
slight temporary reduction in the rate of growth of the world population during these events.) But even this reflection fails
to bring out the seriousness of existential risk. What makes existential catastrophes especially bad is not
that they would show up robustly on a plot like the one in figure 3, causing a precipitous drop in world population or
average quality of life. Instead, their significance lies primarily in the fact that they would
destroy the future. The philosopher Derek Parfit made a similar point with the following thought experiment: I
believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think.
Compare three outcomes: (1) Peace. (2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing
population. (3) A nuclear war that kills 100%. (2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than
(2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I
believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater. … The Earth will remain habitable
for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not
destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the
whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this
tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only
a fraction of a second. (10: 453-454) To calculate the loss associated with an existential catastrophe, we must consider how
much value would come to exist in its absence. It turns out that the ultimate potential for Earth-
originating intelligent life is literally astronomical. One gets a large number
even if one confines one’s consideration to the potential for biological human beings
living on Earth. If we suppose with Parfit that our planet will remain habitable for at least
another billion years, and we assume that at least one billion people could live on it sustainably, then the potential
exist for at least 1018 human lives. These lives could also be considerably better than
the average contemporary human life, which is so often marred by disease,
poverty, injustice, and various biological limitations that could be partly
overcome through continuing technological and moral progress. However, the
relevant figure is not how many people could live on Earth but how many descendants we could have in total. One lower
bound of the number of biological human life-years in the future accessible universe (based on current cosmological
estimates) is 1034 years.[10] Another estimate, which assumes that future minds will be mainly implemented in
computational hardware instead of biological neuronal wetware, produces a lower bound of 1054 human-brain-emulation
subjective life-years (or 1071 basic computational operations).(4)[11] If we make the less conservative assumption that
future civilizations could eventually press close to the absolute bounds of known physics (using some as yet unimagined
technology), we get radically higher estimates of the amount of computation and memory storage that is achievable and
thus of the number of years of subjective experience that could be realized.[12] Even if we use the most
conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and
software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater
than the value of 1018 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing
existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percent age point is at least ten times
the value of a billion human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 1054 human-
brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 1052 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly. Even
if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature
civilization a mere 1% chance of being correct , we find that the expected value of
reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one
percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion
human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential
risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any
“ordinary” good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the
indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost
certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.[13]
Predictions and IR
 Predictions good TL
Predictions and scenario building are valuable for decision-
making, even if they’re not perfect
Garrett 12 [Banning, In Search of Sand Piles and Butterflies, director of the Asia Program and Strategic Foresight
Initiative at the Atlantic Council. http://www.acus.org/disruptive_change/search-sand-piles-and-butterflies]
“Disruptive change” that produces “strategic shocks” has become an
increasing concern for policymakers, shaken by momentous events of the last
couple of decades that were not on their radar screens – from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 terrorist attacks to
the 2008 financial crisis and the “Arab Spring.” These were all shocks to the
international system, predictable perhaps in retrospect but predicted by
very few experts or officials on the eve of their occurrence. This “ failure” to
predict specific strategic shocks does not mean we should abandon efforts to
foresee disruptive change or look at all possible shocks as equally plausible.
Most strategic shocks do not “come out of the blue.” We can understand and
project long-term global trends and foresee at least some of their potential
effects, including potential shocks and disruptive change. We can construct
alternative futures scenarios to envision potential change, including strategic shocks. Based on trends
and scenarios, we can take actions to avert possible undesirable outcomes or limit
the damage should they occur. We can also identify potential opportunities or
at least more desirable futures that we seek to seize through policy course
corrections. We should distinguish “strategic shocks” that are developments
that could happen at any time and yet may never occur. This would include
such plausible possibilities as use of a nuclear device by terrorists or the
emergence of an airborne human-to-human virus that could kill millions.
Such possible but not inevitable developments would not necessarily be the
result of worsening long-term trends. Like possible terrorist attacks,
governments need to try to prepare for such possible catastrophes though
they may never happen. But there are other potential disruptive changes, including those that create
strategic shocks to the international system, that can result from identifiable trends that make them more likely in the
future—for example, growing demand for food, water, energy and other resources with supplies failing to keep pace. We
need to look for the “sand piles” that the trends are building and are subject
to collapse at some point with an additional but indeterminable additional
“grain of sand” and identify the potential for the sudden appearance of
“butterflies” that might flap their wings and set off hurricanes . Mohamed Bouazizi,
who immolated himself December 17, 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, was the butterfly who flapped his wings and (with the
“force multiplier” of social media) set off a hurricane that is still blowing throughout the Middle East. Perhaps the
metaphors are mixed, but the butterfly’s delicate flapping destabilized the
sand piles (of rising food prices, unemployed students, corrupt government, etc.) that had been building
in Tunisia, Egypt, and much of the region. The result was a sudden collapse and disruptive
change that has created a strategic shock that is still producing tremors throughout the region. But the collapse was due to
cumulative effects of identifiable and converging trends. When and what form change will take may be difficult if not
impossible to foresee, but the likelihood of a tipping point being reached—that linear
continuation of the present into the future is increasingly unlikely—can be
foreseen. Foreseeing the direction of change and the likelihood of discontinuities, both sudden and protracted, is
thus not beyond our capabilities. While efforts to understand and project long-term global trends cannot provide accurate
predictions, for example, of the GDPs of China, India, and the United States in 2030, looking at economic and GDP
growth trends, can provide insights into a wide range of possible outcomes. For example, it is a useful to
assess the implications if the GDPs of these three countries each grew at
currently projected average rates – even if one understands that there are
many factors that can and likely will alter their trajectories. The projected growth
trends of the three countries suggest that at some point in the next few decades, perhaps between 2015 and 2030, China’s
GDP will surpass that of the United States. And by adding consideration of the economic impact of demographic trends
(China’s aging and India’s youth bulge), there is a possibility that India will surpass both China and the US, perhaps by
2040 or 2050, to become the world’s largest economy. These potential shifts of economic power from the United States to
China then to India would likely prove strategically disruptive on a global scale. Although slowly developing, such
disruptive change would likely have an even greater strategic impact than the Arab Spring. The “rise” of China has already
proved strategically disruptive, creating a potential China-United States regional rivalry in Asia two decades after
Americans fretted about an emerging US conflict with a then-rising Japan challenging American economic supremacy.
Despite uncertainty surrounding projections, foreseeing the possibility (some would say high likelihood) that China and
then India will replace the United States as the largest global economy has near-term policy implications for the US and
Europe. The potential long-term shift in economic clout and concomitant shift in political power and strategic position
away from the US and the West and toward the East has implications for near-term policy choices. Policymakers could
conclude, for example, that the West should make greater efforts to bring the emerging (or re-emerging) great powers into
close consultation on the “rules of the game” and global governance as the West’s influence in shaping institutions and
behavior is likely to significantly diminish over the next few decades. The alternative to finding such a near-term
accommodation could be increasing mutual suspicions and hostility rather than trust and growing cooperation between
rising and established powers—especially between China and the United States—leading to a fragmented, zero-sum world
in which major global challenges like climate change and resource scarcities are not addressed and conflict over dwindling
resources and markets intensifies and even bleeds into the military realm among the major actors. Neither of these
scenarios may play out, of course. Other global trends suggest that sometime in the next
several decades, the world could encounter a “hard ceiling” on resources
availability and that climate change could throw the global economy into a tailspin, harming China and India even more
than the United States. In this case, perhaps India and China would falter economically leading to internal instability and
crises of governance, significantly reducing their rates of economic growth and their ability to project power and play a
significant international role than might otherwise have been expected. But this scenario has other implications for
policymakers, including dangers posed to Western interests from “failure” of China and/or India, which could produce
huge strategic shocks to the global system, including a prolonged economic downturn in the West as well as the East.
Thus, looking at relatively slowly developing trends can provide foresight for
necessary course corrections now to avert catastrophic disruptive change or
prepare to be more resilient if foreseeable but unavoidable shocks occur.
Policymakers and the public will press for predictions and criticize
government officials and intelligence agencies when momentous events
“catch us by surprise.” But unfortunately, as both Yogi Berra and Neils Bohr
are credited with saying, “prediction is very hard, especially about the future.” One can
predict with great accuracy many natural events such as sunrise and the boiling point of water at sea level. We can rely on
the infallible predictability of the laws of physics to build airplanes and automobiles and iPhones. And we can calculate
with great precision the destruction footprint of a given nuclear weapon. Yet even physical systems like
the weather as they become more complex, become increasingly difficult
and even inherently impossible to predict with precision. With human
behavior, specific predictions are not just hard, but impossible as
uncertainty is inherent in the human universe . As futurist Paul Saffo wrote in the Harvard
Business Review in 2007, “prediction is possible only in a world in which events are preordained and no amount of actions
in the present can influence the future outcome.” One cannot know for certain what actions he or she will take in the
future much less the actions of another person, a group of people or a nation state. This obvious point is made to dismiss
any idea of trying to “predict” what will occur in the future with accuracy, especially the outcomes of the interplay of many
complex factors, including the interaction of human and natural systems. More broadly, the human future is not
predetermined but rather depends on human choices at every turning point, cumulatively leading to different alternative
outcomes. This uncertainty about the future also means the future is amenable
to human choice and leadership. Trends analyses—including foreseeing trends leading to disruptive
change—are thus essential to provide individuals, organizations and political leaders with the strategic foresight to take
steps mitigate the dangers ahead and seize the opportunities for shaping the human destiny. Peter Schwartz nearly a
decade ago characterized the convergence of trends and disruptive change as “inevitable surprises.” He wrote in Inevitable
Surprises that “in the coming decades we face many more inevitable surprises:
major discontinuities in the economic, political and social spheres of our
world, each one changing the ‘rules of the game’ as its played today. If anything,
there will be more, no fewer, surprises in the future, and they will all be
interconnected. Together, they will lead us into a world, ten to fifteen years
hence, that is fundamentally different from the one we know today. Understanding
these inevitable surprises in our future is critical for the decisions we have
to make today …. We may not be able to prevent catastrophe (although
sometimes we can), but we can certainly increase our ability to respond, and
our ability to see opportunities that we would otherwise miss
It’s possible to predict risks – things like black swans and
perfect storms don’t matter.
Pate-Cornell, Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor of Engineering at Stanford, ‘12
[Elisabeth, specialty is engineering risk analysis with application to complex systems (space, medical etc.). Her
research has focused on explicit inclusion of human and organizational factors in the analysis of systems’ failure
risks. Her recent work is on the use of game theory in risk analysis with applications that have included counter-
terrorism and nuclear counter-proliferation problems, “On “Black Swans” and “Perfect Storms”: Risk Analysis
and Management When Statistics Are Not Enough”, Journal of Risk Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 11, 2012, RSR]
Whether a rare event is a “black swan” or a “perfect storm” is often in
the eyes of the beholder and may not matter that much in practice.
Problems arise when these terms are used as an excuse for failure to
act proactively. As stated by Augustine (“Law” XLV(81) ): “One should expect that the
expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been
expected.” Clearly, one cannot assess the risks of events that have really
never been seen before and are truly unimaginable. In reality, there
are often precursors to such events. The best approach in that case is
thus a mix of alertness, quick detection, and early response . By contrast,
rare combinations of known events that can place heavy loads on
human or technical systems can be anticipated and their probabilities
assessed based on a systematic risk analysis anchored in history and
fundamental knowledge. Risk management procedures can then be
designed to face these events, within limits of risk tolerance and resource constraints. In any
case, “it was a ‘black swan’ or “a ‘perfect storm’ ” is not an excuse to wait
until a disaster happens to take safety measures and issue regulations
against a predictable situation.
 Predictions good ext:
Prediction and scenario planning are inevitable
Danzig 11 Richard Danzig, Center for a New American Security Board Chairman, Secretary of the Navy under
President Bill Clinton, October 2011, Driving in the Dark Ten Propositions About Prediction and National Security,
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_Prediction_Danzig.pdf

3. The Propensity
for Prediction Is Especially Deeply Embedded in the U.S.
Department of Defense \ Five factors powerfully contribute to this propensity. Bureaucratic Managers, and
Especially Government Officials, Seek Predict ability as a Means of Maintaining Order Students of both business and
government bureaucracies have observed that managers seek to simplify problems in order to
render them more predictable. In the words of Herbert Simon: Administrative man recognizes that
the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming
confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification
because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real
world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and
that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and
simple.36 Henry Kissinger arrived at a similar observation after decades of interacting with U.S. national security
bureaucracies. “The essence of bureaucracy ,” he writes, “is its quest for safety; its
success is calculability… The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability
which tends to become a prisoner of events.”37 Andrew Krepinevich, a long-time observer of the Pentagon, comments that
bureaucrats would prefer “no thinking about the future (which implies things might
change and they might have to change along with it). To
the extent they ‘tolerate’ such thinking,
they attempt to insure that such thinking results in a world that looks very
much like the one for which they have planned.”38 Insofar as the future is
forecast to differ from the present, it is highly desirable from a bureaucratic
perspective for the forecast to at least be presented with certitude. James C. Scott
discerns the reasons for this, arguing that for a government bureaucrat, [t]he … present is the platform for launching plans
for a better future… The strategic choice of the future is freighted with consequences. To the degree that the future is
known and achievable … the less future benefits are discounted for uncertainty.39 Conceding uncertainty
would weaken budgetary claims, power and status. Moreover, bureaucratic actors who
question alleged certainties soon learn that they are regarded skeptically. Whose team are they on? What bureaucratic
interest is served by emphasizing uncertainty? Militaries, in Particular, Seek Predictive Power
The military environment compounds managers’ predisposition to
prediction, and indeed, most security strategies are designed to reduce risk. Napoleon’s maxim reflects present
military attitudes: “To be defeated is pardonable; to be surprised – never!”40 The American military,
committed to harnessing technological superiority and overwhelming force, is particularly predisposed
to a mind-set in which power and predictive accuracy are exaggerated . William
Astor captures the point: [W]hat disturbs me most is that the [U.S.] military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion
of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on
events… a new vision of the battlefield emerged in which the U.S. military
aimed, without the slightest sense of irony, for “total situational awareness”
and “full spectrum dominance,” goals that, if attained, promised commanders the almost god-like
ability to master the “storm of steel,” to calm the waves, to command the air. In the process, any sense of war
as thoroughly unpredictable and enormously wasteful was lost .41 The Modern
American Military Traces its Roots to Predictive Failure The present American military establishment was created in the
wake of two wars – World War II and the Korean War – for which it was widely recognized that America was
unprepared.42 These led to a mantra of attempting to foresee and plan for risks so as never again to be comparably
unprepared. The McN amara Revolution Enshr ined Pentagon Processes Dependent on Predict ion A half century ago,
Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” intensified the predictive tendency, but for different reasons than their
predecessors. For McNamara and his colleagues, the challenge was to take an internally competitive, substantially
disorganized and significantly dysfunctional DOD and make it more manageable and rational. A key step to this end was
to adopt the then-modern concepts of strategic planning with which McNamara had been closely associated at Ford Motor
Company.43 A related initiative was to establish for DOD a single scenario – a Soviet invasion of Western Europe –
against which most investments could be measured.44 This mechanism of resource allocation became a mechanism of
program planning in accord with the proposition that “what you measure is what you motivate.” This result was
rationalized with the observation that the Soviet scenario was so stressful that all other contingencies would be lesser
included cases; they could be readily handled with the equipment, training and doctrine designed for the most demanding
Soviet scenario. Of course, this scenario was never as dominant in practice as it was in theory. Collateral investments were
made, for example, in attack submarines. Subordinate combat commands worried about scenarios specific to their
regions, such as fighting in Asia or the Persian Gulf. Occasional consideration was also given by the Office of the Secretary
of Defense to some alternative opponents.45 It was not that the system prohibited collateral thought about
unpredicted outcomes. Rather, it forced
overwhelming attention to the predicted
scenario and offered few incentives to consider unexpected contingencies .
Owen Brown and Paul Eremenko observe that the McNamara revolution introduced a bias toward design systems with
long lives for allegedly predictable environments. Analyzing our space programs, they write: Decisionmakers respond to
increased marginal cost by … increasing lifetime to minimize amortized annual costs. In a perfect world of no uncertainty
(or certainty of the uncertainty) this is an appropriate decision. The scars of real world experience illustrate the true
problems of this approach. These space systems, which (because of their complexity) take years to design and build, are
designed to meet requirements based on today’s threat forecasts. With constantly changing threat environments,
requirements change during the design and build phase. The result is redesign, which costs time and money for a large,
tightly coupled system. Once launched, there is little hope the capability of a space system can be adapted to a new
threat.46 The Monolith ic Soviet Opp onent Was Unusually Predict able The Cold War led to co-evolution: The mutually
engaged American and Soviet military systems responded to each other’s doctrines, processes and military products.47
Because the massive Soviet system became largely ponderous and
predictable,48 the American system had unusual opportunities for
forecasting.49 Furthermore, the U.S. system was unusually disposed to produce large numbers of standardized
systems. The Defense Science Board astutely commented on the result: Focus was on long, predictable, evolutionary
change against a Cold War peer opponent who suffered as much, if not more, than the United States from a rigid and
bureaucratic system. There were certainly instances of adaptability during the Cold War period, but the surviving
features of that period are now predominated by long compliance-based
structures.50 These five strands combine to embed a propensity for
prediction deeply within the DNA of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Probabilistic evaluation of hypothetical impacts is the only way

to grapple with strategic uncertainty
Krepinevich 9 (Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. is a defense policy analyst, currently executive director of the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His influential book, The Army and Vietnam, contends that the United States could
have won the Vietnam War had the Army adopted a small-unit pacification strategy in South Vietnam's villages, rather
than conducting search and destroy operations in remote jungles. Today, he criticizes the counterinsurgency approaches
being employed in the Iraq War. He is a West Point graduate. 1/27/2009, “7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist
Explores War in the 21st Century”, http://www.amazon.com/reader/0553805398?_encoding=UTF8&query=so%20are
%20we%20building#reader_0553805398)

While the Pentagon would dearly like to know the answers to these questions, it is simply not possible. Too many factors
have a hand in shaping the future. Of course. Pentagon planners may blithely assume away
all uncertainty and essentially bet that the future they fore-cast is the one
that will emerge. In this case the U.S. military will be very well prepared—for the
predicted future. But history shows that militaries are often wrong when they put too
many eggs in one basket. In the summer of 1914, as World War I was breaking out, Europeans felt
that the war would be brief and that the troops might be home "before the leaves fall." In reality
the Allied and Central Powers engaged in over four years of horrific
bloodletting. In World War II the French Army entered the conflict believing it would experience an advanced
version of the trench warfare it had encountered in 1914-1918. Instead, France was defeated by the Germans in a lightning
campaign lasting less than two months. Finally, in 2003 the Pentagon predicted that the Second Gulf War would play out
with a traditional blitzkrieg. Instead, it turned into an irregular war, a "long, hard slog."20 Militaries seem
prone to assuming that the next war will be an "updated" version of the last
war rather than something quite different. Consequently, they are often accused
of preparing for the last war instead of the next. This is where rigorous,
scenario-based planning comes into play. It is designed to take uncertainty
explicitly into account by incorporating factors that may change the
character of future conflict in significant and perhaps profound ways. By
presenting a plausible set of paths into the future, scenarios can help senior
Pentagon leaders avoid the "default" picture in which tomorrow looks very
much like today. If the future were entirely uncertain, scenario-based
planning would be a waste of time. But certain things are predictable or at
least highly likely. Scenario planners call these things “predetermined
elements.” While not quite “done deals,” they are sufficiently well known that
their probability of occurring is quite high. For example, we have a very good idea
of how many men of military age (eighteen to thirty-one) there will be in the United
States in 2020, since all of those males have already been born, and, barring a catastrophic event, the actuarial
data on them is quite refined. We know that China has already tested several types of weapons that can disable or destroy
satellites. We know that dramatic advances in solid-state lasers have been made in recent years and that more advances
are well within the realm of possibility. These "certainties" should be reflected in all
scenarios, while key uncertainties should be reflected in how they play out
across the different scenarios.21 If scenario-based planning is done well, and
if its insights are acted upon promptly, the changes it stimulates in the
military may help deter prospective threats, or dissuade enemies from
creating threatening new capabilities in the first place.

Uncertainty doesn’t take out our specific scenarios

Krepinevich 9 (Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. is a defense policy analyst, currently executive director of the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His influential book, The Army and Vietnam, contends that the United States could
have won the Vietnam War had the Army adopted a small-unit pacification strategy in South Vietnam's villages, rather
than conducting search and destroy operations in remote jungles. Today, he criticizes the counterinsurgency approaches
being employed in the Iraq War. He is a West Point graduate. 1/27/2009, “7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist
Explores War in the 21st Century”, http://www.amazon.com/reader/0553805398?_encoding=UTF8&query=so%20are
%20we%20building#reader_0553805398)
  
Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we are moved to ask: A re these the shadows
of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that may be only ?...
[I]f the courses be departed from, the ends will change . Say it is thus with what you show
me!1 Fortunately, a country as powerful as the United Stares can often take action to deflect emerging challenges or to
mitigate significantly their potential consequences. Remember, the crafting of scenarios is not an
attempt to predict the future. Far too many interacting factors are at work to
shape the future. It is impossible to know in advance how things will turn
out. Eliminating uncertainty and surprise is simply not possible. No ne of the
scenarios presented above will come to pass exactly as described . Scenarios have a
more modest goal: to describe how the future might turn out . That being the
case, why do these scenarios matter? Their usefulness lies in their ability to
help military planners reduce the risks inherent in their work. The planners'
job is to minimize the overall threat to the national security. Then ability to
do this is limited, among other things, by risk and uncertainty . Risk is
randomness with knowable probabilities; that is, we have some sense of what the probabilities
might be (e.g., low, medium, high}. Uncertainty is randomness with unknowable probabilities. These "wild card" or "Black
Swan" events are essentially unanticipated.2 Hence it is not possible to put a value on
"uncertainty." However, by identifying and assessing the factors that will
likely exert the greatest influence on the future security environment, and
by examining the trends associated with these factors, military planners can
identify significant emerging threats to the national security for which they
must prepare. These risks must he plausible or credible to be taken seriously
by senior decision-makers. Toward this end the narrative path between the world of today and the world
of tomorrow's security challenges must be believable. A credible scenario can help broaden
senior leaders’ attention beyond the immediate problems confronting them
and enable them to overcome the natural mindset that sees tomorrow as
simply a linear extrapolation of the world as it exists today.
Demands for DETERMINIST accuracy misunderstand the point
of NORMATIVE SCENARIO PLANNING in debate – SOCIAL
SCIENCE can be good without being POSITIVISM
Ogilvy 11 [Facing The Fold: Essays on scenario planning¶ Jay is a cofounder of GBN and dean and chief academic
officer at the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco. His own research and work have focused primarily on the
role that human values and changing motivations play in business decision-making and strategy, with a particular focus
on health care, education, and sustainability. He has pursued these interests in collaboration with Peter Schwartz since
1979, when he joined SRI International, and from 1988-2008 with GBN, where he led dozens of scenario projects for
public and private sector clients in health care and life sciences and led GBN’s scenario training courses. While at SRI, Jay
split his time between developing future scenarios for strategic planning and serving as director of research for the Values
and Lifestyles (VALS) Program, a consumer segmentation system used in market research. He also authored monographs
on social, political, and demographic trends affecting the values of American consumers. Jay's work builds on his
background as a philosopher. He taught at the University of Texas, Williams College, and for seven years at Yale, where he
received his PhD in 1968. He is the author of Facing The Fold: Essays on Scenario Planning (2011), Creating Better
Futures: Scenario Planning as a Tool for a Better Tomorrow (2002), Living Without a Goal (1995), Many Dimensional
Man (1977); co-author of China' Futures (2001) and Seven Tomorrows (1980); and editor of Self and World (1971, 1980),
and Revisioning Philosophy (1991). He is currently at work on a book on emergent systems, e.g. consciousness, leadership,
and wealth.]

Monological science is not simply wrong; it is a necessary condition for the emergence of subjectivity
from the conflict between desire and that law. Rather than staking out a romantic opposition to the
force of law; rather than restating New Age complaints about the failure of "Western
science" (whatever that might mean); rather than giving in to Feycrabcnd's methodological anarchism, it seems
wiser to define as precisely as possible what I've called monological science, grant it its due under
laboratory' conditions, but then declare its limitations in applications outside the
laboratory, especially where intentional agents hav e their say. The point is to appreciate the tension between the
force of law and the force of desire. Wishing something doesn't make it so. But there is reason for hope, even in the face of
harsh necessity. Once we grant the force of law, together with its limitations somewhere short of the pre-determined,
billiards table universe of the positivists, then there'sroom for entertaining the role of hope, desire
and care without falling into overly wishful thinking or belief in some benign
teleology. This is precisely where normative scenarios come into play . As I've
argued elsewhere,11 investing our scenarios with our values is not a mistake. It is not an error to recognize
one scenario as aspirational. another as an evil to be avoided at all costs. The effort to create
scenarios that are simply different without being recognized as good or bad derives
from the mistaken belief that pure objectivity is possible . It is not. Of course it is worth even'
effort to explore and identify our biases. But it is a mistake to maintain that we can root out all of our biases, all of our
predispositions, all of our assumptions and pre-judgments,12 to achieve some sort of context-free objectivity.
 Science Good
All of their K’s of science assume that it’s a fixture rather than a
process---scientific knowledge is best because it subjects itself to
constant refinement based on empirical evidence---pure
objectivity is irrelevant because unless they can provide counter-
evidence to refute our advantage, our contingent scientific
claims are sufficient
Hutcheon 93—former prof of sociology of education at U Regina and U British Columbia. Former research
advisor to the Health Promotion Branch of the Canadian Department of Health and Welfare and as a director of the
Vanier Institute of the Family. Phd in sociology, began at Yale and finished at U Queensland. (Pat, A Critique of "Biology
as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA", http://www.humanists.net/pdhutcheon/humanist%20articles/lewontn.htm)

the increasingly popular "postmodernist" claim that all

The introductory lecture in this series articulated

science is ideology. Lewontin then proceeded to justify this by stating the obvious: that scientists are human like the rest of us and subject to
the same biases and socio-cultural imperatives. Although he did not actually say it, his comments seemed to imply that the enterprise of

scientific research and knowledge building could therefore be no different and no more reliable as a guide to
action than any other set of opinions. The trouble is that, in order to reach such an

conclusion, one would have to ignore all those aspects of the scientific
endeavor that do in fact distinguish it from other types and sources of belief
formation .¶ Indeed, if the integrity of the scientific endeavor depended only on
the wisdom and objectivity of the individuals engaged in it we would be in trouble .
North American agriculture would today be in the state of that in Russia today. In fact it would be much worse, for the Soviets threw out Lysenko's ideology-
masquerading-as-science decades ago. Precisely because an alternative scientific model was available (thanks to the disparaged Darwinian theory) the former
Eastern bloc countries have been partially successful in overcoming the destructive chain of consequences which blind faith in ideology had set in motion. This is
what Lewontin's old Russian dissident professor meant when he said that the truth must be spoken, even at great personal cost. How sad that Lewontin has
apparently failed to understand the fact that while scientific knowledge -- with the power it gives us -- can and does allow humanity to change the world, ideological
beliefs have consequences too. By rendering their proponents politically powerful but rationally and instrumentally impotent, they throw up insurmountable
barriers to reasoned and value-guided social change.¶ What are the crucial differences between ideology and science that Lewonton has ignored? Both Karl Popper
and Thomas Kuhn have spelled these out with great care -- the former throughout a long lifetime of scholarship devoted to that precise objective. Stephen Jay
Gould has also done a sound job in this area. How strange that someone with the status of Lewontin, in a series of lectures supposedly covering the same subject,

would not at least have dealt with their arguments!¶ Science has to do with the search for regularities
in what humans experience of their physical and social environments , beginning
with the most simple units discernible, and gradually moving towards the more complex. It has to do with expressing these

regularities in the clearest and most precise language possible, so that cause-and-
effect relations among the parts of the system under study can be publicly and rigorously tested . And
it has to do with devising explanations of those empirical regularities which
have survived all attempts to falsify them . These explanations, once phrased in the form of testable

hypotheses, become predictors of future events . In other words, they lead to further

conjectures of additional relationships which, in their turn, must survive repeated public
attempts to prove them wanting -- if the set of related explanations (or theory) is to continue to operate as a fruitful guide for

subsequent research.¶ This means that science, unlike mythology and ideology, has a self-correcting
mechanism at its very heart. A conjecture, to be classed as scientific, must
be amenable to empirical test. It must, above all, be open to refutation by
experience . There is a rigorous set of rules according to which hypotheses are formulated and research findings are arrived at, reported and replicated.
It is this process -- not the lack of prejudice of the particular scientist, or his
negotiating ability, or even his political power within the relevant university department -- that ensures the reliability of

scientific knowledge. The conditions established by the community of science is one of

precisely defined and regulated "intersubjectivity". Under these conditions the theory
that wins out, and subsequently prevails, does so not because of its agreement with
conventional wisdom or because of the political power of its proponents, as
is often the case with ideology . The survival of a scientific theory such as Darwin's is
due , instead, to its power to explain and predict observable regularities in
human experience , while withstanding worldwide attempts to refute it -- and
proving itself open to elaboration and expansion in the process . In this
sense only is scientific knowledge objective and universal. All this has little
relationship to the claim of an absolute universality of objective "truth"
apart from human strivings that Lewontin has attributed to scientists .¶ Because
ideologies, on the other hand, do claim to represent truth , they are incapable of
generating a means by which they can be corrected as circumstances
change. Legitimate science makes no such claims. Scientific tests are not tests of
verisimilitude. Science does not aim for "true" theories purporting to
reflect an accurate picture of the "essence" of reality. It leaves such claims
of infallibility to ideology . The tests of science, therefore, are in terms of workability and
falsifiability, and its propositions are accordingly tentative in nature. A
successful scientific theory is one which, while guiding the research in a particular problem area, is

continuously revised and refined , until it is eventually superseded by that very hypothesis-making and testing
elaborated,

An ideology, on the other hand, would be considered to have failed under those
process that it helped to define and sharpen.

conditions, for the "truth" must be for all time . More than anything, it is this difference
that confuses those ideological thinkers who are compelled to attack Darwin's theory of evolution
precisely because of its success as a scientific theory . For them, and the world of desired

and imagined certainty in which they live, that very success in contributing to a

continuously evolving body of increasingly reliable -- albeit inevitably

tentative -- knowledge can only mean failure, in that the theory itself has
altered in the process.

We are not science, we use science – our method is the same one
everyone inevitably uses on a day-to-day basis, just more
rigorous
Bricmont 1 [Jean Bricmont 1, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, “Defense of a Modest
Scientific Realism”, September 23, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/bielefeld_final.pdf]
So, how does one obtain evidence concerning the truth or falsity of scientific
assertions? By the same imperfect methods that we use to obtain evidence
about empirical assertions generally. Modern science , in our view, is nothing
more or less than the deepest (to date) refinement of the rational attitude
toward investigating any question about the world , be it atomic spectra, the etiology of smallpox,
or the Bielefeld bus routes. Historians, detectives and plumbers indeed, all human beings use the same basic
methods of induction, deduction and assessment of evidence as do physicists or
biochemists.18 Modern science tries to carry out these operations in a more careful
and systematic way, by using controls and statistical tests, insisting on
replication, and so forth. Moreover, scientific measurements are often much
more precise than everyday observations; they allow us to discover hitherto
unknown phenomena; and scientific theories often conflict with "common
sense'*. But [he con f I id is al the level of conclusions, nol (he basic approach. As Susan Haack lucidly observes: Our
standards of what constitutes good, honest, thorough inquiry and what
constitutes good, strong, supportive evidence are not internal to science . In
judging where science has succeeded and where it has failed , in what areas and at what
times it has done better and in what worse, we are appealing to the standards by which we judge
the solidity of empirical beliefs, or the rigor and thoroughness of empirical inquiry, generally.1'1
Scientists' spontaneous epistemology the one that animates their work, regardless of what they may say
when philosophizing is thus a rough-and-ready realism: the goal of science is to discover
(some aspects of) how things really are. More The aim of science is to give a true (or
approximately true) description of reality. I'll is goal is realizable, because: 1. Scientific
theories are either true or false. Their truth (or falsity) is literal, not
metaphorical; it does not depend in any way on us, or on how we test those
theories, or on the structure of our minds, or on the society within which we
live, and so on. 2. It is possible to have evidence for the truth (or falsity) of a
theory. (Tt remains possible, however, that all the evidence supports some theory T, yet T is false.)20 Tin- most powerful objections to
the viability of scientific realism consist in various theses showing that theories are underdetermined by data.21 In its most common
formulation, the underdetermination thesis says that, for any finite (or even infinite) set of data, there are infinitely many mutually
incompatible theories that are "compatible'' with those data. This thesis, if not properly understood22, can easily lead to radical
conclusions. The biologist who believes that a disease is caused by a virus presumably does so on the basis of some "evidence" or some
"data'*. Saying that a disease is caused by a virus presumably counts as a "theory'' (e.g. it involves, implicitly, many counlerfactual
statements). But if there are really infinitely many distinct theories that are compatible with those "data", then we may legitimately wonder
on what basis one can rationally choose between those theories. In order to clarify the situation, it is important to understand how the
underdetermination thesis is established; then its meaning and its limitations become much clearer. Here are some examples of how
underdeterminatiou works; one
may claim that: The past did not exist: the universe was created five
Alternatively,
minutes ago along with all the documents and all our memories referring to the alleged past in their present state.
it could have been created 100 or 1000 years ago. The stars do not exist: instead, there are spots on
a distant sky that emit exactly the same signals as those we receive. All criminals ever put in jail were innocent. For each alleged criminal,
explain away all testimony by a deliberate desire to harm the accused; declare that all evidence was fabricated by the police and that all
confessions were obtained bv force.2'1 Of course, all these "theses'1 may have to be elaborated, but the
basic idea is clear:
given any set of facts, just make up a story, no matter how ad hoc, to
"account" for the facts without running into contradictions .2,1 It is important to realize
that this is all there is to the general (Quinean) underdetermination thesis. Moreover, this thesis, although it played an important role in the
refutation of the most extreme versions of logical positivism, is not very different from the observation that radical
skepticism or even solipsism cannot be refuted: all our knowledge about the
world is based on some sort of inference from the observed to the
unobserved, and no such inference can be justified by deductive logic alone .
However, it is clear that, in practice, nobody ever takes seriously such "theories" as those
mentioned above, any more than they take seriously solipsism or radical skepticism. Let us call these "crazy theories'*2'1 (of course, it is not
easy to say exactly what it means for a theory to be non-crazy). Xote that these
theories require no work: they
can be formulated entirely a priori. On the other hand, the difficult problem, given
some set of data, is to find even one non-crazy theory that accounts for them .
Consider, for example, a police enquiry about some crime: it is easy enough to invent a story that "accounts for the facts'" in an ad hoc
fashion (sometimes lawyers do just that); what is hard is to discover who really committed the crime and to obtain evidence demonstrating
that beyond a reasonable doubt. Reflecting on this elementary example clarifies the meaning of the underdelermination thesis. Despite the
existence of innumerable "crazy theories'* concerning any given crime, it
sometimes happens in practice that
there is a unique theory (i.e. a unique story about who committed the crime and how) that is plausible
and compatible with the known facts; in that case, one will say that the criminal has
been discovered (with a high degree of confidence, albeit not with certainty). It may also happen
that no plausible theory is found, or that we are unable to decide which one among several suspects is really guilty: in these cases, the
underdetermination is real.-'' One might next ask whether there exist more subtle forms of underdetermination than the one revealed by a
Duhem Quine type of argument. In order to analyze this question, let us consider the example of classical electromagnetism. This is a theory
that describes how particles possessing a quantifiable property called "electric charge" produce "electromagnetic fields" that "propagate in
no one
vacuum" in a certain precise fashion and then "guide" the motion of charged particles when they encounter them.2' Of course,
ever "sees" directly an electromagnetic field or an electric charge. So, should
one interpret this theory "realistically'', and if so, what should it be taken to
mean? Classical electromagnetic theory is immensely well supported by
precise experiments and forms the basis for a large part of modern
technology. It is "confirmed'' every time one of us switches on his or her
computer and finds that it works as designed.'8 Does this overwhelming
empirical support imply that there are "really"' electric and magnetic fields
propagating in vacuum? In support of the idea that thenare, one could argue that electromagnetic theory postulates the
existence of those fields and that there is no known non-crazy theory that accounts equally well for the same data; therefore it is reasonable
to believe that electric and magnetic fields really exist. But is it in fact true that there are no alternative non-crazy theories? Here is one
possibility: Let us claim that there are no fields propagating "in vacuum", but that, rather, there are only "forces" acting directly between
charged particles.29 Of course, in order to preserve the empirical adequacy of the theory, one lias to use exactly the same Maxwell Lorentz
system of equations as before (or a mathematically equivalent system). But one may interpret the fields as a mere "calculational device"
allowing us to compute more easily the net effect of the "real" forces acting between charged particles.30 Almost every physicist reading
these lines will say that this is some kind of metaphysics or maybe even a play on words that this "alternative theory" is really just standard
electromagnetic theory in disguise. Xow, although
the precise meaning of "metaphysics" is
hard to pin down 31, there is a vague sense in which, if we use exactly the
same equations (or a mathematically equivalent set of equations) and make exactly the same
predictions in the two theories, then they are really the same theory as far as
"physics" is concerned, and the distinction between the two if any lies
outside of its scope. The same kind of observation can be made about most
physical theories: In classical mechanics, are there really forces acting on particles, or are the particles instead following
trajectories defined by variational principles? In general relativity, is space-time really curved, or are there, rather, fields that cause particles
to move as if space-time were curved?'2 Let us call this kind of underdetermination "genuine'*, as opposed to the "crazy"
underdeterminations of the usual Duhem Quine thesis. By "genuine'*, we do not mean that these underdeterminations are necessarily
worth losing sleep over, but simply that there
is no rational way to choose (at least on empirical grounds alone)
between the alternative theories if indeed they should be regarded as
different theories.

Reality exists independent of signifiers

Wendt 99 [Alexander Wendt, Professor of International Security at Ohio State University, 1999, “Social theory of
international politics,” gbooks]
The effects of holding a relational theory of meaning on theorizing about world politics are apparent in David
Campbell's provocative study of US foreign policy, which shows how the threats posed by the Soviets,
immigration, drugs, and so on, were constructed out of US national security discourse.29 The book clearly
shows that material things in the world did not force US decision-makers to have particular representations of them - the
picture theory of reference does not hold. In so doing it highlights the discursive aspects of truth and reference, the sense
in which objects are relationally "constructed."30 On the other hand, while emphasizing
several times that he is not denying the reality of, for example, Soviet
actions, he specifically eschews (p. 4) any attempt to assess the extent to
which they caused US representations. Thus he cannot address the extent to
which US representations of the Soviet threat were accurate or true (questions of
correspondence). He can only focus on the nature and consequences of the
representations.31 Of course, there is nothing in the social science rule book which requires an interest in causal
questions, and the nature and consequences of representations are important questions. In the terms discussed
below he is engaging in a constitutive rather than causal inquiry. However, I
suspect Campbell thinks that any attempt to assess the correspondence of
discourse to reality is inherently pointless. According to the relational theory of reference we
simply have no access to what the Soviet threat "really" was, and as such its
truth is established entirely within discourse , not by the latter's correspondence to an extra-
discursive reality 32 problem with the relational theory of reference is that it cannot
account for the resistance of the world to certain representations, and thus
for representational failures or misinterpretations. Worldly resistance is most obvious in
nature: whether our discourse says so or not, pigs can't fly. But examples abound in society too. In 1519
Montezuma faced the same kind of epistemological problem facing social
scientists today: how to refer to people who, in his case, called themselves
Spaniards. Many representations were conceivable, and no doubt the one he chose - that
they were gods - drew on the discursive materials available to him. So why was
he killed and his empire destroyed by an army hundreds of times smaller
than his own? The realist answer is that Montezuma was simply wrong: the Spaniards
were not gods, and had come instead to conquer his empire. Had
Montezuma adopted this alternative representation of what the Spanish
were, he might have prevented this outcome because that representation
would have corresponded more to reality. The reality of the conquistadores
did not force him to have a true representation, as the picture theory of reference would claim,
but it did have certain effects - whether his discourse allowed them or not.
The external world to which we ostensibly lack access, in other words. often
frustrates or penalizes representations. Postmodernism gives us no insight
into why this is so, and indeed, rejects the question altogether.33 The description
theory of reference favored by empiricists focuses on sense-data in the mind while the relational theory of the
postmoderns emphasizes relations among words, but they are similar in at least
one crucial respect: neither grounds meaning and truth in an external world
that regulates their content.34 Both privilege epistemology over ontology.
What is needed is a theory of reference that takes account of the
contribution of mind and language yet is anchored to external reality. The
realist answer is the causal theory of reference. According to the causal
theory the meaning of terms is determined by a two-stage process.35 First
there is a "baptism/' in which some new referent in the environment (say, a
previously unknown animal) is given a name; then this connection of thing-
to-term is handed down a chain of speakers to contemporary speakers. Both
stages are causal, the first because the referent impressed itself upon
someone's senses in such a way that they were induced to give it a name, the
second because the handing down of meanings is a causal process of
imitation and social learning. Both stages allow discourse to affect meaning,
and as such do not preclude a role for "difference" as posited by the
relational theory. Theory is underdetermined by reality, and as such the
causal theory is not a picture theory of reference. However, conceding these
points does not mean that meaning is entirely socially or mentally
constructed. In the realist view beliefs are determined by discourse and
nature.36 This solves the key problems of the description and relational theories: our ability to refer to the
same object even if our descriptions are different or change, and the resistance of the world to certain representations.
Mind and language help determine meaning, but meaning is also regulated
by a mind-independent, extra-linguistic world.
 Liberalism good
Perm solves – liberalism can affirm cultural difference and
contingency – their critique is a totalizing portrayal of
liberalism that destroys progressive change – turns the k
Arslan, professor of government – Polis Akademisi Güvenlik Bilimleri Fakültesi, ’99 (Zhutu, “Taking Rights Less
Seriously,” Res Publica 5)
Incredulous of foundational truth claims, the postmodernists
reject the idea that human
beings have certain rights simply by virtue of being human. Foucault for instance
claims that, like the individual, civil liberties are nothing but expressions of governance and disciplinary power.98 Gaete
writes: [A] Post-Modern perspective would assume that human rights are neither the expression of a universal truth nor a
denial of it and regard their truth claims as only local moves in a game the subject enters when formulating his/her
relationship to power in the language of fundamental rights.99 The postmodern hymn of relativity rules out the possibility
of any universal claim to human rights. In the postmodern condition, it would be
impossible to argue that individuals have some basic rights irrespective of
their nationality or geography. The inevitable consequence of the relativisation of
“truth-claims” is to undercut any universal, “principled, normative basis” for
claiming that human rights simply exist.100 But without such a basis, we are left in a situation in which
we lack any criteria to distinguish between right and wrong . This ethical vacuum may
easily lead to the apparent legitimation and justification of almost any belief and practice in the realm of rights. This
conservative support of the prevailing status quo is an obvious rejection of the “revolutionary” nature of universal human
rights. At the end of the day, the notion of rights is forced to surrender its power as a legitimating factor of political
regimes. With the demise of the subject and his/her rights, the postmodernists in fact undermine any
possible resistance against oppressive orders. As Touraine asserts, “[T]he idea of the subject is a
dissident idea which has always upheld the right to rebel against an unjust power.”101 Touraine also reminds the
murderers of the subject what a subject-less world would look like: [T]he day when the Subject is debased to meaning
introspection, and the Self to meaning compulsory social roles, our social and personal life will lose all its creative power
and will be no more than a post-modern museum in which multiple memories replace our inability to produce anything of
lasting importance.102 The postmodern defence of “uncertainty” and “contingency” is equally
problematic. The very idea of “uncertainty” itself implies the existence of a certainty, after all: “[ I]f you tried
to doubt everything, you would not get as far as doubting anything. The
game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”103 Human beings live with
their values, and need to rank them. Their highest values , or what Charles Taylor calls
“hypergoods”,104 play a central role in our lives. Individuals define and are defined by these hypergoods, be
they a divine being, Brahma, Nirvana, Justice, Reason, Science, Progress, Cogito or Superman. To kill our
hypergoods therefore means an attempt to kill the sources of the self, sources which
confer meaning on the lives of human beings. The need for hypergoods
points to the necessity of “an absolute truth”, to use Sartre’s phrase.105 This necessity is also
the precondition of any critique. Thus Habermas claims that “Nietzsche’s critique consumes the
critical impulse itself”; for “if thought can no longer operate in the realms of truth and validity claims, then analysis and
critique lose their meaning”. 106 Oddly, perhaps, Derrida seems to agree with Habermas when he says that he “cannot
conceive of a radical critique which would not be ultimately motivated by some sort of affirmation, acknowledged or
not”.107 Postmodernity, despite its dream of a “godless” epoch,108 cannot escape the necessity we have explored. Such
a dream itself anyway reflects, however implicitly and unintentionally, the belief in linear
progress, one of the hypergoods of modernity.109 Postmodernism turns out to be a new
grand narrative: “a grand narrative of postmodernity”.110 Even Lyotard comes close to
acknowledging the existence of this new metanarrative. He states that “the great narratives are now barely credible. And it
is therefore tempting to lend credence to the great narrative of the decline of great narratives.”111 As a new
“totalising” project, postmodernism reproduces the very predicaments of
modernity,112 and its rejection of metaphysics becomes a merely “rhetorical” claim.113 The real question
now is how to establish a socio-political framework in which people’s
hypergoods might peacefully live side by side without people trying to kill each other. This is
the project of political liberalism: but it is also to certain extent the project of postmodernism itself, as
we have earlier seen.114 In other words, pluralism is the common value which in fact pervades
the writings of liberals and postmodernists alike,115 even though it is expressed in
different terms, and on different epistemological grounds , amounting, ironically, to both the
“ethical relativism” of John Keane116 and the “moral universalism” of Habermas.117 Keane writes: [T]o defend relativism
requires a social and political stance which is throughly modern. It implies the need for establishing or strengthening a
democratic state and a civil society consisting of a plurality of public spheres, within which individuals and groups can
openly express their solidarity with (or opposition to) others’ ideas.118 In an interview, Habermas explains what his
“moral universalism” stands for: [W]hat does universalism mean, after all? That one relativizes
one’s own way of life with regard to the legitimate claims of other forms of
life, that one grants the strangers and the others, with all their idiosyncrasies and incomprehensibilities,
the same rights as oneself, that one does not insist on universalizing one’s own
identity, that one does not simply exclude that which deviates from it, that the areas of tolerance must become
infinitely broader than they are today – moral universalism means all these things.119 At the core of this pluralism
required by “ethical relativism” and “moral universalism” alike lies the conception of autonomy.120 Indeed, as Raz puts it,
pluralism is a necessary requirement of the value of autonomy.121 Autonomy, however, is inextricably
connected with rights. An autonomous individual who is “the author of his
own life” has certain rights.122 In Raz’s words “autonomy is constituted by rights and nothing else: the
autonomous life is a life within unviolated rights”.123 Since it is an essential part and parcel of human being (or being
human), autonomy constitutes a “sufficient ontological justification” for rights
and thus gives an invaluable support to those who seek for a justificatory ground for
them.124 Autonomy requires the existence of the Other(s).125 The Other is not simply external to me, but he or she at
the same time constitutes my identity: I am in a way parasitic on the Other. My autonomy makes sense only insofar as
there exist others. As Sartre puts it, “[T]he other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can
have of myself.”126 And unless I in turn recognise others as autonomous beings I shall end up in the fundamental
predicament of “absolute loneliness and terror”.127 This points to the absolute necessity of living with others,128 as a
“zoon politikon” in Marx’s words.129 Thus autonomy is a key value not only for “I”, but also for others. The
postmodernists must take into account autonomy, if they are to present an ethical/political project part of which involves
rights, however “locally”. They can do so, furthermore, without having to abandon their conceptual tools. Difference and
otherness, the magical terms of postmodern discourse, are in fact quite compatible with such conceptions as autonomy
and universality. As Lyotard himself argues, a human being has rights only if she is also an other human being. Likewise,
as Terry Eagleton emphasises, universalism and difference are not mutually exclusive .
Difference may need universalism. The idea of difference is indeed likely to be
undermined by “certain militant particularisms of our day ”.130 V. CONCLUSION
Whatever the merits of the entirety of their arguments, the postmodernists emphasise the paramount importance of
human rights: they are, after all, its starting-point. As Bauman points out, “[T]he great issues of ethics – like human rights
. . . – have lost nothing of their topicality”,131 and he is well aware of the fact that “[m]oral issues tend to be increasingly
compressed into the idea of ‘human rights’ ”.132 Lyotard himself likewise states that “[A] human being has rights only if
he is other than a human being. And if he is to be other than a human being, he must in addition become an other human
being.”133 More importantly, influenced by the communitarian and postmodern critique of metaphysical grounds for
ethical and political claims, some liberal rights theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls adopt a kind of
“apologetic” attitude towards the theoretical foundation of rights, refusing to play the traditional role of moral magician by
plucking ethical claims out of a metaphysical hat. In a recent essay, Rawls makes it clear that [T]hese [human] rights
do not depend on any particular comprehensive moral doctrine or
philosophical conception of human nature, such as, for example that human beings are moral
persons and have equal worth or that they have certain particular moral and intellectual powers that entitle them to these
rights. To show this would require a quite deep philosophical theory that many if not most hierarchical societies might
reject as liberal or democratic or else as in some way distinctive of Western political tradition and prejudicial to other
countries.134 This passage implies that in fact the idea of human rights is a product of the western liberal tradition, but in
order to make it universally applicable we must refrain from any theoretical attempt to reveal this fact. Let’s pretend that
human rights are simply there. They do not need any moral or philosophical ground for justification. But there need
be no contradiction between the postmodernists and the liberals ; nor need the
latter apologize for “rights”. For, as we have seen, the postmodernists have never
underestimated the importance of human rights. They argue that ethical
issues such as human rights “only need to be seen, and dealt with, in a novel
way”.135 Yet the postmodernists have not presented us with any postmodern “novel
way” in which human rights might be seen. It seems to be difficult, if not impossible,
for them to show this novel way without taking into account the conceptions of autonomous self and
universality. Perhaps they need to begin taking rights more seriously.
Liberalism in IR theory is empirically and analytically sound
Moravcsik 01 – Andrew Moravcsik, Professor of Politics and director of the European Union Program at
Princeton University [“Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” Princeton Library,
http://www.princeton.edu/~amoravcs/library/preferences.pdf]
Liberal IR theory is not simply an ideological foil for more realistic and rigorous theories, as
its critics claim, nor an eclectic collection of hypotheses linked only by common intellectual history and normative
commitment, as its proponents are currently forced to concede. It is instead a logically coherent,
theoretically distinct, empirically generalizable social scientific theory - one
that follows from explicit assumptions and generates a rich range of related propositions about
world politics that reach far beyond cases of cooperation among a minority of liberal states. By reformulating
liberalism as theory rather than ideology, we have repeatedly seen that what
are often treated as liberal failures become liberal predictions . Moreover, liberalism
exhibits considerable potential for theoretical extension. Aside from the myriad opportunities for empirical testing and
theoretical refinement of specific hypotheses, a number of broader areas are poised for theoretical innovation. Relaxing
the assumption of unitary state behavior would support a range of "two level" hypotheses about the differential ability of
various domestic state and societal actors to pursue semiautonomous transnational activities. Relaxing the assumption
that decision making is static would support analyses of change over time. Greater attention to feedback
from prior decisions mediated by intervening liberal factors like domestic
ideas, institutions, and interests might provide firmer microfoundations for
theories of regime stability and change—an area of potential collaboration with constructivists and
historical institutionalists. Finally, the rich interaction among domestic and transnational ideas, interests, and institutions
is only beginning to be explored. A final word to those readers who object to using the term liberal to distinguish this
restatement. Such potential critics fall into two groups. One group is likely to find this formulation of liberal theory too
narrow, the other too broad. The first group of critics will protest that this restatement fails to acknowledge the full
richness of the intellectual history and, in particular, the normative implications of liberalism. This criticism is correct, but
the omission is deliberate. This article does not aim to provide a comprehensive intellectual history of classical liberal
international thought, nor a self-sufficient guide to the normative evaluation of policy, but to distill a coherent core of
social scientific assumptions for the narrower purpose of explaining international politics.126 The project is best judged
on its own terms—the four criteria outlined in the preceding section—not its fidelity to prior usage. The second group of
critics will complain that liberalism has too many definitions as it stands, most too vague to be useful. Some reject
altogether the use of ‘‘isms’’ to designate foundational theoretical positions
in IR. This criticism is semantic rather than substantive. In contrast to other
fundamental divisions—for example, those between domestic and systemic ‘‘levels of analysis,’’ optimistic and pessimistic
prognosis or realist, liberal, and Marxist ideologies—the tripartite division among realism, liberalism, and institutionalism
is fully consistent with the foundation of rationalist social theory, which divides the determinants of social behavior into
three categories: interests, resources, and institutions or information. Those who view behavior as the
result of a process of constrained choice would do well to champion rather
than criticize efforts to impose greater theoretical coherence and
consistency on theories of rational state behavior. Either type of critic may nonetheless prefer to call liberal theory
a ‘‘societal,’’ ‘‘state-society,’’ ‘‘social purpose,’’ or ‘‘preference-based’’ theory. The central claims of this article, however,
remain intact. First, major IR theories should be divided into those that stress the pattern of state preferences, the
distribution of resources, and the institutional provision of information. Second, greater priority should be given to the
further development of the first category. This development need not proceed ad hoc, but can be achieved by grounding
such efforts in the common assumptions and causal processes proposed here. Only further research can reveal
their full empirical power; yet existing studies—from explanations of the democratic peace to endogenous
tariff theory to theories relating domestic institutions and ideas to foreign policy—suggest considerable promise. Third, a
liberal theory of state preferences is the most fundamental type of IR theory .
Hypotheses that endogenize changes in state preferences deserve equal treatment in monocausal explanations and
analytical priority in multicasual nes, because liberal theory defines the theoretical and empirical domains in which it is
appropriate even to consider realist and institutionalist claims. Thus those who ignore liberal theory
do not simply sacrifice comprehensiveness; they undermine valid
empirical evaluation of their own theories . Only by building on these three conclusions can
liberals and their critics supplant debates over labels with debates over data.
There’s no alternative—the renunciation of power provides no
basis by which to formulate a solution
Chandler, IR professor at the University of Westminster, 10 [David, October 2010, “The Uncritical Critique of
‘Liberal Peace,’” Review of International Studies, Volume: 36, p. 17]
It would appear that the ostensibly more radical critics, those who draw out the problematic nature of
power relations – the ‘power-based’ critiques above – in fact, havevery little to offer as a critical
alternative to the current policies of intervention and statebuilding, other
than a scaling back of the possibilities of social change. The leading critics of
the liberal peace, like Mark Duffield, Michael Pugh and Oliver Richmond – working through critical theoretical
frameworks which problematise power relations and highlight the importance of difference – suggest that the
difference between the liberal West and the non-liberal Other cannot be
bridged through Western policymaking. For Pugh, as we have seen above, taking critical theory to
its logical conclusion, capitalist rationality is itself to be condemned for its universalising and destabilising impulses.
Similarly, for Duffield, it seems that the problem of hegemonic relations of
power and knowledge cannot be overcome, making any projection of the ideals of development
or democracy potentially oppressive.63 Oliver Richmond, has systematised this perspective ,
highlighting the problems of the disciplinary forms of knowledge of ‘liberal peace’ approaches and suggesting
that while it may be possible to go beyond them through the use of post-
positivist and ethnographic approaches – enabling external interveners to have a greater access to
the knowledge of ‘everyday life’ in non-liberal societies being intervened in – any attempt to know, rather
than merely to express ‘empathy’, is open to hegemonic abuse .64 It would
appear that, without a political agent of emancipatory social change, the
radical ‘power-based’ critics of liberal peace who draw upon the
perspectives of critical theory, cannot go beyond the bind which they have
set themselves, of overcoming hegemonic frameworks of knowledge and
power. In fact, it could be argued that these critical approaches, lacking the basis of a
political subject to give content to critical theorising , ultimately take an
uncritical approach to power. Power is assumed rather than theorised,
making the limits to power appear merely as external to it. It is assumed
that there is an attempt to transform the world in liberal terms and that the
failure to do so can therefore be used to argue that liberal forms of
knowledge are inadequate ones. The critique is not essentially of power or
of intervention but of the limited knowledge of liberal interveners. The
alternative is not that of emancipatory social transformation but of the
speculative and passive search for different, non-liberal, forms of
knowledge or of knowing. This comes across clearly in the conclusions reached by Duffield, Richmond
and others, and highlights the lack of a critical alternative embedded in these
approaches.
Impact Framing
 Positivism
Epistemology isn’t a prior question – truth claims can be
evaluated objectively through empirical analysis
Houghton 08 – [David Patrick, Associate Professor of International Relations Theory at the University of
Central Florida, Positivism ‘vs’ Postmodernism: Does Epistemology Make a Difference? International Politics (2008) 45]
As long ago as 1981, Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach effectively laid the influence of the dogmatic behaviouralism of the 1960s to rest
in their book The Elusive Quest, signaling the profound disillusionment of mainstream IR with the idea that a cumulative science of IR
would ever be possible (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1988). The popularity of the ‘naïve’ form
of positivism, wed to a view of inexorable scientific progress and supposedly practiced by
wide-eyed scholars during the 1960s, has long been a thing of the past . Postmodernists hence do
the discipline a disservice when they continue to attack the overly optimistic
and dogmatic form of positivism as if it still represented a dominant
orthodoxy, which must somehow be overthrown. Equally, supporters of the contemporary or ‘neo-’ version of positivism perform a
similar disservice when they fail to articulate their epistemological assumptions clearly or at all. Indeed, the first error is greatly
encouraged by the second, since by failing to state what they stand for, neo-positivists have allowed postmodernists to
fashion a series of straw men who burn rapidly at the slightest touch. Articulating
a full list of these assumptions lies beyond the scope of this article, but contemporary neo-positivists are, I would suggest,
committed to the following five assumptions, none of which are especially radical or hard to defend: (1) That explaining
the social and political world ought to be our central objective, (2) That — subjective though
our perceptions of the world may be — many features of the political world
are at least potentially explainable. What remains is a conviction that there are at least some
empirical propositions, which can be demonstrably shown to be ‘true’ or ‘false’, some underlying
regularities that clearly give shape to IR (such as the proposition that democracies do not fight one
another), (3) That careful use of appropriate methodological techniques can
establish what patterns exist in the political world, (4) That positive and normative questions,
though related, are ultimately separable, although both constitute valid and interesting forms of enquiry. There is also a
general conviction (5) that careful use of research design may help researchers avoid
logical pitfalls in their work. Doubtless, there are some who would not wish to use the term ‘positivism’ as an umbrella term for
these five assumptions, in which case we probably require a new term to cover them. But to the extent that there
exists an ‘orthodoxy’ in the field of IR today, this is surely it. Writing in 1989,
Thomas Biersteker noted that ‘the vast majority of scholarship in international relations (and the
social sciences for that matter) proceeds without conscious reflection on its philosophical
bases or premises. In professional meetings, lectures, seminars and the design of curricula, we do not often engage in serious reflection
on the philosophical bases or implications of our activity. Too often, consideration of these core issues is reserved for (and largely forgotten
after) the introductory weeks of required concepts and methods courses, as we socialize students into the profession’
(Biersteker,
1989). This observation — while accurate at the time — would surely be deemed incorrect
were it to be made today. Even some scholars who profess regret at the philosophically self-regarding nature of
contemporary of IR theory, nevertheless feel compelled to devote huge chunks of their work to
epistemological issues before getting to more substantive matters (see for
instanceWendt, 1999). The recent emphasis on epistemology has helped to push
IR as a discipline further and further away from the concerns of those who
actually practice IR . The consequent decline in the policy relevance of what we do,
and our retreat into philosophical self-doubt, is ironic given the roots of the field
in very practical political concerns (most notably, how to avoid war). What I am suggesting is not that IR
scholars should ignore philosophical questions, or that such ‘navel gazing’ is always unproductive, for questions of epistemology surely
undergird every vision of IR that ever existed. Rather, I would suggest that the existing debate is sterile and unproductive in the sense that
postpositivists have
the various schools of thought have much more in common than they suppose; stated more specifically,
much more in common than they would like to think with the positivists
they seek to condemn. Consequently, to the extent that there is a meaningful
dialogue going on with regard to epistemological questions, it has no real
impact on what we do as scholars when we look at the world ‘out there’.
Rather than focusing on epistemology, it is inevitably going to be more
fruitful to subject the substantive claims made by positivists (of all metatheoretical
stripes) and postpositivists to the cold light of day. My own view, as the reader may have gathered
already, is that the empirical claims of scholars like Der Derian and Campbell will not often stand up to such harsh scrutiny
given the inattention to careful evidence gathering betrayed by both, but this is a side issue here; the point is that
substantive theoretical and empirical claims , rather than metatheoretical or
epistemological ones, ought to be what divides the international relations
scene today.
 No PQ
No prior questions – action is necessary
Cochran 99 – Prof. of International Affairs @ Georgia Institute of Technology Molly Cochran 99, Assistant
Professor of International Affairs at Georgia Institute for Technology, “Normative Theory in International Relations”,
1999, pg. 272
To conclude this chapter, while modernist and postmodernist
debates continue, while we are
still unsure as to what we can legitimately identify as a feminist ethical/political
concern, while we still are unclear about the relationship between discourse
and experience, it is particularly important for feminists that we proceed with
analysis of both the material ( institutional and structural) as well as the
discursive. This holds not only for feminists, but for all theorists oriented towards the
goal of extending further moral inclusion in the present social sciences
climate of epistemological uncertainty. Important ethical/ political concerns
hang in the balance. We cannot afford to wait for the meta-theoretical
questions to be conclusively answered . Those answers may be unavailable.
Nor can we wait for a credible vision of an alt ernative institutional order to
appear before an emancipatory agenda can be kicked into gear. Nor do we have
before us a chicken and egg question of which comes first : sorting out the
metatheoretical issues or working out which practices contribute to a
credible institutional vision. The two questions can and should be pursued
together , and can be via moral imagination. Imagination can help us think beyond discursive and material
conditions which limit us, by pushing the boundaries of those limitations in thought and examining what yields. In this respect, I believe
international ethics as pragmatic critique can be a useful ally to feminist and normative theorists generally.
 Can’t Wait for Truth
We can’t wait for truth – combining action with questioning
is best
Kratochwil, professor of international relations – European University Institute, ‘8
(Friedrich, “The Puzzles of Politics,” pg. 200-213)
The lesson seems clear. Even at the danger of “fuzzy boundaries”, when we deal with “practice” ( just as with the
“pragmatic turn”), we would be well advised to rely on the use of the term rather than on its reference (pointing to some
property of the object under study), in order to draw the bounds of sense and understand the meaning of the concept. My
argument for the fruitful character of a pragmatic approach in IR, therefore, does not depend on a comprehensive
mapping of the varieties of research in this area, nor on an arbitrary appropriation or exegesis of any specific and self-
absorbed theoretical orientation. For this reason, in what follows, I will not provide a rigidly specified definition, nor will I
refer exclusively to some prepackaged theoretical approach. Instead, I will sketch out the reasons for which a prag- matic
orientation in social analysis seems to hold particular promise. These reasons pertain both to the more general area of
knowledge appropriate for praxis and to the more specific types of investigation in the field. The follow- ing ten points are
– without a claim to completeness – intended to engender some critical reflection on both areas. ¶ Firstly, a
pragmatic approach does not begin with objects or “things” (ontology), or with
reason and method (epistemology), but with “acting” (prattein), thereby
preventing some false starts. Since, as historical beings placed in a specific situations,
we do not have the luxury of deferring decisions until we have found the
“truth”, we have to act and must do so always under time pressures and in the face of incomplete
information. Pre- cisely because the social world is characterised by strategic
interactions, what a situation “is”, is hardly ever clear ex ante, because it is
being “produced” by the actors and their interactions , and the multiple
possibilities are rife with incentives for (dis)information. This puts a premium on quick
diagnostic and cognitive shortcuts informing actors about the relevant features of the situ- ation,
and on leaving an alternative open (“plan B”) in case of unexpected difficulties. Instead of relying on certainty
and universal validity gained through abstraction and controlled experiments, we know
that completeness and attentiveness to detail, rather than to generality, matter. To that
extent, likening practical choices to simple “discoveries” of an already independently existing “reality” which discloses
itself to an “observer” – or relying on optimal strategies – is somewhat heroic. ¶ These points have been made vividly by
“realists” such as Clausewitz in his controversy with von Bülow, in which he criticised the latter’s obsession with a strategic
“science” (Paret et al. 1986). While Clausewitz has become an icon for realists, only a few of them (usually dubbed “old”
realists) have taken seriously his warnings against the misplaced belief in the reliability and use- fulness of a “scientific”
study of strategy. Instead, most of them, especially “neorealists” of various stripes, have embraced the “theory”-building
based on the epistemological project as the via regia to the creation of knowledge. A pragmatist orientation would most
certainly not endorse such a position.¶ Secondly, since acting in the social world often involves
acting “for” some- one, special responsibilities arise that aggravate both the
incompleteness of knowledge as well as its generality problem. Since we owe special
care to those entrusted to us, for example, as teachers, doctors or lawyers, we cannot just rely on what is
generally true, but have to pay special attention to the particular case . Aside
from avoiding the foreclosure of options, we cannot refuse to act on the basis of incomplete
information or insufficient know- ledge, and the necessary diagnostic will involve typification and
comparison, reasoning by analogy rather than generalization or deduction. Leaving out the particularities of a case, be it a
legal or medical one, in a mistaken effort to become “scientific” would be a fatal flaw. Moreover, there still
remains the crucial element of “timing” – of knowing when to act . Students of
crises have always pointed out the importance of this factor but, in attempts at building a general “theory” of international
politics analogously to the natural sci- ences, such elements are neglected on the basis of the “continuity of nature” and the
“large number” assumptions. Besides, “timing” seems to be quite recalcitrant to analytical treatment.
 Discourse Focus Bad
Discursive focus trades off with focus on structural change
Kidner 2k – psychology professor, David, Nature and Psyche, p 66-7
Noam Chomsky has noted that if "it's too hard to deal with real problems,' some academics tend to "go off on
wild goose chases that don't matter ... [or] get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from
any reality and that provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is." An emphasis on language can
serve this sort of defensive function; for the study of discourse enables one to stand aside
from issues and avoid any commitment to a cause or ideal, simply presenting all sides of a
debate and pointing out the discursive strategies involved. As the physical world appears
to fade into mere discourse, so it comes to seem less real than the language used to
describe it; and environmental issues lose the dimensions of urgency and tragedy and become instead the
proving grounds for ideas and attitudes. Rather than walking in what Aldo Leopold described as a "world of wounds,"
the discursive theorist can study this world dispassionately, safely insulated from the
emotional and ecological havoc that is taking place elsewhere. Like experimentalism, this
is a schizoid
pathology of our time; and it is one that supports Melanie Klein's thesis that the internal object
world can serve as a psychotic substitute for an external "real" world that is
either absent or unsatisfying." Ian Craib's description of social constructionism as a
"social psychosis" therefore seems entirely apt. But what object relations theorists such as
Klein fail to point out is the other side of this dialectic that withdrawing from the external world
and substituting an internal world of words or fantasies, because of the
actions that follow from this state of affairs, makes the former even less
satisfying and more psychologically distant, so contributing to the vicious
spiral that severs the "human" from the "natural" and abandons nature to
industrialism.
 Reality Exists
Discourse isn’t the primary shaper of reality and material
change from the plan outweighs
Thierry Balzacq 5, Professor of Political Science and IR @ Namar University, “The Three Faces of Securitization:
Political Agency, Audience and Context” European Journal of International Relations, London: Jun 2005, Volume 11,
Issue 2
However, despite important insights, this position remains highly disputable. The reason behind this qualification is not
hard to understand. With great trepidation my contention is that one of the main distinctions we need to take into account
while examining securitization is that between 'institutional' and 'brute' threats. In its attempts to follow a more radical
approach to security problems wherein threats are institutional, that is, mere products of communicative relations
between agents, the CS has neglected the importance of 'external or brute threats', that is, threats that do not
depend on language mediation to be what they are - hazards for human life. In
methodological terms, however, any framework over-emphasizing either institutional or brute threat risks losing sight of
important aspects of a multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, securitization, as suggested earlier, is successful when the
securitizing agent and the audience reach a common structured perception of an ominous development. In this scheme,
there is no security problem except through the language game. Therefore, how problems are 'out there'
is exclusively contingent upon how we linguistically depict them . This is not
always true . For one, language does not construct reality ; at best, it shapes our
perception of it. Moreover, it is not theoretically useful nor is it empirically
credible to hold that what we say about a problem would determine its
essence . For instance, what I say about a typhoon would not change it s
essence. The consequence of this position, which would require a deeper articulation, is that some security problems are
the attribute of the development itself. In short, threats are not only institutional ; some of them can
actually wreck entire political communities regardless of the use of language .
Analyzing security problems then becomes a matter of understanding how external contexts, including external
objective developments, affect securitization. Thus, far from being a departure from
constructivist approaches to security, external developments are central to it.
Impact D
 Squo Up
The world is getting better now
Yevgeniy Feyman 14, Manhattan Institute Fellow, "The Golden Age Is Now", May 23, www.city-
journal.org/2014/bc0523yf.html
Bjørn Lomborg is well-known as a climate “skeptic.” He has frequently voiced concerns that money spent battling climate change could shift
scarce resources away from more urgent global problems, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. But the most recent book by the self-proclaimed
“skeptical environmentalist” does more than just voice concern; it attempts to evaluate the damage caused by a variety of problems—from
climate change to malnutrition to war—and project future costs related to these same issues. In
How Much Have
Global Problems Cost the World?, Lomborg and a group of economists conclude
that , with a few exceptions, the world is richer, freer, healthier, and smarter than it’s
ever been . These gains have coincided with the near-universal rejection of
statism and the flourishing of capitalist principles. At a time when political figures such as New
York City mayor Bill de Blasio and religious leaders such as Pope Francis frequently remind us about the evils of unfettered capitalism, this
is a worthwhile message.¶ The
doubling of human life expectancy is one of the most
remarkable achievements of the past century. Consider, Lomborg writes, that “the
twentieth century saw life expectancy rise by about 3 months for every
calendar year.” The average child in 1900 could expect to live to just 32 years old; now that same child should make it to 70. This
increase came during a century when worldwide economic output, driven by the spread of capitalism and freedom, grew by more than
4,000 percent. These gains occurred in developed and developing countries alike; among men and women; and even in a sense among
children, as child mortality plummeted.¶ Why
are we living so much longer? Massive
improvements in public health certainly played an important role. The World Health Organization’s
global vaccination efforts essentially eradicated smallpox. But this would have been impossible
without the innovative methods of vaccine preservation developed in the private sector by British scientist Leslie Collier. Oral rehydration
therapies and antibiotics have also been instrumental in reducing child mortality. Simply put, technological progress
is the key to these gains —and market economies have liberated, and
rewarded, technological innovation.¶ People are not just living longer, but
better—sometimes with government’s help, and sometimes despite it. Even people in the developing
countries of Africa and Latin America are better educated and better fed
than ever before. Hundreds of thousands of children who would have died
during previous eras due to malnutrition are alive today. Here, we can
thank massive advancements in agricultural production unleashed by the
free market . In the 1960s, privately funded agricultural researchers bred new,
high-yield strains of corn, wheat, and various other crops thanks to
advances in molecular genetics. Globalization helped spread these
technologies to developing countries, which used them not only to feed their
people, but also to become export powerhouses . This so-called “green revolution” reinforced both
the educational progress (properly nourished children tend to learn more) and the life-expectancy gains (better nutrition leads to better
health) of the twentieth century. These children live in a world with fewer armed conflicts, netting what the authors call a “peace dividend.”
Globalization and trade liberalization have surely contributed to this more
peaceful world (on aggregate). An interdependent global economy makes
war costly.¶ Of course, problems remain. As Lomborg points out, most foreign aid likely does little to boost
economic welfare, yet hundreds of billions of dollars in “development assistance” continue to flow every year from developed countries to
the developing world. Moreover, climate change is widely projected to intensify in the second half of the twenty-first century, and will carry
with it a significant economic cost. But those familiar with the prior work of the “skeptical environmentalist” understand that
ameliorating these effects over time could prove wasteful. Lomborg notes that the latest research on climate change estimates a net cost of
0.2 to 2 percent of GDP from 2055 to 2080. The same report points out that in 2030, mitigation costs may be as high as 4 percent of GDP.
Perhaps directing mitigation funding to other priorities—curing AIDS for instance—would be a better use of the resources. ¶ Lomborg’s main
message? Ignore
those pining for the “good old days.” Thanks to the immense
gains of the past century, there has never been a better time to be alive .
The status quo is structurally improving.
Goklany 09 – Assistant Director for Science and Technology Policy, PhD electrical engineering from MSU
[Indur. “Have Increases In Population, Affluence And Technology Worsened Human And Environmental Well-Being?”]
Although global population is no longer growing exponentially, it has
quadrupled since 1900. Concurrently, affluence (or GDP per capita) has sextupled, global economic product
(a measure of aggregate consumption) has increased 23-fold and carbon dioxide has increased over 15-fold (Maddison
2003; GGDC 2008; World Bank 2008a; Marland et al. 2007).4 But contrary to Neo-Malthusian
fears, average human well-being, measured by any objective indicator, has
never been higher. Food supplies, Malthus’ original concern, are up worldwide. Global food
supplies per capita increased from 2,254 Cals/day in 1961 to 2,810 in 2003
(FAOSTAT 2008). This helped reduce hunger and malnutrition worldwide . The proportion of the
population in the developing world, suffering from chronic hunger declined
from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1969-71 and 2001-2003 despite an 87
percent population increase (Goklany 2007a; FAO 2006). The reduction in hunger and
malnutrition, along with improvements in basic hygiene, improved access to
safer water and sanitation, broad adoption of vaccinations, antibiotics,
pasteurization and other public health measures, helped reduce mortality
and increase life expectancies. These improvements first became evident in today’s developed countries
in the mid- to late-1800s and started to spread in earnest to developing countries from the 1950s. The infant mortality rate
in developing countries was 180 per 1,000 live births in the early 1950s; today it is 57. Consequently, global life
expectancy, perhaps the single most important measure of human well-being, increased from 31 years in 1900 to 47 years
in the early 1950s to 67 years today (Goklany 2007a).  Globally, average annual per capita
incomes tripled since 1950. The proportion of the world’s population
outside of high-income OECD countries living in absolute poverty  (average
consumption of less than $1 per day in 1985 International dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity),  fell from 84
percent in 1820 to 40 percent in 1981 to 20 percent in 2007  (Goklany 2007a; WRI 2008; World Bank
2007). Equally important, the world is more literate and better educated . Child
labor in low income countries declined from 30 to 18 percent between 1960 and 2003.  In most countries,
people are freer politically, economically and socially to pursue their goals
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 has never been greater. It is easier to transcend the bonds of caste, place, gender, and other
accidents of birth in the lottery of life. People work fewer hours, and have more money and better health to enjoy their
leisure time (Goklany 2007a). Figure 3 summarizes the U.S. experience over the 20th century with respect to growth of
population, affluence, material, fossil fuel energy and chemical consumption, and life expectancy. It indicates that
population has multiplied 3.7-fold; income, 6.9-fold; carbon dioxide emissions, 8.5-fold; material use, 26.5-fold; and
organic chemical use, 101-fold. Yet its life expectancy increased from 47 years to 77 years and infant mortality (not shown)
declined from over 100 per 1,000 live births to 7 per 1,000. It is also important to note that not only are people living
longer, they are healthier. The disability rate for seniors declined 28 percent between 1982 and 2004/2005 and, despite
better diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and heart and respiratory diseases) occur 8– 11 years laternow than a
century ago (Fogel 2003; Manton et al. 2006). If similar figures could be constructed for other countries, most would
indicate qualitatively similar trends, especially after 1950, except Sub-Saharan Africa and the erstwhile members of the
Soviet Union. In the latter two cases, life expectancy, which had increased following World War II, declined after the late
1980s to the early 2000s, possibly due poor economic performance compounded, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, by
AIDS, resurgence of malaria, and tuberculosis due mainly to poor governance (breakdown of public health services) and
other manmade causes (Goklany 2007a, pp.66-69, pp.178-181, and references therein). However, there are signs of a
turnaround, perhaps related to increased economic growth since the early 2000s, although this could, of course, be a
temporary blip (Goklany 2007a; World Bank 2008a). Notably, in most areas of the world, the
health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE), that is, life expectancy adjusted
downward for the severity and length of time spent by the average
individual in a less-than-healthy condition, is greater now than the
unadjusted life expectancy was 30 years ago. HALE for the China and India in 2002, for
instance, were 64.1 and 53.5 years, which exceeded their unadjusted life expectancy of 63.2 and 50.7 years in 1970-1975
(WRI 2008). Figure 4, based on cross country data, indicates that contrary to
Neo-Malthusian fears, both life expectancy and infant mortality improve
with the level of affluence (economic development) and time, a surrogate for technological change (Goklany
2007a). Other indicators of human well-being that improve over time and as affluence rises are: access to safe water and
sanitation (see below), literacy, level of education, food supplies per capita, and the prevalence of malnutrition (Goklany
2007a, 2007b). 
 A2 Endless War
No risk of endless war
Gray 7—Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at
the University of Reading, graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, Founder and Senior Associate to the
National Institute for Public Policy, formerly with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson
Institute (Colin, July, “The Implications of Preemptive and Preventive War Doctrines: A
Reconsideration”, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ssi10561/ssi10561.pdf)
7. A policy that favors preventive warfare expresses a futile quest for absolute security. It could do so. Most controversial
policies contain within them the possibility of misuse. In the hands of a paranoid or boundlessly
ambitious political leader, prevention could be a policy for endless warfare.
However, the American political system, with its checks and balances, was
designed explicitly for the purpose of constraining the executive
from excessive folly. Both the Vietnam and the contemporary Iraqi experiences
reveal clearly that although the conduct of war is an executive prerogative, in practice that
authority is disciplined by public attitudes . Clausewitz made this point superbly with his designation of
the passion, the sentiments, of the people as a vital component of his trinitarian theory of war. 51 It is true to claim that
power can be, and indeed is often, abused, both personally and nationally. It is possible that a state could acquire a taste
for the apparent swift decisiveness of preventive warfare and overuse the option. One might argue that the easy success
achieved against Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, provided fuel for the urge to seek a similarly rapid success against Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq. In other words, the delights of military success can be habit forming. On balance, claim seven is not
persuasive, though it certainly contains a germ of truth. A country with unmatched wealth and power, unused to physical
insecurity at home—notwithstanding 42 years of nuclear danger, and a high level of gun crime—is vulnerable to demands
for policies that supposedly can restore security. But  we ought not to endorse the argument that
the United States should eschew the preventive war option because it could lead
to a futile, endless search for absolute security. One might as well argue
that the United States should adopt a defense policy and develop capabilities shaped strictly for homeland security
approached in a narrowly geographical sense. Since a president might misuse a military
instrument that had a global reach, why not deny the White House even the
possibility of such misuse? In other words, constrain policy ends by limiting
policy’s military means. This argument has circulated for many decades and, it must be admitted, it does
have a certain elementary logic. It is the opinion of this enquiry, however, that the claim that a policy
which includes the preventive option might lead to a search for total security
is not at all convincing. Of course, folly in high places is always possible, which is one of the many reasons
why popular democracy is the superior form of government . It would be absurd to permit the fear
of a futile and dangerous quest for absolute security to preclude prevention
as a policy option. Despite its absurdity, this rhetorical charge against
prevention is a stock favorite among prevention’s critics. It should be
recognized and dismissed for what it is, a debating point with little
pragmatic merit. And strategy, though not always policy, must be nothing if not
pragmatic.
 A2 Subject Formation
Don’t prioritize ontology or subjectivity---Subject formation is
not inherently violent and doesn’t dictate broader politics
Nancy Fraser 95, “False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,” Ch 3 in Feminist
Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, p 68, google books
This brings me to the second set of claims implicit in Butler's post- structuralist account of subjectivity—
normative, as opposed to onto- logical , claims. Such claims arise, first, in relation to the social practices through which subjects are
constituted. Here Butler follows Foucault in claiming that practices of subiectivation are also practices of subjection. Like him, she
insists that subjects are constituted through exclusion ; some people are authorized to speak
authorita- tively because others are silenced. Thus, in Butler's view, the consti- tution of a class of
authorized subiects entails "the creation of a domain of deauthorized
subjects, pre-subjects, figures of abjection , populations erased from view." ¶ But is
it really the case that no one can become the subject of speech without
others' being silenced? Are there no counterexamples? Where such
exclusions do exist, are they all bad? Are they all equally bad? Can we
distinguish legitimate from illegitimate exclusions, better from worse
practices Of subiectivation? Is subject-authorization inherently a zero-sum
game? Or does it only become one in oppressive societies? Can we
overcome or at least ameliorate the asymmetries in current practices Of
subjectivation? Can we construct practices, institutions, and forms of life in
which the empowerment Of some does not entail the disempowerment Of
others? If not, what is the point Of feminist struggle? ¶ Butler offers no help in thinking about these issues. Nor
can she, I submit, so long as she fails to integrate critical-theoretical considera- tions into her poststructuralist Foucauldian framework.
That frame- work, I have argued elsewhere, is structurally incapable of providing satlsfactory answers to the normative questions it
unfailingly solicits.13 It needs modification and supplementation, therefore, in order to be fully adequate to the feminist project. In addition
to her claims about the social practices of subiectiva- tion, Butler also makes normative claims about the relative merits of different theories
of subjectivity. She claims that some such theories are "politically insidious," whereas others are progressive or emanci- patory. On the
insidious side is the view of subjectivity as possessing an ontologically intact reflexivity that is not an effect of cultural processes of
subjectivation. This view, according to Butler, is a "ruse of power" and an "instrument Of cultural imperialism." ¶ Is it really ?
There is no denying that foundationalist theories of subjectivity have often

functioned as instruments of cultural imperialism. But is that due to

conceptual necessity or historical contingency? In fact, there are cases where
such theories have had emancipatory effects —witness the French
Revolution and the appropriation Of its foundationalist view of subjectivity by
the Haitian "Black Jacobin, Toussaint de I 'Ouverture.14 These examples
show that it is not possible to deduce a single, univocal political valence from
a theory of subjectivity . Such theories, too, are bits of cultural discourse whose meanings are subject to "resignification.
¶ How, then, should we resolve the Benhabib-Butler dispute over "the death of man"? I conclude that Butler is right in maintaining that a
culturally constructed subject can also be a critical subject, but that the terms in which she formulates the point give rise to difficul- ties.
Specifically, "resignification" is not an adequate substitute for "critique, since it surrenders the normative moment. Likewise, the view that
subiectivation necessarily entails subjection precludes nor- mative distinctions between better and worse subjectivating practices. ¶ Finally,
the view that foundationalist theories of subjectivity are inherently
oppressive is historically disconfirmed , and it is conceptually incompatible with a contextualist theory of
meaning. The upshot, then, is that feminists need to develop an alternative conceptualiza- tion of the subject, one that integrates Butler's
poststructuralist emphasis on construction with Benhabib's critical-theoretical stress on critique.
 A2 Root Cause of War
No root cause of war – we have to address the
circumstances that allow underlying aggressions to be
expressed
Moore 4 – Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia, 7-time Presidential appointee, & Honorary
Editor of the American Journal of International Law, Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace, John Norton
Moore, pages 41-2
If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and an
absence of effective deterrence, what is the role of the many traditional "causes" of war?
Past, and many contemporary, theories of war have focused on the role of specific
disputes between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty or social injustice, competition for
resources, incidents and accidents, greed, fear, and perceptions of "honor," or many other such factors. Such
factors may well play a role in motivating aggression or in serving as a means for generating fear and manipulating public
opinion. The reality, however, is that while some of these may have more potential to contribute
to war than others, there may well be an infinite set of motivating factors, or human
wants, motivating aggression. It is not the independent existence of such motivating
factors for war but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high risk
decisions leading to war that is the key to more effectively controlling war. And the
same may also be true of democide. The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on "ethnic conflict," as
though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other through spontaneous combustion, distracted our attention
from the reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan
Tutsis as well as its Hutu opponents.I1 Certainly if we were able to press a
button and end poverty, racism, religious intolerance, injustice, and endless
disputes, we would want to do so. Indeed, democratic governments must remain
committed to policies that will produce a better world by all measures of
human progress. The broader achievement of democracy and the rule of law will itself assist in this
progress. No one, however, has yet been able to demonstrate the kind of robust
correlation with any of these "traditional" causes of war  as is reflected in the
"democratic peace." Further, given the  difficulties in overcoming many of these
social problems , an approach to war exclusively dependent on their
solution may be to  doom us to war for generations to come.

There’s no one root cause of war - prefer our proximate causes

Sharp 8 – senior associate deputy general counsel for intelligence at the US Department of Defense, Dr. Walter,
“Democracy and Deterrence”, Air Force University Press, May
While classical liberals focused on political structures, socialists analyzed
the socioeconomic system of states as the primary factor in determining the propensity of states to engage
in war. Socialists such as Karl Marx attributed war to the class structure of society; Marx believed that war resulted from a
clash of social forces created by a capitalist mode of production that develops two antagonistic classes, rather than being
an instrument of state policy. Thus capitalist states would engage in war because of their growing needs for raw materials,
markets, and cheap labor. Socialists believed replacing capitalism with socialism
could prevent war, but world events have proven socialists wrong as well .32
These two schools of thought—war is caused by innate biological drives or social
institutions—do not demonstrate any meaningful correlation with the occurrence
or nonoccurrence of war. There are many variables not considered by these two
schools: for example, the influence of national special interest groups such as the military
or defense contractors that may seek glory through victory, greater resources,
greater domestic political power, or justification for their existence. Legal
scholar Quincy Wright has conducted one of the “most thorough studies of the nature of
war”33 and concludes that there “is no single cause of war.”34 In A Study of War, he
concludes that peace is an equilibrium of four complex factors: military and industrial
technology, international law governing the resort to war, social and political organization at the domestic and
international level, and the distribution of attitudes and opinions concerning basic values. War is likely when controls on
any one level are disturbed or changed.35 Similarly, the 1997 US National Military Strategy identifies the root causes of
conflict as political, economic, social, and legal conditions.36 Moore has compiled the following list
of conventional explanations for war: specific disputes; absence of dispute
settlement mechanisms; ideological disputes; ethnic and religious
differences; communication failures; proliferation of weapons and arms
races; social and economic injustice; imbalance of power; competition for resources ;
incidents, accidents, and miscalculation; violence in the nature of man; aggressive national
leaders; and economic determination. He has concluded, however, that these causes or motives for war explain specific
conflicts but fail to serve as a central paradigm for explaining the cause of war.37
 Ontology Doesn’t Cause Violence
Ascribing violence to abstract metaphysical ideas is essentialist
and wrong---ontology does not determine politics
Joseph M. Schwartz 8, The Future of Democratic Equality, p 59-60, google books
To contend that only an anti-foundationalist epistemology can sustain , anti-realist

democracy is to argue for a foundational metaphysical grounding for the

precisely

democratic project. It is to contend that one’s epistemology determines

one’s politics . Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz where some attributed “reactionary” and “left cultural conservatism” to belief

in “reactionary” “foundationalist humanism”42 Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist conception of identity. For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that democratic feminists must embrace the post-structuralist
“non-definability of woman” as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a “woman.”43 But this is itself a “closed” position and runs counter to the practices of many democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a
pluralist, yet collective identity around the shared experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society (of course, realizing that working-class women and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from the patriarchy

has there ever existed a mass social

experienced by middle-class white women).¶ One query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves:

movement that defined its primary “ethical” values as being those of

“ instability and flux ”? Certainly many sexual politics activists are cognizant of the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual and gender identity. But only a small (disproportionately university

educated) segment of the women’s and gay and lesbian movement would subscribe to (or even be aware of) the core principles of post-structuralist “anti-essentialist epistemology.” Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the state should
protect their rights to express their sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why some identities should be considered open and democratic and others exclusionary and anti-democratic. That is, how could
post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or Klan “ethics” are antithetical to a democratic society—and that a democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of “agonal” (e.g. harassing forms of behavior against minorities) struggle
on the part of such anti-democratic groups.¶ A politics of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a whole-hearted epistemological critique of “enlightenment rationality.” For implicit to any radical democratic project is a
belief in the equal moral worth of persons; to embrace such a position renders one at least a “critical defender” of enlightenment values of equality and justice, even if one rejects “enlightenment metaphysics” and believes that such values are

democratic norms are developed by political practice and

often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course,

struggle rather than by abstract philosophical argument . But this is a sociological and historical reality rather than a

trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their politics in coherent ontologies
and epistemologies ; and even among trained philosophers there is no necessary connection
between one’s metaphysics and one’s politics . There have, are , and will be Kantian
conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen; Sosuan Okin); teleologists, left, center,
and right anti-universalist feminists and quasi-
(Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown)

universalist, Habermasian feminists ¶ Post-structuralists try to (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser).

read off from ontology a politics; such attempts simply replace

an epistemology or

enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern meta-narratives (allegedly anti-) . Such

efforts represent an idealist effort to read social version of the materialist —which post-structuralists explicitly condemn—

consciousness off the structural position of “the agent.” A democratic political theory must offer both a theory of social

post-structuralist
structure and of the social agents capable of building such a society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and Derrida),

theory has abandoned the institutional analysis of social theory for the
idealism of abstract philosophy .
Link Turns
 Governmental Violence
Perm do the plan and _______.
The plan is a direct challenge to governmental violence – the
alt’s failure to call for an end to the US military presence is
complicit in government atrocities
Kramer 11 (Nicholas Kramer a former associate investigator for an oversight & investigations (O&I) committee in
the United States Senate. "Commending Torturers Uganda : Another US Military Adventure" October 24, 2011
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29495.htm) JP
If only we could trust governments to make good and moral decisions that would
always reflect what we would do as individuals. Unfortunately for us all, theUS government is not
known for this, especially when it comes to propping up authoritarian regimes, arming dictators with weapons to
use against their own people, and training military-types to more effectively and efficiently torture and otherwise “control”
human beings. See, for example, US military “aid” to Afghanistan, Bahrain, Colombia, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, Iraq,
Jordan, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Lebanon, Oman, Turkey, and the West Bank/Gaza, all of whom received more
than $100 million each just between 2002 and 2004 and tend to be regularly cited by even the US State department for
things such as ethnic/minority oppression, oppression of women, threats to civil liberties, child exploitation, religious
persecution, and judicial/prison abuses. The simple truth is that throughout history, violence perpetrated by governments
(often against their own people) tends to far outstrip violence perpetrated by non-state actors, including terrorist
organizations, rebel groups, and individual criminals. This is not because governments are any less moral than violent
non-state actors, but rather because governments have more resources at their disposal with which to wreak their terror.
In his statement celebrating the enactment of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery
Act of 2009, Barack Obama commended the government of Uganda “for its efforts to stabilize the northern part of the
country” against the LRA and noted that we “have supported regional governments as they worked to provide for their
people’s security.” The people of Uganda might wonder exactly when it is that their
government is providing for their “security”: is it when Ugandan women are gang
raped by members of the military and/or police? Or perhaps it is when state security
forces mutilate the genitals of Ugandan men through kicking, beating with sticks,
puncturing with hypodermic needles, and tying the penis with wire or weights. These are just a few
examples of the “efforts” of the Ugandan government in what Human Rights
Watch describes as a “state-sanctioned campaign of political suppression”
which includes “illegal and arbitrary detention and unlawful
killing/extrajudicial executions, and using torture to force victims to confess
to links to the government’s past political opponents or current rebel groups” in its 2004
report State of Pain: Torture in Uganda. The details of violence and torture are difficult to even read, but it is
important to understand exactly what sort of activities our government is
supporting in our names. Put yourself, for instance, in Derrick’s shoes – his story was also recounted in the Human
Rights Watch report mentioned above. One day in Uganda, Derrick was riding in a bus which was hijacked by five or six
armed members of the Ugandan military in civilian clothes. The men pulled two passengers from the bus, executed them,
and then asked Derrick if he knew them. When he denied it, they started beating him, shoved a gun into his mouth, then
dragged him to the headquarters of the Ugandan military intelligence organization. He was there beaten with an electrical
wire and a hammer, cut deeply with a knife across his back, stabbed in his testicles with needles, and finally shocked and
burned with electricity before he lost consciousness. He woke up under the steps of a nearby building; his captors
apparently had no more use for him. Now put yourself more realistically in the shoes of his torturers and their employer,
the Ugandan government, which Barack Obama commends. Make no mistake: it is they who we support with our “aid” –
not Derrick, and certainly not the people of Uganda. Ending the threat to Ugandan civilians
posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army is a noble goal (for who and under what authority are
separate questions). But at what moral cost do American military personnel
“advise” the Ugandan military? When we support brutal governments in
foreign countries – be it through aid, training, or troops on the ground – there are real and
lasting consequences for the people who live there . There are many reasons
to oppose the US incursion into Uganda (the risk of blowback, the chance of escalation, the
furtherance of the imperial presidency, the financial cost, the practical fact that we can’t intervene everywhere, and so on),
but the most important argument is moral. In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly called the United States government
“the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He was not seeking merely to criticize, but rather to acknowledge
the moral hypocrisy of his calls for non-violence in the civil rights movement while implicitly supporting the violent
actions of his own government. “For the sake of those boys,” he continued, “for the sake of this government, for the sake of
the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” For the sake of us all, we
cannot be silent now. It is fundamentally immoral to arm, train, or otherwise “advise”
any government that engages in torture and/or other forms of repression, no matter who
our common enemy may be. As the still-reigning greatest purveyor of violence
worldwide, the single most important action the United States government
could take against the horrors of the world would be to stop contributing to
them. Please join me in demanding an immediate end to US military
operations in and aid to the Ugandan government.
 Colonialism
The US military presence is an outgrowth of colonialism – the
plan challenges it
Pheko 12 [(Motsoko, author of several books and a former Member of Parliament in South Africa) “UGANDAN
OIL: US Africa Command a tool to Recolonise the African Continent” Global Research, March 15, 2012] AT
The USA Africa Command, which America calls ‘Africom’, is a military structure of the
Defence Department of America. Africom was formed in 2007 during President George W Bush’s
second term of office. That was two months after America had bombed a small African country, Somalia, destabilising it to
the ashes it is today and to the danger it now poses to Africa and international trade. The coast of Somalia is infested with
sea piracy and kidnappings. This is as a result of the earlier American invasion of Somalia, in pursuit of its illegitimate
economic interests in Africa. The political instability of Somalia has now caused the problem of ‘terrorism’ for East African
countries such as Kenya. In October 2011, the Institute of Security Studies held a seminar in Pretoria, South Africa, on
United States’ security policy in Africa and the role of the US Africa Command. The main speaker was the American
Ambassador to South Africa. He presented what was a ‘non-military insider’s perspective on the United States’ Africa
Command.’ This way he was supposedly to ‘separate facts from fiction and rumours and deal directly with misconceptions
and misapprehensions about Africom.’ The American apologists of Africom suggested that
the creation of this American military structure under the American Defence Department
‘has turned out to be different from what the US A government had originally
envisioned and what the United States of America had originally perceived, having quickly foresworn locating its
headquarters in Africa.’ It seems that even in this 21st century the United States of America government does
not respect the sovereignty of African states and the territorial integrity of
the continent. If it did, it would know that Africans have national and continental interests and the right to
protect them. Assistance should be solicited. Those who need assistance know what kind of assistance they want. The
United States of America has no right to prescribe Africom on Africa even at the expense of dividing Africa and weakening
the African Union. America wants its own interests to prevail over those of Africa.
Africans have a painful history of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, racism and
colonialism by nations that claim to be ‘civilised’ but have behaviour that is
contrary to civilisation. They dehumanised Africa’s people and saw nothing
wrong with that. They have never shown any remorse for their inhuman
deeds to Africans or offered any reparations for the colossal damage they
inflicted on Africans. America’s persistence to impose Africom on Africa
proves this beyond reasonable doubt. UGANDA N OIL AND AMERICAN TROOPS TO ‘HELP’
Uganda suffered unspeakable atrocities under Idi Amin’s government that was
installed by Britain under Prime Minister Edward Heath. The British government did not like the socialist
policies of President Milton Obote. Idid Amin killed many Ugandans. They included the Anglican Archbishop Janani
Luwum. After the overthrow of Idid Amin, there emerged Joseph Kony, leader of what he calls the Lord’s
Resistance Army. Kony has murdered thousands of Ugandans . This included kidnapping hundreds of
Ugandan children who he forced to join his army to fight the Ugandan government. Many of those children were killed in
the senseless war. This has gone on for over 20 years. The US government never approached Uganda or the
African Union or its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity, to ask how the United States could help. Now
there is discovery of oil in Uganda. Almost immediately, there are reports
that US government has sent an army to Uganda to find Joseph Kony and rescue
Uganda’s children. Why did America not make this offer long before Uganda discovered this oil wealth? Acquisition
of Africa’s resources is the chief purpose of Africom, not the development of Africa. WILL
US ALLOW RUSSIAN OR CHINESE ARMY INSIDE AMERICA? Some African countries have been
threatened with sanctions and ‘regime change.’ One of them is Libya, where Colonel
Maummar Gaddafi was killed under the dark cloud of NATO and United States of America. When Africans raise concerns
about ‘Africom’ they are said to suffer ‘misconceptions, misapprehensions, rumours, and fiction.’ Now, is the United States
of America government prepared to allow Russia or China to establish their own ‘American Command’ and call it
‘Americom’ in pursuit of their national interests in America? How would Americans react to this? Would they go to the
streets and say, ‘Welcome messiah!’ Anyway, the architect of ‘Africom’ President George W Bush has said that the United
States’ Africa Command ‘will co-ordinate all United States security interests throughout Africa.’ If this is not imperialist
arrogance and contempt for the sovereignties of African States, then the proponents of ‘Africom’ must be sent to a mental
hospital for treatment. VICE ADMIRAL MOELLER HAS SPILLED BEANS ABOUT AFRICOM Vice Admiral Moeller was
the man President George W Bush entrusted with the mission of Africom. Moeller knew that mission in and out. At the
United States’ Africa Command Conference held at Fort McNair on 18 February 2008, this American
head of
‘Africom’ declared that, ‘Protecting the free flow of natural resources from
Africa to the global market is one of Africom’s guiding principles.’ Admiral
Moeller specifically cited ‘oil disruption’, ‘terrorism’ and the growing
influence of China as a major challenge to United States’ interests in Africa.
Africom is organised by the office of the Under-Secretary of Defence for Forces Transformation Resources and National
Security Policy at the National Defence University Fort McNair, Washington D.C.
 White Savior Complex
The US military presence in Uganda is part and parcel of a
colonial strategy that portrays the US as a savior of the helpless
African
Mackey 12 [(Robert Mackey, reporter for The New York Times, where I am was the editor and main writer of The
Lede, a news blog, and a contributor to Timescast) African Critics of Kony Campaign See a 'White Man's Burden' for the
Facebook Generation, Lede 3-9-2012] AT
As my colleagues David Goodman and Jennifer Preston explain, a viral marketing campaign to raise awareness of the
suffering inflicted on African children by the warlord Joseph Kony has dominated social media conversations this week,
despite concerns that the young Americans behind it might be spreading factual inaccuracies and wasting donors’ money.
While much of the backlash reported in the American news media this week cited objections raised by development
experts in the United States and Europe, several African bloggers and activists have objected to what they see as more
fundamental problems. Among them, the possibility that the “ Kony 2012″ campaign reinforces the old
idea, once used to justify colonial exploitation, that Africans are helpless and
need to be saved by Westerners. Many African critics of the new effort to make Mr. Kony, the brutal
leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a household name in the United States — five months after President Obama
pleased Human Rights Watch and annoyed Rush Limbaugh by dispatching military advisers to aid in his capture — said it
echoed the ideas in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to urge Americans to embrace
their imperial destiny and rule over the “new-caught, sullen peoples,” of the Philippines — even though the typical native
was “half-devil and half-child.” In a critique of the campaign posted on YouTube, Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger,
observed that the filmmaker behind the “Kony 2012″ viral video calling for action “plays so much on
the idea that this war has been going on because millions of Americans” and
other Westerners, “have been ignorant about it.” Speaking directly to the camera, Ms.
Kagumire added: this is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children. We have seen
these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia, you know, it does not end the problem. I think we need to
have kind of sound, intelligent campaigns that are geared towards real policy shifts, rather than a very sensationalized
story that is out to make one person cry, and at the end of the day, we forget about it. I think it’s all about trying to make a
difference, but how do you tell the story of Africans? It’s much more important what the story is,
actually, because ifyou are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless… you shouldn’t be
telling my story if you don’t believe that I also have the power to change
what is going on. And this video seems to say that the power lies in America, and it does not lie with my
government, it does not lie with local initiatives on the ground, that aspect is lacking. And this is the problem, it is
furthering that narrative about Africans: totally unable to help themselves
and needing outside help all the time. A Ugandan journalist, Angelo Izama, took up the same
theme, arguing that all such campaigns aimed at “saving hapless Africans,” were problematic because, “ the
simplicity of the ‘good versus evil,'” narrative, “where good is inevitably
white/Western and bad is black or African, is also reminiscent of some of the
worst excesses of the colonial-era interventions.” In an angry blog post, dismissing the Kony
campaign as a “fund-raising stunt,” the Ugandan-American activist TMS Ruge wrote: “We as Africans, especially the
diaspora, are waking to the idea that our agency has been hijacked for far too long by well-meaning Western do-gooders
with a guilty conscience, sold on the idea that Africa’s ills are their responsibility.” He added: Africa is our problem, we
hereby respectfully request you let us handle our own matters. We will make mistakes here and there, sure. That is
expected. But the trade-off of writing our own destiny far outweighs the self-assigned guilt the world assigned to us. If you
really want to help, keep the guilt and charity in your backyard. Bring instead, respect, and the humility to let us
determine our destiny. As Max Fisher reported for The Atlantic, the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole, responded to
the Kony campaign on Twitter with “Seven thoughts on the banality of sentimentality.” In his biting critique,
Mr. Cole wrote that the American charity behind the Kony campaign, Invisible Children, was
part of what he called
the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” along with the economist Jeffrey Sachs, The Times Op-Ed
columnist Nicholas Kristof and the organizers of the TED conferences on technology, entertainment and design. Watching
the viral hubbub over the campaign build from North Africa, the Egyptian activist Mosa’ab Elshamy was distinctly
unimpressed. Mr. Elshamy, who took part in the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak last year, and
documented it on Twitter, told The Lede: “I felt awkward about the whole thing without even reading the tons of critiques
on the Internet. It just doesn’t make sense: the whole exploiting teenagers to buy bracelets and paint graffiti just to make
them feel they’ve done something.” On the brighter side, he observed, the campaign did at least generate some inspired
comedy, in the form of an online photo book imagining how the entire thing might have been dreamed up at the White
House to justify President Obama’s deployment of troops to Africa. Updated: After this post was originally published, the
blogger Rosebell Kagumire pointed to an outraged open letter to Jason Russell, the American filmmaker behind Invisible
Children and the “Kony2012″ video, written by Amber Ha, a student at Columbia University. Ms. Ha wrote: “Last year I
went to Gulu, Uganda, where Invisible Children is based, and interviewed over 50 locals. Every single person questioned
Invisible Children’s legitimacy and intention.” On her blog, Ms. Ha also posted a link to a response to the video from
Adam Branch, an American expert on “the politics of human rights intervention,” who currently lives and works in
Kampala, Uganda. Writing on the Web site of Uganda’s Makerere Institute of Social Research, Mr. Branch observed: “As
someone who has worked in and done research on the war in northern Uganda for over a decade, much of it with a local
human rights organization based in Gulu, the Invisible Children organization and their videos have infuriated me to no
end.” He added: My frustration with the group has largely reflected the concerns expressed so eloquently by those
individuals who have been willing to bring the fury of Invisible Children’s true believers down upon themselves in order to
point out what is wrong with what this group of young Americans is doing: the warmongering, the self-
indulgence, the commercialization, the
reductive and one-sided story they tell, their
portrayal of Africans as helpless children in need of rescue by white
Americans, and the fact that civilians in Uganda and central Africa may have to pay
a steep price in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good
about themselves, and a few can make good money. This, of course, is sickening, and I think that Kony
2012 is a case of Invisible Children having finally gone too far. They are now facing a backlash from people of conscience
who refuse to abandon their capacity to think for themselves…. Invisible Children is a symptom, not a cause. It
is an excuse that the US government has gladly adopted in order to help
justify the expansion of their military presence in central Africa. Invisible
Children are “useful idiots,” being used by those in the US government who seek to
militarize Africa, to send more and more weapons and military aid, and to
build the power of military rulers who are US allies. The hunt for Joseph
Kony is the perfect excuse for this strategy—how often does the US
government find millions of young Americans pleading that they intervene
militarily in a place rich in oil and other resources? The US government would be pursuing this
militarization with or without Invisible Children—Kony 2012 just makes it a bit easier. Therefore, it is the
militarization we need to worry about, not Invisible Children.
 Africa As Evil
And the US military presence is part of the whiteness they
critique
Daniels 12 [(Jessie Daniels, professor (CUNY), author (White Lies, Cyber Racism), and digital media activist
(Racism Review) Kony 2012: Whiteness, Social Media and Africa -, No Publication 3-15-2012] AT
It’s this moment, and the image here, that carry the central message of the film, and it has much to say
about “whiteness.” It is, in effect, a white savior film with social media added in. This film
is, (as Richard Dyer argues about another film) “organized around a rigid binarism: with
white standing for modernity, reason, order, stability and black standing for
backwardness, irrationality, chaos and violence” (1988:49). The added
dimension of social media also gets coded as constitutive of whiteness. As the
voice over narration in the video observes, “we’re living in a new world, a Facebook world.” And, this new world
is going to “stop” the atrocities of the “old, primitive” world. You see this throughout
the video in the large crowd shots of the young people involved in the ‘Invisible Children’ campaign, who are almost
universally white, are presented as the image of the ‘new, Facebook world’ intent on saving Africa. This is a deeply ironic
claim given the importance of mobile technology throughout the continent, often at rates that out-pace the U.S. The
absurdity of this is playfully skewered in the “First Day on the Internet Kid” meme (“Share Kony Video, I Fixed Africa”).
Yet, the more serious implications here are the ways that this kind of white racial frame is rooted
in colonialism. The notion that Jason Russell – a white, heterosexual, American man – is
going to “stop”and “fix” the problems in Uganda ignores the work already
happening there in favor of a white-led campaign advocating military intervention. One of the moments the
video portrays as a victory #StopKony campaign is the order by President Obama to send troops to Uganda. The
iconography of (predominantly white) U.S. troops with “boots on the ground” in
Africa, flying an American flag conjures the very essence of colonialism and
whiteness. The Kony 2012 video’s binarism is, in the broadest sense, racist but not in the narrower sense of
operating within a notion of intrinsic, unalterable, biological differences between groups of people (Dyer 1988:51). There
is also a strong theme of evolutionism in the video as well, that the, good, liberal whites portrayed in the video are charting
a path of progress that is potentially open to all. The video takes pains to draw a distinction
between the “bad African,” Joseph Kony, to save the “good African,” Jacob Acaye,
who we learn aspires to be a lawyer (as in the image above). Jacob, unlike Joseph Kony, is portrayed as
reasonable, rational, humane, and liberal. White viewers are invited to root for (if not identify
with) Jacob Acaye, and in so doing, the film positions itself as ‘white savior’ of this young man and the other children he
represents. Kony 2012 is, then, an endorsement of the moral superiority of white values of reason, order, and now social
media against the supposed chaos and violence of Africa.
 * Militarism + Africa Evil
US military presence in Uganda is the institutionalization of a
securitized narrative that portrays Africa as evil to justify global
militarism
Kouveld 13 [(Thomas, MA in Conflict Studies and Human Rights at Utrecht University) “Cosmopolitan
Warmongering in Uganda A Discursive Approach to Kony 2012” Utrecht University 07-08-2013] AT
Kony
However, the low degree of commitment to the mission by most member states involved leads to the belief that
is still a convenient political excuse for increased militarization of this
region in central Africa. It is generally believed that the reason the LRA was never defeated
was not because of its military supremacy or guerrilla warfare tactics, but because it gave Ugandan
president Yoweri Museveni effective tools for his reign. First of all, the constant
threat of the LRA allowed Museveni to increase spending on defence,
thereby creating the strongest army in the region. This in turn made Museveni
an important partner to western powers on the frontline against Islamic
extremism in the early nineties and later the global War against Terror, leading to increased
foreign donor streams (Mwenda in Allen & Vlassenroot 2010: 51) Second of all, Kony is an Acholi from the northern
part of Uganda. A history of ethnic strife between north and south Uganda, initiated by colonial powers, has been the
foundation of many violent clashes since independence. Museveni could use the boogeyman
image of Kony as a wedge between the various tribes of Uganda, using a
divide and conquer technique based on mutual fear to systematically
marginalize the northern population while keeping himself in power (2010: 54).
The current situation is showing signs of the same dynamics: there seems to be no real reason for
many involved to capture Kony, other than increased western pressure catalysed by the Kony 2012
video. The Séléka rebel takeover of CAR, from this perspective, is merely 45 convenient for all parties involved. The
Ugandan government and its allies can keep spending on defence and expand
their armies while external situations “force” them to suspend the mission
itself. Furthermore, even if the mission were to continue, the “invisible” Kony, partly built up in the west through the very
narrative Kony 2012, is somewhere ‘out there’ in the deep jungles of CAR, DRC and Sudan. The nigh
impossibility of locating him has already been established by the fact that
the American advisors’ intelligence still seems to have no idea where he is. As
such, Kony has been called “Africa’s Osama bin Laden”, the illusive national
enemy of the US, who was also impossible to locate and finally killed under mysterious circumstances (Engdahl
2012). In the end, national interests like the protection of natural resources and regional
military dominance may indeed be at play over a cosmopolitan responsibility to help those in
need. Another effect of the Kony 2012 campaign is the increasing legitimacy of US
military presence on the African continent. The increasing militarization of
Africa by the US faced a setback when the newly created AFRICOM was met with
resistance from prominent AU member states and was forced to locate itself in Stuttgart. The
AU, with Muammar Gaddafi as chair, seemed at a point in time when it had the opportunity to initiate important changes.
When Gaddafi was defeated and killed by NATO bombings, the severely weakened structure of the AU became weak again
(Glazebrook 2013). Its attempt to gain more agency for an independent Africa had failed, opening up the opportunity for
external actors to increasingly meddle in African affairs. The Kony 2012 movie promotes such
meddling. It clearly conveys the message that unless American forces assist
in the mission to capture Kony, there will be no end to civilian suffering in the
region. It promotes military intervention by US forces and asks its audience to
demand the same thing. Not long after the movie went viral, US president Obama presented his
determination to stay in Uganda. In doing so, he mirrors the drive of the US to keep boots on
the ground in Africa. Also, the lack of opposing force signifies the
international legitimacy the US has to do so. The lack of tangible results
from the military advisers seems to be taken for granted and obscured
through the confusing borderland image portrayed by Kony 2012. On a more theoretical level,
the Kony 2012 narrative upholds, perpetuates and complements borderland
imaginaries of Sub-Sahara Africa. The narrative feeds form and into popular imaginings which are
informed by the spectacular, the nocturnal and the horrible. It portrays a battle to be fought for
humanity and rationality, on the foundations of a moral 46 cosmopolitanism,
armed with the knowledge that what we do is right. Manifested in the image
of Uganda as a borderland, Kony 2012 created social space for the naming and shaming of Joseph
Kony and generated legitimacy for increased military practices against the LRA.
What this shows us is that borderland imaginaries of faraway places are still very
much part and parcel of dominant western discourse. What was emphasised, however, is
that these narratives have a very distinct goal of portraying the inhabitants of
borderlands either as victims or perpetrators. They have no agency, political
standing or self-determination, only to be subjected to misery and awaiting
salvation by western powers. The Kony 2012 narrative perpetuates this image and complements it by
adding the monstrous, nocturnal image of Joseph Kony as a “bad guy” stealing children. It thereby not only simplifies the
conflict, it simplifies victims’ suffering. The massive awareness generated by the video also promotes this way of
presenting a conflict for future campaigns. NGO staff told how impressed they were by the video’s success and that they
would certainly use it as example material for their own campaigns. This is not to say that the world will be flooded with
Konys anytime soon, but the mechanisms and metaphors used in the video may affect future aid campaigns and
legitimations for military intervention in general. When we return to the initial theoretical debate, it becomes clear that
mutually excluding explanations of humanitarian war are difficult to uphold. It is more important to
understand the workings of discourse and how it feeds from and into
existing regimes of truth to eventually be institutionalized in tangible
behaviour and power relations. The Kony 2012 campaign shows that a transnational, modern and
distinctly cosmopolitan narrative can have very real consequences in the world and that these consequences are often
challenged by other actors. It set in motion discourse, action and laid bare power dynamics underlying international
relations. On a discursive level, a battle between supporters and those who oppose it shows that theory is often put into
practice, as some support the cosmopolitan core of the narrative and many oppose it, seeing it as a way to instrumentalize
power.
 Turns Racial Policing
Militarism abroad causes violence at home – addressing policies
helps dismantle the militaristic machine and challenge violence
here
Brian Trautman 16 [(Brian Trautman, writes for PeaceVoice, is a military veteran, an instructor of peace
studies at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, MA, and a peace activist, ) Police Response in Ferguson Rooted in
Systemic Violence and Militarism, Common Dreams 2-20-2016] AT
To better understand, effectively reduce, and eventually prevent the underlying factors
which led to thew police slaying of Mike Brown and other unarmed citizens, we must
openly debate two major forms of violence prevalent in the United States:
systemic violence (aka structural violence) and militarism. Systemic violence is the type of violence
that is deeply-embedded in a nation’s social, economic, educational, political, legal and environmental frameworks, and
tends to be rooted in government policy. It is organized violence with an historical context, and often manifests in subtle
but very specific and destructive ways. Examples include entrenched racism, classism and discrimination and economic
inequality and relative poverty. Systemic violence paves the way for authoritarian and undemocratic values such as
exploitation, marginalization and repression, especially of underrepresented, underprivileged populations.
Militarism is the ideology that a nation must maintain a strong military
capability and must use, or threaten to use, force to protect and advance national
interests. America’s militaristic approach to overseas conflicts can be found
in many aspects of its domestic policies. Systemic violence and militarism
are interconnected and mutually dependent. They go hand in hand, building on and reinforcing
each other. Both define and direct American policing, which regularly treats
citizens like enemies of the state. We need not look further for an example than the military-style
police assault in Ferguson. Systemic violence and militarism are responsible for the flow of
military grade equipment such as mine resistance vehicles and semi-automatic weapons
to police departments across the country. In an op-ed I wrote last month entitled “Escalating Domestic
Warfare,” I discussed a report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on the emergence of a militarist
ethos in American policing. The ACLU’s research showed that the militarization of police has
become excessive and lethal. For example, SWAT teams are being deployed primarily to serve search
warrants in low-level drug cases, and these teams are using methods and equipment
traditionally reserved for war to do so. The ACLU also found that police militarization increased
substantially after each of three major national events: the initiation of the “War on Drugs,” the attacks of 9-11, and a
series of Supreme Court decisions which have eroded the rights guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment. Over the past two
decades, the violent crime rate in the United States has decreased sharply. The militarization of policing, then, is counter-
intuitive. Historically, nations that have militarized their police have done so not because of violent crime but rather to
rapidly quell potential mass civil uprisings against tyranny, oppression and injustice. A statement released by Veterans for
Peace (VFP), a global organization of military veterans and allies working to build a culture of peace, calls for justice for
Mike Brown and his family through, in part, “a complete, swift and transparent investigation” into his death. VFP strongly
condemns the use of violence – in any form – to secure justice. Instead, they implore protestors “to continue to channel
their anger towards building power, solidarity and creating change nonviolently…” The organization expresses deep
outrage for the state violence in Ferguson: “police over reaction to community expressions of grief and anger is the
outcome of a national mindset that violence will solve any problem.” According to VFP, the military-
industrial complex and a permanent war mentality are two major sources of
this violence: “Thirteen years of war has militarized our whole society. We
see equipment designed for the battlefield used in our nation’s streets
against our citizens. We see police in uniforms and using weapons indistinguishable from the military.”
This militaristic approach to domestic policing, says VFP, has resulted in
tragedy on our streets: “Week after week we see reports of police abuse and
killings of innocent and unarmed civilians.” Justice for the victims is often denied: “time and
time again we see police given impunity for their crimes and citizens left in disbelief wondering where to turn next.” VFP
reminds us of the repeated targeting of communities of color by police. The Ferguson protests are a natural reaction to this
legacy of mistreatment and injustice. Police brutality against young black males, in particular, VFP argues, was a powder
keg waiting to explode: “the unrest in Ferguson and similar incidents of citizen rebellions are the outcome of state abuse
and neglect, not of hoodlums and opportunists. Eventually, any people who are held down will attempt to standup.” VFP’s
statement also warns that militarism at home cannot be solved until we end our
nation’s militarism abroad: “We cannot call for peace in the streets at home
and at the same time conduct war for thirteen years in the streets of other
nations.” America's violent system of policing and its antagonistic foreign
policy are interrelated. Therefore, they must be addressed together before reforms can
be effective and help to end our culture of violence. Solutions-based approaches
begin with local, state and federal legislators acknowledging that many current laws and
policies create and fuel systemic violence and militarism. They must then find the
wisdom and muster the courage to act to change or abandon those laws and
policies. One strategy that our towns and cities can adopt to contribute to this process is nonviolent community
policing. Retired police captain Charles L. Alphin, who served for over twenty-six years in the St. Louis City Police
Department, offers suggestions for such a policing model in an article titled “Kingian Non-violence: A Practical
Application in Policing.” Alphin believes Kingian nonviolence holds great potential for American policing. He gives
examples of how this model of policing can work using Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. Alphin contends, as Dr. King
did, that how we approach policing cannot stand alone from teaching nonviolence in the school, home, streets and in every
phase of life. Alphin also explains that he applied Kingian philosophy effectively in interrogation of criminal suspects and
in the organization of communities to get at the root causes of violence and drugs, effectively empowering communities to
identify and work on these problems at the grassroots level (note: this community-based solution to violence is a feature of
the theory and practice of transformative justice). There is an urgent need for models of paramilitary policing to be
replaced with models of nonviolent community policing. Freedom and democracy are at stake. So are the lives of our
innocent citizens. The killing of Mike Brown can be a pivotal moment for how we treat the systemic violence and
militarism that produced the policing system of today. Ferguson has awakened many Americans to the realities of police
militarism on their streets and to the urgent need to demilitarize the police. We cannot afford public apathy on this issue
any longer. The people must insist on alternative models of policing that respect and protect civil and human rights. To
reverse the trend of police violence in this country, we must work to eliminate the systemic and
militaristic roots of this violence, remembering that military-style policing
is inextricably linked to America’s belligerence abroad. No matter how you slice it, the
weapons of war and other violent tactics used against Ferguson protestors will go down as a tragic chapter in American
history. Still, robust and meaningful people-powered action for progressive social change can help make this chapter a
turning point toward the positive transformation of policing in the United States. This action, change, and transformation
are inevitable because justice demands it.
 2AC Non-reformist reform
The aff is a non-reformist reform – it challenges the belief that
military presence makes us safer, which underpins US empire
globally – this is the only effective approach
Robert Naiman 10, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, President of the Board of Truthout, former policy
analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, “Why
Peaceniks Should Care About the Afghanistan Study Group Report,” The Seminal—a FireDogLake blog, September 10th,
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/70379
On the other hand, peace activists can't be satisfied with being right; they also are
morally compelled to try to be effective. And part of being effective is giving
consideration to, and seeking to publicize, arguments are likely to end the
war sooner rather than later. It's not likely, for example, that discussing ways in which the
war might be useful for the long-term maintenance of the "capitalist world
system" will turn the Washington debate against war in the short run. If, on the other
hand, central to the official story is a claim that the war is a war against Al Qaeda, but senior U.S. officials publicly concede
that there is no significant Al Qaeda presence today in Afghanistan, that is certainly a fact worth knowing and spreading.
This is why it is important for as many people as possible to read and digest the short and accessible report of the
"Afghanistan Study Group" which has been publicly unveiled this week. The assumptions and conclusions of the ASG
report should be the subject of a thousand debates. But there are a few things about it that one can say without fear of
reasonable contradiction. The authors of the report oppose the war and want to end it. The principal authors of the report
are Washington insiders with a strong claim to expertise about what sort of arguments are likely to move Washington
debate. The authors of the report have a strategy for trying to move Washington
debate so that at the next fork in the road, the choice made is to de-escalate
the war and move towards its conclusion, rather than to escalate it further.
Therefore, the arguments made deserve careful consideration. They may not be particularly useful
for making posters for a demonstration. But for lobbying Congressional
staff, writing a letter to the editor, or making any other presentation to
people who are not already on our side, the arguments of the Afghanistan Study Group
are likely to be useful. Many of the authors and signers of the report are known to peace activists who follow
policy debates. Former Marine Corps captain Matthew Hoh, director of the ASG, made waves last October when he
became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war. Stephen Walt, with his co-author John
Mearsheimer, helped break open mainstream debate about U.S. policy towards Israel and the Palestinians with their book
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Juan Cole, author of the blog Informed Comment, is the author of "Engaging
the Muslim World." Robert Pape, author of "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," has documented
how U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan has produced more terrorism. Former CIA official Paul Pillar attacked the
central justification of the current military escalation in an op-ed in the Washington Post last September, arguing that
there was little reason to believe that a "safe haven" for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would have any significant bearing on the
terrorist threat to the United States. Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, author of the blog Washington Note,
originally convened the ASG. Of course, these impeccable "establishment dissident" credentials do not put the
assumptions or conclusions of the report beyond criticism. But they do make a strong case for consideration of the report.
Furthermore, the Afghanistan Study Group does break new ground politically, in the direction of ending the war. By far
the most important contribution, in my view, is the report's call for expedited and more vigorous efforts to resolve
Afghanistan's civil war through political negotiations leading to decentralization of power in Afghanistan and a power-
sharing agreement between the government and the insurgency. This call should be a commonplace, but the opposite is
currently true: people in Washington, even critics of the war, are afraid to say out loud the most important fact about
ending the war: there needs to be a political deal in Afghanistan with the Afghan Taliban insurgency. One of the most
important potential accomplishments of an experts' study group is to try to put into play key facts which experts know but
politicians are afraid to say. It's the "Murder on the Orient Express" strategy: if there's something important that no-one
wants to say, have a bunch of people say it together. If the Afghanistan Study Group makes it easier for people to say out
loud, "There needs to be a political deal with the Afghan Taliban," it will have made a major contribution to ending the
war. The second important contribution is to focus attention on the urgent need to engage "regional stakeholders,"
especially Pakistan, India, and Iran, in a political resolution of the armed conflict. In particular, current U.S. policy has
appeared to be predicated on the bizarre belief that the U.S. can cajole Pakistani decision-makers into abandoning what
they perceive to be their core national security interests in Afghanistan, rather than on the far more realistic approach of
engaging with Pakistan so that its national security concerns are met in an Afghan political settlement. The approach of
trying to "wall out" antagonistic regional actors has failed spectacularly in Afghanistan and produced much needless death
and human suffering, as it failed before in Iraq and Lebanon. If the Obama Administration would implement the course
correction in Afghanistan which the Bush Administration implemented in Iraq and Lebanon after 2006 - accepting that
antagonistic regional actors could not be walled out, and that the U.S. is better off trying to manage their influence rather
than exclude it - it would be a major step to ending the war. The third important contribution is the call for the U.S. to
reduce and eventually end its military operations in southern Afghanistan. Southern Afghanistan, the historic heartland of
the Taliban insurgency, is the focal point of the current U.S. military escalation; the current U.S. military escalation in
southern Afghanistan is the main cause of the fact that U.S. troops are dying in record numbers. The fourth major
contribution of the report is to attack the central justification of the war: the claim that it will reduce the threat of
terrorism against Americans. The report argues: First, the decision to escalate the U.S. effort in Afghanistan rests on the
mistaken belief that victory there will have a major impact on Al Qaeda's ability to attack the United States. Al Qaeda's
presence in Afghanistan today is very small, and even a decisive victory there would do little to undermine its capabilities
elsewhere. Victory would not even prevent small Al Qaeda cells from relocating in Afghanistan, just as they have in a wide
array of countries (including European countries). Second, a U.S. drawdown would not make Al Qaeda substantially more
lethal. In order for events in Afghanistan to enhance Al Qaeda's ability to threaten the U.S. homeland, three separate steps
must occur: 1) the Taliban must seize control of a substantial portion of the country, 2) Al Qaeda must relocate there in
strength, and 3) it must build facilities in this new "safe haven" that will allow it to plan and train more effectively than it
can today. Each of these three steps is unlikely, however, and the chances of all three together are very remote. [...] Most
importantly, no matter what happens in Afghanistan in the future, Al Qaeda will not be able to build large training camps
of the sort it employed prior to the 9/11 attacks. Simply put, the U.S. would remain vigilant and could use air power to
eliminate any Al Qaeda facility that the group might attempt to establish. Bin Laden and his associates will likely have to
remain in hiding for the rest of their lives, which means Al Qaeda will have to rely on clandestine cells instead of large
encampments. Covert cells can be located virtually anywhere, which is why the outcome in Afghanistan is not critical to
addressing the threat from Al Qaeda. In short, a complete (and unlikely) victory in Afghanistan and the dismantling of the
Taliban would not make Al Qaeda disappear; indeed, it would probably have no appreciable effect on Al Qaeda. At the
same time, dramatically scaling back U.S. military engagement will not significantly increase the threat from Al Qaeda.
From the point of view of official Washington, this speaks to the core of the
argument against the war. Continuing the war is not promoting the national security interests of
the United States, and in fact is counterproductive to those interests.¶ This is also the part of the argument that is most likely to stick in the craw of
many peace activists, in part because they have a well-grounded allergy to efforts to

promote the purported "national security interests of the United States," and in part because the report, if
implemented, still envisions a potential role for U.S. military force in the region.¶ However, a bit of

realism about prospects in the near-term future is in order . If you look around the world,
the U.S. is currently deploying military force in a lot of places. In the places
where the U.S. is deploying military force without the presence of a significant
number of U.S. ground troops, this activity goes on without occasioning
significant public debate in the U.S. There is essentially zero public debate
over what the U.S. is doing in the Philippines, almost zero about what the U.S. is doing in Somalia, very little about what the U.S. is doing in Yemen, not very much
about what the U.S. is doing in Pakistan. Following the blip occasioned by President Obama’s announcement of the so-called "end of combat mission" in Iraq, it is
likely that public debate about what the U.S. is doing in Iraq will fall back towards Pakistan levels.¶ That these things are true, of course, does not make them just.
it is not enough to be right; one has the moral obligation to
However, as I wrote at the outset,

also try to be effective. And part of being effective is understanding where the
adversary is vulnerable, and where the adversary is not, at present, very vulnerable. The permanent war apparatus is

currently politically vulnerable over the war in Afghanistan primarily because U.S. troops are currently dying there in
significant numbers for no apparent reason, so it makes sense for this to be a central point of attack.

Yes, we’re a reform, but that doesn’t make us reformist –

combining the aff into the alternative is best
Chris Dixon, Activist and founding member of Direct Action Network, 200 5, “Reflections on Privilege, Reformism,
and Activism,” www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/dixon2.html, accessed 3-6-05
Evidently sasha doesn't grasp my argument in "Finding Hope." Or else he disagrees. It's difficult to tell because, while
skillfully sidestepping engagement with my discussion of privilege, he also sidesteps the main thrust of my essay:
rethinking radicalism, particularly in the context of privilege. As I wrote, " we have to move beyond the myopic
view--often endemic among anarchists--that the most 'important' activism only or mainly happens in the
streets, enmeshed in police confrontations." In other words, spheres of traditional 'radical action' are limited
and limiting. And though I don't believe that sasha fundamentally disagrees with this criticism, he refuses to accept its
broader consequences. For instance, where I question the bounds of 'radicalism' with examples of
struggles like opposing prison construction and establishing community and cultural centers, he
conclusively points to "a set of demands and goals of which none suggest any serious critique of capitalism and the state in
their totality." There is much more to the "totality" that we all confront than capitalism and the state .
That's unequivocal. Furthermore,a "totality" has an undeniable physical presence, and people do in
fact contest and resist it every day through a variety of struggles using a variety of means--not all
containing the "serious critique" necessary to satisfy sasha. J. Kellstadt nicely observes this, noting that an
'activist' perspective (not unlike sasha's) overlooks a whole layer of more "everyday" forms of
resistance - from slacking off, absenteeism, and sabotage, to shopfloor "counter-planning" and other forms of
autonomous and "unofficial" organizing - which conventional activists and leftists (including most anarchists)
have a bad track record of acknowledging. And this still leaves out all of those modes of struggle
which take place beyond the shopfloor, such as various forms of cultural and sexual revolution. Unfortunately,
sasha doesn't deign to discuss these all-too-pedestrian realities, many of which potentially embrace the very anarchist
ethics he touts. They certainly have bearing on the lives of many folks and speak to a breadth of social struggle, but they
apparently don't constitute a sufficient "critique." Even if sasha were to acknowledge their importance, my sense is that he
would erect a rationalized theoretical division between Kellstadt's "everyday forms of resistance"
and 'reformism.' No doubt, he would use a rhetorical sleight of hand on par with the "simple fact
of language that those who want to reform the present system are called reformists ." A seemingly
irrefutable, self-apparent statement, this actually glosses over legitimate questions: Are 'reformists' so easily discernable
and cleanly categorized? Are all 'reforms' equal? Can they be part of a long-term revolutionary strategy? So let's talk
plainly about reformism. No matter how much some might wish otherwise, it simply isn't a cut-and-
dry issue. And while it actually deserves a book-length examination, here I'll sketch some general considerations.
Principally, I ask, assuming that we share the goal of dismantling systems of power and
restructuring our entire society in nonhierarchical ways, what role does reform play? Must we
eschew it, unconditionally embrace it, or is there another approach? sasha steadfastly represents one rather limited
'radical' view. To bolster his critique of 'reformism ,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in
my essay: demanding authentic public oversight of police . "[This] might be a small step for social change in
some general sense," he argues, "but ultimately it is a step backwards as it strengthens the legitimacy of the police and of
imposed decision." I respect the intent of this critique; it makes sense if one is privileged enough to engage with the police
on terms of one's own choosing. Yet in real life, it's both simplistic and insulated . Look at it this way: accepting
sasha's argument, are we to wait until the coming insurrectionary upheaval before enjoying an end to
police brutality? More specifically, are African-American men to patiently endure the continued targeting of "driving
while Black"? Should they hold off their demands for police accountability so as to avoid
strengthening "the legitimacy of the police and of imposed decision"? And if they don't, are they
'reformists'? Many folks who experience daily police occupation understand that ending the "imposed
decision" (often epitomized by police) will require radical change, and they work toward it. At the same
time, they demand authentic public oversight of police forces. The two don't have to be mutually
exclusive. I'll even suggest that they can be complementary, especially if we acknowledge the legacies of white
supremacy and class stratification embedded in policing. Ultimately, we need a lucid conception of social
change that articulates this kind of complementarity. That is, we need revolutionary strategy that
links diverse, everyday struggles and demands to long-term radical objectives, without sacrificing
either. Of course, this isn't to say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative or organizing campaign is
necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created equal . But some can fundamentally shake
systems of power, leading to enlarged gains and greater space for further advances. Andre Gorz, in his
seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as "non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He contends , "a struggle
for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist reforms--is one which does not base its validity and
its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined
not in terms of what can be, but what should be." Look to history for struggles, and none were
endpoints. Yet they all struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and
capitalism), and in the process, they created new prospects for revolutionary change. Now consider contemporary
struggles: amnesty for undocumented immigrants, socialized health care, expansive
environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty. These and many more are arguably non-
reformist reforms as well. None will single-handedly dismantle capitalism or other systems of
power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles and sharpen social contradictions. And we
shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply meliorative incrementalism, making 'adjustments' to
a fundamentally flawed system. Certainly that tendency exists, but there are plenty of other folks
working very consciously within a far more radical strategy, pushing for a qualitative shift in struggle.
"To fight for alternative solutions," Gorz writes, "and for structural reforms (that is to say, for intermediate
objectives) is not to fight for improvements in the capitalist system; it is rather to break it up, to
restrict it, to create counter-powers which, instead of creating a new equilibrium, undermine its
very foundations." Thankfully, this is one approach among a diverse array of strategies, all of which encompass a
breadth of struggles and movements. Altogether, they give me hope.

Proposing reform doesn’t legitimize the apparatus we operate

within
Mervyn Frost, Professor @ U. of Kent, 1996, Ethics in International Relations, 90
A first objection which seems inherent in Donelan’s approach is that utilizing the modern state domain of
discourse in effect sanctifies the state: it assumes that people will always live in states and that it
is not possible within such a language to consider alternatives to the system. This objection is not
well founded, by having recourse to the ordinary language of international relations I am not
thereby committed to argue that the state system as it exists is the best mode of human political
organization or that people ought always to live in states as we know them. As I have said, my
argument is that whatever proposals for piecemeal or large-scale reform of the state system are
made, they must of necessity be made in the language of the modern state. Whatever proposals are
made, whether in justification or in criticism of the state system, will have to make use of concepts which are at present
part and parcel of the theory of states. Thus,for example. any proposal for a new global institutional arrangement
superseding the state system will itself have to be justified, and that justification will have to include within it reference to
a new and good form of individual citizenship, reference to a new legislative machinery equipped with satisfactory checks
and balances, reference to satisfactory law enforcement procedures, reference to a satisfactory arrangement for
distributing the goods produced in the world, and so on. All of these notions are notions which have been developed and
finely honed within the theory of the modern state. It is not possible to imagine a justification of a new world order
succeeding which used, for example, feudal, or traditional/tribal, discourse. More generally there is no worldwide
language of political morality which is not completely shot through with state-related notions such as citizenship, rights
under law, representative government and so on.
 Authoritarianism
Alt can’t solve – their alt would be perceived as a challenge to
state power and immediately crushed – to be effective, it needs
access to organizations, which authoritarian government would
suppress – the plan reverses authoritarianism and unlocks alt
solvency
Kirsch 2000 (Max, professor of comparative studies at Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory and Social
Change, p. 117)
Strategy in this context consists of the ways in which we organize energy to meet the ends we seek to achieve.
Strategy as such is the mechanism by which true politics is generated, both
on the personal and the political level. A true resistance politics has to
incorporate both the micro and the macro levels of analysis to mediate
differences and to confront effectively the forces of well-organized
opposition. Lesbian, gay, and queer movements have, so far, depended on the involvement of individuals as the
primary drivers of social change (and particularly the experience of labor movements) that individuals need to
have structural representation in order to maintain the energy needed for
sustained opposition. Individuals working against their oppressors, whether in
the workplace or neighborhood, cannot succeed without a mechanism that can play a
larger role in incorporating them into communities of resistance where
mutual recognition is present. “We’re Queer and We’re Here” is a necessary declaration of identity. But
it is only a moment. Required is a strategy that can institutionalize a movement
towards resistance so that change may be recognized as a social necessity.
Differences will continue to exist. Black women face the sexism inherent in their relations with men
while confronting racism; lesbians are confrtoned with the hierarchy of sexual politics while dealing with arguments
around pornography and sexual pleasure. And more economic issues such as the pervasive and growing feminization of
poverty. Bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered peoples are often ignored by all. Queers, in general, encounter the real
differences based on status and class as they experience the oppression of the dominant culture. But these are all in fact
part of a larger class struggle which is borne out in the conflict of the uses and control of energy and, ultimately,
human regeneration. They need to be recognized as such. The test of successful movement will be whether we
might honor all these divergent interests and experiences while joining together to forge a
successful attempt to redistribute the rewards of labor and to end the
violence of prejudice. Resistance, then, involves more than language-based
opposition to noxious forces. Real opposition takes place in the realm of
reproduction of community and the larger social sphere, on the basis of daily existence and in the realm of
social and productive power.
 A2 Soft Power Link
If they can solve other forms of US coercion including current
soft and hard power, then they can also solve the soft power
resulting from the plan which is much less coercive and easier to
resist – that means the perm shields their links
 A2 Leverage Link
Leverage doesn’t directly coerce people in Africa – it only is
meant to improve corrupt institutions that were a product of
colonialism to begin with
Our leverage link allows African states to exercise agency
Harman and Brown 13 [(Sophie Harman and William Brown) “In from the margins? The changing
place of Africa in International Relation” International Affairs 89: 1, 2013] AT
Much of this body of research tends to suggest that African
states are rather
passive recipients of external actions, mere backdrops in front of which
what Carmody calls ‘the new scramble for Africa’—larger states wanting to
gain resources and economic advantages—plays out.63 Such accounts tend to
ignore how the new scramble opens up the potential for agency to African
states themselves, offering the opportunity to play such interests off against
each other and use shifts in power to pursue their own interests.64 The tensions
Taylor highlights with regard to the West’s competition with China and the durability of China’s peaceful coexistence
should African states renege on agreements65 suggest that the presence of China does offer new space and opportunities
for African states to exert influence in the international system. Such arguments can be extended more widely: for
example, in his work on India and Africa, Taylor argues that the degree to which India is a ‘scrambler or development
partner … depends on African agency’.66 One of the openings for Africa through such
change is seen to be increased involvement with ‘trilateral’ relations
between South Africa, India and Brazil;67 however, the degree to which such ‘trilateralism’ will
benefit the majority of African countries, particularly those with the resources wanted by other states, rather than just
South Africa, is questionable. What the role of China and growing economies such as India tells us about Africa and
international relations is thus not limited to Africa as a case-study or passive entity in which changing configurations of
power continue to play out or as a region wholly bound by structural social and economic forces. Even during the
era of colonialism and the Cold War, African states and other political
actors were able to exercise choices within the spaces opened up by
contending external powers.68 Today, the rise of China suggests a shifting
terrain of international relations in which Africa is at the core, with the
potential opportunity to make aggressive use of the space created by the
presence of China to exert greater agency in the international system. The
case-study of China thus reveals a number of points about Africa and IR. First,
Africa is a key site in which changing configurations of power are being
played out, where western states remain interested in asserting their
influence and where growing economies see their interests as best served.
However, second, the attempt by external powers to assert influence over Africa , for
example through colonial scrambles and Cold War proxy wars, presents an
opportunity for African states to assert their influence and agency by playing off
China and the West against each other and using the interests of these states to their own advantage. Hence the
resurgence of states such as China is not just about middleincome countries or South Africa, but reflects a wider opening
of space within the international system in which Africa plays a central role. Third, though classical concepts of relative
and absolute gains can be applied to these changes, they may obscure some of the distinctive features of the context and
the gains that can be made by African states and economic interests within these relationships. In other words, the rise of
China is not just about what China and the West can get out of Africa and their competition in doing so, but rather what
Africa can get out of such competition. Finally, Africa as a site for exploring Chinese foreign policy and resource extraction
provides empirical evidence in support of the political and diplomatic evidence for China’s increased prominence in
international affairs, which has often taken a back seat behind the country’s economic growth. Much attention has focused
on the economic aspects of China’s growing importance in international politics; Africa provides ample evidence and cases
for exploration with regard to China’s growing political role.

Leverage is key to solve conflict

Lake 06 [(Anthony Lake and Christine Todd Whitman Chairs Princeton n. lyman and j. stephen morrison Project
Directors) “more than humanitarianism: a strategic u.s. approach toward Africa” Council on Foreign Relations 2006] AT
It is not only peacekeeping—and occasionally peace enforcement— where
international involvement is essential. None of the major conflicts in Africa
can be resolved without both African and international political
participation. Leadership by the United States and European countries is necessary to
bring the weight of the UN Security Council to bear on a conflict, with the prospect
of sanctions and eventual UN peacekeeping operations as necessary. Only Western donors can provide the incentive of
post-conflict reconstruction funds. Moreover, in some cases, the parties in the conflict are
much more focused on their relationship with the United States than their
neighbors. In the case of Sudan, the Khartoum government’s interest in improving
its relationships with Washington, and having Sudan removed from the U.S.
list of states supporting terrorism, was a major incentive in coming to terms
with its southern opponents. The United States was influential in getting
Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC to create a trilateral commission to monitor
the unstable and contested eastern region of DRC. U.S. Programs There is a potpourri of
U.S. programs supporting conflict resolution, peacekeeping, and post-conflict reconstruction in Africa, with a clear
upward trend. However, funding is sporadic, heavily dependent upon supplemental appropriations, and more responsive
to immediate crises than longer-term capacity building. Diplomatic leadership for conflict resolution has been relatively
strong in the case of Sudan but limited elsewhere on the continent. Conflict Prevention and Resolution The
principal ingredient in conflict resolution and mediation efforts is strong
diplomatic leadership backed up by dedicated staff and the use of as many elements of
leverage as possible. One example was the use of Anthony Lake as a special envoy from the United States to
help bring about an end to the 1999 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. He was a key member of an international
mediation effort backed by strong support from the Clinton administration. The United States provided such
leadership again in helping bring an end to the north-south civil war in
Sudan. A presidential envoy, John Danforth, was appointed early in President George W. Bush’s first term. He was
backed up by a strong team in the Department of State. Sudan’s desire to come out from under U.S. listing as a state
supporter of terrorism and to gain economic support for reconstruction gave the United States leverage that it used
liberally. The diplomatic effort drew further support from active American constituencies, particularly the evangelical
community and the Black Caucus in Congress. The United States also worked closely with the lead African negotiator,
Kenya, the African regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, and a number of European powers.
The United States has not mounted anything as strong to address the other conflicts in Africa. Staff limitations, other
policy priorities, and lack of the same pressure from the American public are all factors. Yet the war in the DRC has taken
more lives than any other of these conflicts and has ramifications all across Central and southern Africa. The situation in
West Africa, Guinea and Ivory Coast, and both Liberia and Sierra Leone threatens a region that is becoming ever more
impor- tant in energy supplies. The ongoing insurgency and criminal activity in the oil-rich Niger Delta threaten the future
of oil supplies from Africa’s principal oil producer and indeed the stability of Nigeria itself. And in Sudan, the Darfur
situation, which the United States has labeled genocide, continues out of control. Yet there is no longer a presidential
envoy for Sudan. Conflict prevention and resolution should not be an ad hoc activity. Conflict in Africa is
still too prevalent and often predictable. The United States needs to dedicate
high-level attention to the critical ongoing conflicts in Africa, such as in the
DRC, Darfur, Nigeria, and Ethiopia- Eritrea. In some cases presidential envoys are essential,
backed up by staff and resources. The United States should also mobilize European
attention to these conflicts so that outside attention is coordinated and
leadership can be shared. Within the government, the Department of State should create a permanent
staff, at both the central and regional bureau level, dedicated to supporting high-level diplomatic activity, monitoring the
risks of conflict in Africa, and engaging in conflict prevention, resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction in the situations
not receiving higher-level focus. The Department should further supplement its resources in this area by drawing on the
skills and program capabilities in the university, think tank, and NGO communities dedicated to conflict prevention and
resolution.9 These institutions can help both in mediation and staffs in conflict
and risk assessment.
 A2 US Security Coop = Colonialist
The plan is cooperative engagement which is mutually beneficial
and not colonialist
Cordner 11 [(Lee, strategic analyst who worked as a Principal Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong,
Australia, and was formerly CEO of Future Directions International, an independent Australian strategic think tank)
PROGRESSING MARITIME SECURITY COOPERATION IN THE INDIAN OCEAN Naval War College Review, Autumn
2011, Vol. 64, No. 4] AT
In a related vein, the Mumbai terrorist attacks are symptomatic of a lack of effective maritime-border control.40 India and
(to a lesser extent) Pakistan have capable naval and other maritime security forces, as do Arabian Gulf states (Saudi
Arabia, Iran, the UAE). Some other countries, however, have small naval forces of little
effectiveness (Yemen, Kenya, and Djibouti, in the western Indian Ocean), and in many
respects the region is a maritime security void. Many IOR states lack
intelligence, early warning, and maritime air surveillance and
reconnaissance or the coordinated maritime security patrol and response
capabilities necessary to exercising sovereign control over their maritime domains. The lack of national
capabilities is exacerbated at regional and subregional levels by the lack of
cooperative bodies to coordinate the use of sparse resources. Many extraregional
countries have significant and legitimate interests to protect in the IOR. The extensive involvement of
the U.S., Chinese, South Korean, and various European navies in the antipiracy effort off
Somalia, for example, is aimed at protecting a common stake in the free flow of
maritime trade. The United States, Britain, and other Western powers remain deeply engaged in the Middle East
in support of global energy security and in addressing the sources of Islamist extremism. It can be argued that the
involvement of external states helps to stabilize regional security; in many cases
such involvement is essential to make up for shortfalls in the capabilities of
regional states. However, in many IOR nations that experienced colonial rule it
remains easy for politicians to invoke the specter of imperialism or
“gunboat diplomacy.” External intervention is not universally welcomed by
regional states, and certain types of intervention are potentially destabilizing.
However , realization has dawned, especially since the 2004 tsunami
disaster relief episode, that “cooperative engagement” with outside powers
offers many benefits.
 A2 Intervention Link
We turn this – the aff removes long-term US military
interference in Uganda which is an outgrowth of colonialism
[but it increases US influence overall which allows cooperation
that creates more effective short-term interventions in Africa –
that’s Meservey – that’s those are key to solve conflict – the
alternative causes more violence]
Lake 06 [(Anthony Lake and Christine Todd Whitman Chairs Princeton n. lyman and j. stephen morrison Project
Directors) “more than humanitarianism: a strategic u.s. approach toward Africa” Council on Foreign Relations 2006] AT
Africans have responded and taken an increasingly active role to bring conflicts to
an end. Africa provided the first peacekeepers in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s and again in Liberia in 2003,
before the UN authorized a UN force. Africans, under the aegis of the ECOWAS, led the negotiations that ended the
Liberian civil war. Together with France they provided peacekeepers to the Central African Republic and most recently to
Ivory Coast, again ahead of the UN taking action. In 2003, the AU established a Peace and Security Council, a rough
approximation of the UN Security Council. Under the auspices of the council, African leaders have taken the lead to
negotiate an end to the wars in Darfur, Ivory Coast, and Burundi. The council sent a contingent of African peacekeepers to
Burundi as one of its first acts, and has sent close to 7,000 peacekeepers to Darfur with a commitment to increase that
force to as many as 13,000 by spring 2006. The AU has proposed creating a standby force consisting of several regionally
based brigades across Africa, ready to step in whenever peacekeeping is needed. Another important development is the
growth of grassroots peace efforts and peacebuilding. Women’s groups have become much more active in Africa, insisting
on a seat at the table when peace agreements are being negotiated. The Mano River Women’s Peace Network and similar
groups in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and other countries, provide an important source of support for peace. Religious
institutions are playing a similar role. Finally, the role of elders in bringing about dialogue when combatants will not do so
and in mobilizing support for peace processes is an often underappreciated resource. The Need for International Help
But African leaders cannot carry this responsibility alone and they know it.
They lack much of the capacity necessary to achieve their objectives. African
peacekeeping operations in Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and
earlier in the Central African Republic, had eventually to be taken over by
the UN, as Africa could not sustain the expense . Africans have also needed assistance with
equipment, communications, and transport. In Darfur, where Africans have provided the total peace- keeping force,
their lack of logistical capability and equipment has led to extraordinary
delays. Both the EU and NATO, along with bilateral donors including the United States, are
playing an enabling role in assisting AU forces to deploy to Darfur. This
logistical and technical support aided the AU in strengthening security
within several camps of displaced persons, but did not enable the AU to prevent recurrent
attacks across the vast territory in which the victims of the Janjaweed have been displaced. UN Peacekeeping The UN
currently deploys more than 54,000 peacekeepers in eight missions in Africa. The growth of UN peacekeeping operations
in Africa is a turnaround from the 1990s and reflects recognition by both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and by
bipartisan majorities in Congress, that such a role serves U.S. interests. UN peacekeeping operations were sharply reduced
during the mid-1990s, after the disaster in Somalia, which reduced U.S. support, in particular, for such opera- tions, a
reaction that contributed to the failure of UN member states to stop the genocide in Rwanda. But, beginning with the
deployment to Sierra Leone in 1999, they have grown and steadily expanded their operations. Africa is now
home to the most complex and demanding UN peacekeeping operations.
Ceasefires in most of the countries where they are stationed are fragile. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and the DRC,
the UN is also struggling to disarm and reintegrate the many young soldiers (a number of whom are child soldiers) who
have become a source of mercenary armies throughout the western Africa region. In the DRC, the UN force
moved from a more traditional UN ‘‘neutrality’’ to take military action
against rebel militias, thus preserving the prospects for holding elections in the country and bringing, if
belatedly, protection to civilians that were suffering from often brutal attacks.
The UN force is still insufficient, however, to stop such attacks altogether. On the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the
UN force is the principal barrier to renewed fighting between two countries engaged in a bitter border dispute. Tens of
thousands lost their lives in the previous war. A major UN peacekeeping mission is now deploying to Sudan, where it will
play a critical role in protecting the peace between the north and south. Coalitions of the Willing On several
occasions, short but timely interventions by Western troops prepared to use
force have played a critical role in providing initial stability, thereby permitting
African and UN peacekeepers to carry out their mission. The United Kingdom
sent troops to Sierra Leone to help an initially undermanned UN
peacekeeping force protect the capital and push back rebel forces. The EU,
together with South Africa, sent troops to eastern DRC to help what was, at the outset, an
insufficiently equipped and mandated UN peacekeeping force stop the
massacre of civilians by roving rebel forces. France has provided its own troops side by side
with African and UN troops in Ivory Coast and Central African Republic. The United States deployed
several thousand U.S. marines off the Liberian coast in 2003 , sent some on land,
and provided important logistical help before an African peace- keeping
force could assemble to take charge. This two-step pattern has proved effective in
crisis situations where the intervention of combat- capable, well-equipped
outside forces may provide the show of force necessary to enable blue-
helmeted peacekeepers later to seize and hold the initiative vis-a`-vis local
militias. History has shown that in most of these cases Western troop
presence need only be short-term.
 EAC Solves Colonialism
EAC integration revitalizes East African unity and challenges
colonial borders
Austin Bukenya 15 [(Austin Bukenya, Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in
East Africa. Mwalimu Bukenya taught for many years in Kenya) We both desire and lack that E. African unity, No
Publication JULY 4, 2015] AT
Earlier this week, an important East African Community Protocol came into effect. These protocols are like the laws by
which the citizens of East Africa should run their affairs. They are jointly formulated by all the member countries of the
Community and assented to by the East African Community Authority, comprising their Heads of State. Each Protocol
indicates a date on which it should come into effect. The last Protocol, in whose formulation I participated, was the one for
the establishment of the East African Kiswahili Commission. I have, unfortunately, lost track of its progress towards
coming into effect. It will be soon, I am sure, if it is not already operational. My point is that my heart always
rejoices when a significant step is taken to concretise the reality of our
oneness. I am a born East African Community citizen, who benefited
enormously from its original undiluted structures, suffered enormously
from its temporary collapse, and continues to benefit enormously from its
revived protocols. A few historically and socially scattered legends, events and
claims continue to convince me that we people in East Africa always want to
regard and treat ourselves as united. Indeed we have wanted this oneness even longer than the
present generations might realise. To start with the legend, I will not belabour the Kabalega and Kenyatta one. But, far-
fetched as it might appear, what its creators wanted to symbolise was that there was close kinship among our people, the
Ugandans and Kenyans, as expressed in the strongest minds of their predecessors. In any case, that legend is not in
isolation. Nabongo Mumia of Mumias, too, traces his decent to Busoga and eventually to Bunyoro-Kitara. Even the Luos of
Mara must have come from Ramogi. In any case, we should never lose sight of the fact that our
so-called national borders are artificial colonial creations . There are as many
Wakuria and Maasai in Kenya as there are in Tanzania. The Iteso are Iteso, whether in Kenya or in Uganda. Certainly no
one can tell on sight the difference between Ugandan Rwandese and Rwandan Rwandese. I always laugh when my Kenyan
friends complain, after the track victories of people like Stephen Kiprotich and Moses Kipsiro, that Ugandans are hiring
Kenyans to run for them. The truth is that at least three Ugandan districts are inhabited by Ugandan Kalenjins, among
them the Kwen and the Sabiny. There are as many descendants of Masaba around Mbale (the one of Uganda, where I am
writing from) as there are around Bungoma and Webuye. And this brings me to some recent curious encounters that
startled me into reconsidering our citizenship. As I mentioned some time back, on World Culture Day, we launched a book
about Uganda’s minority cultures. Now, one of the cultures featured among these was Babukusu, represented by an oral
narrative in the book. I wonder what my Bakoki, Chris Wanjala, or our cousin, Timothy Wangusa, would say about that.
Well, the fact is that there are some children of the “Inzu ya Masaaba” (the House of Ancestor Masaba), who, finding
themselves surrounded by other cultures in western Uganda, regard themselves as a minority. Speaking about western
Uganda, it was a delightful realisation for me that the few hundred Kenyans who returned to their original homes from
there were identified as “IDPs” (internally displaced people) . Fleeing across the border from the infamous post-election
violence, these East African citizens had been settled in Kiryandongo, some 300 kilometres inside Uganda. But they were
not “refugees”, because they were inside their own country, East Africa. UPPER ZONE In any case, as Njoroge, one of the
returning IDPS put it, “If I don’t like it back home, I can always come back here (to Kiryandongo). I have family here, and I
have a shamba.” There is an East African after my own heart! I like it in Kampala and elsewhere in Uganda, but I cannot
stop coming back to Nairobi. I may not have a shamba here yet, but I certainly do have family. But there is a lot
more to the inevitable free movement of people that is one of the ideals of
the East African Community. Just around the time we were launching the book in Kampala, participants
at another function in Kigumba, again in Western Uganda, proposed that the Maragoli people resident there should be
given Ugandan citizenship. Their main reason was that “their language is strikingly similar to Runyoro-Rutooro”, the
language of the area, and Kabalega’s native tongue. This took me many years back to an afternoon when the late Francis
Imbuga took me and another colleague home to lunch. He lived in Kenyatta University’s Upper Zone then, on Malawi
Road, I believe. Because we had to get back to work, Imbuga, who so loved inviting friends home that even on the day
before he died he had had some to lunch, told his house help in Lulogooli, “Kora bwango.” Or so it sounded to me. The
meaning however, was clear to me without any need for translation. That is exactly what John Ruganda, or my
grandmother Ateenyi would have said for “hurry up” in Runyoro-Rutooro. I have not done any further explorations of the
similarities between Runyoro-Rutooro and Lulogooli, but the residents of Kigumba have pronounced themselves about
their East African Valogooli compatriots. I am sure my reverend friend, Professor Henry Indangasi, is listening. Maybe we
should team up and have a close look at the reality on the ground at Kigumba. After all, we need no passports to travel
“home”. Whatever the case maybe, our plea to those charged with formulating and
implementing the protocols that cement our East African oneness is that
they should not delay it on any front. We want it , and we want it fast. To each and every one
of them we say: “Kora bwango.”
 China Link Turn
Plan solves Chinese influence in Africa
Sun 13 [(Yun Sun, Visiting Fellow, Africa Growth Initiative and John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings
Institution) “China in Africa: Implications for U.S. Competition and Diplomacy” Brookings Institute 2013] AT
China is an increasingly important player in the politics, economic
development and security of Africa. Historically, China has prioritized strong diplomatic relations
and political ties with African states with an ideological aspiration anchored on the “solidarity among the Third World
countries.”1 However, since 2001, China’s pursuit in the continent has rapidly expanded
into the economic arena, focusing on Africa’s rich natural resources to fuel China’s domestic economic
growth. China’s growing economic presence in Africa is hardly altruistic and is
guided by the principle of “mutual benefits” to both sides. Under the framework of “resources for
development,” Beijing mobilizes its vast state financial resources to invest
broadly in infrastructure projects across Africa and extract natural
resources in return. Moreover, these investments generate multiple layers of
benefits for China, including contracts for Chinese service companies, the relocation of labor-intensive, heavy-
pollution industries from China, political favors extracted from African governments on foreign policy issues at
multilateral forums such as the United Nations, and a positive international image of China being a “responsible
stakeholder.” These motivations are particularly true in explaining China’s interests in resource-poor African countries.
This strategy most likely will continue in the foreseeable future. In July 2012, China
doubled its 2009 commitment to provide $20 billion in financing to Africa to further its strategic blueprint in the next
three years.2 The contemporary analysis of China’s role in Africa is dramatically split. Dragon-slayers emphasize China’s
selfish quest for Africa’s natural resources and how it sabotages international efforts to keep unpalatable African regimes
in check. On the other hand, panda-huggers applaud China’s contribution to Africa’s economic development through
infrastructure projects and revenue creation. Neither reflects the nuanced, complicated nature of what China means for
Africa. China enjoys unique financial and political advantages in promoting
Africa’s growth but neglects the governance, fairness and sustainability of
such development. Therefore, the short-term benefit China provides to Africa is
intrinsically flawed and has long-term negative consequences . Meanwhile, along
with China’s enhanced role in Africa is the reality that the U.S. is being
increasingly edged out of the continent politically and economically. To
compete with the Chinese presence and to counter the negative
consequences of China’s approach, the U.S. must become more engaged in
Africa with effective strategies. China’s unique approach also has
tremendous implications for the U.S. role in global governance and the
future of its African partners. Why is it Important for the U.S.? China’s approach to
Africa represents a fundamental challenge to U.S. interests in promoting
democracy, good governance and sustainable development in Africa. Chinese
funding flows to Africa with “no strings attached,” such as requirements on transparency, anti-corruption, environmental
protection, human development and better governance. Chinese players in Africa exacerbate the
problems through their active endorsement and participation in the flawed
process. Therefore, Beijing offers an easy alternative to the principled or disciplined
development assistance from the West and multilateral financial
institutions, and undercuts the latter’s effort to address the systematic and
institutional deficiencies of African countries and to promote long-term
sustainable development and democratic systems. Furthermore, China’s engagement in
Africa has profound geopolitical implications for the U.S. global strategy. As the U.S. rebalances to the Asia-Pacific region,
China has identified increasing hindrances in its strategic advancement in East Asia and the Pacific. In response, China is
shifting its attention westward to South Asia, the Middle East and Africa to expand arenas for its political and strategic
influence. These areas are seen as the most promising by Beijing given the stagnant or declining U.S. involvement.
Especially in Africa, China is looking beyond the traditional pursuit of economic
benefits and aspires to increase and solidify its strategic presence through
enhanced political, economic, diplomatic and academic resources. The
failure to perceive and prepare for China’s moves would be dangerous , unwise
and potentially detrimental for the United States in the near future. The Opportunity for the U.S. Given China’s
involvement in Africa, there is an even greater need for the U.S. to engage and cooperate with China for its own national
interests and global agenda, such as security and governance. Not engaging China in Africa could
undercut and even nullify U.S. objectives given China’s approach. Cooperation on
security issues, like South Sudan, most likely will not excite China in that China believes the U.S. might ask Beijing to carry
a disproportionate share of economic and political responsibility. Furthermore, China worries that a U.S.-China/G-2
approach to African security issues might alienate China’s traditional
friendship with African countries since China prefers bilateral or multilateral approaches. Meanwhile,
there are key issues on which the U.S. could and should focus. The U.S. needs to raise its concerns and request that China
adjust its investment and assistance policies toward Africa through the Africa consultation under the U.S.-China Strategic
and Economic Dialogue. The U.S. needs to better coordinate with China on providing aid, technology and technical
support in the fields of health care, and medical and agricultural assistance. Furthermore, inside Africa, the
U.S. needs to mobilize its political, diplomatic and soft power influences to mitigate
the negative impact of the mercantilist approach of China. Last but not least, a
conscious educational effort should be made to help Africa achieve the long-term vision about the consequences of China’s
myopic development model.

Chinese influence in Africa is a worse form of colonialism

Alexis Okeowo 13 [(Alexis Okeowo, joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. She is working on a book
about people standing up to extremism in Africa and is a fellow at the New America Foundation) China in Africa: The New
Imperialists?, New Yorker 6-12-2013] AT
The Chinese have managed to accomplish at least one impressive thing in Africa—they have made everyone else
uncomfortable. The Americans are uneasy, worried about (and perhaps jealous of) China’s rapid and profitable
investments throughout the continent, and the developmental assistance that it has started to provide in some areas.
Europeans have only to look at trade figures: the share of Africa’s exports that China receives has shot from one to fifteen
per cent over the past decade, while the European Union’s share fell from thirty-six to twenty-three per cent. China is
now Africa’s largest trading partner. Some Africans have become resentful,
though, unhappy with unbalanced relationships in which China has taken
proprietorship of African natural resources using Chinese labor and equipment without
transferring skills and technology. “China takes our primary goods and sells
us manufactured ones. This was also the essence of colonialism ,” Lamido Sanusi,
the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, wrote in the Financial Times earlier this year. The threat (whether real
or imagined) of a looming Chinese imperialist presence in Africa has given way to
what has been called “resource nationalism,” in which countries aim to take control of the
exploitation of their natural resources. But this idea potentially fails to address the fact that the Chinese in Africa are
people, and not just part of a faceless imperialist mass. I’ve spoken to Chinese investors in Zambia who appear to
genuinely want to not just make money but integrate into Zambian communities and run responsible companies. One
complained about how immoral businessmen ruin the efforts of others who want to pay fair wages and keep their workers
safe. In Zambia, a copper-rich country in southern Africa and the beneficiary of the continent’s third-highest level of
Chinese investment, persistent unemployment and poverty have left Zambians wondering where exactly the fruits of their
government’s lucrative deals with the Chinese have gone. President Michael Sata was elected in 2011 partly thanks to anti-
Chinese sentiment (he likened work at Chinese mines to slave labor and said he would deport any abusive investors), but
immediately forged close ties with Chinese leaders. Still, his government has tried, at least on the surface, to even its
playing field with China by launching criminal proceedings against former government officials who made corrupt deals
with the Chinese, and by reforming the way foreign investors have to do business in Zambia. It is likely that the country
will be only the first of many to do so. “The people of Zambia have been complaining,” the
country’s finance ministry said last month, “about
lack of reliable and accurate information
on the resources that are generated in the country or which come from foreign sources, to
develop Zambia.” Under a new law, the Bank of Zambia will create an “electronic reporting and monitoring system” tasked
with overseeing the collection of royalties and taxes from foreign investors. Those same investors—who, the legislation
notes, are benefiting from numerous business incentives—are now required to open and keep active taxable foreign-
currency bank accounts. If they export their goods, as the Chinese owners of copper, coal, and gemstone mines do, they
must deposit their profits in Zambia within two months of the date the goods are shipped abroad. The ministry added,
“This is the way to go for a country that is so richly endowed with resources
but whose capacity to unroll development to higher echelons has been
hampered by poor transparency and accountability practices. ” Chinese
owners of copper mines in Zambia regularly violate the rights of their
employees by not providing adequate protective gear and insuring safe
working conditions, according to a Human Rights Watch report. When Zambian employees of the Chinese-
owned Collum Coal Mine protested these poor conditions three years ago, their Chinese managers, who said they feared
for their lives, fired gunshots at the miners, injuring thirteen of them. After Chinese business interests put pressure on the
then-government in Lusaka, the director of public prosecutions suddenly dropped its criminal case against the managers.
Last year, renewed protests at Collum led to hundreds of miners pushing a mine trolley into a Chinese manager. They
killed him, and injured two other Chinese supervisors. In the murky aftermath of the violence, the current government
finally wrested control of the mine from the Chinese brothers who ran it and promised never to let such incidents happen
again, partially resulting in this new legislation. Zambia, along with all of its copper and gems, had been especially
attractive to China because it had let investors take their profits abroad. That policy has become too expensive, both
financially and politically. (Tax avoidance by foreign investors is reportedly costing Zambia close to two billion dollars a
year.) “There will be a big fight with the mines,” Mooya Lumamba, Zambia’s director of mines, told me in May. The
government has had battles with the mines before. Despite fears of scaring off investors, leaders, then recently elected,
doubled the mine royalty rate nearly two years ago. Investors, including the Chinese, stuck around and even increased
their direct inflows. This time, Lumamba didn’t seem worried.
 NGOs K2 Culture
Eurocentrism has attempted to replace Ugandan culture – NGOs
are key to revitalize it and spill over more broadly – the perm
ensures alt solvency
Drani 14 [(Emily, Regional coordinator of the Hivos Knowledge programme in Uganda) “ the role of ngos in
preserving and promoting” volkskunde 2014 | 3 : 405-409] AT
To understand why such immense potential is not sufficiently harnessed, it is necessary to reflect on the some historical
factors and contextual issues that affect efforts to promote and preserve intangible cultural heritage. The influence of
conventional religions in Uganda have had a significant impact on the local perceptions of the value of culture and general
skepticism about its relevance in addressing contemporary development concerns. Traditional beliefs and practices which
form the foundation of local cultures were to a large extent, perceived as pagan and satanic. The perception
that culture is negative and irrelevant was reinforced by an education
system which, until recently, also dismissed culture as irrelevant to contemporary
development concerns. Formal education and the written word in English
were, and are still often glorified without question. As such oral traditions
which constitute much of Uganda’s intangible cultural heritage are still
largely underdeveloped – to be replaced by new wisdom derived from
academic achievements. During the colonial era, a quest for modernization
informed by western ideologies and interests took center stage. Some of the laws
established by the colonial administration further reinforced an aversion
for indigenous knowledge and practices, for instance, traditional
spirituality termed as witchcraft have remained on the statute book , contributing
to the perception that local culture is evil, primitive and therefore unlawful (e.g. Anti-witchcraft Act). Too often the
definition of culture is limited to traditional rituals and practices, especially to those that are considered oppressive and
negative, such as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), widow cleansing, and wife sharing to mention a few. There is
hardly any mention of positive aspects of culture in respect to values,
principles of community labour and solidarity, the spirit of communal
responsibility and accountability, conflict resolution , and the value of chastity (and
general abstinence from sexual activity by the youth before marriage) which were often manifested in social practices and
rituals. The post-independence governments of Uganda continued to give low
priority to the development of culture , evident in the very low budgetary allocation and investment
in heritage development and promotion. With the abolition of traditional institutions in 1966, traditional practices
including non-formal heritage education were subdued. As a result the development of oral traditions and indigenous
knowledge and skills expressed through creative narration of history, artistic skills, cultural practices, expressions, drama
and innovation based on traditional knowledge and skills has been very slow and minimal. Although the traditional
institutions were restored in the 1995 Constitution, the heritage development trends had been distorted and many
institutions are still struggling to restore a connection between the past and the present. This is compounded by the fact
that a little less than one third of the Ugandan population lives in extreme poverty (less than 1 dollar a day). Productive
energies tend to be geared towards basic needs such as food, medical care, shelter and security. Developing cultural
human potential through experimentation of local innovative thinking, science and technology is thus perceived as
secondary. While cultural heritage presents a potential source of livelihood if harnessed, this has to be accompanied by
concerted effort to learn about the value of heritage, build the capacity to device effective means to safeguard intangible
and tangible heritage and link it to sustainable development. Currently there are very limited avenues through which the
younger generation, who are increasingly becoming the majority in Uganda, can learn to appreciate cultural heritage. They
are not only the future custodians of our heritage but are also future decision makers on how or whether cultural heritage
will be preserved and promoted. Legal Framework for the Promotion and Preservation of Culture There are however some
efforts made by the Government of Uganda to provide for the protection and promotion of cultural heritage. The 1995
Constitution enshrines a right to culture and stipulates that “Every person has a right to belong to, enjoy, practice, profess,
maintain and promote any culture, cultural institution, language, tradition, creed or religion in community with others.”
This coupled with the 2006 National Cultural Policy, among other policies, provide the framework within which various
actors in the culture sector operate, however with limited resources and technical support the achievements of the
objectives of these instruments is slow. The ratification of the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the
Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009, provides a valuable opportunity not only to emphasize the importance of cultural
heritage at international and national levels but also to provide guidance on how heritage can be safeguarded. Thus
examples of elements that have been inscribed on the urgent list for safeguarding (such as bark cloth from central Uganda;
oral tradition of the royal trumpets of the Basoga – the Bigwala, and a traditional naming practice in western Uganda
called the Empaako are eye openers for communities to rigorously identify, assess and inventory their heritage. This also
serves as an important avenue for community learning and capacity building as well as a point of reference for heritage
education. Appreciating the need to preserve heritage, a growing number of
NGOs in Uganda have taken the initiative to promote different aspects of
cultural heritage through the development of local languages, promotion of
the creative arts (visual and performing), heritage education (in school clubs as well as a holiday
programme), production of literature, cultural tourism, support to collection and
exhibition of artifacts through community museums, traditional dances,
cultural festivals and galas, research and documentation, and cultural
cooperation, among others. The Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda: Promoting Heritage Education In
a bid to counter the negative attitudes towards culture and nurture an
appreciation of heritage as a resource, the Cross-Cultural Foundation of
Uganda (CCFU)2 , has documented a number of case studies to illustrate the
relevance of culture (e.g. traditional knowledge, social and governance systems etc.) in development.
The knowledge generated is used a point of reference in capacity building
initiatives. Recognizing the important role the youth have in preserving intangible cultural heritage, the
Foundation embarked on a heritage education programme that is currently
operational in 60 secondary schools across the country. The overall objective of this
programme is to enhance the recognition of the importance of heritage in Uganda’s current development context. This is
done by enhancing teachers’ skills and knowledge, promoting the development of the cultural heritage resources in the
vicinity of schools; supporting community museums and their outreach activities and raising the profile of heritage
nationally through a nationwide competition. Teachers of the selected secondary schools are trained using a heritage
education kit and equipped with materials to support heritage clubs. Refreshers courses are also organized to update the
information provided and get feedback on the relevance of the material in the kit. The Foundation has linked these
secondary schools to 12 community museums in the country through which the youth can meet cultural resource persons,
gain exposure to cultural information, provide voluntary services, sell their art and crafts products and learn to appreciate
cultural diversity. Some museums that promote living culture also train the youth in traditional music and dance. 2 The
Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda is a national NGO dedicated to promoting the recognition of culture as vital for
human development that reflects Uganda’s cultural diversity and identity. To increase the involvement
of youth across the country in appreciating heritage, CCFU holds an annual
heritage competition. The youth are guided by an annual theme to illustrate
their understanding of heritage through drawings, creative writing – poetry,
short stories, and proverbs. The best 12 entries, as determined by an independent jury, are used to
develop a heritage calendar, which is launched and distributed widely. In addition, the Foundation provides
communication outputs including a “heritage passport” for heritage club members. To ensure sustainability of this
intervention, CCFU has approached the National Curriculum Development Centre to advocate for the integration of
cultural heritage in the national secondary school curriculum, which is currently under review. This process
involved presenting content on cultural heritage to representatives of the
relevant learning areas and developing relevant resource materials as
teaching aids. The content is yet trial tested and revised for incorporation in the curriculum. CCFU is at the last
stages of this process. As an accredited NGO under the 2003 UNESCO Convention, the Foundation has acquired
enhanced knowledge about ICH and has incorporated elements of it in the heritage education kit. In addition, using
inscribed ICH elements in its resource materials has been another way to publicize the elements as well as encourage
communities to explore opportunities to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. At a recent conference co-organised
by CCFU and the International National Trust Organisation, two of the inscribed ICH elements (bark cloth and the royal
trumpets) were included on learning journeys programme to be visited by for 150 international heritage experts. As an
accredited NGO, CCFU also provides technical support and guidance in inventorying and the nomination process, when
requested. Prospects for ICH NGOs’ Activities At national level, the impending integration of culture in the national
curriculum will enhance accessibility to knowledge and skills in heritage appreciation in secondary schools. In addition,
the implementation of a national thematic curriculum which promotes the use of local languages as the medium for
instruction in lower primary is another way through which language, the conduit for transmitting intangible cultural
heritage may be preserved. There is an increasing emergence of community museums across the country, which indicates
the potential of new and widespread references for learning, research and cultural tourism. In addition, Makerere
University Kampala, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in Uganda has developed the concept of Orature (the
study of African oral literature) and by so doing has contributed to the promotion of literature and creative writing in
tertiary institutions. In Uganda efforts have been made to forge partners to promote cultures across the globe.
Cultural cooperation between Uganda and the European Union, China,
Germany, Britain, France and Korea through the UgandaKorea Cultural Friendship Association
provides opportunities for exchanges and study visits, joint festivals and
exhibitions which foster respect, support learning and an appreciation of
cultural diversity especially for the youth who not only need to understand and embrace their
own heritage but also learn to appreciate and respect other cultures within and outside Uganda. In the East African region
and beyond there are other NGOs such as Arterial Network, Bayimba Cultural Foundation, Centre for Heritage
Development in Africa, AFRICOM – International Council of African Museums, Culture and Development East Africa
(CDEA) among others play that play an important role by providing platforms for information and experience sharing,
technical support and resource mobilization, and culturally rooted talent development. In the absence of National Trusts
or heritage authorities in these countries, most NGOs tend to operate individually. It is only
recently that efforts have been made to hold joint initiatives such as
exhibitions, annual cultural festivals and heritage conferences that provide
opportunities for forging partnerships on intangible and tangible cultural
heritage in the region. In conclusion, despite the challenges that the culture sector
in Uganda faces, conducive national and international policy frameworks
provide the necessary political support to preserve, develop and promote
intangible cultural heritage. If sustained, heritage education on a national
scale has potentially far reaching effects, not only in respect to enhanced
knowledge on intangible cultural heritage but also to foster respect and
appreciation of cultural diversity – a necessity in a country as diverse as Uganda. With the
increasing number of heritage focused NGOs and community museums, the
competence to support heritage development initiatives is growing. International and
regional heritage networks and associations also offer the much needed expertise and professionalism to harness cultural
heritage resources for posterity and sustainable development. Partnerships and cultural
cooperation with NGOs and other like-minded institutions within and
outside the Uganda present valuable experiences from which lessons may be
drawn, home grown models for heritage development produced and best
practices publicized. Notably however these prospects would have greater impact if a deliberate effort is made
to coordinate interventions in the culture sector nationally, regionally and internationally.
 Conflict Turns Culture
Conflict prevents cultural development – no alt solvency absent
the plan
Drani 14 [(Emily, Regional coordinator of the Hivos Knowledge programme in Uganda) “ the role of ngos in
preserving and promoting” volkskunde 2014 | 3 : 405-409] AT
Although the traditional institutions were restored in the 1995 Constitution, the
heritage development
trends had been distorted and many institutions are still struggling to
restore a connection between the past and the present. This is compounded
by the fact that a little less than one third of the Ugandan population lives in
extreme poverty (less than 1 dollar a day). Productive energies tend to be geared
towards basic needs such as food, medical care, shelter and security.
Developing cultural human potential through experimentation of local innovative thinking, science
and technology is thus perceived as secondary. While cultural heritage presents a
potential source of livelihood if harnessed, this has to be accompanied by
concerted effort to learn about the value of heritage, build the capacity to device effective means to
safeguard intangible and tangible heritage and link it to sustainable
development.
Legal Change Good
 Law Good
Legal reforms solve it- the plan is an interrogation of specific
instances of state repression that radically challenge the squo
Brenna Bhandar 13, Senior Lecturer in Law at SOAS, University of London Strategies of Legal Rupture: the
politics of judgment, http://www.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/BHANDAR-Brenna.-
Strategies-of-Legal-Rupture.pdf
Strategies of Rupture In this article, my aim is to consider the use of law as a political strategy of rupture in colonial ¶ and
post-colonial nation states. The question of whether and how to use law in order to ¶
transform and potentially shatter an existing political-legal order is one that
continues to plague ¶ legal advocates in a variety of places, from Australia, to India, to Canada to
Israel/Palestine. For ¶ example, the struggle for the recognition of indigenous rights in the context of
colonial settler ¶ regimes has often produced pyrrhic victories.21 The question of
indigenous sovereignty is ¶ ultimately quashed, and aboriginal rights are paradoxically recognised as an interest that
derives ¶ from the prior occupation of the land by aboriginal communities but is at the same time parasitic ¶ on underlying
Crown sovereignty; an interest that can be justifiably limited in the interests of ¶ settlement.22 Thus, the primary
and inescapable question remains: how does one utilise the law ¶ without re-
inscribing the very colonial legal order that one is attempting to break
down?23 I ¶ argue that this is an inescapable dilemma; as critical race theorists and indigenous scholars have ¶ shown,
to not avail ourselves of the law in an effort to ameliorate social ills, and to promote and ¶
protect the rights of oppressed minorities is to essentially abrogate one’s
political responsibilities . ¶ Moreover, the reality of political struggle
(particularly of the anti-colonial variety) is that it is of ¶ a diffuse and varied
nature, engaging multiple different tactics in order to achieve its ends. ¶ The
notion of the ruptural defence emerges from the work of Jacques Vergès, a French advocate ¶ and subject of a film by
Barbet Schroder entitled Terror’s Advocate. The film is as much a portrait ¶ of Vergès’ life as it is a series of vignettes of
armed anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle during ¶ the decades between the late 1940s and the 1980s. I should say at
the beginning that I do not ¶ perceive Vergès as a heroic figure or defender of the oppressed; we can see from his later ¶
decisions to defend Klaus Barbie, for instance, that his desire to reveal the violence wrought by ¶ European imperial powers
was pursued at any cost. But in tracing the development of what¶ Verges called the ruptural
defence, the film takes us to the heart of the inescapable paradoxes¶ and
contradictions involved in using law as a means of political resistance in
colonial and post-¶ colonial contexts. I want to explore the strategy of rupture as developed by Verges
but also in a ¶ broader sense, to consider whether there is in this defence strategy that arose in colonial, ¶ criminal law
contexts, something that is generalisable, something that can be drawn out to form a ¶ notion of legal rupture more
generally.¶ To begin then, an exploration of Verges* 'rupture defence', or rendered more eloquently, a ¶ strategy of rupture.
At the beginning of the film, Verges comments on his strategy for the trial of ¶ Djamila Bouhired, a member of the KLN,
who was tried in a military court for planting a bomb ¶ in a cafe in Algiers in 1956. Verges states the following in relation to
the trial:¶ The problem wasn't to play for sympathy as left-wing lawyers advised us to do, from the ¶ murderous fools who
judged us, but to taunt them, to provoke incidents that would reach ¶ people in Paris, London, Brussels and Cairo...¶ The
refusal to play for sympathy from those empowered to uphold the law in a
colonial legal¶ order hints at the much more profound refusal that lies at the
basis of the strategy of rupture,¶ which we see unfold throughout the film. In refusing to accept the
characterisation of Djamila s¶ acts as criminal acts, Verges challenges the very legal categories that were used to
criminalise,¶ condemn and punish anti-colonial resistance. The refusal to make the defendants' actions ¶ cognisable to and
intelligible within the colonial legal framework breaks the capacity of the ¶ judges to adjudicate in at least two senses. First,
their moral authority is radically undermined by ¶ an outright rejection of the
legal terms of reference and categories which they are appointed to¶ uphold.
The legal strategy of rupture is a politics of refusal that calls into question
the¶ justiciability of the purported crime by challenging the moral and
political jurisdiction of the¶ colonial legal order itself.¶ Second, the refusal of the legal
categorisation of the FLN acts of resistance as criminal brought ¶ into light the contradictions inherent in the official
French position and the reality of the¶ Algerian context. This was not, as the official line would have it, simply a case of
French criminal¶ law being applied to French nationals. The repeated assertion that the defendants were ¶ independent
Algerian actors fighting against colonial brutality, coupled with repeated revelations ¶ of the use of torture on political
prisoners made it impossible for the contradictions to be ¶ "rationally contained" within the normal operations of criminal
law. The revelation and¶ denunciation of torture in the courtroom not to prevent statements or admissions from being ¶
admissable as evidence (as such violations would normally be used) but to challenge the ¶ legitimacy of the imposition of a
colonial legal order on the Algerian people made the normal ¶ operation of criminal law procedure virtually impossible.24
And it is in this making impossible of¶ the operation of the legal order that the power of the strategy of rupture lies. ¶ In
refusing to render his clients* actions intelligible to a colonial (and later imperial) legal ¶ Framework, Verges makes visible
the obvious hypocrisy of the colonial legal order that attempts ¶ to punish resistance that employs violence, in the same
spatial temporal boundaries where the¶ brute violence of colonial rule saturates everyday life. In doing so, this is a strategy
that¶ challenges the monopoly of legitimate violence the state holds. Verges aims to render visible the¶
raise distinction between common crimes and political crimes, or more broadly, the
separation of¶ law and politics.25 The ruptural defence seeks to subvert the order and structure of the
trial by¶ re-defining the relation between accuser and accused. This illumination of the hypocrisy of
the¶ colonial state questions the authority of its judiciary to adjudicate . But more
than this, his¶ strategy is ruptural in two senses that are fundamental to the operation of the law in the colonial ¶ settler
and post-colonial contexts. The first is that the space of opposition within the legal ¶ confrontation is reconfigured. The
second, and related point, is that the strictures of a legal ¶ politics of recognition are shattered.¶ In relation to the first
point, a space of opposition is, in the view of Fanon, missing in certain ¶ senses, in the colonial context. A space of
opposition in which a genuinely mutual struggle¶ between coloniser and colonised can occur is denied by spatial and legal-
political strategies of¶ containment and segregation. While these strategies also exhibit great degrees of plasticity2", the ¶
control over such mobility remains to a great degree in the hands of the colonial occupier. The¶ legal strategy
of rupture creates a space of political opposition in the courtroom that
cannot be¶ absorbed or appropriated by the legal order. In Christodoulidis' view, this
lack of co-option is¶ the crux of the strategy of rupture. ¶ This strategy of rupture also
points to a path that challenges the limits of a politics of recognition, ¶ often one of the key legal and political strategies
utilised by indigenous and racial minority¶ communities in their struggles for justice. Claims for recognition
in a juridical frame inevitably¶ involve a variety of onto-epistemological
closures.2' Whether because of the impossible and¶ irreconciliable relation
between the need for universal norms and laws and the specificities of the ¶
particular claims that come before the law, or because of the need to lit one's claims within legal-
¶ political categories that are already intelligible within the legal order, legal recognition has been ¶

critiqued, particularly in regards to colonial settler societies, on the basis

that it only allows¶ identities, legal claims, ways of being that are always-
already proper to the existing juridical ¶ order to be recognised by the law. In
the Canadian context, for instance, many scholars have¶ elucidated the ways in which the legal doctrine of aboriginal title
to land imports Anglo-¶ American concepts of ownership into the heart of its definition; and moreover, defines ¶
aboriginality on the basis of a fixed, static concept of cultural difference. The strategy of rupture¶ elides
the violence of recognition by challenging the legitimacy of the colonial
legal order itself .¶ In an article discussing Verges* strategy of rupture, Emilios Christodoulidis takes up a
question¶ posed to Verges by Foucault shortly after the publication of Verges' book, De La Strategic ¶ Jiwuiare, as to
whether the defence of rupture in the context of criminal law trials in the colony ¶ could be generalised more widely, or
whether it was "not in fact caught up in a specific historical ¶ conjuncture." In exploring how the strategy of rupture could
inform practices and theory'¶ outside of the courtroom, Christodoulidis characterises the strategy of rupture as one mode
of¶ immanent critique. As individuals and communities subjected to the force of law,
the law itself¶ becomes the object of critique, the object that needs to be
taken apart in order to expose its¶ violence. To quote from Christodoulidis:¶ Immanent critique
aims to generate within these institutional frameworks ¶ contradictions that are inevitable (they can neither be displaced
nor¶ ignored), compelling (they necessitate action) and transformative in that ¶ (unlike internal critique) the overcoming of
the contradiction does not¶ restore, but transcends, the 'disturbed' framework within which it arose. ¶ It pushes it to go
beyond its confines and in the process, famously' in ¶ Marx's words, "enables the world to clarify' its consciousness in
waking it¶ from its dream about itself” 29¶ Christodoulidis explores how the strategy of rupture can be
utilised as an intellectual resource ¶ for critical legal theory and more
broadly, as a point of departure for political strategies that ¶ could cause a
crisis for globalised capital. Strategies of rupture are particularly crucial when¶ considering a system, he
notes, that has been so successful at appropriating, ingesting and ¶ making its own, political aspirations (such as freedom,
to take one example) that have also been¶ used to disrupt its most violent and exploitative tendencies. Here
Christodoulidis departs from¶ the question of colonialism to locus on the operation of capitalism in post-war European
states. It¶ is also this bifurcation that I want to question, and rather than a distinction between colonialism ¶ and
capitalism, to consider how the colonial (as a set of economic and political relations that rely ¶ on ideologies of racial
difference, and civilisational discourses that emerged during the period of ¶ European colonialism) is continually re-
written and re-instantiated through a globalised¶ capitalism. As I elaborate in the discussion of the Salwa Judum
judgment below, it is the¶ combination of violent state repression of political dissent that finds its origins (in the legal
form¶ it takes) during the colonial era, and capitalist development imperatives that implicate local and ¶ global mining
corporations in the dispossession of tribal peoples that constitutes the legal- ¶ political conflict at issue.¶ After the Trial:
From Defence to Judgement¶ "Les bons juges, comme les hero¶ de la presse du coeur, n'existent pas."30¶ In response to a
question from Jean Lapeyrie (a member of the Action Committee for Prison- ¶ Justice) during a discussion of De La
Strategic Judiciare published as the Preface to the second ¶ edition, Verges remarks that there are actually effective judges,
but that they are effective when¶ forgetting the essence of what it is to be a judge.51 The strategy of rupture is a tactic
utilised to¶ subvert the order and structure of a trial; to re-define the very terms upon which the trial is ¶ premised. On this
view, the judge, charged with the obligation to uphold the rule of law is of ¶ course by definition not able to do anything but
sustain an unjust political order.¶ In the film Terror'^ Advocate, one is left to wonder about the specificities of the judicial
responses¶ to the strategy deployed by Verges. (Djamila Bouhired, for instance, was sentenced to death, but ¶ as a result of
a worldwide media campaign was released from prison in 1962). While I would ¶ argue that the judicial response is clearly'
not what is at stake in the ruptural defence, I want to¶ consider the potentiality of the
judgment to be ruptural in the sense articulated by¶ Christodoulidis. discussed above. Exposing a
law to its own contradictions and violence,¶ revealing the ways in which a
law or policy contradicts and violates rights to basic political ¶ freedoms, has
clear political-legal effects and consequences. Is it possible for members of
the¶ judiciary to expose contradictions in the legal order itself, thereby transforming
it? Would the¶ redefinition, for instance, of constitutional provisions guaranteeing
rights that come into conflict¶ with capitalist development imperatives
constitute such a rupture? In my view, the re-definition¶ of the limitations on
the guarantees of individual and group freedom that are inevitably and ¶
invariably utilised to justify state repression of rights in favour of capitalist development¶
imperatives, security, or colonial settlement have the potential to contribute to the

re-creation of¶ political orders that could be more just and democratic .¶ We
may be reluctant to ever claim a judgment as ruptural out of fear that it
would contaminate¶ the radical nature of this form of immanent critique . Is
to describe a judgment as ruptural to¶ belie the impossibility of justice, the
aporia that confronts every moment of judicial decision- ¶ making? I want to suggest that it is

impossible to maintain such a pure position in relation to law, ¶ particularly

given its capacity (analogous to that of capital itself ) for reinvention . Thus, I
want to¶ explore the potential for judges to subvert state violence
engendered by particular forms of¶ political and economic dispossession,
through the act of judgment. In my view, basic rights¶ protected by
constitutional guarantees (as in the Indian case) have been so compromised in the¶
interests of big business and development imperatives, that re-defining rights to
equality, dignity¶ and security of person, and subverting the interests of the
state-corporate nexus is potentially¶ ruptural, in the sense of causing a crisis
for discrete tentacles of global capitalism.¶ At this juncture, we may want to
explicitly account for the specific differences between criminal ¶ defence
cases and Verges' basic tactic, which is to challenge the very jurisdiction of the court
to¶ adjudicate, to define the act of resistance as a criminal one and constitutional
challenges to the¶ violation of rights in cases such as Salwa Judum. While one tactic seeks to render

the illegitimacy¶ of the colonial state bare in its confrontation with anti-
colonial resistance, the other is a tactic¶ used to re-define the terms upon
which political dissent and resistance take place within the ¶ constitutional
bounds of the post-colonial state. These two strategies appear to be each
other's¶ opposite ; one challenges the legitimacy of the state itself through refusing the jurisdiction of the ¶ court
to criminalise freedom fighters, while the
other calls on the judiciary to hold the state to ¶
account for criminalising and violating the rights of its citizens to engage in
political acts of¶ dissent and resistance. However, the common thread that situates these strategies
within a¶ singular political framework is the fundamental challenge they pose to the state's monopoly over ¶ defining the
terms upon which anti-colonial and anti-capitalist political action takes place.

A dialectical process of revolutionary reforms is necessary---the

aff is a concrete expression of a more systemic critique
Ben Wray 14, International Socialist Group, The case for revolutionary reforms,
http://internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2014/04/the-case-for-revolutionary-reforms/
We need revolutionary change. There’s no two ways about it – if the exploitation of labour by capital continues to
be the central dynamic driving economic development, we are headed for human and environmental catastrophe. ¶ But as I’ve discussed
in the previous five parts of this series, getting from where we are to a revolutionary
transformation that overthrows the dominant property relations of the capitalist economy and
replaces them with social relations based on democratic control of the world’s resources is not as simple as

declaring our desire for it to be so. I saw a petition on change.org the other day proposing
the overthrow of capitalism. If one million people signed that petition and
one million people signed a further petition to introduce full collective
bargaining rights for trade-unions in the UK, which one would move us closer to
the overthrow of capitalism? I wager the latter.¶ Whilst having an end goal in
sight is important, most people don’t change their thinking about the world
based on bold visions of what could be done at some point in the future: they change their ideas based on
evidence from their material lives which points to the inadequacy or irrationality of the status quo. In other words, we need to have ideas
that build upon people’s lived experience of capitalism, and since that it is within the framework of a representative democracy system,
we need ideas based around proposals for reforms. At the same time those reforms
have to help rather than hinder a move to more revolutionary
transformation that challenges the very core of the capitalist system. ¶ The dialectic
of reform and revolution¶ What we need, therefore, is a strategy of revolutionary reforms . Such a
notion would appear as a contradiction in terms to many who identify as reformists or revolutionaries and see the two as
dichotomous, but there is no reason why this should be the case. Indeed, history has
shown that revolutionary transformations have always happened as a dialectical
interaction between rapid, revolutionary movements and more
institutional, reform-based challenges . Even the revolutionary part of that dialectic has always been
motivated by the immediate needs of the participants involved – ‘land, bread and peace’ being the first half of the slogan of the Russian
Revolution.¶ What does a strategy of ‘revolutionaryreforms’ entail? Ed Rooksby explains that it is a
political strategy that builds towards revolutionary change by using reforms
to ‘push up against the limits’ of the ‘logic of capitalism’ in practice :¶ “At first
these “feasible objectives” will be limited to reforms within capitalism—or at
least to measures which, from the standpoint of a more or less reformist working class consciousness, appear to
be legitimate and achievable within the system, but which may actually run
counter to the logic of capitalism and start to push up against its limits. As
the working class engages in struggle , however, the anti-capitalist
implications of its needs and aspirations are gradually revealed. At the same time,
through its experience of struggle for reform, the working class learns about
its capacity for “self-management, initiative and collective decision ” and can have a
“foretaste of what emancipation means”. In this way struggle for reform helps
prepare the class psychologically, ideologically and materially for revolution .”
The late Daniel Bensaid expressed this argument through the lens of the history of the socialist movement:¶ “In reality
all sides in the controversy agree on the fundamental points inspired by The Coming Catastrophe (Lenin’s pamphlet of the summer
of 1917) and the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International (inspired by Trotsky in 1937): the need for
 transitional demands , the politics of alliances (the united front), the logic of hegemony and on
the dialectic (not antinomy) between reform and revolution. We are therefore against the
idea of separating an (‘anti-neoliberal’) minimum programme and an (anti-capitalist) ‘maximum’ programme. We remain convinced that a
consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that the two are interlinked by the dynamic of struggle.” ¶ So
revolutionary reforms means a policy agenda that, as Alberto Toscano has put it, “at one
and the same time make concrete gains within capitalism which permits
further movement against capitalism”. The Italian marxist Antonio Gramsci described this approach as a
‘war of positon’.
 A2 Military Evil
The military’s inevitable and students should engage it
productively – outright hostility widens the civil-military gap
and leads to militarism, collapse of civic education, and an air of
civilian superiority that perpetuates stigma.
Downs et al 12 (Donald Alexander Downs is a Professor of Journalism, Law, and Science
at the University of Wisconsin, Ilia Murtazashvili is a Professor at the Graduate School of
International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and has a PhD in Political Science, “Arms and
the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-Military Students,” Cambridge
Press, 2012, p8-11) AS
In the normative framework we set forth, the state of affairs to which we have just alluded – quasi-benign neglect at best,
outright hostility to the military and military affairs in the academy at the worst – is
detrimental to the constitutional order, civic equality, and the civic and liberal
education of non-military students.  We join a large community of scholars, leaders, and citizens in
maintaining that the constitutional order requires a civil—military relationship that
protects military professionalism and appropriate military autonomy while also
honoring the principle and practice of civilian control. Historically, the majority worries about
an inappropriate relationship between military and civil society (including a disquiet about a military-social gap) have
centered on three¶ concerns: (1) the dangers of a military takeover— a worry that scholars rightly consider exaggerated (at
the least) in the modern American context; (2.) undue¶ military interference with civilian strategic judgment that tilts the
appropriate constitutional balance; (3) and uncooperative military—civilian interaction in the policy process, which can
lead to bad policy decisions. These are obviously important considerations, and they are relevant to our inquiry; but they
lie toward the periphery of our concern. Our emphasis is upon higher education, ¶ civic equality, and the learning process.
In this vein, we believe that ignorance of the military and war can lead to four problems:¶
(1.) Uncritical support of the military, often accompanied by what historian (and former Army
lieutenant colonel) Andrew Bacevich calls the “new American¶ militarism, “which entails an
undue and unrealistic enthusiasm for¶ power and adventure.‘ ‘ Such support is misbegotten
because the military -¶ like any institution or group, however noble and worthy of respect-¶ is rife
with conflicts and imperfections. Military leaders and soldiers make mistakes,¶ sometimes egregiously so,
and the politics of defense and defense spending is ¶ notoriously messy and laced with institutional and bureaucratic self-
interest,¶ as President Dwight D. Eisenhower accentuated when he warned against the ¶ shenanigans of the military—
congressional—industrial complex in his famous ¶ presidential Farewell Address. As an Army lieutenant colonel with
twenty-¶ five years of service told us in an interview, “The military can have a signifi- ¶ cant bullshit problem." '4 A recent
example is the military’s initial distortion ¶ (some claimed it was a cover—up) of the truth behind the killing of Army ¶
Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan on April 22., 2.004. The Army claimed that ¶ the former football star’s death was caused
by enemy fire, and it was only after¶ Tillman’s family publicly pursued the matter that the Army acknowledged the ¶
embarrassing fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire.“ The university’s¶ relationship with the
military must be duly respectful , but also critical. As the¶ great military sociologist Morris
janowitz wrote in a letter to a colleague in¶ 1971, warning against what he called “unanticipated militarism," “ A new¶
intellectual, critical, and truly academic relation between the universities and¶ the
military will have to be created — since such contacts will be essential for¶
effective civilian control and a meaningful military policy.”"'¶ (2.) Endorsement
of an opposite, antimilitary ideology that perceives the military¶ as evil or as the “other.”
As we will see in our section on the politics of ROTC, ¶ some students berate ROTC cadets as “baby
killers” and similar embodi-¶ ments of evil, or uncritically assume that universal peace would
prevail if¶ nations only laid down their arms. A healthy relationship between the
military and civilians on campus should help to dispel negative stereotypes and
myths about the military and the legitimate uses and abuses of the deployment ¶ of
military force.¶ (3.) A simple lack of knowledge regarding the military and strategic
security¶ matters,
a lack that amounts to a failure of civic education and
responsibility.¶ National security and the appropriate use of force are vital matters
of national¶ interest, so understanding these phenomena constitutes an important
aspect¶ of citizenship. As former Democratic senator Russ Feingold and former¶ Democratic congressman (and
former vice chair of the 9/1 I Commission) ¶ Lee Hamilton remarked in a 1009 editorial, “Protecting our national security
is the most solemn responsibility of members of Congress, one that should ¶ transcend both partisan politics and the
parochialism of the current appro-¶ priations process.” ' '¶ Bacevich detects a common denominator winding through all
three of these¶ postures. “Here we confront a central paradox of present-day American ¶
militarism. Even as US. policy in recent decades has become progressively¶
militarized, so too has the Vietnam-induced gap separating the U.S. military¶ from
American society persisted and perhaps even widened. Even as¶ American elites
become ever more fascinated with military power and the¶ use of force — Vice President Cheney,
for example, is a self-professed war buff¶ with a passion for military history — soldiering itself is something
left to the¶ p|ebs.”‘” Bacevich’s concern points to the civic duty and equality aspects of ¶ the gap problem.¶ (4.)
The fourth problem concerns the military itself: the rise of an undue sense of¶
moral superiority to civilian society. To some extent, this problem is inherent¶ to the military.
Competent soldiers engage in rigorous training that turns ¶ them into soldier—warriors who possess special skills and
forms of courage¶ that lie beyond the ken of the average citizen. (The need for courage, of ¶ course, depends upon the role a
soldier performs, for not all military r()les¶ involve combat.) This disparity can engender a feeling of moral superiority ¶
that is detrimental to an appropriate relationship between the military and¶ civil
society. As Machiavelli relates at the beginning of The Art of War, a¶ trained soldier wearing a uniform often finds it
difficult to respect his fellow¶ citizens who lack such accouterments."’ A widening gap between the
military and civilian society exacerbates this problem. A productive relationship
between the civil order and the military can be fostered¶ in a number of ways, but
one important vehicle involves the university. in many¶ respects, the university is a
microcosm of the relationship among the military,¶ civil society, and the
government.
 A2 Reformism Bad
Non-reformist reforms avoid their offense and is more viable
than their alt
Wright 07 [Wright, Erik Olin (American analytical Marxist sociologist, specializing in social stratification, and in
egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was the 2012 President of the American Sociological Association).
"Guidelines for envisioning real utopias." SOUNDINGS-LONDON-LAWRENCE AND WISHART- 36 (2007): 26] AJ
The final guideline for discussions of envisioning real utopias concerns the importance of waystations. The central
problem of envisioning real utopias concerns the viability of institutional
alternatives that embody emancipatory values, but the practical achievability of such
institutional designs often depends upon the existence of smaller steps, intermediate
institutional innovations that move us in the right direction but only partially embody
these values. Institutional proposals which have an all-or-nothing quality to them
are less likely to be adopted in the first place, and may pose more difficult transition-
cost problems if implemented. The catastrophic experience of Russia in the 'shock
therapy' approach to market reform is historical testimony to this problem.
Waystations are a difficult theoretical and practical problem because there are many instances in which partial reforms
may have very different consequences than full-bodied changes. Consider the example of unconditional basic income.
Suppose that a very limited, below, subsistence basic income was instituted: not enough to survive on, but a grant of
income unconditionally given to everyone, One possibility is that this kind of basic income would act mainly as a subsidy
to employers who pay very low wages, since now they could attract more workers even if they offered below poverty level
earnings. There may be good reasons to iItitute such wage subsidies, but they would not generate the positive effects of a
UBI, and therefore might not function as a stepping stone. What we ideally want, therefore, are intermediate
reforms that have two main properties: first, they concretely demonstrate the
virtues of the fuller programme of transformation, so they contribute to the ideological battle of
convincing people that the alternative is credible and desirable; and second,
they enhance the capacity for action of people, increasing their ability to push further in the
future. Waystations that increase popular participation and bring people together in problem-solving deliberations for
collective purposes are particularly salient in this regard. This is what in the 1970s was called ‘ nonreformist
reforms' : reforms that are possible within existing institutions and that
pragmatically solve real problems while at the same time empowering people in
ways which enlarge their scope of action in the future.
 Reformism Good
Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer
rather than pushing it away
Richard Delgado 9, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law School, J.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers
awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s Outstanding
Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal
profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p.
588-590
CLS critique of piecemeal reform¶ Critical scholars reject the idea of
2. The

piecemeal reform. Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the

wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society. Even worse, an
unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and
legitimize oppression . Those who control the system weaken resistance by
pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff
or worker as evidence that the system is fair and¶ just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the¶ common law or
using the case method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure.“ To avoid this, CLS
scholars¶ urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order¶ in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political

fashion.¶ The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and

wrong . Minorities know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand . The critique is
imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should

interpret events affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority

to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the
revolution, or it may not . In the meantime, the order keeps a number of
poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a
comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of paternalism to
assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat
now,¶ unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some
incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer , not push
them further away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may
whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a tenants‘
union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal
reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether
total change, when it comes, will be what we want .
 Hardt
Not mutually exclusive – voting Aff affirms the transformational
power of oppositional networks to resist capital itself &
accelerate the fragmenting power of anti-hegemonic networks –
larger trajectory of reform can be understood as a strategy for
political action
Hardt 2 – Prof. of Literature @ Duke & The European Graduate School
New Left Review, New Left Review 14, March-April 2002,
http://newleftreview.org/II/14/michael-hardt-porto-alegre-today-s-bandung
Anti-capitalism and national sovereignty The Porto Alegre Forum was in this sense perhaps to happy, to celebratory and
not conflictual enough. The most important political difference cutting across the entire Forum concerned the role of
national sovereignty. There are indeed two primary positons in the response to today’s dominant forces of globalization:
either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and
global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative to the present
form of globalization that is equally global. The first poses neoliberalism as the primary
analytical category, viewing the enemy as unrestricted global capitalist activity with weak state controls; the second is
more clearly posed against capital itself , whether state-regulated or not . The first
might rightly be called an antiglobalization posit on, in so far as national sovereignties, even if linked by international
solidarity, serve to limit and regulate the forces of capitalist globalization. National liberation thus remains for this posit
on the ultimate goal, as it was for the old anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The second, in contrast, opposes any
national solutions and seeks instead a democratic globalization. The first position occupied the most visible and dominant
spaces of the Porto Alegre Forum; it was represented in the large plenary sessions, repeated by the official spokespeople,
and reported in the press. A key proponent of this position was the leadership of the Brazilian PT (Workers' Party)—in
effect the host of the Forum, since it runs the city and regional government. It was obvious and inevitable that the PT
would occupy a central space in the Forum and use the international prestige of the event as part of its campaign strategy
for the upcoming elections. The second dominant voice of national sovereignty was the French leadership of ATTAC,
which laid the groundwork for the Forum in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique. The leadership of ATTAC is, in this
regard, very close to many of the French politicians— most notably Jean-Pierre Chevenement—who advocate
strengthening national sovereignty as a solution to the ills of contemporary globalization. These, in any case, are the
figures who dominated the representation of the Forum both internally and in the press. The non-sovereign, alternative
globalization position, in contrast, was minoritarian at the Forum—not in quantitative terms but in terms of
representation; in fact, the majority of the participants in the Forum may well have occupied this minoritarian position.
First, the various movements that have conducted the protests from Seattle to Genoa are generally oriented towards non-
national solutions. Indeed, the centralized structure of state sovereignty itself runs counter to the horizontal network-form
that the movements have developed. Second, the Argentinian movements that have sprung up in response to the present
financial crisis, organized in neighbourhood and city-wide delegate assemblies, are similarly antagonistic to proposals of
national sovereignty. Their slogans call for getting rid, not just of one politician, but all of them—que se vayan todos: the
entire political class. And finally, at the base of the various parties and organizations present at the Forum the sentiment is
much more hostile to proposals of national sovereignty than at the top. This may be particularly true of ATTAC, a hybrid
organization whose head, especially in France, mingles with traditional politicians, whereas its feet are firmly grounded in
the movements. The division between the sovereignty, anti-globalization position
and the non-sovereign, alternative globalization position is therefore not
best understood in geographical terms. It does not map the divisions
between North and South or First World and Third. The conflict
corresponds rather to two different forms of political organization. The
traditional parties and centralized campaigns generally occupy the national
sovereignty pole, whereas the new movements organized in horizontal networks
tend to cluster at the non-sovereign pole. And furthermore, within traditional, centralized organizations, the top tends
toward sovereignty and the base away. It is no surprise, perhaps, that those in positions of power would be most interested
in state sovereignty and those excluded least. This may help to explain, in any case, how the national sovereignty,
antiglobalization position could dominate the representations of the Forum even though the majority of the participants
tend rather toward the perspective of a non-national alternative globalization. As a concrete illustration of this political
and ideological difference, one can imagine the responses to the current economic crisis in Argentina that logically follow
from each of these positions. Indeed that crisis loomed over the entire Forum, like a threatening premonition of a chain of
economic disasters to come. The first position would point to the fact that the Argentinian debacle was caused by the
forces of global capital and the policies of the IMF, along with the other supranational institutions that undermine
national sovereignty. The logical oppositional response should thus be to reinforce the national sovereignty of Argentina
(and other nation-states) against these destabilizing external forces. The second position would identify the same causes of
the crisis, but insist that a national solution is neither possible nor desirable. The alternative to the rule of global capital
and its institutions will only be found at an equally global level, by a global democratic movement. The practical
experiments in democracy taking place today at neighbourhood and city levels in Argentina, for example, pose a necessary
continuity between the democratization of Argentina and the democratization of the global system. Of course, neither
of these perspectives provides an adequate recipe for an immediate solution
to the crisis that would circumvent IMF prescriptions—and I am not convinced that such a solution exists. They
rather present different political strategies for action today which seek, in the

course of time, to develop real alternatives to the current form of global

rule. Parties vs networks In a previous period we could have staged an old-style ideological
confrontation between the two positions. The first could accuse the second of playing into the
hands of neoliberalism, undermining state sovereignty and paving the way for further globalization. Politics, the
one could continue, can only be effectively conducted on the national terrain
and within the nation-state. And the second could reply that national regimes and
other forms of sovereignty, corrupt and oppressive as they are, are merely obstacles to the global democracy that we
seek. This kind of confrontation, however, could not take place at Porto Alegre—in part because of the dispersive nature of
the event, which tended to displace conflicts, and in part because the sovereignty position so successfully occupied the
central representations that no contest was possible. But the more important reason for a lack of confrontation may have
had to do with the organizational forms that correspond to the two positions. The traditional parties and centralized
organizations have spokespeople who represent them and conduct their battles, but no one speaks for a
network. How do you argue with a network ? The movements organized
within them do exert their power, but they do not proceed through oppositions.
One of the basic characteristic s of the network form is that no two nodes face
each other in contradiction; rather, they are always triangulated by a third , and
then a fourth, and then
by an indefinite number of others in the web . This is one of the
characteristics of the Seattle events that we have had the most trouble
understanding: groups which we thought in objective contradiction to one
another—environmentalists and trade unions, church groups and anarchists—were suddenly able to
work together, in the context of the network of the multitude. The movements, to take a
slightly different perspective, function something like a public sphere, in the sense that
they can allow full expression of differences within the common context of
open exchange . But that does not mean that networks are passive . They
displace contradictions and operate instead a kind of alchemy, or rather a sea change,
the flow of the movements transforming the traditional fixed positions ;
networks imposing their force through a kind of irresistible undertow . Like
the Forum itself, the multitude in the movements is always overflowing, excessive and unknowable. It is certainly
important then, on the one hand, to recognize the differences that divide the activists and politicians gathered at Porto
Alegre. It would be a mistake, on the other hand, to try to read the division according
to the traditional model of ideological conflict between opposing sides . Political
struggle in the age of network movements no longer works that way. Despite the
apparent strength of those who occupied centre stage and dominated the representations of the Forum, they may
ultimately prove to have lost the struggle. Perhaps the representatives of the traditional parties and centralized
organizations at Porto Alegre are too much like the old national leaders gathered at Bandung—imagine Lula of the PT in
the position of Ahmed Sukarno as host, and Bernard Cassen of ATTAC France as Jawaharlal Nehru, the most honoured
guest. The leaders can certainly craft resolutions affirming national sovereignty around a conference table, but they
can never grasp the democratic power of the movements. Eventually they too will
be swept up in the
multitude, which is capable of transforming all fixed and centralized
elements into so many more nodes in its indefinitely expansive network .
Alt Answers
 A2 Solves Case
Alt doesn’t immediately reduce the US military presence in
Uganda – only that can contain adventurism now, which is set to
escalate soon – new scholarship can’t solve fast enough to
prevent war
And, adventurism and authoritarian isn’t a result of flawed
epistemologies – that wouldn’t explain why Uganda nixed its
previous anti-LGBT law and withdrew from South Sudan despite
their alt not having been enacted – Museveni’s actions are based
on a political calculus, US withdrawal changes
 CTP
alienating ourselves from politics inevitably crushes movements for
change and has empirically failed
Boggs 97 [Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public
sphere in late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6]
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many
ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology – intersect
with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they
remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in
common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of
empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public
engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large
groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent
problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved –
perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in the future. And such problems (ecological
crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be
understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized
markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often
inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities
will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence . In his commentary on the state of citizenship today,
Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public
concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate
the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the meantime, the fate of the
world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics
becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political
power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands
further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be
less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic
state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far
from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many
levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an already familiar
dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not
very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of
the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the facek of disunity
and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent
guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what
Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.
 A2 Co-Option DA
Fear of co-option radicalizes the alt – only perm solves
Zizek 08 (Slavoj Zizek, professor at the University of Ljubljana, Law and the Postmodern Mind, p. 92 )
Finally, the point about inherent transgression is not that every
opposition, every attempt at subversion, is
automatically "coopted." On the contrary, the very fear of being coopted that
makes us search for more and more "radical," "pure" attitudes, is the supreme
strategy of suspension or marginalization . The point is rather that true subversion is not always where
it seems to be. Sometimes, a small distance is much more explosive for the system
than an ineffective radical rejection. In religion, a small heresy can be more
threatening than an outright atheism or passage to another religion; for a hard-line Stalinist, a Trotskyite is
infinitely more threatening than a bourgeois liberal or social democrat. As le Carre put it, one true revisionist in the
Central Committee is worth more than thousand dissidents outside it. It was easy to dismiss
Gorbachev for aiming only at improving the system, making it more efficient
—he nonetheless set in motion its disintegra tion. So one should also bear in mind the
obverse of the inherent transgression: one is tempted to paraphrase Freud's claim from The Ego and the Id that man is not
only much more immoral than he believes, but also much more moral than he knows— the System is not only infi-
nitely more resistant and invulnerable than it may appear (it can coopt apparently subversive strategies, they can serve as
its support), it is also infinitely more vulnerable (a small revision etc, can have large
unforeseen catastrophic consequences).
 Vague Alt
Vague movements that criticize solutions without presenting
realistic alternatives prevent change and drive people into
reigning ideology
Bryant 12 (levi, prof of philosophy at Collins college, Critique of the Academic Left,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/)
this is the worst sort of abstraction (in the Marxist sense) and wishful thinking.
The problem as I see it is that

a thought is abstract when it ignores all of the mediations in

Within a Marxo-Hegelian context,

which a thing is embedded. For example, I understand a robust tree abstractly when I attribute its robustness, say, to its genetics alone, ignoring the
complex relations to its soil, the air, sunshine, rainfall, etc., that also allowed it to grow robustly in this way. This is the sort of critique we’re always leveling against the neoliberals. They are
abstract thinkers. In their doxa that individuals are entirely responsible for themselves and that they completely make themselves by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, neoliberals ignore
all the mediations belonging to the social and material context in which human beings develop that play a role in determining the vectors of their life. They ignore, for example, that George W.
Bush grew up in a family that was highly connected to the world of business and government and that this gave him opportunities that someone living in a remote region of Alaska in a very
different material infrastructure and set of family relations does not have. To think concretely is to engage in a cartography of these mediations, a mapping of these networks, from circumstance to

the academic left falls

circumstance (what I call an “onto-cartography”). It is to map assemblages, networks, or ecologies in the constitution of entities.¶ Unfortunately,

prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that
denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic
constructions of alternatives . This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be
remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park:¶ The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this:¶
Phase 1: Collect Underpants¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Profit!¶ They even have a catchy song to go with their work:¶ Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as

Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique¶ Phase 2: ?¶ Phase 3: Revolution and

follows:¶

complete social transformation!¶ Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase
1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but
there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced,

people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is
where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often
right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can
understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the
humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and

David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution,

and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other

academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from
these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and
tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound!
Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing?¶ But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them

We are every bit as

for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse.

off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of

the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system,
and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “ revolutionary ” is the greatest

friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the
reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush
embrace of

Limbaugh in business. Well done!¶ But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious
shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete
proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our
critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things
contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when
we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent
on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their
consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and
communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc.¶ What are your proposals? How

will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin
had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and
talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of

Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to

organization.

build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of
planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri
& Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think
ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet
another critical paradigm, Laruelle.¶ I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide
for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste

disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What
is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly
revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing
real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!”

without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution

is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would
concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation.¶ “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical
theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the
problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything
with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even
the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and
denounce. Good luck with that.
 A2 Passive Resistance Alt
Doesn’t solve
Righi 11 [(Andrea, Assistant Professor of Italian at Colorado College, Current
Assistant Professor of Italian and Humanities at University of Puerto Rico)
“Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri”
Chapter 3, available on google books] AT
Two further considerations merit attention. There is at least one element that is connected to the apparatus of Fordism as
a passive revolution that Gramsci missed. He did not realize that consumption was a far more complex thing than the
basic fulfillment of biological necessities or the foundation of a caste of parasites that, as he says, “live on so-called past
labor, a metaphor to indicate the present labor of others.”'9 Gramsci, furthermore, ignored the libidinal attachment that
commodities exercised, and of course had little recourse to firsthand information to start considering the profound
stabilizing power they had over the whole of society. It is true that he sensed the danger of the new “necessities” that the
system was creating for its con- sumer, but he did not explore the productive element of consumption. Second,
Gramsci warns against the use of the passive revolution as an abstract
historical schema, for if it is not “purged of every residue of mechanicism and
fatalism,” this category faces the “danger of historical defeatism.”2° As any
other sociopolitical situation, this revolution without a revolution is in fact
always the result of an “equilibrium of political forces ,” both at the national and
international levels.“ The engaged intellectual must not forget the historicity of such
a situation and read through the economic and political contradictions that
generated it in order to change them.
 A2 Don’t Need an Alt
No alt means their kritik fails
Arvidsson 13 [(Adam, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the
University of Milano) “Thinking beyond neo-liberalism: A response to Detlev Zwick” ephemera: theory & politics in
organization 13(2): 407-412] AT
This makes it trickier to do critical theory. We can of course still criticize the actual state of things. We can point to the
precarious relations that prevail among creative knowledge workers; show how exploitative and unjust conditions are
intensified by the very forces that drive the globalization of communicative capitalism, like the outsourcing of design work;
or lament the fact that a triumphant neoliberal regime subsumes and appropriates aspects of subjectivity and social life
that we think should have been left alone. To produce such critiques remains useful intellectual work – I have done it in
other contexts (Arvidsson et al., 2010; Arvidsson, 2007), as has Detlev Zwick (2008), and many others. To the extent that
such critiques reach a mass audience, they can become a progressive impulse to action and reflection – as in the case of
Naomi Klein’s work inspiring the ‘no global’ movement (to use an inadequate name coined by the mainstream press). But
such a critique without an alternative remains unsatisfactory for at least three reasons.
First, and most superficially, since everyone else is doing it, the marginal utility of yet another piece of critical theory
rapidly diminishes, as does the intellectual satisfaction that can be derived form producing it. Second, and more seriously,
the absence of a realistic alternative, or even of a historical subject in the name of which such a
critique can be pronounced, risksrendering critical theory moralistic and rather
toothless. We might agree with Zwick when he suggests that the outsourcing of design
work from Toronto to the Philippines is somehow wrong, but it is difficult to understand
exactly why this would be the case. (Why shouldn’t Philippine designers be allowed to compete with Canadian
designers? Can the ‘creative class’ claim an exemption from the global economy? Perhaps the answer is ‘yes’, but I do not
know of any viable alternative vision of society that is able to substantiate that ‘yes’.) Third, and most importantly, in
the absence of an alternative vision, critical theory remains rather unconvincing
to the people in the name of whom it proposes to speak. I can assure you – and I’ve tried! – that
you won’t become an organic intellectual among social entrepreneurs or precarious
creative workers by telling them that they are exploited , that they sell out their subjectivity, or
that the system in which they operate is unjust. Pure critique is simply not attractive enough
to make the multitude of new productive subjects, fragmented by neoliberalism, cohere
into a historical subject. To do that you need at least the myth of an alternative, as agitators from Sorel via
Lenin to Subcomandante Marcos could tell you.
 A2 Kick Out MP
Perm – do the alt – it’s not severance if they kick out the US
military
They can’t end the military presence – the US military doesn’t
care about African interests now so peaceful attempts to get the
military to leave won’t cause them to leave
Even if they do – withdrawal will be perceived as forced rather
than as withdrawing support for Museveni’s regime – so it can’t
solve our advantages
 A2 Fiating Uganda Action
Fiating that the Ugandan government becomes less repressive is
a voting issue – they automatically assume they solve the object
of the plan which precludes the relevant discussion of how to
make that happen – kills education.
 2AC Security
Strategy for 2ar – our specific impact turns for terror/piracy/etc prove their broad “securitization bad” impact cards are
not true in the context of these impacts – but they are true of the securitization of Northern Uganda the aff solves
2AC Top Level
 2AC Standard
The aff makes unlimited assumptions they can critique, which is
unpredictable and too broad and vague to engage – evaluating
the plan’s hypothetical enactment provides a stable basis for
engagement and preserves topic education
Focused debates on specific military policies holds policymakers
accountable
Ewan E. Mellor 13, Ph.D. candidate, Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, 2013, “Why
policy relevance is a moral necessity: Just war theory, impact, and UAVs”
This section of the paper considers more generally the need for just war theorists to
engage with policy debate about the use of force , as well as to engage with the more
fundamental moral and philosophical principles of the just war tradition. It draws on John Kelsay’s conception of just war
thinking as being a social practice,35 as well as on Michael Walzer’s understanding of the role of the social critic in
society.36 It argues that the just war tradition is a form of “practical discourse”
which is concerned with questions of “ how we should act .”37 Kelsay argues that: [T]he
criteria of jus ad bellum and jus in bello provide a framework for structured
participation in a public conversation about the use of military force . . .
citizens who choose to speak in just war terms express commitments . . . [i]n the
process of giving and asking for reasons for going to war, those who argue in
just war terms seek to influence policy by persuading others that their
analysis provides a way to express and fulfil the desire that military actions be
both wise and just.38 He also argues that “good just war thinking involves continuous
and complete deliberation, in the sense that one attends to all the standard criteria at war’s inception, at
its end, and throughout the course of the conflict.”39 This is important as it highlights the need for just war scholars to
engage with the ongoing operations in war and the specific policies that are involved. The question of whether a particular
war is just or unjust, and the question of whether a particular weapon (like drones)
can be used in accordance with the jus in bello criteria , only cover a part of
the overall justice of the war. Without an engagement with the reality of war,
in terms of the policies used in waging it, it is impossible to engage with the
“moral reality of war,”40 in terms of being able to discuss it and judge it in
moral terms. Kelsay’s description of just war thinking as a social practice is similar to Walzer’s more general
description of social criticism. The just war theorist, as a social critic, must be involved with his
or her own society and its practices. In the same way that the social critic’s distance from his or her
society is measured in inches and not miles,41 the just war theorist must be close to and must understand the language
through which war is constituted, interpreted and reinterpreted.42 It is only by understanding the
values and language that their own society purports to live by that the social
critic can hold up a mirror to that society to demonstrate its hypocrisy and to
show the gap that exists between its practice and its values .43 The tradition
itself provides a set of values and principles and, as argued by Cian O’Driscoll, constitutes a “language of
engagement” to spur participation in public and political debate.44 This language
is part of “our common heritage, the product of many centuries of arguing about war.”45 These principles and
this language provide the terms through which people understand and come
to interpret war, not in a deterministic way but by providing the categories necessary
for moral understanding and moral argument about the legitimate and
illegitimate uses of force .46 By spurring and providing the basis for political
engagement the just war tradition ensures that the acts that occur within war are considered
according to just war criteria and allows policy-makers to be held to account on this basis.
Engaging with the reality of war requires recognising that war is , as Clausewitz
stated, a continuation of policy. War, according to Clausewitz, is subordinate to politics and to
political choices and these political choices can, and must, be judged and critiqued.47
Engagement and political debate are morally necessary as the alternative is
disengagement and moral quietude, which is a sacrifice of the obligations of
citizenship.48 This engagement must bring just war theorists into contact with
the policy makers and will require work that is accessible and relevant to policy
makers, however this does not mean a sacrifice of critical distance or an abdication of
truth in the face of power. By engaging in detail with the policies being pursued and their
concordance or otherwise with the principles of the just war tradition the policy-makers will be forced
to account for their decisions and justify them in just war language. In contrast to the view, suggested by
Kenneth Anderson, that “the public cannot be made part of the debate” and that “[w]e are necessarily committed into the
hands of our political leadership”,49 it is incumbent upon just war theorists to ensure that
the public are informed and are capable of holding their political leaders to
account. To accept the idea that the political leadership are stewards and that accountability will not benefit the
public, on whose behalf action is undertaken, but will only benefit al Qaeda,50 is a grotesque act of intellectual
irresponsibility. As Walzer has argued, it is precisely because it is “our country” that we are “especially obligated to
criticise its policies.”51 Conclusion This paper has discussed the empirics of the policies of drone strikes in the ongoing
conflict with those associate with al Qaeda. It has demonstrated that there are significant moral questions raised by the
just war tradition regarding some aspects of these policies and it has argued that, thus far, just war scholars
have not paid sufficient attention or engaged in sufficient detail with the
policy implications of drone use . As such it has been argued that it is necessary for just
war theorists to engage more directly with these issues and to ensure that
their work is policy relevant, not in a utilitarian sense of abdicating from
speaking the truth in the face of power, but by forcing policy makers to justify
their actions according to the principles of the just war tradition, principles which they invoke themselves in
formulating policy. By highlighting hypocrisy and providing the tools and
language for the interpretation of action, the just war tradition provides the
basis for the public engagement and political activism that are necessary for
democratic politics.52

No prior questions – action is necessary

Cochran 99 – Prof. of International Affairs @ Georgia Institute of Technology Molly Cochran 99, Assistant
Professor of International Affairs at Georgia Institute for Technology, “Normative Theory in International Relations”,
1999, pg. 272
To conclude this chapter, while modernist and postmodernist
debates continue, while we are
still unsure as to what we can legitimately identify as a feminist ethical/political
concern, while we still are unclear about the relationship between discourse
and experience, it is particularly important for feminists that we proceed with
analysis of both the material ( institutional and structural) as well as the
discursive. This holds not only for feminists, but for all theorists oriented towards the
goal of extending further moral inclusion in the present social sciences
climate of epistemological uncertainty. Important ethical/ political concerns
hang in the balance. We cannot afford to wait for the meta-theoretical
questions to be conclusively answered . Those answers may be unavailable.
Nor can we wait for a credible vision of an alt ernative institutional order to
appear before an emancipatory agenda can be kicked into gear. Nor do we have
before us a chicken and egg question of which comes first : sorting out the
metatheoretical issues or working out which practices contribute to a
credible institutional vision. The two questions can and should be pursued
together , and can be via moral imagination. Imagination can help us think beyond discursive and material
conditions which limit us, by pushing the boundaries of those limitations in thought and examining what yields. In this respect, I believe
international ethics as pragmatic critique can be a useful ally to feminist and normative theorists generally.

US military presence in Uganda is the institutionalization of a

securitized narrative that justifies global militarism
Kouveld 13 [(Thomas, MA in Conflict Studies and Human Rights at Utrecht University) “Cosmopolitan
Warmongering in Uganda A Discursive Approach to Kony 2012” Utrecht University 07-08-2013] AT
Kony
However, the low degree of commitment to the mission by most member states involved leads to the belief that
is still a convenient political excuse for increased militarization of this
region in central Africa. It is generally believed that the reason the LRA was never defeated
was not because of its military supremacy or guerrilla warfare tactics, but because it gave Ugandan
president Yoweri Museveni effective tools for his reign. First of all, the constant
threat of the LRA allowed Museveni to increase spending on defence,
thereby creating the strongest army in the region. This in turn made Museveni
an important partner to western powers on the frontline against Islamic
extremism in the early nineties and later the global War against Terror, leading to increased
foreign donor streams (Mwenda in Allen & Vlassenroot 2010: 51) Second of all, Kony is an Acholi from the northern
part of Uganda. A history of ethnic strife between north and south Uganda, initiated by colonial powers, has been the
foundation of many violent clashes since independence. Museveni could use the boogeyman
image of Kony as a wedge between the various tribes of Uganda, using a
divide and conquer technique based on mutual fear to systematically
marginalize the northern population while keeping himself in power (2010: 54).
The current situation is showing signs of the same dynamics: there seems to be no real reason for
many involved to capture Kony, other than increased western pressure catalysed by the Kony 2012
video. The Séléka rebel takeover of CAR, from this perspective, is merely 45 convenient for all parties involved. The
Ugandan government and its allies can keep spending on defence and expand
their armies while external situations “force” them to suspend the mission
itself. Furthermore, even if the mission were to continue, the “invisible” Kony, partly built up in the west through the very
narrative Kony 2012, is somewhere ‘out there’ in the deep jungles of CAR, DRC and Sudan. The nigh
impossibility of locating him has already been established by the fact that
the American advisors’ intelligence still seems to have no idea where he is. As
such, Kony has been called “Africa’s Osama bin Laden”, the illusive national
enemy of the US, who was also impossible to locate and finally killed under mysterious circumstances (Engdahl
2012). In the end, national interests like the protection of natural resources and regional
military dominance may indeed be at play over a cosmopolitan responsibility to help those in
need. Another effect of the Kony 2012 campaign is the increasing legitimacy of US
military presence on the African continent. The increasing militarization of
Africa by the US faced a setback when the newly created AFRICOM was met with
resistance from prominent AU member states and was forced to locate itself in Stuttgart. The
AU, with Muammar Gaddafi as chair, seemed at a point in time when it had the opportunity to initiate important changes.
When Gaddafi was defeated and killed by NATO bombings, the severely weakened structure of the AU became weak again
(Glazebrook 2013). Its attempt to gain more agency for an independent Africa had failed, opening up the opportunity for
external actors to increasingly meddle in African affairs. The Kony 2012 movie promotes such
meddling. It clearly conveys the message that unless American forces assist
in the mission to capture Kony, there will be no end to civilian suffering in the
region. It promotes military intervention by US forces and asks its audience to
demand the same thing. Not long after the movie went viral, US president Obama presented his
determination to stay in Uganda. In doing so, he mirrors the drive of the US to keep boots on
the ground in Africa. Also, the lack of opposing force signifies the
international legitimacy the US has to do so. The lack of tangible results
from the military advisers seems to be taken for granted and obscured
through the confusing borderland image portrayed by Kony 2012. On a more theoretical level,
the Kony 2012 narrative upholds, perpetuates and complements borderland
imaginaries of Sub-Sahara Africa. The narrative feeds form and into popular imaginings which are
informed by the spectacular, the nocturnal and the horrible. It portrays a battle to be fought for
humanity and rationality, on the foundations of a moral 46 cosmopolitanism,
armed with the knowledge that what we do is right. Manifested in the image
of Uganda as a borderland, Kony 2012 created social space for the naming and shaming of Joseph
Kony and generated legitimacy for increased military practices against the LRA.
What this shows us is that borderland imaginaries of faraway places are still very
much part and parcel of dominant western discourse. What was emphasised, however, is
that these narratives have a very distinct goal of portraying the inhabitants of
borderlands either as victims or perpetrators. They have no agency, political
standing or self-determination, only to be subjected to misery and awaiting
salvation by western powers. The Kony 2012 narrative perpetuates this image and complements it by
adding the monstrous, nocturnal image of Joseph Kony as a “bad guy” stealing children. It thereby not only simplifies the
conflict, it simplifies victims’ suffering. The massive awareness generated by the video also promotes this way of
presenting a conflict for future campaigns. NGO staff told how impressed they were by the video’s success and that they
would certainly use it as example material for their own campaigns. This is not to say that the world will be flooded with
Konys anytime soon, but the mechanisms and metaphors used in the video may affect future aid campaigns and
legitimations for military intervention in general. When we return to the initial theoretical debate, it becomes clear that
mutually excluding explanations of humanitarian war are difficult to uphold. It is more important to
understand the workings of discourse and how it feeds from and into
existing regimes of truth to eventually be institutionalized in tangible
behaviour and power relations. The Kony 2012 campaign shows that a transnational, modern and
distinctly cosmopolitan narrative can have very real consequences in the world and that these consequences are often
challenged by other actors. It set in motion discourse, action and laid bare power dynamics underlying international
relations. On a discursive level, a battle between supporters and those who oppose it shows that theory is often put into
practice, as some support the cosmopolitan core of the narrative and many oppose it, seeing it as a way to instrumentalize
power.

Only appealing to security can effectively ensure drawdown

Robert Naiman 10, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, President of the Board of Truthout, former policy
analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, “Why
Peaceniks Should Care About the Afghanistan Study Group Report,” The Seminal—a FireDogLake blog, September 10th,
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/70379
On the other hand, peace activists can't be satisfied with being right; they also are
morally compelled to try to be effective. And part of being effective is giving
consideration to, and seeking to publicize, arguments are likely to end the
war sooner rather than later. It's not likely, for example, that discussing ways in which the
war might be useful for the long-term maintenance of the "capitalist world
system" will turn the Washington debate against war in the short run. If, on the other
hand, central to the official story is a claim that the war is a war against Al Qaeda, but senior U.S. officials publicly concede
that there is no significant Al Qaeda presence today in Afghanistan, that is certainly a fact worth knowing and spreading.
This is why it is important for as many people as possible to read and digest the short and accessible report of the
"Afghanistan Study Group" which has been publicly unveiled this week. The assumptions and conclusions of the ASG
report should be the subject of a thousand debates. But there are a few things about it that one can say without fear of
reasonable contradiction. The authors of the report oppose the war and want to end it. The principal authors of the report
are Washington insiders with a strong claim to expertise about what sort of arguments are likely to move Washington
debate. The authors of the report have a strategy for trying to move Washington
debate so that at the next fork in the road, the choice made is to de-escalate
the war and move towards its conclusion, rather than to escalate it further.
Therefore, the arguments made deserve careful consideration. They may not be particularly useful
for making posters for a demonstration. But for lobbying Congressional
staff, writing a letter to the editor, or making any other presentation to
people who are not already on our side, the arguments of the Afghanistan Study Group
are likely to be useful. Many of the authors and signers of the report are known to peace activists who follow
policy debates. Former Marine Corps captain Matthew Hoh, director of the ASG, made waves last October when he
became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war. Stephen Walt, with his co-author John
Mearsheimer, helped break open mainstream debate about U.S. policy towards Israel and the Palestinians with their book
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Juan Cole, author of the blog Informed Comment, is the author of "Engaging
the Muslim World." Robert Pape, author of "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," has documented
how U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan has produced more terrorism. Former CIA official Paul Pillar attacked the
central justification of the current military escalation in an op-ed in the Washington Post last September, arguing that
there was little reason to believe that a "safe haven" for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would have any significant bearing on the
terrorist threat to the United States. Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, author of the blog Washington Note,
originally convened the ASG. Of course, these impeccable "establishment dissident" credentials do not put the
assumptions or conclusions of the report beyond criticism. But they do make a strong case for consideration of the report.
Furthermore, the Afghanistan Study Group does break new ground politically, in the direction of ending the war. By far
the most important contribution, in my view, is the report's call for expedited and more vigorous efforts to resolve
Afghanistan's civil war through political negotiations leading to decentralization of power in Afghanistan and a power-
sharing agreement between the government and the insurgency. This call should be a commonplace, but the opposite is
currently true: people in Washington, even critics of the war, are afraid to say out loud the most important fact about
ending the war: there needs to be a political deal in Afghanistan with the Afghan Taliban insurgency. One of the most
important potential accomplishments of an experts' study group is to try to put into play key facts which experts know but
politicians are afraid to say. It's the "Murder on the Orient Express" strategy: if there's something important that no-one
wants to say, have a bunch of people say it together. If the Afghanistan Study Group makes it easier for people to say out
loud, "There needs to be a political deal with the Afghan Taliban," it will have made a major contribution to ending the
war. The second important contribution is to focus attention on the urgent need to engage "regional stakeholders,"
especially Pakistan, India, and Iran, in a political resolution of the armed conflict. In particular, current U.S. policy has
appeared to be predicated on the bizarre belief that the U.S. can cajole Pakistani decision-makers into abandoning what
they perceive to be their core national security interests in Afghanistan, rather than on the far more realistic approach of
engaging with Pakistan so that its national security concerns are met in an Afghan political settlement. The approach of
trying to "wall out" antagonistic regional actors has failed spectacularly in Afghanistan and produced much needless death
and human suffering, as it failed before in Iraq and Lebanon. If the Obama Administration would implement the course
correction in Afghanistan which the Bush Administration implemented in Iraq and Lebanon after 2006 - accepting that
antagonistic regional actors could not be walled out, and that the U.S. is better off trying to manage their influence rather
than exclude it - it would be a major step to ending the war. The third important contribution is the call for the U.S. to
reduce and eventually end its military operations in southern Afghanistan. Southern Afghanistan, the historic heartland of
the Taliban insurgency, is the focal point of the current U.S. military escalation; the current U.S. military escalation in
southern Afghanistan is the main cause of the fact that U.S. troops are dying in record numbers. The fourth major
contribution of the report is to attack the central justification of the war: the claim that it will reduce the threat of
terrorism against Americans. The report argues: First, the decision to escalate the U.S. effort in Afghanistan rests on the
mistaken belief that victory there will have a major impact on Al Qaeda's ability to attack the United States. Al Qaeda's
presence in Afghanistan today is very small, and even a decisive victory there would do little to undermine its capabilities
elsewhere. Victory would not even prevent small Al Qaeda cells from relocating in Afghanistan, just as they have in a wide
array of countries (including European countries). Second, a U.S. drawdown would not make Al Qaeda substantially more
lethal. In order for events in Afghanistan to enhance Al Qaeda's ability to threaten the U.S. homeland, three separate steps
must occur: 1) the Taliban must seize control of a substantial portion of the country, 2) Al Qaeda must relocate there in
strength, and 3) it must build facilities in this new "safe haven" that will allow it to plan and train more effectively than it
can today. Each of these three steps is unlikely, however, and the chances of all three together are very remote. [...] Most
importantly, no matter what happens in Afghanistan in the future, Al Qaeda will not be able to build large training camps
of the sort it employed prior to the 9/11 attacks. Simply put, the U.S. would remain vigilant and could use air power to
eliminate any Al Qaeda facility that the group might attempt to establish. Bin Laden and his associates will likely have to
remain in hiding for the rest of their lives, which means Al Qaeda will have to rely on clandestine cells instead of large
encampments. Covert cells can be located virtually anywhere, which is why the outcome in Afghanistan is not critical to
addressing the threat from Al Qaeda. In short, a complete (and unlikely) victory in Afghanistan and the dismantling of the
Taliban would not make Al Qaeda disappear; indeed, it would probably have no appreciable effect on Al Qaeda. At the
same time, dramatically scaling back U.S. military engagement will not significantly increase the threat from Al Qaeda.
From the point of view of official Washington, this speaks to the core of the
argument against the war. Continuing the war is not promoting the national security interests of
the United States, and in fact is counterproductive to those interests.¶ This is also the part of the argument that is most likely to stick in the craw of
many peace activists, in part because they have a well-grounded allergy to efforts to

promote the purported "national security interests of the United States," and in part because the report, if
implemented, still envisions a potential role for U.S. military force in the region.¶ However, a bit of

realism about prospects in the near-term future is in order . If you look around the world,
the U.S. is currently deploying military force in a lot of places. In the places
where the U.S. is deploying military force without the presence of a significant
number of U.S. ground troops, this activity goes on without occasioning
significant public debate in the U.S. There is essentially zero public debate
over what the U.S. is doing in the Philippines, almost zero about what the U.S. is doing in Somalia, very little about what the U.S. is doing in Yemen, not very much
about what the U.S. is doing in Pakistan. Following the blip occasioned by President Obama’s announcement of the so-called "end of combat mission" in Iraq, it is
likely that public debate about what the U.S. is doing in Iraq will fall back towards Pakistan levels.¶ That these things are true, of course, does not make them just.
However, as I wrote at the outset, it is not enough to be right; one has the moral obligation to
also try to be effective. And part of being effective is understanding where the
adversary is vulnerable, and where the adversary is not, at present, very vulnerable. The permanent war apparatus is

currently politically vulnerable over the war in Afghanistan primarily because U.S. troops are currently dying there in
significant numbers for no apparent reason, so it makes sense for this to be a central point of attack.

One speech act doesn’t cause securitization – no impact to

the aff’s discourse
Irina Ghughunishvili 10, “Securitization of Migration in the United States after 9/11: Constructing
Muslims and Arabs as Enemies”, Submitted to Central European University Department of International Relations
European Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Professor Paul
Roe http://www.etd.ceu.hu/2010/ghughunishvili_irina.pdf
As provided by the Copenhagen School securitization theory is comprised by
speech act, acceptance of the audience and facilitating conditions or other non-securitizing actors contribute to a successful
securitization. The causality or a one-way relationship between the speech act, the
audience and securitizing actor, where politicians use the speech act first to
justify exceptional measures, has been criticized by scholars, such as Balzacq. According to him, the
one-directional relationship between the three factors, or some of them, is not the best approach. To fully grasp the
dynamics, it will be more beneficial to “rather than looking for a one-
directional relationship between some or all of the three factors highlighted,
it could be profitable to focus on the degree of congruence between them . 26
Among other aspects of the Copenhagen School’s theoretical framework, which he criticizes, the thesis will rely on the criticism of the lack
of context and the rejection of a ‘one-way causal’ relationship between the audience and the actor. The
process of threat
construction, according to him, can be clearer if external context, which
stands independently from use of language, can be considered . 27 Balzacq opts for more
context-oriented approach when it comes down to securitization through the speech act, where a single speech does not
create the discourse, but it is created through a long process , where context
is vital. 28 He indicates: In reality, the speech act itself, i.e. literally a single security
articulation at a particular point in time, will at best only very rarely explain
the entire social process that follows from it . In most cases a security scholar
will rather be confronted with a process of articulations creating
sequentially a threat text which turns sequentially into a securitization . 29 This
type of approach seems more plausible in an empirical study, as it is more likely that a single speech will
not be able to securitize an issue, but it is a lengthy process, where a the
audience speaks the same language as the securitizing actors and can relate
to their speeches.

No root cause of war

Moore 4 – Dir. Center for Security Law @ University of Virginia, 7-time Presidential appointee, & Honorary
Editor of the American Journal of International Law, Solving the War Puzzle: Beyond the Democratic Peace, John Norton
Moore, pages 41-2
If major interstate war is predominantly a product of a synergy between a potential nondemocratic aggressor and an
absence of effective deterrence, what is the role of the many traditional "causes" of war?
Past, and many contemporary, theories of war have focused on the role of specific
disputes between nations, ethnic and religious differences, arms races, poverty or social injustice, competition for
resources, incidents and accidents, greed, fear, and perceptions of "honor," or many other such factors. Such
factors may well play a role in motivating aggression or in serving as a means for generating fear and manipulating public
opinion. The reality, however, is that while some of these may have more potential to contribute
to war than others, there may well be an infinite set of motivating factors, or human
wants, motivating aggression. It is not the independent existence of such motivating
factors for war but rather the circumstances permitting or encouraging high risk
decisions leading to war that is the key to more effectively controlling war. And the
same may also be true of democide. The early focus in the Rwanda slaughter on "ethnic conflict," as
though Hutus and Tutsis had begun to slaughter each other through spontaneous combustion, distracted our attention
from the reality that a nondemocratic Hutu regime had carefully planned and orchestrated a genocide against Rwandan
Tutsis as well as its Hutu opponents.I1 Certainly if we were able to press a
button and end poverty, racism, religious intolerance, injustice, and endless
disputes, we would want to do so. Indeed, democratic governments must remain
committed to policies that will produce a better world by all measures of
human progress. The broader achievement of democracy and the rule of law will itself assist in this
progress. No one, however, has yet been able to demonstrate the kind of robust
correlation with any of these "traditional" causes of war  as is reflected in the
"democratic peace." Further, given the  difficulties in overcoming many of these
social problems , an approach to war exclusively dependent on their
solution may be to  doom us to war for generations to come.
Impact Framing
 Prag [Lipschutz]
Even if discourse focus is important, reality exists and their
meta-theoretical philosophizing disables action
Lipschutz 11 (Ronnie Lipschutz, Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, “Cal Round Robin – Policy,” video,
post-round criticism of the final round of the California Round Robin at the College Preparatory School in Oakland, CA, in
which the Georgetown Day School went for a Foucaultian critique of knowledge production against Damien High School’s
conventional deterrence affirmative, February 18, transcribed by Josh Clark, debate coach at the University of Michigan,
http://nfltv.org/2011/02/24/cal-round-robin-policy/)
RONNIE LIPSCHUTZ: Well, many, many years ago…one day when I was reading the San Francisco chronicle, I clipped a
little phrase. I’ve never been able to find it, but it was something like, one of the emperor Fredricks said, “ The surest
way to ruin your country is to put it under the charge of college professors.” I
have to say that I am now fully convinced of the truth of that statement . But since I have
been charged here with taking on the philosophical side of things, I want to make a few points about – in particular the
negative arguments – but also I think about the affirmative. I’m not a debater, by the way, so I don’t quite
understand what’s been going on. But
what I think in particular is a problem is, first of all, we have
incommensurate conceptual categories going on here; that the affirmative is
taking a very narrow policy question and proposing a change to it. The
negative then raises these questions of epistemology and ontology which, in a way,
are not obviously confronting the policy question which, and I agree with Erin, is very, very
narrowly construed. I mean, there was no question about – well, let me put it this way: that although there
was a discussion of the virtues of the alliance with Japan, it was largely taken as a given, and therefore of course that
causes a problem, and by taking this epistemological and ontological approach, it is…
ships passing in the night. And then, of course, the theory question came up and that, I thought, was
problematic for both sides. A couple of things I want to say: the first one is that social constructions can

kill . And I think this is a very important thing to remember that, threats can be socially
constructed but threats, social constructions have material components, and
they are aimed in particular directions . So the fact that something is a social
construction or is epistemologically and ontologically questionable does not
mean that there aren’t missiles being deployed, and that those missiles are
not going to go off. These arguments are, I think, operating at a somewhat different space, and it does raise the
question: how is it that we judge what is a threat in the first place? And of course we have nuclear friends and nuclear
enemies. You ought to ask the question, “Why is it that Great Britain has nuclear weapons and yet there is nobody, as far
as I know, that is planning a war with Great Britain?”. Now I could be wrong about this, since the Pentagon probably has
plenty of analysts who have nothing to do. ERIN SIMPSON: They make Powerpoints. LIPSCHUTZ: Yeah, they make
Powerpoints. So that, then, of course raises some of these epistemological questions . Which, I
think if you want to somehow deploy the stuff that it seems like, sadly, I have said somewhere, it is important to take that
much more carefully into account. The other thing that I am struck by is that I’ve become in recent – in the last year or so
– a great fan of Pierre Bourdieu. All of these guys, all of my "friends" that you were citing – though I don’t consider
Mearsheimer a friend – as I listen to this I think, “What patent nonsense it is that they are
basically spouting.” But this is the way that the academic realm goes . I mean, it’s
attack and counter-attack. And, I think you have to be very careful, again, in interrogating. So, if you’ve got to be
critical, you should be very critical of those who are critical, to ask what is the
politics behind the critique. Because there are politics in all of this. Not just politics in the policy—
interests and all kinds of deeply imbedded commitments, which are
impossible to change. If you watch Congress in action right now, you can see
that. But also that there is a kind of…I mean it is – academics is war by other means, I guess, to take a leaf from both
Clausewitz and Foucault. Anyway, to go back to Bourdieu. Bourdieu, who’s a sociologist who died several years ago,
has a very interesting approach to some of these things which is oriented
around practice. What are the practices that groups and societies engage in,
and how do we understand those practices reinforcing normative beliefs
and policies and approaches. And if you really are interested in “how do things
change?,” you have to look at how practices change rather than intellectual
arguments on the one hand or arming to the teeth on the other. So perhaps I would encourage, if you are to go on
with debate, you should probably take a look at Bourdieu. I’m done.
 Prag [Rorty]
It’s better to compare differing actions, not methods
Rorty 80 [(Richard) “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association, Vol. 53, No. 6. (Aug.,1980), pp. 717+719-738.] RMT
So a second characterization of pragmatism might go like this: there
is no epistemological difference
between truth about what ought to be and truth about what is, nor any meta- physical difference between facts and
values, nor any methodological difference between morality and science. Even non- pragmatists think Plato was wrong to think of
moral philosophy as discovering the essence of goodness, and ill and Kant wrong in trying to reduce moral choice to rule. But every reason
for saying that they were wrong is a reason for thinking the epistemological tradition wrong in looking for the essence of science and in
trying to reduce rationality to rule. For
the pragmatists, the pattern of all inquiry -- scientific as well as
moral -- is
deliberation concerning the relative attractions of various concrete
alternatives. The idea that in science or philosophy we can substitute "method" for
deliberation between alternative results of speculation is just wishful thinking.
It is like the idea that the morally wise man resolves his dilemmas by consulting his memory of the Idea of the Good, or by looking up the
relevant article of the moral law. It
is the myth that rationality consists in being constrained
by rule. According to this Platonic myth, the life of reason is not the life of Socratic conversation but an
illuminated state of consciousness in which one never needs to ask if one
has exhausted the possible descriptions of, or explanations for, the
situation. One simply arrives at true beliefs by obeying mechanical
procedures.
 Owen
Focus on epistemology fails to explain phenomena
Owen 2 (David Owen, Reader of Political Theory at the Univ. of Southampton, Millennium Vol 31 No 3 2002 p.
655-7)
Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a] frenzy for words like “epistemology” and
“ontology” often signals this philosophical turn ’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often
used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a
central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of
the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical
commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in
making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a
philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that
has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the
philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and
epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a simple
function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a
theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments
(otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in
contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one
need not be sympathetic to rational choice theory to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of
problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course,
be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in
accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances
that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this
does not undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide
the best account available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in
terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even
necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because
prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from
philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than
problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is
the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge
is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question
given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven work is part of a
reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description that
calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The
justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general
explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points
out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there
are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific
inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this
strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity.
The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate
in IR—what might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical
approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of
sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of,
ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there can only be one
theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its
ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and
second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.
Case O/W
 LTurn - Militarization
US military presence in Uganda is the institutionalization of a
securitized narrative that justifies global militarism
Kouveld 13 [(Thomas, MA in Conflict Studies and Human Rights at Utrecht University) “Cosmopolitan
Warmongering in Uganda A Discursive Approach to Kony 2012” Utrecht University 07-08-2013] AT
Kony
However, the low degree of commitment to the mission by most member states involved leads to the belief that
is still a convenient political excuse for increased militarization of this
region in central Africa. It is generally believed that the reason the LRA was never defeated
was not because of its military supremacy or guerrilla warfare tactics, but because it gave Ugandan
president Yoweri Museveni effective tools for his reign. First of all, the constant
threat of the LRA allowed Museveni to increase spending on defence,
thereby creating the strongest army in the region. This in turn made Museveni
an important partner to western powers on the frontline against Islamic
extremism in the early nineties and later the global War against Terror, leading to increased
foreign donor streams (Mwenda in Allen & Vlassenroot 2010: 51) Second of all, Kony is an Acholi from the northern
part of Uganda. A history of ethnic strife between north and south Uganda, initiated by colonial powers, has been the
foundation of many violent clashes since independence. Museveni could use the boogeyman
image of Kony as a wedge between the various tribes of Uganda, using a
divide and conquer technique based on mutual fear to systematically
marginalize the northern population while keeping himself in power (2010: 54).
The current situation is showing signs of the same dynamics: there seems to be no real reason for
many involved to capture Kony, other than increased western pressure catalysed by the Kony 2012
video. The Séléka rebel takeover of CAR, from this perspective, is merely 45 convenient for all parties involved. The
Ugandan government and its allies can keep spending on defence and expand
their armies while external situations “force” them to suspend the mission
itself. Furthermore, even if the mission were to continue, the “invisible” Kony, partly built up in the west through the very
narrative Kony 2012, is somewhere ‘out there’ in the deep jungles of CAR, DRC and Sudan. The nigh
impossibility of locating him has already been established by the fact that
the American advisors’ intelligence still seems to have no idea where he is. As
such, Kony has been called “Africa’s Osama bin Laden”, the illusive national
enemy of the US, who was also impossible to locate and finally killed under mysterious circumstances (Engdahl
2012). In the end, national interests like the protection of natural resources and regional
military dominance may indeed be at play over a cosmopolitan responsibility to help those in
need. Another effect of the Kony 2012 campaign is the increasing legitimacy of US
military presence on the African continent. The increasing militarization of
Africa by the US faced a setback when the newly created AFRICOM was met with
resistance from prominent AU member states and was forced to locate itself in Stuttgart. The
AU, with Muammar Gaddafi as chair, seemed at a point in time when it had the opportunity to initiate important changes.
When Gaddafi was defeated and killed by NATO bombings, the severely weakened structure of the AU became weak again
(Glazebrook 2013). Its attempt to gain more agency for an independent Africa had failed, opening up the opportunity for
external actors to increasingly meddle in African affairs. The Kony 2012 movie promotes such
meddling. It clearly conveys the message that unless American forces assist
in the mission to capture Kony, there will be no end to civilian suffering in the
region. It promotes military intervention by US forces and asks its audience to
demand the same thing. Not long after the movie went viral, US president Obama presented his
determination to stay in Uganda. In doing so, he mirrors the drive of the US to keep boots on
the ground in Africa. Also, the lack of opposing force signifies the
international legitimacy the US has to do so. The lack of tangible results
from the military advisers seems to be taken for granted and obscured
through the confusing borderland image portrayed by Kony 2012. On a more theoretical level,
the Kony 2012 narrative upholds, perpetuates and complements borderland
imaginaries of Sub-Sahara Africa. The narrative feeds form and into popular imaginings which are
informed by the spectacular, the nocturnal and the horrible. It portrays a battle to be fought for
humanity and rationality, on the foundations of a moral 46 cosmopolitanism,
armed with the knowledge that what we do is right. Manifested in the image
of Uganda as a borderland, Kony 2012 created social space for the naming and shaming of Joseph
Kony and generated legitimacy for increased military practices against the LRA.
What this shows us is that borderland imaginaries of faraway places are still very
much part and parcel of dominant western discourse. What was emphasised, however, is
that these narratives have a very distinct goal of portraying the inhabitants of
borderlands either as victims or perpetrators. They have no agency, political
standing or self-determination, only to be subjected to misery and awaiting
salvation by western powers. The Kony 2012 narrative perpetuates this image and complements it by
adding the monstrous, nocturnal image of Joseph Kony as a “bad guy” stealing children. It thereby not only simplifies the
conflict, it simplifies victims’ suffering. The massive awareness generated by the video also promotes this way of
presenting a conflict for future campaigns. NGO staff told how impressed they were by the video’s success and that they
would certainly use it as example material for their own campaigns. This is not to say that the world will be flooded with
Konys anytime soon, but the mechanisms and metaphors used in the video may affect future aid campaigns and
legitimations for military intervention in general. When we return to the initial theoretical debate, it becomes clear that
mutually excluding explanations of humanitarian war are difficult to uphold. It is more important to
understand the workings of discourse and how it feeds from and into
existing regimes of truth to eventually be institutionalized in tangible
behaviour and power relations. The Kony 2012 campaign shows that a transnational, modern and
distinctly cosmopolitan narrative can have very real consequences in the world and that these consequences are often
challenged by other actors. It set in motion discourse, action and laid bare power dynamics underlying international
relations. On a discursive level, a battle between supporters and those who oppose it shows that theory is often put into
practice, as some support the cosmopolitan core of the narrative and many oppose it, seeing it as a way to instrumentalize
power.
 LTurn – 1AC
The authoritarianism link turns the K – withdrawal prevents
Uganda from expanding repressive and militaristic policy – that
shields any impact to security discourse since the plan reduces
militarization in both Uganda and the US
 Political Motivation
Only appealing to security can effectively ensure drawdown
Robert Naiman 10, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, President of the Board of Truthout, former policy
analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, “Why
Peaceniks Should Care About the Afghanistan Study Group Report,” The Seminal—a FireDogLake blog, September 10th,
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/70379
On the other hand, peace activists can't be satisfied with being right; they also are
morally compelled to try to be effective. And part of being effective is giving
consideration to, and seeking to publicize, arguments are likely to end the
war sooner rather than later. It's not likely, for example, that discussing ways in which the
war might be useful for the long-term maintenance of the "capitalist world
system" will turn the Washington debate against war in the short run. If, on the other
hand, central to the official story is a claim that the war is a war against Al Qaeda, but senior U.S. officials publicly concede
that there is no significant Al Qaeda presence today in Afghanistan, that is certainly a fact worth knowing and spreading.
This is why it is important for as many people as possible to read and digest the short and accessible report of the
"Afghanistan Study Group" which has been publicly unveiled this week. The assumptions and conclusions of the ASG
report should be the subject of a thousand debates. But there are a few things about it that one can say without fear of
reasonable contradiction. The authors of the report oppose the war and want to end it. The principal authors of the report
are Washington insiders with a strong claim to expertise about what sort of arguments are likely to move Washington
debate. The authors of the report have a strategy for trying to move Washington
debate so that at the next fork in the road, the choice made is to de-escalate
the war and move towards its conclusion, rather than to escalate it further.
Therefore, the arguments made deserve careful consideration. They may not be particularly useful
for making posters for a demonstration. But for lobbying Congressional
staff, writing a letter to the editor, or making any other presentation to
people who are not already on our side, the arguments of the Afghanistan Study Group
are likely to be useful. Many of the authors and signers of the report are known to peace activists who follow
policy debates. Former Marine Corps captain Matthew Hoh, director of the ASG, made waves last October when he
became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war. Stephen Walt, with his co-author John
Mearsheimer, helped break open mainstream debate about U.S. policy towards Israel and the Palestinians with their book
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Juan Cole, author of the blog Informed Comment, is the author of "Engaging
the Muslim World." Robert Pape, author of "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," has documented
how U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan has produced more terrorism. Former CIA official Paul Pillar attacked the
central justification of the current military escalation in an op-ed in the Washington Post last September, arguing that
there was little reason to believe that a "safe haven" for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would have any significant bearing on the
terrorist threat to the United States. Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, author of the blog Washington Note,
originally convened the ASG. Of course, these impeccable "establishment dissident" credentials do not put the
assumptions or conclusions of the report beyond criticism. But they do make a strong case for consideration of the report.
Furthermore, the Afghanistan Study Group does break new ground politically, in the direction of ending the war. By far
the most important contribution, in my view, is the report's call for expedited and more vigorous efforts to resolve
Afghanistan's civil war through political negotiations leading to decentralization of power in Afghanistan and a power-
sharing agreement between the government and the insurgency. This call should be a commonplace, but the opposite is
currently true: people in Washington, even critics of the war, are afraid to say out loud the most important fact about
ending the war: there needs to be a political deal in Afghanistan with the Afghan Taliban insurgency. One of the most
important potential accomplishments of an experts' study group is to try to put into play key facts which experts know but
politicians are afraid to say. It's the "Murder on the Orient Express" strategy: if there's something important that no-one
wants to say, have a bunch of people say it together. If the Afghanistan Study Group makes it easier for people to say out
loud, "There needs to be a political deal with the Afghan Taliban," it will have made a major contribution to ending the
war. The second important contribution is to focus attention on the urgent need to engage "regional stakeholders,"
especially Pakistan, India, and Iran, in a political resolution of the armed conflict. In particular, current U.S. policy has
appeared to be predicated on the bizarre belief that the U.S. can cajole Pakistani decision-makers into abandoning what
they perceive to be their core national security interests in Afghanistan, rather than on the far more realistic approach of
engaging with Pakistan so that its national security concerns are met in an Afghan political settlement. The approach of
trying to "wall out" antagonistic regional actors has failed spectacularly in Afghanistan and produced much needless death
and human suffering, as it failed before in Iraq and Lebanon. If the Obama Administration would implement the course
correction in Afghanistan which the Bush Administration implemented in Iraq and Lebanon after 2006 - accepting that
antagonistic regional actors could not be walled out, and that the U.S. is better off trying to manage their influence rather
than exclude it - it would be a major step to ending the war. The third important contribution is the call for the U.S. to
reduce and eventually end its military operations in southern Afghanistan. Southern Afghanistan, the historic heartland of
the Taliban insurgency, is the focal point of the current U.S. military escalation; the current U.S. military escalation in
southern Afghanistan is the main cause of the fact that U.S. troops are dying in record numbers. The fourth major
contribution of the report is to attack the central justification of the war: the claim that it will reduce the threat of
terrorism against Americans. The report argues: First, the decision to escalate the U.S. effort in Afghanistan rests on the
mistaken belief that victory there will have a major impact on Al Qaeda's ability to attack the United States. Al Qaeda's
presence in Afghanistan today is very small, and even a decisive victory there would do little to undermine its capabilities
elsewhere. Victory would not even prevent small Al Qaeda cells from relocating in Afghanistan, just as they have in a wide
array of countries (including European countries). Second, a U.S. drawdown would not make Al Qaeda substantially more
lethal. In order for events in Afghanistan to enhance Al Qaeda's ability to threaten the U.S. homeland, three separate steps
must occur: 1) the Taliban must seize control of a substantial portion of the country, 2) Al Qaeda must relocate there in
strength, and 3) it must build facilities in this new "safe haven" that will allow it to plan and train more effectively than it
can today. Each of these three steps is unlikely, however, and the chances of all three together are very remote. [...] Most
importantly, no matter what happens in Afghanistan in the future, Al Qaeda will not be able to build large training camps
of the sort it employed prior to the 9/11 attacks. Simply put, the U.S. would remain vigilant and could use air power to
eliminate any Al Qaeda facility that the group might attempt to establish. Bin Laden and his associates will likely have to
remain in hiding for the rest of their lives, which means Al Qaeda will have to rely on clandestine cells instead of large
encampments. Covert cells can be located virtually anywhere, which is why the outcome in Afghanistan is not critical to
addressing the threat from Al Qaeda. In short, a complete (and unlikely) victory in Afghanistan and the dismantling of the
Taliban would not make Al Qaeda disappear; indeed, it would probably have no appreciable effect on Al Qaeda. At the
same time, dramatically scaling back U.S. military engagement will not significantly increase the threat from Al Qaeda.
From the point of view of official Washington, this speaks to the core of the
argument against the war. Continuing the war is not promoting the national security interests of
the United States, and in fact is counterproductive to those interests.¶ This is also the part of the argument that is most likely to stick in the craw of
many peace activists, in part because they have a well-grounded allergy to efforts to

promote the purported "national security interests of the United States," and in part because the report, if
implemented, still envisions a potential role for U.S. military force in the region.¶ However, a bit of

realism about prospects in the near-term future is in order . If you look around the world,
the U.S. is currently deploying military force in a lot of places. In the places
where the U.S. is deploying military force without the presence of a significant
number of U.S. ground troops, this activity goes on without occasioning
significant public debate in the U.S. There is essentially zero public debate
over what the U.S. is doing in the Philippines, almost zero about what the U.S. is doing in Somalia, very little about what the U.S. is doing in Yemen, not very much
about what the U.S. is doing in Pakistan. Following the blip occasioned by President Obama’s announcement of the so-called "end of combat mission" in Iraq, it is
likely that public debate about what the U.S. is doing in Iraq will fall back towards Pakistan levels.¶ That these things are true, of course, does not make them just.
it is not enough to be right; one has the moral obligation to
However, as I wrote at the outset,

also try to be effective. And part of being effective is understanding where the
adversary is vulnerable, and where the adversary is not, at present, very vulnerable. The permanent war apparatus is

currently politically vulnerable over the war in Afghanistan primarily because U.S. troops are currently dying there in
significant numbers for no apparent reason, so it makes sense for this to be a central point of attack.
 Particularity
Prefer SPECIFIC predictions over broad theories of
violence
PRICE ’98
(RICHARD PRICE is a former prof in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Later, he moved to Johns
Hopkins University to found the Department of Anthropology, where he served three terms as chair. A decade of freelance
teaching (University of Minnesota, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Florida, Universidade Federal
da Bahia), ensued. This article is co-authored with CHRISTIAN REUS-SMIT – Monash University – European Journal of
International Relations Copyright © 1998 via SAGE Publications –
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~courses/PoliticalScience/661B1/documents/PriceReusSmithCriticalInternatlTheoryConstr
uctivism.pdf)
One of the central departures of critical international theory from positivism is the view that we cannot escape the
interpretive moment. As George (1994: 24) argues, ‘the world is always an interpreted “thing”, and it is always interpreted
in conditions of disagreement and conflict, to one degree or another’. For this reason, ‘there can be no common body of
observational or tested data that we can turn to for a neutral, objective knowledge of the world. There can be no ultimate
knowledge, for example, that actually corresponds to reality per se.’ This proposition has been
endorsed wholeheartedly by constructivists, who are at pains to deny the possibility of making ‘Big-T’
Truth claims about the world and studiously avoid attributing such status to their findings. This having been
said, after undertaking sustained empirical analyses of aspects of world politics constructivists do make ‘ small-t’
truth claims about the subjects they have investigated. That is, they claim to have arrived at logical and
empirically plausible interpretations of actions, events or processes, and they appeal to the
weight of evidence to sustain such claims. While admitting that their claims are always
contingent and partial interpretations of a complex world , Price (1995, 1997)
claims that his genealogy provides the best account to date to make sense of anomalies
surrounding the use of chemical weapons , and Reus-Smit (1997) claims that a culturalist perspective
offers the best explanation of institutional differences between historical societies of states. Do such claims
contradict the interpretive ethos of critical international theory? For two reasons, we argue that they
do not. First, the interpretive ethos of critical international theory is driven, in large measure, by a normative rejection
of totalizing discourses, of general theoretical frameworks that privilege certain perspectives over others. One searches
constructivist scholarship in vain, though, for such discourses. With the possible exception of Wendt’s problematic
flirtation with general systemic theory and professed commitment to ‘science’, constructivist research is at its
best when and because it is question driven, with self-consciously contingent claims made
specifically in relation to particular phenomena, at a particular time,
based on particular evidence, and always open to alternative interpretations. Second, the rejection
of totalizing discourses based on ‘big-T’ Truth claims does not foreclose the
possibility, or even the inevitability, of making ‘small-t’ truth claims. In fact, we
would argue that as soon as one observes and interacts in the world such claims are unavoidable, either as a person
engaged in everyday life or as a scholar. As Nietzsche pointed out long ago, we cannot help putting forth
truth claims about the world. The individual who does not cannot act, and the
genuinely unhypocritical relativist who cannot struggles for something to say and write. In short, if constructivists are not
advancing totalizing discourses, and if making ‘small-t’ truth claims is inevitable if one is to talk about how the world
works, then it is no more likely that constructivism per se violates the interpretive ethos of critical international theory
than does critical theory itself.
 A2 Rationalism Bad
Our predictions don’t commit us to a rationalist paradigm –
multiple analytic lenses can be used together to analyze IR
Fearon 2 [James Fearon (Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Political Science at Stanford University) &
Alexander Wendt, "Rationalism v. constructivism: A skeptical view," In Handbook of International Relations (pp. 52-72).
SAGE Publications, 2002] AZ
Supposing that ‘rationalism v. constructivism’ does orient some debate in IR in the coming years, we ask what the contrast amounts to.
What are the ‘isms’ referred to? And do the differences between them provide grounds for a war of paradigms? We answer the last question
mainly in the negative. Although there are some important differences between
the two approaches, we argue that there are also substantial areas of
agreement , and where genuine differences exist they are as often
complementarities as contradictions. Our objective is not to suggest that there is no need for discussion, or that
rationalism and constructivism should or could be synthesized into one
perspective . It is to suggest, rather, that the most interesting research is likely to be
work that ignores zero-sum interpretations of their relationship and
instead directly engages questions that cut cross the
rationalist/constructivist boundary as it is commonly understood. 3 A key argument towards this
conclusion is that, in our view, rationalism and constructivism are most fruitfully
viewed pragmatically as analytical tools, rather than as metaphysical
positions or empirical descriptions of the world. 4 Since the ontological and empirical interpretations of the debate seem more
common in the literature and lead to more zero-sum pictures, it may be useful to explain briefly why we resist them. The ontological reading
treats rationalism and constructivism as sets of assumptions about what social life is made of and what kinds of relationships exist among
these elements. For example, from this perspective rationalism is usually seen as assuming an individualist ontology, in which wholes are
reducible to interacting parts, and constructivism as assuming a holist ontology, in which parts exist only in relation to wholes. In each case,
certain empirical arguments and analytical tools are prescribed or proscribed a priori as legitimate or illegitimate, scientific or unscientific,
It is important to understand these
and thus the stage is set for a genuine war of paradigms.
ontological issues, since failure to do so can lead to analytical tools or
frameworks becoming tacit ontologies (Ruggie, 1983: 285), foreclosing potentially interesting lines of
argument without justification. However, we do not believe this framing of the rationalist–
constructivist debate is the most useful, for three reasons. First, the
issues are by definition philosophical, and as such not likely to be settled soon, if ever, and almost
certainly not by IR scholars. Second, although some rationalists and constructivists
may in fact have strong ontological commitments, others may not,
since there is no inherent need to commit to an ontology to work in
these traditions. Just as quantum physicists can do their work without any idea how to interpret its ontological implications,
social scientists too can proceed pragmatically, remaining agnostic about what society is ‘really’ made of. Finally, it seems doubtful that as a
discipline we know so much about international life that we should rule out certain arguments a priori on purely philosophical grounds.
Thus, while recognizing the role that ontological issues play in structuring the rationalist–constructivist debate, in this chapter we will
largely avoid them, adopt a stance of ontological pluralism instead
ing . 5 A second way to
frame the debate is in empirical terms, as a disagreement about substantive issues in the world like how often actors follow a logic of
consequences or logic of appropriateness, or whether preferences really are exogenous or endogenous to a given social interaction. We
explore some of these questions below, and find some genuine differences, but this too is not our preferred way to proceed. First, in their
purest, most stripped-down forms, neither approach makes many interesting empirical predictions about the world. To a large extent it is
only with the addition of auxiliary assumptions – a particular theory of preferences, for example – that such predictions emerge. Moreover,
although one can interpret an assumption of, say, exogenous preferences, as a factual claim about a certain social system, there is no need to
It is perfectly legitimate to view it instead as merely a
do so.
methodological convenience necessitated by the fact that one cannot study everything at once. As in the
ontology case, there is always a danger here that analytical assumptions will become tacit empirical ones, but given sufficient
This brings us to the pragmatic
methodological self-consciousness this problem can be avoided.
interpretation of rationalism and constructivism, as analytical tools
or lenses with which to theorize about world politics. Analytical lenses
do not in themselves force the researcher to make ontological or
empirical commitments. What makes a comparison of them interesting none the less is that they view society from
opposing vantage points – roughly speaking, rationalism from the ‘bottomup’ and constructivism from the ‘topdown’. As a result they tend
in practice to ask somewhat different questions and so bring different aspects of social life into focus. It would be surprising if this did not
lead to different pictures of world politics, and thus to ‘paradigmatic’ debate about what world politics is really like. Emphasizing these
differences would have been one way to write this chapter. Yet, in IR today there is ample perception already of conflict between rationalism
and constructivism, in 69 our view much of it unnecessary or ill-founded, based either on treating them in ontological or empirical terms or
on misunderstandings about what they entail. Moreover, we are also struck by two areas of potential convergence that are insufficiently
two approaches often yield similar, or at least
appreciated. First, the
complementary, accounts of international life. This redundancy may
arise because in the end they are studying the same underlying
reality. Second, even though their respective vantage points tend in practice to highlight some questions and not others, in many
cases there may be much to be gained by using the tools of one to try to answer questions that tend to be asked primarily by the other. Such
a crossparadigmatic exchange of characteristic questions and answers is in our view the most fruitful way to advance not only these two
research agendas, but more importantly, our understanding of world politics. With these considerations in mind, we shall write this chapter
with a view toward deconstructing some of the supposed contradictions between the two approaches, and highlighting the convergences.
Again, this is not to suggest that there are no differences, many of which we discuss below. But once viewed in an analytical, tool-kit fashion,
we believe many putative disputes lose much of their force. From this pragmatic stance, we seek to clarify what each approach brings to the
table and how they relate. In standard representations of the debate, two issues seem most at stake: (1) whether and how ideas matter in
world politics, and (2) the relationship between international actors and the structures in which they are embedded. These are large issues
and we do not attempt a full discussion of both here. We will argue, however, that on the first issue there is considerably less difference than
Rationalism is sometimes portrayed as emphasizing material
is often thought.
as opposed to ideational factors, but this misunderstands what is
entailed by the approach.
Threat Inflation
 No Threat Con
The plan text turns their kritik – even if it constructs
threats, it is DEMILITARIZATION which endorses a
peaceful solution
 No Inflation
Threats real – strong incentives against inflation
Ravenal 9 [(earl, distinguished senior fellow in foreign policy studies at Cato, is professor emeritus of the
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He is an expert on NATO, defense strategy, and the defense budget)
“What's Empire Got to Do with It? The Derivation of America's Foreign Policy.” Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Politics and Society 21.1 (2009) 21-75]
notion of “the security bureaucracies . . . looking for new enemies” is a
The underlying

threadbare concept that has somehow taken hold across the political spectrum, from the radical left (viz. Michael Klare
[1981], who refers to a “threat bank”), to the liberal center (viz. Robert H. Johnson [1997], who dismisses most alleged “threats” as “improbable dangers”), to libertarians (viz. Ted Galen Carpenter

What is missing from most

[1992], Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy of the Cato Institute, who wrote a book entitled A Search for Enemies).

analysts’ claims of “threat inflation,” however, is a convincing theory of why, say, the
American government significantly(not merely in excusable rhetoric) might magnify and even invent threats

(and, more seriously, act on such inflated threat estimates). In a few places, Eland (2004, 185)
suggests that such behavior might stem from military or national security bureaucrats’ attempts to enhance their personal status and organizational budgets, or even from the influence and
dominance of “the military-industrial complex”; viz.: “Maintaining the empire and retaliating for the blowback from that empire keeps what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial
complex fat and happy.” Or, in the same section:¶ In the nation’s capital, vested interests, such as the law enforcement bureaucracies . . . routinely take advantage of “crises”to satisfy parochial
desires. Similarly, many corporations use crises to get pet projects— a.k.a. pork—funded by the government. And national security crises, because of people’s fears, are especially ripe opportunities
to grab largesse. (Ibid., 182)¶ Thus, “bureaucratic-politics” theory, which once made several reputa- tions (such as those of Richard Neustadt, Morton Halperin, and Graham Allison) in defense-
intellectual circles, and spawned an entire sub-industry within the field of international relations,5 is put into the service of dismissing putative security threats as imaginary. So, too, can a
surprisingly cognate theory, “public choice,”6 which can be considered the right-wing analog of the “bureaucratic-politics” model, and is a preferred interpretation of governmental decision-
making among libertarian observers. As Eland (2004, 203) summarizes:¶ Public-choice theory argues [that] the government itself can develop sepa- rate interests from its citizens. The
government reflects the interests of powerful pressure groups and the interests of the bureaucracies and the bureaucrats in them. Although this problem occurs in both foreign and domestic policy,
it may be more severe in foreign policy because citizens pay less attention to policies that affect them less directly.¶ There is, in this statement of public-choice theory, a certain ambiguity, and a
certain degree of contradiction: Bureaucrats are supposedly, at the same time, subservient to societal interest groups and autonomous from society in general.¶ This journal has pioneered the
argument that state autonomy is a likely consequence of the public’s ignorance of most areas of state activity (e.g., Somin 1998; DeCanio 2000a, 2000b, 2006, 2007; Ravenal 2000a). But state
autonomy does not necessarily mean that bureaucrats substitute their own interests for those of what could be called the “national society” that they ostensibly serve. I have argued (Ravenal
2000a) that, precisely because of the public-ignorance and elite-expertise factors, and especially because the opportunities—at least for bureaucrats (a few notable post-government lobbyist cases
nonwithstanding)—for lucrative self-dealing are stringently fewer in the defense and diplomatic areas of government than they are in some of the contract-dispensing and more under-the-radar-
screen agencies of government, the “public-choice” imputation of self-dealing, rather than working toward the national interest (which, however may not be synonymous with the interests,
perceived or expressed, of citizens!) is less likely to hold. In short, state autonomy is likely to mean, in the derivation of foreign policy, that “state elites” are using rational judgment, in insulation
from self-promoting interest groups—about what strategies, forces, and weapons are required for national defense.¶ Ironically, “public choice”—not even a species of economics, but rather a kind
of political interpretation—is not even about “public” choice, since, like the bureaucratic-politics model, it repudiates the very notion that bureaucrats make truly “public” choices; rather, they are
held, axiomatically, to exhibit “rent-seeking” behavior, wherein they abuse their public positions in order to amass private gains, or at least to build personal empires within their ostensibly official
niches. Such sub- rational models actually explain very little of what they purport to observe. Of course, there is some truth in them, regarding the “behavior” of some people, at some times, in
some circumstances, under some conditions of incentive and motivation. But the factors that they posit operate mostly as constraints on the otherwise rational optimization of objectives that, if for
no other reason than the playing out of official roles, transcends merely personal or parochial imperatives.¶ My treatment of “role” differs from that of the bureaucratic-politics theorists, whose
model of the derivation of foreign policy depends heavily, and acknowledgedly, on a narrow and specific identification of the role- playing of organizationally situated individuals in a partly
conflictual “pulling and hauling” process that “results in” some policy outcome. Even here, bureaucratic-politics theorists Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow (1999, 311) allow that “some players
are not able to articulate [sic] the governmental politics game because their conception of their job does not legitimate such activity.” This is a crucial admission, and one that points— empirically—

Roles (all theorists state) give rise to “expectations” of

to the need for a broader and generic treatment of role.¶

performance. My point is that virtually every governmental role, and especially

national-security roles, and particularly the roles of the uniformed military, embody expectations of devotion
to the “national interest”; rationality in the derivation of policy at every
functional level; and objectivity in the treatment of parameters, especially external parameters such as
“threats” and the power and capabilities of other nations. Sub-rational models (such as “public choice”) fail to take into account even a partial dedication to the “national” interest (or
even the possibility that the national interest may be honestly misconceived in more parochial terms). In contrast, an official’s role connects the individual to the (state-level) process, and

moderates the (perhaps otherwise) self-seeking impulses of the individual. Role-derived behavior tends to be formalized
and codified; relatively transparent and at least peer-reviewed, so as to be
consistent with expectations; surviving the particular individual and trans- mitted to successors and ancillaries; measured
against a standard and thus corrigible; defined in terms of the performed
function and therefore derived from the state function; and uncorrrupt, because personal cheating and
even egregious aggrandizement are conspicuously discouraged. ¶ My own direct observation
suggests that defense decision-makers attempt to “frame” the structure of the problems that they try to solve on the basis of the most accurate intelligence. They make it

their business to know where the threats come from. Thus, threats are not
“socially constructed” (even though, of course, some values are). A major reason for the rationality, and the objectivity, of the process is that much
security planning is done, not in vaguely undefined circumstances that offer
scope for idiosyncratic, subjective behavior, but rather in structured and reviewed
organizational frameworks. Non-rationalities (which are bad for understanding
and prediction) tend to get filtered out. People are fired for presenting skewed
analysis and for making bad predictions. This is because something important is
riding on the causal analysis and the contingent prediction. For these reasons, “public choice” does not
have the “feel” of reality to many critics who have participated in the structure of defense decision-making. In that structure, obvious, and even not-so-obvious,“rent-seeking” would not only be
shameful; it would present a severe risk of career termination. And, as mentioned, the defense bureaucracy is hardly a productive place for truly talented rent-seekers to operatecompared to
opportunities for personal profit in the commercial world. A bureaucrat’s very self-placement in these reaches of government testi- fies either to a sincere commitment to the national interest or to
a lack of sufficient imagination to exploit opportunities for personal profit.
 Threats Real
Perm do the aff and the alt in other instances – Threats are
real, not paranoid, and addressing them concretely is best
Knudsen 1– PoliSci Professor at Sodertorn (Olav, Post-Copenhagen Security Studies, Security Dialogue 32:3)
Moreover, I have a problem with the underlying implication that it is unimportant whether states 'really' face dangers
from other states or groups. In the Copenhagen school, threats are seen as coming mainly from the
actors' own fears, or from what happens when the fears of individuals turn into paranoid political
action. In my view, this emphasis on the subjective is a misleading conception of
threat, in that it discounts an independent existence for whatever is perceived as
a threat. Granted, political life is often marked by misperceptions, mistakes, pure imaginations, ghosts, or
mirages, but such phenomena do not occur simultaneously to large numbers of
politicians, and hardly most of the time. During the Cold War, threats - in the sense of
plausible possibilities of danger - referred to 'real' phenomena, and they refer
to 'real' phenomena now. The objects referred to are often not the same, but that is a different matter.
Threats have to be dealt with both in terms of perceptions and in terms of
the phenomena which are perceived to be threatening. The point of Waever’s concept of
security is not the potential existence of danger somewhere but the use of the word itself by political elites. In his 1997 PhD
dissertation, he writes, ’One can View “security” as that which is in language theory called a speech act: it is not interesting
as a sign referring to something more real - it is the utterance itself that is the act.’24 The deliberate disregard of objective
factors is even more explicitly stated in Buzan & WaeVer’s joint article of the same year.” As a consequence, the
phenomenon of threat is reduced to a matter of pure domestic politics.” It seems to me that the security dilemma, as a
central notion in security studies, then loses its foundation. Yet I see that Waever himself has no compunction about
referring to the security dilemma in a recent article." This discounting of the objective aspect of threats shifts security
studies to insignificant concerns. What has long made 'threats' and ’threat perceptions’
important phenomena in the study of IR is the implication that urgent
action may be required. Urgency, of course, is where Waever first began his argument in favor of an
alternative security conception, because a convincing sense of urgency has been the chief culprit behind the abuse of
'security' and the consequent ’politics of panic', as Waever aptly calls it.” Now, here - in the case of urgency - another baby
is thrown out with the Waeverian bathwater. When real situations of urgency arise, those
situations are challenges to democracy; they are actually at the core of the problematic arising with
the process of making security policy in parliamentary democracy. But in Waever’s world, threats are merely more or less
persuasive, and the claim of urgency is just another argument. I hold that instead of 'abolishing'
threatening phenomena ‘out there’ by reconceptualizing them, as Waever does, we
should continue pay ing attention to them, because situations with a credible
claim to urgency will keep coming back and then we need to know more about how they
work in the interrelations of groups and states (such as civil wars, for instance), not least to find adequate democratic
procedures for dealing with them.
 1% Risk
Even a miniscule risk of the advantage is enough to justify
regarding it as a threat and responding to it – I only need to win
a small risk to consider it a “real” threat
Nick Bostrom 11, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director of the Future of
Humanity Institute, and Director of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford,
recipient of the 2009 Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement, holds a Ph.D. in
Philosophy from the London School of Economics, 2011 (“The Concept of Existential Risk,” Draft of a Paper published on
ExistentialRisk.com, Available Online at http://www.existentialrisk.com/concept.html, Accessed 07-04-2011)
Holding probability constant, risks become more serious as we move toward the upper-right region of figure 2. For any
fixed probability, existential
risks are thus more serious than other risk
categories. But just how much more serious might not be intuitively obvious. One might think we could get a grip
on how bad an existential catastrophe would be by considering some of the worst historical disasters we can think of—
such as the two world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic, or the Holocaust—and then imagining something just a bit worse.
Yet if we look at global population statistics over time, we find that these horrible events of the past century fail to register
(figure 3). [Graphic Omitted] Figure 3: World population over the last century. Calamities such as the Spanish flu
pandemic, the two world wars, and the Holocaust scarcely register. (If one stares hard at the graph, one can perhaps just
barely make out a slight temporary reduction in the rate of growth of the world population during these events.) But even
this reflection fails to bring out the seriousness of existential risk. What makes existential catastrophes
especially bad is not that they would show up robustly on a plot like the one in figure 3, causing a precipitous drop in
world population or average quality of life. Instead, their significance lies primarily in the fact that
they would destroy the future. The philosopher Derek Parfit made a similar point with the
following thought experiment: I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than
most people think. Compare three outcomes: (1) Peace. (2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the
world’s existing population. (3) A nuclear war that kills 100%. (2) would be worse than (1), and (3)
would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is
between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater. … The Earth will
remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few
thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years
may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference
between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare
this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second. (10: 453-454) To calculate the loss
associated with an existential catastrophe, we must consider how much value would come to exist in its absence. It turns
out that the ultimate potential for Earth-originating intelligent life is
literally astronomical. One gets a large number even if one confines
one’s consideration to the potential for biological human beings living on Earth. If
we suppose with Parfit that our planet will remain habitable for at least another billion years, and
we assume that at least one billion people could live on it sustainably, then the potential exist for at
least 1018 human lives. These lives could also be considerably better than the
average contemporary human life, which is so often marred by disease, poverty, injustice, and various biological
limitations that could be partly overcome through continuing technological and moral progress. However, the relevant
figure is not how many people could live on Earth but how many descendants we could have in total. One lower bound of
the number of biological human life-years in the future accessible universe (based on current cosmological estimates) is
1034 years.[10] Another estimate, which assumes that future minds will be mainly implemented in computational
hardware instead of biological neuronal wetware, produces a lower bound of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective life-
years (or 1071 basic computational operations).(4)[11] If we make the less conservative assumption that future
civilizations could eventually press close to the absolute bounds of known physics (using some as yet unimagined
technology), we get radically higher estimates of the amount of computation and memory storage that is achievable and
thus of the number of years of subjective experience that could be realized.[12] Even
if we use the most
conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and
software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is
greater than the value of 1018 human lives. This implies that the expected
value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one
percentage point is at least ten times the value of a billion human lives. The
more technologically comprehensive estimate of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 1052 lives of
ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly. Even if we give this allegedly lower
bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a mere 1% chance of
being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by
a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth
a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might
consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an
expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any
“ordinary” good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the
indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost
certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.[13]
 Alt Deflates
They deflate threats and their authors are biased – under-
balancing is more likely than overreacting which means err
aff
Schweller 4 [Randall L. Schweller, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio
State University, “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical Realist Theory of Underbalancing,” International Security 29.2
(2004) 159-201, Muse]
Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing , little has been written on the subject. Indeed,
Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of
shelves are
peace" could have been made with equal veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library 

filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating threats, ranging from studies of domestic politics
to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there have been few

studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain
why states have with some, if not equal, regularity underestimated dangers to their
survival. There may be some cognitive or normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance,
that there is a commonly used word, paranoia, for the unwarranted fear that people

are, in some way, "out to get you" or are planning to do one harm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted
with the opposite psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do
not even like you. Yet, we do not have a familiar word for this phenomenon . Indeed, I am unaware
of any word that describes this pathology (hubris and overconfidence come close, but they plainly define something other than what I have described). That
noted, international relations theory does have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of states' underestimation of threats to their survival, the so-
called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a disparaging way by theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naïveté associated
with Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf
Hitler. Thus, the analogy either mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] to adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is deliberately used by leaders to
justify such policies and mislead the public. A more compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on under reactions to threats, however, is the tendency of
theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the desire of theorists and journals to provide society with policy—relevant theories that may help resolve or
security
manage urgent security problems. Thus, born in the atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War, the field of 

studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national security

that have had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings
of—the dangers of underreacting to or underestimating  threats. After all, the nuclear
revolution was not about overkill but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation,
accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were more concerned about overreacting to threats than under responding to them. At a time
when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under conditions of
uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous actions overly benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a
crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process and bring on a war that nobody wants. Many important
conclusions about the risk of nuclear war, and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94 Now that the Cold War is over,
we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a
prudent and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with recent realist studies on imperial under—and
overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the United States had the national
power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power (i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the
United States did [End Page 199] not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to expand because it lacked the institutional state strength to harness
resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent,
fragmented states are unwilling and unable to balance against potentially
dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are unable to
mobilize the required resources from a divided society. The arguments presented here also suggest that elite fragmentation and

disagreement within a competitive political process , which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for
overexpansionist policies, are more likely to produce under balancing  than overbalancing behavior among

threatened incoherent states.96 This is because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks

with few, if any, compensating short-term political gains, and because the strategic
environment is always somewhat uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented
elites within threatened states is more likely to generate overly cautious
responses to threats than overreactions to them . This dynamic captures the under reaction of democratic
states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic domestic-level variables that
regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.

Their alt also prevents responding to true threats – ISIS and

World War 2 prove some threats are real
Alt Fails
 One Speech not Key
One speech act doesn’t cause securitization – no impact to
the aff’s discourse
Irina Ghughunishvili 10, “Securitization of Migration in the United States after 9/11: Constructing
Muslims and Arabs as Enemies”, Submitted to Central European University Department of International Relations
European Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Professor Paul
Roe http://www.etd.ceu.hu/2010/ghughunishvili_irina.pdf
As provided by the Copenhagen School securitization theory is comprised by
speech act, acceptance of the audience and facilitating conditions or other non-securitizing actors contribute to a successful
securitization. The causality or a one-way relationship between the speech act, the
audience and securitizing actor, where politicians use the speech act first to
justify exceptional measures, has been criticized by scholars, such as Balzacq. According to him, the
one-directional relationship between the three factors, or some of them, is not the best approach. To fully grasp the
dynamics, it will be more beneficial to “rather than looking for a one-
directional relationship between some or all of the three factors highlighted,
it could be profitable to focus on the degree of congruence between them . 26
Among other aspects of the Copenhagen School’s theoretical framework, which he criticizes, the thesis will rely on the criticism of the lack
of context and the rejection of a ‘one-way causal’ relationship between the audience and the actor. The
process of threat
construction, according to him, can be clearer if external context, which
stands independently from use of language, can be considered . 27 Balzacq opts for more
context-oriented approach when it comes down to securitization through the speech act, where a single speech does not
create the discourse, but it is created through a long process , where context
is vital. 28 He indicates: In reality, the speech act itself, i.e. literally a single security
articulation at a particular point in time, will at best only very rarely explain
the entire social process that follows from it . In most cases a security scholar
will rather be confronted with a process of articulations creating
sequentially a threat text which turns sequentially into a securitization . 29 This
type of approach seems more plausible in an empirical study, as it is more likely that a single speech will
not be able to securitize an issue, but it is a lengthy process, where a the
audience speaks the same language as the securitizing actors and can relate
to their speeches.
 No War
Threat construction doesn’t cause war
Kaufman 9, Prof Poli Sci and IR – U Delaware, 2009 (Stuart J, “Narratives and Symbols in Violent
Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case,” Security Studies 18:3, 400 – 434)
Even when hostile narratives, group fears, and opportunity are strongly
present, war occurs only if these factors are harnessed. Ethnic narratives
and fears must combine to create significant ethnic hostility among mass
publics. Politicians must also seize the opportunity to manipulate that
hostility, evoking hostile narratives and symbols to gain or hold power by riding a wave of chauvinist
mobilization. Such mobilization is often spurred by prominent events (for example, episodes of violence) that
increase feelings of hostility and make chauvinist appeals seem timely. If the other group also mobilizes and if each side's
felt security needs threaten the security of the other side, the result is a security dilemma spiral of rising fear, hostility, and
mutual threat that results in violence. A virtue of this symbolist theory is that symbolist
logic explains why ethnic peace is more common than ethnonationalist war.
Even if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity exist, severe violence
usually can still be avoided if ethnic elites skillfully define group needs in
moderate ways and collaborate across group lines to prevent violence: this is
consociationalism.17 War is likely only if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity spur hostile attitudes, chauvinist
mobilization, and a security dilemma.
 Mutual Enmity
Strategically deploying security discourse overcomes mutual
enmity and solves their kritik
Bilgin 2000 [(Pinar, University of Wales, Aberystwyth) “Inventing Middle Easts? The making of regions
through security discourses” 13-16 August 1998] AT
As emphasised in the introduction, the argument put forward in this paper is that the answers peoples of the region (this
part of the world formerly known as the Middle East) give to the questions Who are we? and Which region do we belong
to? are very important in terms of what they do with their future. Through the creation of a regional identity and
strengthening the sense of belonging, for instance, cooperation and
interdependence may take root. They may choose to define insecurity
as their common enemy by way of conceiving themselves as part of a
'security complex'. [105] In the remainder of the paper I will discuss how viewing this group
of states as a 'security complex' may constitute a first step on the way to saw the
seeds of regionalism towards the establishment of a 'security community'. Barry
Buzan, in People, States and Fear introduced the concept of 'security complex' as an analytical tool when studying security.
His contention was that when conceptualising the regional level, one should do away with territoriality and voluntarism
(which turned out to be problematic as seen in the first two parts of this paper) but emphasise the present patterns of
amity and enmity. This, argues Buzan, would enable the analyst to treat a group of states together in a 'security complex',
i.e. as an intermediate level between the levels of states and the international system, whether or not those states recognise
themselves to be operating as part of one whole. Accordingly, he
defines a 'security complex' as
'a group of states whose primary security concerns link together
sufficiently closely that their national securities cannot realistically be considered apart from one another.' [106] By way of
this definition, Buzan re-introduces the role of external actors when he argues that a Middle Eastern security complex
might exist whether indigenous actors recognise it or not. [107] It is in this sense that the
'security
complex' as an analytical tool is useful in bringing together a group of
states to show their securities are interdependent upon one another's
policies. Coming to see the fact that their securities are interdependent and that they have to
cooperate towards achieving stable security might constitute a first, but nevetheless
crucial step towards sawing the seeds of regionalism in the 'Middle East'. However, although external actors' (including
analysts) view (and perhaps encouragement and support) is important, what is also very important is the creation of a
distinct identity within the construct -regardless of what we come to call it, a 'security complex' or a 'region'- if it is to
become a 'security community' in Karl Deutsch's terms. Deutsch and his associates defined a security community as 'one
in which where there is real assurance that the members of that community will not fight each either physically, but will
settle their disputes in some other way.' [108] As Wæver also indicates, security
complex as a concept does
not contain the standards for change towards a security community.
Rather security complex is an analytical tool for analysing the processes
and explaining the dynamics of security in a given area; it does not show or
attempt to change the quality of relationships at a given time within a given area. [109] Still, given the lack of enthusiasm
for regionalism (as a way of establishing security) in the 'Middle East', the 'Middle Eastern security complex' as a concept
is a good place for the analyst to start with. Some Arab regimes and non-governmental organisations may not include
Iran, Israel and Turkey in their definitions of the region they live in; Turkey and Israel, on the other hand may view
themselves as belonging to Europe rather than the 'Middle East'. Nevertheless, when
viewed in security
terms, they are all parts of a Middle Eastern (in)security complex; they all take
each other into account when making their calculations , especially when it
comes to buying military equipment. Then, although the concept of security complex in itself may not involve standards
for change, as Wæver has rightly pointed out, to convince regional actors that they are all involved within the same
security complex may arguably be a first step towards the creation of a security community. A second step might be taken
when they begin to see themselves not as victims of each other (or the past)
but of insecurity which has to be overcome through cooperative
efforts . [110] A third step may be the creation of security regimes on a number of issue areas, as Ken Booth has
suggested, so that a complex web of different regimes would help establish and maintain security in this part of the world.
This may allow the co-existence of all these four visions presented above; each helping address the issues they are most
concerned with. The involvement of non-governmental organisations may also help bring out issues that are not usually
met by states' policies. In the long-run, with possible spill-over effects, these security regimes may contribute towards
building a security community. [111] Viewed
from the lens of Critical Security Studies,
it is the issues of water, food, population, productivity, environment, and
education in addition to those of arms proliferation, the introduction of weapons of mass destruction, and expansionist
regimes, that
are the main problems in the region; for it is these very issues that
cause insecurity for peoples lives. Hence the Critical Security Studies call
to understand and practice security at different levels in reference to multiple referents
(subjects of security) and by way of multiple agents (actors that act for security, i.e. social movements, non-governmental
organisations, international organisations, individuals as well as states). Our
understanding and
practices of security, then, should be informed by a view of security that
is cognisant of the complexities involved in human affairs. The
insecurity in the 'Middle East' attests well to this.
 CTP [Fitzsimmons]
If scholars don’t make predictions, elites base policy on
biases and pathologies which is worse
Fitzsimmons, 07 (Michael, Washington DC defense analyst, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic
Planning”, Survival, Winter 06-07, online)
But handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challeng— ing. If
not sufficiently bounded,
a high degree of variability in planning factors can exact a significant price
on planning. The complexity presented by great variability strains the
cognitive abilities of even the most sophisticated decision— makers .15 And even a
robust decision-making process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth as
variability and complexity grows. It should follow, then, that in planning under conditions of risk,
variability in strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to available
analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between
complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is
silent or inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void . As
political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic sur— prise, in ‘an environment that lacks
clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous
assessment of sources and validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to
drive interpretation ... The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of
preconceptions.’16 The decision-making environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis,
not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his
environment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making .
He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a
priori scepticism about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for
discounting the importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to
which data and ‘rigorous assessment’ can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of
analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and
attempting to subordinate those factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both
undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well. Without careful
analysis of what is relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the
possible bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in
prediction is left with little more than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs
about the world to confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less
well founded, but if they are not made explicit and subject to analysis and
debate regarding their application to particular strategic contexts, they
remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at
their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly understood by the
organisations charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions may be
poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.
 Power Ineq
Alt doesn’t change power relations – concrete action solves
better
McCormack 10 (Tara, is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester and has a PhD in
International Relations from the University of Westminster. 2010, (Critique, Security and Power: The political limits to
emancipatory approaches, page 59-61)
In chapter 7 I engaged with the human security framework and some of the problematic implications of ‘emancipatory’
security policy frameworks. In this chapter I argued that the shift away from the pluralist security
framework and the elevation of cosmopolitan and emancipatory goals has served to enforce
international power inequalities rather than lessen them. Weak or unstable
states are subjected to greater international scrutiny and international
institutions and other states have greater freedom to intervene, but the
citizens of these states have no way of controlling or influencing these international
institutions or powerful states. This shift away from the pluralist security
framework has not challenged the status quo, which may help to explain why major
international institutions and states can easily adopt a more cosmopolitan rhetoric in their
security policies. As we have seen, the shift away from the pluralist security framework has entailed a shift towards a more
openly hierarchical international system, in which states are differentiated according to, for example, their ability to
provide human security for their citizens or their supposed democratic commitments. In this shift, the old pluralist
international norms of (formal) international sovereign equality, non-intervention and ‘blindness’ to the content of a state
are overturned. Instead, international institutions and states have more freedom to intervene in weak or unstable states in
order to ‘protect’ and emancipate individuals globally. Critical and emancipatory security theorists argue that the goal of
the emancipation of the individual means that security must be reconceptualised away from the state. As the domestic
sphere is understood to be the sphere of insecurity and disorder, the international sphere represents greater emancipatory
possibilities, as Tickner argues, ‘if security is to start with the individual, its ties to state sovereignty must be severed’
(1995: 189). For critical and emancipatory theorists there must be a shift towards a ‘cosmopolitan’ legal framework, for
example Mary Kaldor (2001: 10), Martin Shaw (2003: 104) and Andrew Linklater (2005). For critical theorists, one of the
fundamental problems with Realism is that it is unrealistic. Because it prioritises order and the existing status quo,
Realism attempts to impose a particular security framework onto a complex world, ignoring the myriad threats to people
emerging from their own governments and societies. Moreover, traditional international theory serves to obscure power
relations and omits a study of why the system is as it is: [O]mitting myriad strands of power amounts to exaggerating the
simplicity of the entire political system. Today’s conventional portrait of international politics thus too often ends up
looking like a Superman comic strip, whereas it probably should resemble a Jackson Pollock. (Enloe, 2002 [1996]: 189)
Yet as I have argued, contemporary critical security theorists seem to show a marked lack of engagement with their
problematic (whether the international security context, or the Yugoslav break-up and wars). Without concrete
engagement and analysis, however, the critical project is undermined and
critical theory becomes nothing more than a request that people behave in a
nicer way to each other. Furthermore, whilst contemporary critical security theorists argue that
they present a more realistic image of the world, through exposing power
relations, for example, their lack of concrete analysis of the problematic considered renders
them actually unable to engage with existing power structures and the way in which
power is being exercised in the contemporary international system. For critical and emancipatory theorists the central
place of the values of the theorist mean that it cannot fulfil its promise to critically engage with contemporary power
relations and emancipatory possibilities. Values must be joined with engagement with the material circumstances of the
time.
 A2 Burke
The alt isn’t feasible
Elshtain, 05 [Jean Bethke, was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the
Divinity School, Political Science, and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago, “RESPONSE
TO “AGAINST THE NEW INTERNATIONALISM” Against the New Utopianism”, Ethics & International Affairs 19, no. 2
(2005)]
JUST WAR TRADITION In Burke's analysis and criticism of my own positions--portions of which are clear and fair in exposition--he offers a very brief and, I fear,
One of the many problems with my argument,
misleading account of the just or justified war tradition.

Burke claims, is "overreliance on just war theory as a guide both to jus ad bellum
conditions for decisions about force and jus in bello protection of civilians" (p. 80). He further claims, without argument
or substantiation, that "just war principles of proportionality and unintentional harm fail to address adequately such dangers," referring to the dangers I cite of
"either deepening the injustice already present or creating new instances of injustice" (p. 80). As Burke surely knows, proportionality and discrimination are key in
Has he a
hello criteria. If just war limitations fail, it must be with reference to some unstated standard of Burke's own. What is this standard?

compelling, plausible alternative to how states might strive to avoid

"creating new instances of injustice"? If so, this should be spelled out as a real alternative to current in bello norms.
Burke not only fails to spell out such an alternative, but cannot do so. That is, he
absolves himself of the duty to identify ethical limits to the use of force by
imagining a world in which such conflicts have simply melted away. (I will have more
to say on this below.) In addition, Burke ignores altogether jus ad bellum criteria that are intended

to serve as an ethical and conceptual framework for practical reasoning regarding the use
of force among statespersons. But statespersons also disappear in Burke's normative
schema because states are to be dismantled. Indeed, it is difficult to see any real
political actors altogether in his constructive case because the United Nations, transformed into a mega-
collective security apparatus, takes up all the "political"--if one could call it that--space. Politics, as all students of it know,

involves contestation over various goods--a contestation that is never-ending

as one cannot perfectly "reconcile competing human wills ," as St. Augustine put it. By
eliminating the political space occupied by states and transcending it in a
kind of Hegelian dialectical move that is rather breathtaking, Burke
transfers politics to some mega- or meta-level. MORAL AMBIGUITY In criticizing my position of "equal
moral regard for all persons" and an international ethic that, once a certain set of criteria are met, calls upon responsible states to act when people are being
systematically, egregiously, and unremittingly assaulted, Burke pounces on my use of the "Spider-Man ethic"--namely, that "the more powerful have greater
responsibilities" For Burke this means that the United States is "recast as superhero, with all the absence of moral ambiguity such a metaphor implies" (p. 80).
With all due respect to Mr. Burke, I do not believe he knows anything about Spider-Man. Any reader of Marvel Comics appreciates that Spider-Man is a tormented
superhero and that his life is riddled with moral conflict and ambiguity. Does his loyalty to family and girlfriend take precedence over his duty to protect the
innocent from torture and death? How can he be fair to the "domestic" and the "trans-domestic" at the same time? Spider-Man is always in danger of stretching
himself too thin; always a bit exhausted; always wondering if he is doing the right thing. I chose Spider-Man rather than, say, Superman precisely because of the
perduring conflicts Spidey faces. What a pity that Burke has not familiarized himself with this existential and troubled hero! If I am guilty of anything here it is in
assuming that those engaged in cultural criticism have some knowledge of the world of superheroes, the troubled (Spider-Man, Batman) and the untroubled
Let me be
(Superman). (Alas, and I sigh as I write this, my explanation will probably be another strike against me--a case of cultural imperialism.)

clear about what I call for in the essay Burke criticizes: it is a world of
"minimally decent" states-- not perfect states and certainly not a world of
perpetual peace. (If there is such a world, it is not of this earth.) But to say this is not to fall into
despair, but rather to endorse a chastened and restrained hope that the
world can be made less brutal and less unjust, and this means more respect for human rights and more democracies, insofar as
democracy involves respect for persons qua persons. Saying this does not dictate any particular form of government save that no one is born to be a slave, to be
The
tormented, or to be slaughtered because of who he or she is--whether American or Palestinian or Israeli or Jew or Christian or Muslim or male or female.

real challenge to my perspective is to require of me that I spell out the

criteria for what counts as "minimally decent" and what threshold
conditions obtain--that is to say, at what point armed intervention becomes
necessary to uphold equal moral regard. That would be a real challenge to my essay. I fear that Burke's
rejoinder fails to articulate such a challenge because he cannot resist a
flight into utopianism . A PRESCRIPTIVE ARGUMENT? Burke's prescriptive argument is not
only improbable but also impossible as a course for a world of human
beings organized presently within hundreds of entities called states. His indictment of
the state is relentless. Indeed, reading Burke you would never know that states have carried human aspirations and hopes; that much of the dignity and purpose of
human beings derives from their location in particular communities with particular histories and traditions and stories and languages. States, at their best, help to
protect and to nourish certain goods. As the late, great Hannah Arendt put it, "No one can be a citizen of the world as he [and she] is a citizen of a particular
country." Burke wants "collective decision-making," a world beyond states. When one thinks of the challenges of representation and transparency in contemporary
states--none of which is any longer monocultural--the notion that anything that would meaningfully count as representation could pertain in a world body defies
One would likely wind up with a small group of elites , claiming to be
common sense.

something like a Hegelian class of disinterested persons , dictating policy. How

could it be anything else in the absence of any concrete account by Burke of the principles of authority and legitimacy that are to characterize his proposed global
order? Or without any compelling account of how politics is to be organized? What would be the principle of political organization? What, indeed, would be the
Burke criticizes my ethic as being allegedly
purview of citizenship--conspicuous by its absence in his account?

based on a "narrow dialogue between government elites," ignoring thereby

the "profound problem of accountability to citizens inherent in all security
policy-making." I could not agree more that accountability is a "profound
problem" and that to deal with it requires certain sorts of domestic institutional
arrangements . And of course in endorsing democracy I thereby endorse citizen
participation. The term "domestic" already signals a distinction between a particular set of arrangements culminating in states and arrangements
beyond that level. It is states that can be pressured to take responsibility for aberrant

behavior--for example, the U.S. military courts-martial of the out-of-control

rogues who enacted their own sordid pornographic fantasies with prisoners
in Abu Ghraib. One doesn't court-martial people for carrying out faithfully an official policy. There is most certainly fault to be found here--
whether in ambiguous statements about what is permitted or in insufficient training of those guarding prisoners, admittedly in a difficult situation over which the
U.S. military was just beginning to take control. We rightly judge a military by whether it indicts and punishes perpetrators of wrong: Why is nothing said about
Surely Burke owes us an account of a coherent set of institutional
this by Burke?

arrangements to carry out such a role in a world characterized by ethnic

revisionists, murderous jihadists, one-party dictatorships, child soldiering,
rape campaigns, human trafficking, genocides, corruption, exploitation, and
all the rest. It is through states and through the national contingents of international bodies--whether of churches or the Red
Cross or human rights groups or guilds of various professional organizations-- that persons can try to act and to

organize. Once they do, such entities based in one state connect up to other
such entities to form international networks that can put pressure
simultaneously on particular states and on relevant international or transnational
bodies. To assume a world beyond this sort of politics is to assume what
never was and never will be--namely, that there will no longer be a need to
"reconcile competing human wills." Defending, as Burke claims to be doing, a "liberal ethic
of war and peace" (p. 82) means, surely, to think of rules and laws and responsibility
and accountability. Liberalism is premised on a world of states and, depending on whether one is a Kantian or some other sort of liberal, a
world in which the principle of state sovereignty can be overridden under some circumstances. KANT'S FANTASY So I, pace Burke, have not forgotten "the vision
Perpetual peace is a fantasy of at-
of the great cosmopolitan" Immanuel Kant. Instead, I profoundly disagree with it.

oneness, as I have called it, of a world in which differences have all been
rubbed off and sameness invites "the definitive abolition of the need to
resort to war" (p. 83). For Kant, all hostilities must be concluded without any "secret reservation of material for a future war" (4) Otherwise, one
has a mere--mere--truce, not authentic peace. Here, and elsewhere, we find Kant downgrading the humanly possible work and

the arduous tasks of diplomats, statespersons, international organizations of citizens, and so on , in favor

of a utopian fantasy of eternity--the ability of human beings to, in effect, freeze a particular vision or arrangement and for that arrangement

to hiring men "to kill or be killed" is

to continue undisturbed in perpetuity. To reduce soldiering, as Kant does,

stunningly reductionist, and it mocks those who have died to fight fascism,
slavery, and other evils. Kant may enjoin the destruction of standing armies until he is blue in the face, but that is not going to happen.
It is not going to happen because eliminating human fear, envy, jealousy,
anger, rage--including rage at injustice-- is not possible . What Burke calls
"dismantl[ing] security dilemmas, brick by terrible brick" (p. 85) also requires
the dismantling of human beings as we know them. His positive vision runs
contrary to the entirety of the historic and even paleontological record ; there
has never been an epoch in which armed conflict has been altogether
absent. The challenge is not to eliminate--presumably if that could be done it
would by now have been done--but rather to limit the occasions for war and
the destructiveness of war. (And, contrary to Burke, modern warfare such as the
United States fights is less, not more, destructive, capable of realizing the ideal of

discrimination better than ever before; consider whether it would have been better to be in Baghdad in 2003 or in
Berlin in 1944.) People fight for good reasons and for bad ones. It is the obligation of citizens and responsible

statespersons to distinguish good and bad reasons to engage in armed

conflict and--here I agree with Burke--to find ways to chasten overambitious
and enthusiastic recourse to the use of force. This can only be done if particular citizens in particular
places act politically to tame their own states when they find them in the wrong. require some sort of workable set of

principles that places limits on the use of force and animates realistic and
hopeful possibilities in a way that abstract models cannot. Those who
endorse utopian visions of perpetual peace neglect the hard, nitty-gritty
political and ethical work. I hope Burke turns his considerable intelligence
and learning to a concrete account of how a Kantian vision can be realized
and, when he does so, I believe he will realize that the dualistic contrast
between "perpetual peace" and "perpetual war" is a chimera that ignores
ambiguity, nuance, the smudginess of real human lives and history--the very
things he accuses me of downplaying when they form the very background
assumptions out of which I work.
 A2 De-naturalize the state
De-naturalizing makes social studies impossible – the state
being contingent doesn’t refute the fact that they are a
primary actor and they’re conceptually useful
Jones 11 (David Jones, Martin Smith, Senior Lecturer, School of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, M.L.R., Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London,
London, United Kingdom, “Terrorology and Methodology: A Reply to Dixit and Stump,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
Volume 34, issue 6)
“de-naturalizing the state” is
In this context, Dixit and Stump's proposal to advance critical inquiry by
reinforces the obsessive suspicion of the
less than helpful, not least because it merely
state that defines critical terrorology's worldview. In particular, Dixit and Stump's
suggestion is based on the reductionist claim by Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson and Duvall that the whole field of “security
studies” (an ill-defined subject area at the best of times) is predicated on immutable state threats. Consequently: Actors
and their insecurities are naturalized in the sense that they are treated as facts that, because they are given by the nature of
the interstate system, can be taken for granted. Taken as natural facts, states and other organized actors become the
foundational objects the taken-for-granted of which serves to ground security studies.3 The proposed “de-naturalizing” of
What, we might
the state rests on this flimsy criticism of security studies, which raises more questions than it answers.
ask, does “de-naturalizing” the state really mean? Taken to its logical conclusion it
implies that we cannot discuss states as social facts. Nor can a de-naturalized
perspective accept that the international system is primarily composed of states
that express themselves through collective identities and interests
and give material form to these through institutions and symbols that
range from flags and anthems to national airlines and armed forces. From the constructivist ontology that Dixit and
Stump embrace it appears that because there are no social facts that are not socially constituted there can be no such thing
if states cannot at a minimum be construed as social facts
as facts at all. But
with histories and interests then how, we might wonder, can we begin to study their
actions? In their subsequent discussion of terrorism as practice, the world Dixit and Stump inhabit is comprised
purely of discourses and practices. Even a state's terror strategy, from this perspective,
erroneously assumes an “objectively existing phenomenon.”4 Extending the process
of de-naturalization, moreover, leads to some bizarre and nihilistic conclusions. The logic of constructivism would
entail “de-naturalizing” not just the state, but all social arrangements,
and any human organization, from nationalities, governments, and sub-state actors, to universities, academic journals,
language and the constitution of the self itself. Ultimately, such
“de-naturalization”
undermines the foundations of social inquiry . All human institutions,
from the state downwards, rest on assumptions and practices that are socially
and historically constituted. All institutions and social structures can therefore be deconstructed.5
Fundamentally, there is nothing particularly novel about this insight that in fact began with the ancient Greek distinction
between nomos and physis.6 Yet, if a program of inquiry simply regards constitutive processes as the only thing worth
studying, thenall phenomena collapse back into language, which robs
everything, including constructivism itself, of meaning. As the Australian philosopher John Anderson
observed of this style of thinking , it functions “as a substitute at once for
philosophy and for a real theory of language.”7 The point is, as we argued in our review,
that to achieve a genuine understanding we must either investigate the facts that are talked about or study the fact that
they are talked about in a certain way. If we concentrate on the uses of language we are in danger of taking our discoveries
about manners of speaking as answers to questions about what is there. This path leads not to any meaningful insight, but
to the paradoxes of idealism Jorge Luis Borges explored in his Ficciones. In Borges's short story “Tln, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius,” the metaphysicians of the imaginary world of Tln (or the world conceived by constructivism) do not seek “for the
truth, or even for verisimilitude,”8 which they consider devoid of interest, but instead pursue a “kind of amazement.”9
For, ultimately, if
human agents are themselves, as Dale Copeland notes, merely “puppets of
the ideational system in which they find themselves” then “each would exist as a
socially conditioned 'Me', without the free-willed 'I' capable of resisting the
socialization process.”10 Such a condition of linguistic mutability, in fact, undermines
any transformative possibility for the international system, or indeed anything
else. Yet, ironically, this is the very thing constructivists and critical theorists want to show is possible. Furthermore, if
Dixit and Stump do not accept the logic of their constructivism, which abandons academic engagement for the path of
Tlnist astonishment, then they must assert, somewhat arbitrarily, that we should de-naturalize the state, yet leave all other
social institutions in their “natural” state. Such a method only frames the debate in a way
that favors a set of ideological preferences, which inevitably
prejudices the outcome of any inquiry by determining that all
problems are the fault of the state and its insidious systems of exclusion. Dixit and Stump's
proposed de-naturalization of the state, therefore, fails any adequate standard of
hypothesis testing. Put simply, you cannot “de-naturalize” the one thing
you might object to in the current political system, but leave all other practices and social
arrangements, including the constitutive positions you occupy, naturalized as if you existed in Olympian
detachment. As we pointed out in our review, at best this position is intellectually incoherent, and at worst hypocritical.
We exemplified this point in our initial review with reference to Ken Booth's contradictory assertion that critical theorists
must recognize that they inhabit a world constituted by powerful ideological systems, yet must themselves “stand outside”
those systems.11 Such
schemes repeat the Marxian fallacy of false consciousness, asserting that
everyone, apart from the critically initiated, has their understanding
distorted by the ideology in dominance. Critical theory apparently endows its disciples with
the unique capacity to “stand outside” these systems of dominance and see through the othering processes of the state.
Meanwhile, those trapped in the quotidian reality of the state have no access to this higher insight. Booth's article in
Critical Studies on Terrorism shows where this style of thinking leads: to the conviction that the followers of critical theory
alone can transcend the mundane and the political.
 Interdisciplinary Approaches Good
Reject non interdisciplinary explanations of IR
Steve Smith, Vice Chancellor of the Univ. of Exeter, BA, MA, PhD IR From Univ. of Southhampton, , Are Dialogue and
Synthesis Possible in International Relations? International Studies Review (2003) 5,
No research agenda can lead to synthesis, simply because different approaches
see different worlds. With regard to dialogue, it is important to make four points: (1) Any research
agenda should be empirically (or problem) driven and not determined a
priori by the kinds of empirical questions deemed relevant . (2) Such an agenda needs
to be open to all interpretations of events and not preclude ex cathedra any particular approach. (3) Such an
agenda should also be interdisciplinary because the study of international relations
cannot be restricted to any one discipline. Being interdisciplinary permits us
to open up epistemological and methodological space while, lessening claims
for the exceptionalism of international relations as a field. (4) Such an agenda would
not use methodology and epistemology to police the boundaries of what can
and cannot be talked about and studied. Several other contributors to this forum, namely, Frank
Harvey, Joel Cobb, and Andrew Moravcsik, criticize this author’s answers to the questions posed to us. Harvey and Cobb’s
basic complaint is that these responses fail to provide the criteria by which to assess work in each approach. The argument
here, however, is decidedly not that there are no standards but that the standards for assessing work within any one
approach must be the standards of that research tradition. Appealing to any neutral ground for judging work merely
reintroduces the epistemological orthodoxy of the mainstream in the disguise of neutral scholarly standards. In this
regard, this author sides with Friedrich Kratochwil’s comment that there is no philosopher’s stone on which to build
foundational truth claims. This statement does not imply, however, that there are no standards for assessing work. Far
from wishing to protect any theory from fatal criticism, the point is to ensure that no one theory gets protected by
epistemological gatekeeping. (143)
 Security Studies Bad
Their kritik is non-falsifiable conspiracy theory – they
cherry-pick examples
Marijke Breuning (professor of political science at the University of North Texas) December 2009
“Thinking Critically About Security Studies” International Studies Review Volume 11, Issue 4, Pages 792-794
In their zeal to critique conspicuous consumption and the American love affair with the SUV, Simon
Dalby and Matthew Paterson resort to the familiar argument that the Dutch consume less oil because they choose "to
walk, ride bicycles, or take the train" (p. 184). They forget to mention that this is an easy choice in a very
densely populated country with public transportation plentiful in most locations, whereas gas is pricey and parking
expensive (and difficult to find)—just as public transportation is preferred by many in New York City but generally not an
option for residents of the many small towns of the American Midwest. These examples are typical of the
interpretations offered in the volume's chapters. Greater reflection on initial judgments might have enabled the authors to
arrive at deeper insights. Finally, there is the issue of assumptions. The contributors share a conviction that their
perceptions are on target. There is no serious consideration of alternative explanations.
Moreover, the
explanations tend to attribute a unity of purpose to decisions
made by disparate entities (e.g., government, business, and media) and occasionally resemble
conspiracy theories . For instance, Marie Thorsten implies that TV shows such as 24 are designed to facilitate
citizens' acceptance of the Bush administration's position that torture was both effective and acceptable. She does not
consider the possibility that such shows may also turn people against such tactics or that they simply may have little
impact because viewers understand them to be fictional entertainment. She also does not consider that the appearance of
this show may have been a lucky happenstance for its creator, not something done by design and collusion.
Ultimately, critical security studies as presented in this volume is remarkably
uncritical. Careful investigation and considered judgment is replaced with
the affirmation of foregone conclusions . More is required to successfully
address contemporary security challenges.
 Abstraction Bad
The abstractness of their approach to IR means realism fills
in
Sandole 9 [(Dennis J. D. Sandole is Professor of Conflict Resolution and International Relations at the Institute
for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, USA. Sean Byrne is Professor of Peace and Conflict
Studies and Founding Director of the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, St. Paul’s College, University of
Manitoba, Canada. Ingrid Sandole-Staroste is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology, Global Affairs and
Women’s Studies Programs at George Mason University, USA. Jessica Senehi is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict
Studies and Associate Director of the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, St. Paul’s College, University of
Manitoba, Canada.) “Conflict resolution The missing link between liberal international relations theory and realistic
practice” Handbook of Conflict Analysis and Resolution] AT
Traces of Morgenthau’s guidance can be found in many contemporary books on diplomacy and in foreign policy practices.
However, it is very hard to quote a liberal IR theorist on the conduct of foreign
policy, mainly because, at the conceptual level, the liberal paradigm does not provide daily
practical tools for managing the day-to-day business of diplomacy. Whereas
decisionmakers find themselves at ease in strategizing foreign policies by
taking into consideration principles of realist approaches, such as threats, crises,
and strategic alliances, they are not well-enough equipped to add new
concepts to their daily policy formulations. In many instances, this produces foreign policy
strategies that are identical to national security strategies. The above argument is also in line with Rapoport’s “first order
learning” argument. In this view, when problems occur, they are addressed by reference to the “default values,” which are
based on commonly used assumptions and become regarded as immutable. “Orderly and creative transformation of social
systems, however, depends upon a capacity for second-order learning, which requires a willingness and capacity for
challenging assumptions” (Miall et al. 2000: 48). Hopmann (2001) makes a similar observation by addressing bargaining
and problemsolving approaches to international negotiations. He claims that: since most senior diplomats were trained
during the period when the realist paradigm was dominant in the field of international relations, it is likely that whatever
theoretical analysis of negotiations they might have encountered would have been heavily laden with the content of
bargaining theory. Believing it to be valid, along with the realist perspective to which it is closely related conceptually, they
have tended to negotiate as if bargaining constituted the only appropriate approach to international negotiations. (ibid:
22) The second issue area addressed by the aforementioned observations is related to conceptual limitations in
formulating liberal foreign policy practice. The realist and liberal approaches to IR differ from
each other in terms of their ability to provide concrete policy tools to
policymakers and diplomats in their daily conduct of foreign relations. Whereas the abstract
realist theory of IR provides the immediate “concrete tools” to execute daily
foreign policies in the form of threat, commitment, ultimatum, strategic alliance, and sanctions, the liberal
paradigm seems to offer another set of “abstract frameworks,” namely
multilateralism, economic interdependence, relative gains, soft power, democratic peace, and security communities that
can only be implemented in the form of medium- or long-term policy. Lack
of operational coherence in liberal approaches often results in default use of
realist tools in the making and execution of foreign policies, even in situations in which joint interests can be
increased through cooperation.
 Rep Determinism
They assume responses to security reps is pre-determined,
but they’re actually dependent on perspective
Shim 14 (David Shim is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations and International
Organization of the University of Groningen – As part of the critique of visual determinism, this card internally quotes
David D. Perlmutter, Ph.D.. He is Dean of the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. Before coming
to Texas Tech, he was the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. As a
documentary photographer, he is the author or editor of seven books on political communication and persuasion. Also, he
has written several dozen research articles for academic journals as well as more than 200 essays for U.S. and
international newspapers and magazines such as Campaigns & Elections, Christian Science Monitor, Editor & Publisher,
Los Angeles Times, MSNBC.com., Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today. Routledge Book Publication –Visual Politics and
North Korea: Seeing is believing – p.24-25)
Imagery can enact powerful effects, since political actors are almost always pressed to take action when confronted with images of atrocity and human suffering resultant from wars, famines and

Usually, humanitarian emergencies are conveyed through media

natural disasters.

representations, which indicate the important role of images in producing emergency situations as (global) events (Benthall 1993; Campbell 2003b; Lisle 2009; Moeller
1999; Postman 1987). Debbie Lisle (2009: 148) maintains that, 'we see that the objects, issues and events we usually study [. . .] do not even exist without the media [.. .] to express them’. As a
consequence, visual images have political and ethical consequences as a result of their role in shaping private and public ways of seeing (Bleiker. Kay 2007). This is because how people come to
know, think about and respond to developments in the world is deeply entangled with how these developments are made visible to them. Visual representations participate in the processes of how
people situate themselves in space and time, because seeing involves accumulating and ordering information in order to be able to construct knowledge of people, places and events. For example,
the remembrance of such events as the Vietnam War, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 or the torture in Abu Ghraib prison cannot be separated from the ways in which these events have
been represented in films, TV and photography (Bleiker 2009; Campbell/Shapiro 2007; Moller2007). The visibility of these events can help to set the conditions for specific forms of political

action. The current war in Afghanistan serves as an example of this. Another is the nexus of hunger images and relief operations.
Vision and visuality thus become part and parcel of political dynamics, also revealing the ethical dimension of imagery, as it affects the ways in which people interact with each other.

However, particular representations do not automatically lead to particular

responses as, for instance, proponents of the so-called 'CNN effect’ would
argue (for an overview of the debates among academic, media and policy-making circles on the 'CNN effect', see Gilboa 2005; see also. Dauber 2001; Eisensee/ Stromberg 2007;
Livingston/Eachus 1995; O'Loughlin 2010; Perlmutter 1998, 2005; Robinson 1999, 20011. There is no causal relationship between

a specific image and a political intervention, in which a dependent variable (the image)
would explain the outcome of an independent one (the act). David Perlmutter (1998: I), for instance,
explicitly challenges, as he calls it, the 'visual determinism' of images, which
dominates political and public opinion. Referring to findings based on public surveys, he argues that the formation
of opinions by individuals depends not on images but on their idiosyncratic
predispositions and values (see also, Domke et al. 2002; Perlmutter 2005).

Their kritik is missing an internal link, its impact story

relies on everyone being unable to form their own opinions
which is independently bad because it encourages harmful
manipulation
 ---terror
Rep determinism is especially true in the context of terror
Perkoski 10 [(Evan, Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Government) “Rethinking
Repression: Exploring the Effectiveness of Counterterrorism in Spain” Wesleyan College, 2010] AT
Combating terrorism is one of the most pressing and difficult issues facing modern governments. Nations around the
world, ranging from the most developed to those struggling to exist, are forced to contend with domestic and international
terrorist organizations that strive to alter the current political framework. Unfortunately, there is no silver
bullet to defeating terrorism; policies that were successfully implemented
by one nation have utterly failed in another. The general nature of terrorism and terrorist
groups present even more problems: governments are dealt crippling disadvantages as terrorists enjoy the luxuries of
maneuverability, blending in with civilians, informational advantages and minor resource needs. Amnesty,
conciliation, repression, restriction: all are forms of counterterrorism
strategies that are available to states. But which policies – or combination of policies – should states
choose? An examination of modern history shows that states often attempt a variety of strategies,
mixing conciliation with repression, or restriction with discriminate violence. I argue that legal, nonviolent forms of
counterterrorism are the most effective at reducing the frequency of terrorist attacks. More precisely, arrests, restrictive
policies that make it harder for terrorist to carry out attacks, and judicial policies that increase the punishment for
terrorism are the most effective counterterrorist measures. Conciliatory policies can also be effective when there is no
public involvement or referendum; for example, a general amnesty policy will be effective, but a regional referendum may
cause terrorists to increase attacks in an attempt to 5 influence civilian and government voting behavior. These findings
suggest that government legitimacy is more important to deterring terrorism
than previously believed. Overall, the results from my study show that counterterrorism policies are most
effective when they abide by preexisting legal boundaries, and that fighting fire with fire – in other words, fighting
terrorist violence with state violence – can either instigate further terrorist attacks or simply be insignificant. Central
Question The goal of this thesis is to provide a quantitative assessment of the relative ability of counterterrorist tactics to
reduce the likelihood of terrorist incidents. This information is largely missing from modern political science literature,
but its value cannot be underestimated. Understanding the most effective means to combat terrorism would be
enormously helpful to modern governments facing threats from non-state actors. There are four main
categories of counterterrorism tactics: conciliation, repression, restriction,
and legal reform (Miller 2007). Conciliation generally includes amnesty policies and regional political
referendums. Repression incorporates the violent methods of counterterrorism such as bombing group headquarters and
camps and assassinating terrorist leaders. Restriction refers to methods that make it difficult for terrorists to plan and
carry out attacks; these include arresting terrorist suspects, and hardening important targets (e.g. rerouting traffic away
form government buildings). Lastly, legal reform is often used in conjunction with other policies. For example, legal
reform can be implemented to increase police 6 powers. Another example is altering domestic law to increase political
representation.
Predictions Good
 Chernoff
Predictions are good enough---they can be based on specific
knowledge and empirical data
Chernoff 9 Fred, Prof. IR and Dir. IR – Colgate U., European Journal of International Relations,
“Conventionalism as an Adequate Basis for Policy-Relevant IR Theory”, 15:1, Sage
For these and other reasons, many social theorists and social scientists have come to the conclusion
that prediction is impossible. Well-known IR reflexivists like Rick Ashley, Robert Cox, Rob Walker and Alex
Wendt have attacked naturalism by emphasizing the interpretive nature of social theory. Ashley is explicit in his
critique of prediction, as is Cox, who says quite simply, ‘It is impossible to predict the future’ (Ashley, 1986: 283; Cox,
1987: 139, cf. also 1987: 393). More recently, Heikki Patomäki has argued that ‘qualitative changes and emergence are
possible, but predictions are not’ defective and that the latter two presuppose an unjustifiably narrow notion of
‘prediction’.14 A determined prediction sceptic may continue to hold that there is too great a
degree of complexity of social relationships (which comprise ‘open systems’) to allow any prediction
whatsoever. Two very simple examples may circumscribe and help to refute a radical variety
of scepticism. First, we all make reliable social predictions and do so with great frequency.  We
can predict with high probability that a spouse, child or parent will react to  certain well-
known stimuli that we might supply, based on extensive past experience . More to the point of IR prediction
– scepticism, we can imagine a young child in the UK who (perhaps at the cinema) (1) picks up a bit of 19th-
century British imperial lore thus gaining a sense of the power of the crown, without knowing anything of current
balances of power, (2) hears some stories about the US–UK invasion of Iraq in the context of the aim of
advancing democracy, and (3) hears a bit about communist China and democratic Taiwan. Although
the specific term ‘preventative strike’ might not enter into her lexicon, it is possible to imagine
the child, whose knowledge is thus limited, thinking that if democratic Taiwan were
threatened by China, the UK would (possibly or probably) launch a strike on China to protect it,
much as the UK had done to help democracy in Iraq. In contrast to the child, readers of this journal and scholars
who study the world more thoroughly have factual information  (e.g. about the relative
military and economic capabilities of the UK and China) and hold some cause-and-effect
principles (such as that states do not usually initiate actions that leaders
understand will have an extremely high probability of undercutting their
power with almost no chances of success). Anyone who has adequate knowledge of world
politics would predict that the UK will not launch a preventive attack against China. In
the real world, China
knows that for the next decade and well beyond the UK will not intervene militarily in its
affairs. While Chinese leaders have to plan for many likely — and even a few somewhat unlikely — future
possibilities, they do not have to plan for various implausible contingencies: they do not have to structure forces
geared to defend against specifically UK forces and do not have to conduct diplomacy with the UK in a way that would
be required if such an attack were a real possibility. Any rational decision-maker in China may
use some cause-and-effect ( probabilistic ) principles along with knowledge of
specific facts relating to the Sino-British relationship to predict (P2) that the UK will not
land its forces on Chinese territory — even in the event of a war over Taiwan (that is, the probability is very
close to zero). The statement P2 qualifies as a prediction based on DEF above and counts as knowledge for Chinese
political and military decision-makers. A Chinese diplomat or military planner who would deny that theory-based
prediction would have no basis to rule out extremely implausible predictions like P2 and would thus have to prepare
for such unlikely contingencies as UK action against China . A reflexivist theorist sceptical of ‘prediction’ in IR
might argue that the China example distorts the notion by using a trivial prediction and
treating it as a meaningful one. But the critic’s temptation to dismiss its value stems precisely
from the fact that it is so obviously true. The value to China of knowing that the UK is not a
military threat is significant. The fact that, under current conditions, any plausible cause-and-effect
understanding of IR that one might adopt would yield P2, that the ‘UK will not attack China’, does not diminish the
value to China of knowing the UK does not pose a military threat. A critic might also argue that DEF and the China
example allow non-scientific claims to count as predictions. But we note that while physics and chemistry
offer precise ‘point predictions’, other natural sciences, such as seismology, genetics or
meteorology, produce predictions that are often much less specific ; that is, they describe the
predicted ‘events’ in broader time frame and typically in probabilistic terms. We often find predictions about the
probability, for example, of a seismic event in the form ‘some time in the next three years’ rather than ‘two years from
next Monday at 11:17 am’. DEF includes approximate and probabilistic propositions as predictions and is thus able to
catagorize as a prediction the former sort of statement, which is of a type that is often of great value to policy-
makers. With the help of these ‘non-point predictions’ coming from the natural and the social
sciences, leaders are able to choose the courses of action (e.g. more stringent earthquake-safety building
codes, or procuring an additional carrier battle group) that are most likely to accomplish the leaders’
desired ends. So while ‘point predictions’ are not what political leaders require in most
decision-making situations, critics of IR predictiveness often attack the predictive capacity of
IR theory for its inability to deliver them. The critics thus commit the straw man fallacy by
requiring a sort of prediction in IR (1) that few, if any, theorists claim to be able to offer, (2)
that are not required by policy-makers for theory-based predictions to be valuable, and (3)
that are not possible even in some natural sciences .15 The range of theorists included in ‘reflexivists’ here
is very wide and it is possible to dissent from some of the general descriptions. From the point of view of the central
argument of this article, there are two important features that should be rendered accurately. One is that reflexivists
reject explanation–prediction symmetry, which allows them to pursue causal (or constitutive) explanation without
any commitment to prediction. The second is that almost all share clear opposition to predictive social science.16 The
reflexivist commitment to both of these conclusions should be evident from the foregoing discussion.
 Kurasawa
Predictions are good
Kurasawa 4, Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, and a Faculty Associate of the
Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale, 2004 (Fuyuki, “Cautionary Tales,” Constellations Volume 4 No. 11, December)
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is
likely to encounter from some intellectual circles is a deep-seated
skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern line of
thinking, for instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless , perhaps even harmful, to
strive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra
teleological models, history has no intrinsic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and
if, contra scientistic futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological
inscrutability supposedly opens up at our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of
chance. Therefore, rather than embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a
pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to
emergencies as they arise. While this argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all
predictive schemes, it conflates
the necessary recognition of the contingency of
history with unwarranted assertions about the latter’s total opacity and
indeterminacy. Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be known with
absolute certainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to understand
what is brewing on the horizon and to prepare for crises already coming
into their own. In fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work of prevention means that we
must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses
that provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in
the final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the acceptance of historical contingency and of
the self-limiting character of farsightedness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present
generations. The future no longer appears to be a metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor
can it be sloughed off to pure randomness. It becomes, instead, a
result of human action shaped
by decisions in the present – including, of course, trying to anticipate and
prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to our successors .
 Low Probability Planning Good
High magnitude, low probability scenario planning (like nuclear
war) is productive in IR
Timothy Junio 13, cybersecurity postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, PhD in political science from the University of
Pennsylvania, and Thomas Mahnken, Naval War College, “Conceiving of Future War: The Promise of Scenario Analysis
for International Relations”, September, International Studies Review Volume 15, Issue 3, pages 374–395
This introduces political scientists to scenarios future counterfactuals and
article — —

demonstrates their value across a wide range of research in tandem with other methodologies and

questions scenarios contribute to theory building

. The authors describe best practices regarding the scenario method and argue that

and development , identifying new hypotheses , analyzing data-poor

research topics , articulating “world views ,” setting new research agendas ,
avoiding cognitive biases , and teaching the low rate at which . The article also establishes

scenarios are used in the international relations subfield and situates

scenarios in the broader context of political science methods . The conclusion offers two detailed examples of

¶
the effective use of scenarios. social scientists often have a hard
In his classic work on scenario analysis, The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz commented that “

time [building scenarios]; they have been trained to stay away from ‘what
if?’ questions and concentrate on ‘what was? ’” (Schwartz 1996:31). While Schwartz's comments were impressionistic based on his years of

Scenarios—counterfactual narratives about the

conducting and teaching scenario analysis, his claim withstands empirical scrutiny.

future—are woefully underutilized among political scientists . The method is almost never taught on graduate

The low rate at which

student syllabi, and a survey of leading international relations (IR) journals indicates that scenarios were used in only 302 of 18,764 sampled articles.

political scientists use scenarios is surprising; the method is —less than 2% of the time—

popular in fields as disparate as business, demographics, ecology, pharmacology, public health, economics, and epidemiology (Venable, Li, Ginter, and Duncan 1993; Leufkens, Haaijer-Ruskamp, Bakker, and Dukes 1994; Baker,

Scenarios also are a common tool

Hulse, Gregory, White, Van Sickle, Berger, Dole, and Schumaker 2004; Sanderson, Scherbov, O'Neill, and Lutz 2004).

employed by the policymakers whom political scientists study.¶ This seeks article

to elevate the status of scenarios in political science by demonstrating their

usefulness for theory building and pedagogy . Rather than constitute mere
speculation regarding an unpredictable future scenarios assist , as critics might suggest,

scholars with developing testable hypotheses , gathering data, and identifying a theory's upper and lower bounds. Additionally,

scenarios are an effective way to teach students to apply theory to policy . In the

political
pages below, a “best practices” guide is offered to advise scholars, practitioners, and students, and an argument is developed in favor of the use of scenarios. The article concludes with two examples of how

scientists have invoked the scenario method to improve the specifications

of their theories, propose falsifiable hypotheses, and design new empirical
research programs.¶ ¶ What do counterfactual narratives about the
Scenarios in the Discipline

future look like? One of the most common uses

Scenarios may range in length from a few sentences to many pages. of the scenario method,

is to study the conditions under which high-consequence ,

which will be referenced throughout this article,

low-probability events may occur. Perhaps the best example of this is

nuclear warfare , a circumstance that has never resulted, but has
captivated generations of political scientists. consider a For an introductory illustration, let us very simple

scenario regarding how a first use of a nuclear weapon might occur ¶ : During the year 2023, the
US military is ordered to launch air and sea patrols of the Taiwan Strait to aid in a crisis. These highly visible patrols disrupt trade off China's coast, and result in skyrocketing insurance rates for shipping companies. Several days into the
contingency, which involves over ten thousand US military personnel, an intelligence estimate concludes that a Chinese conventional strike against US air patrols and naval assets is imminent. The United States conducts a preemptive strike
against anti-air and anti-sea systems on the Chinese mainland. The US strike is far more successful than Chinese military leaders thought possible; a new source of intelligence to the United States—unknown to Chinese leadership—allowed the
US military to severely degrade Chinese targeting and situational awareness capabilities. Many of the weapons that China relied on to dissuade escalatory US military action are now reduced to single-digit-percentage readiness. Estimates for
repairs and replenishments are stated in terms of weeks, and China's confidence in readily available, but “dumber,” weapons is low due to the dispersion and mobility of US forces. Word of the successful US strike spreads among the Chinese and
Taiwanese publics. The Chinese Government concludes that for the sake of preserving its domestic strength, and to signal resolve to the US and Taiwanese Governments while minimizing further economic disruption, it should escalate

dramatically with the use of an extremely small-yield nuclear device against a stationary US military asset in the Pacific region. ¶This reflects a future event that,
short story

while unlikely to occur and far too vague to be used for military planning, contains many dimensions of
 political science theory . These include what leaders perceive as the following:

“limited,” “proportional,” or “escalatory” uses of force; the importance of private

information about capabilities the relationship between and commitment; audience costs in international politics;

military expediency and political objectives during war; and the role of
compressed timelines for decision making The purpose is to explain , among others. of this article

to scholars how such stories, and more rigorously developed narratives that
specify variables of interest and draw on extant data, may improve the
study of IR . An important starting point is to explain how future counterfactuals fit into the methodological canon of the discipline.
 Complexity Theory
Linear predictions good and complexity theory wrong
Steven N. Durlauf 99, Professor of Economics – University of Wisconsin-Madison “System Effects: Complexity in
Political and Social Life,” Emergence: Complexity and Organization, 1.2, April
Similarly, the presence of positive feedback effects does not logically entail, as is claimed (p. 146), that there are nonlinearities in a system. This is not to say that
the examples that Jervis gives of nonlinear systems are actually linear systems, butthe arguments made in support of
nonlinearity are frequently incorrect. In other cases, Jervis, in adopting
systemswide metaphors, is really placing new labels on old bottles. Many of
the examples in System Effects are cases where government policies,
because they ignore interdependences between social, economic and
political actors, have proven to be counterproductive. To an economist, this is
old hat. In a system of actors whose behaviors are linearly connected, it is
possible for the direct effect of the change in a variable on one actor's behavior
to have the opposite sign as the equilibrium effect of the change, due to
indirect effects. In linear economic models, this is known as the difference between structural and reduced form equations, where only the latter,
when derived from the former, allow one to compute the full effect of a change in an exogenous variable on the equilibrium of a system. Indeed, the

many cases of unintended consequences described by Jervis seem to result from

a failure to consider the full range of causes of individual and group behavior, not because of
interactions, emergence, nonlinearity , etc. In other cases, there is a lack of
clarity in the definitions of terms such as nonlinearity. Statistics provides a simple example. A standard
statistical problem is the modeling of the probability of a binary outcome (e.g., go to war or remain at peace) as a function of a set of causal factors. Suppose that
the probability of going to war depends on the linear combination of a set of factors. Since probabilities are bounded between zero and one, it is generally the case
that the effect of this combination on the probability must be nonlinear. So, is this a nonlinear model, in that the sum of the factors has a nonlinear effect on the
probability of the outcome of interest, or is it linear, because the different factors can be traded off at fixed rates with no effect on the net probability? (Models of
this type are sometimes referred to as generalized linear models!) More broadly, the problem is that one can construct models that from one perspective are linear
and from another are not. In such cases, how does one determine what it is about nonlinearity that matters in explaining the phenomenon of interest? While this
determination can be made through a careful consideration of the structure of a system (or a historical episode of interest), the analyses in System Effects are far
too cursory to be persuasive. My most serious concern is that it is unclear how complexity, nonlinearity, and related formal ideas enrich the sorts of analyses that
Jervis conducts. Consider Jervis's discussion of Vietnam, where he argues that the success of the US in conventional fighting had the unintended consequence of
What
causing the North Vietnamese to choose guerrilla tactics and thereby win the war, providing a clear example of unintended consequences.

makes such an example persuasive is a deep examination of the history of

the case in question. It is not made more persuasive by the ex post
determination that aspects of the example are similar to some features of
certain formal systems. Nor is it obvious that ex ante knowledge of such
systems would have led to any differences in the analysis or interpretation
of the historical episode in question. In general, I am strongly skeptical that the
wisdom required to develop careful historical arguments can be substantially augmented by a knowledge
of the basic ideas of complexity theory. Indeed, there is a certain sense in which the use of
mathematical tools conventionally associated with nonlinear systems can stymie (retard) the understanding
of social science phenomena. When utilizing these tools, mathematical tractability
can frequently require one to make assumptions about human behavior that
fail to reflect the cognitive power and purposeful nature of individuals (who after
Without strong
all, behave differently than the particles, atoms or species whose behavior nonlinear systems were generally designed to explain).
cognitive foundations , the conclusions of complex interactive system models can be as misleading as non-
system-based thinking is shown to be.
This is, in my judgment, the main failure in the
current use of various complex or agent-based systems to study social
phenomena, namely, the failure of many implementations of such systems
to reflect the cognitive strengths of human actors. I do not mean that formal
social science models need to assume the complete rationality of some
neoclassical economic models, but that irrationality is no substitute for a properly
modeled bounded rationality. Now, Jervis himself is certainly not guilty of this failing (except indirectly through his insouciant enthusiasm for
these methods); much of the value of the narrative in System Effects is that it avoids making the sorts of unrealistic assumptions often required when using the
various formal methods to which Jervis frequently refers. In my view, Jervis underestimates the extent to which the careful,
albeit nonmathematical, reasoning in which he engages can successfully explain patterns in social
phenomena. In short, System Effects is fascinating both for the imagination and erudition it presents, as well as for its demonstration of how formal
systems methods have yet to contribute much beyond metaphors to certain aspects of social and historical science.
 A2 Taleb and Blythe
This goes aff – says conventional policymaking fails to account
for low probability/high impact risks, which are important – my
aff specifically accounts for this while their kritik deflates it – a
low risk of the aff’s big impacts means you vote aff
Fear Good
 Fear Good
Our reps are consistent—fearing militarism of overseas
presence challenges securitization
Michael WILLIAMS Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa ’11
“Securitization and the liberalism of fear” Security Dialogue 42 p. 453-456
Fear is not a concept (or indeed a word) often found in securitization theory. Instead, the Copenhagen School speaks of
security as an existential threat, as emergency measures or as a ‘breaking free of rules’. Security is not an objective
condition, but emerges through particular social processes or ‘speech acts’ that elevate an issue above the normal political
logic: ‘if we do not tackle this problem, everything else will be irrelevant because we will not be here or will not be free to
handle it in our own way’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 24). Yet, even this formulation indicates an intimate relationship between
existential threat and fear—the fear of annihilation, loss and alienation. Threats imply the loss of or damage to something
(physical survival or well-being, an object, a social order, an identity) that is valued—that is, a fear for its continued
possession or existence. People can fear other individuals, other groups, other states (or their own); they can fear
economic calamity or environmental degradation. Even exceptional violence or fearless killing—an existential or heroic
self-sacrifice, for instance—is tied in complex ways to fear: fear for someone or something else that is being defended, fear
of failing to achieve glory or salvation. Fear’s negativity always has positive value. This article seeks to extend
securitization theory conceptually and, to a lesser degree, empirically by further developing the relationship between
securitization and the politics of fear. My suggestion is that by so doing it is possible to enlarge the theoretical framework
of the Copenhagen School and to expand its application in understanding the politics of security in liberal societies. At
first glance, fear might seem straightforwardly related to securitization: an
increase in fear equals an increase in securitization , or at the very least facilitates
successful securitization. However, rather than looking at the ways in which fear can facilitate securitization, or adding to
the widespread claims about the connections between the politics of fear and the extension of security logics throughout
society,1 I want to explore a rather different possibility: that focusing on fear also allows us to see how fear can
operate in ways that can actually inhibit processes of securitization,
constraining the logic of extremity, making actors reluctant to use
securitizing moves and providing resources for opposing such moves . To make
this argument, I turn to an examination of the relationship between liberalism and fear. As Jef Huysmans (1998) pointed
out in one of the earliest and most perceptive appraisals of the Copenhagen School, liberalism provides an important
backdrop to the theory, with a narrowly technocratic liberalism and superficial pluralism serving
both as a foil for the idea of securitization as radically creative and socially
constructed and as a link to theories of enmity, emergency, and the political identified with Carl Schmitt and with classical
political realism more broadly. Fear within liberalism is thus often closely associated with a politics of extremity and
enmity, and is seen as having close—and perhaps even constitutive—connections to securitization. Liberal societies, such
positions often imply, either need a politics of security and fear in order to overcome the weaknesses of their pluralist
foundations or, conversely, are congenitally ill-equipped to respond effectively to the challenges of a politics of extremity
and securitization. This understanding of liberalism has in turn become a staple
(sometimes an almost unquestioned assumption) for some of the most vibrant controversies over the theoretical and
political entailments of securitization theory.2 There is little doubt that these analyses point to crucial issues in the
relationship between liberalism and security, and in the politics of securitization in liberal states. Yet, this
‘Schmittian’ or classical ‘realist’ (or, for that matter, Straussian) representation and critique of
liberalism is not the only version of liberalism available , and to take it as a
given model for liberal thought or practice as a whole—and as an assumed
foundation for analysing how ‘security’ operates in liberal societies—may in
fact risk being seriously misleading . At least, this is the suspicion I want to explore here, and for help
in doing so it is particularly revealing to turn one of the most nuanced and influential expressions of an alternative vision,
a vision that Judith Shklar aptly christened the ‘liberalism of fear’.3 Shklar’s conception of liberal politics, I
suggest, can help provide a more rounded appreciation of the politics of security
in liberal polities, and of how a better understanding of the liberalism of fear
can extend the reach of securitization theory both conceptually and empirically, and may—
perhaps paradoxically—even provide support for the Copenhagen School’s political project of
desecuritization . I In contrast to the narrowly rationalistic liberalism that is the focus of the critiques alluded to
above, the liberalism of fear has a number of affinities with securitization theory.4 It is resolutely
anti-utopian . It is, in a philosophical sense, non-foundationalist. It is sceptical, seeing a
world where violence (actual or potential) is and will remain an
 ineradicable part of political life . It sides with what Emerson once called the ‘party of
memory’ in contrast to the ‘party of hope’ (see Shklar, 1998: 8), insisting on facing
up to the worst things
that human beings have shown themselves capable of doing to one another, and
trying to avoid them. It is suspicious of and generally eschews grand moral visions and
philosophical or theo-political schemas, which it tends to see as sources of obscurantism and conflict rather than
emancipation and progress. It has no ‘strong’ ontology, in either a rationalist or a social constructivist (self–other) sense.5
It rejects the identification of liberalism with an abstract rationalism, a narrow utilitarianism, Kantian formalism, a
programme of indisputable natural rights or a flat proceduralism.6 In sum, it is a vision of liberalism that contrasts
sharply with the thin version often put forth by both proponents and critics of liberalism in international relations7—and
in many debates over securitization theory. Yet, if the liberalism of fear is sceptical, it is not cynical . Nor is it
it
without a place to stand. In place of essentialist visions of individuals or schemes of indisputable rights,
advocates a focus on cruelty and fear. It is, in Stanley Hoffmann’s (1998: xxii) nice phrase, a vision
based on the ‘existential experience of fear and cruelty’, concentrating on humanity’s
shared capacity to feel fear and to be victims of cruelty .8 Perhaps most importantly in
this context, it turns this focus on fear into a positive principle of liberal politics. As Shklar (1998: 10–11) argues, the
liberalism of fear does not, to be sure, offer a summum bonum toward which all political agents should
strive, but it certainly does begin with a summum malum which all of us know and
would avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear that it inspires, and the very fear of
fear itself. To that extent, the liberalism of fear makes a universal and especially a cosmopolitan claim, as it
historically has always done. In this vision, fear is central to liberal politics, but in a way very different from those visions
that see fear, emergency and ‘security’ as the defining ‘outside’ of liberal societies, as the antithesis of normal politics, or,
as suggested in other analyses, as the constitutive realm or radical otherness or enmity that stabilizes and/or energizes
otherwise decadent or depoliticized liberal orders.9 For the liberalism of fear, fear cannot and should not
be always and in every way avoided. For one thing, it is an inescapable part of life,
something that often helps preserve us from danger. More complexly, fear can also be a
crucial element in preserving as well as constructing a liberal order, for one of the major things to be feared in social life is
the fear of fear itself. As Shklar (1998: 11) puts it in one of her most evocative phrasings: To be alive is to be afraid, and
much to our advantage in many cases, since alarm often preserves us from danger. The fear we fear is of
pain inflicted by others to kill and maim us, not the natural and healthy fear
that merely warns us of avoidable pain. And, when we think politically, we are afraid not only for
ourselves but for our fellow citizens as well. We fear a society of fearful people. This vision of liberal
politics fears the politics of fear. It fears above all collective concentrations of power

that make possible ‘institutionalized cruelty’ , particularly when they are abetted or
accompanied by a politics of fear. Thus, while the liberalism of fear fears all concentrations of power, it fears most the
concentration of power in that most fearsome of institutions in the modern world—the state; for while cruelty can reflect
sadistic urges, ‘public cruelty is not an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by differences in public power’
(Shklar, 1998: 11). A degree of fear and coercion is doubtless a condition of the operation of all social orders; but, as its
first order of concern, the liberalism of fear focuses on restraining fear’s excesses . As
Shklar (1998: 11) puts it: A minimal level of fear is implied in any system of law, and the liberalism of fear does not dream
of an end to public, coercive government. The fear it does want to prevent is that which is created by arbitrary,
unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed
by military, paramilitary and police agents in any regime. The liberalism of fear is far from
rejecting the state’s role in the provision of social goods, including security .
Indeed, these may be essential in overcoming socially derived cruelties of many kinds.10 But, it is continually
alert to the state’s potential to do the opposite .11 Here, then, is a vision of politics where fear is
not confined to the realm of security; nor is fear wholly negative. Such a vision shares with the Copenhagen School the fear
that fear in politics is dangerous. But, Shklar’s multidimensional analysis of fear allows us to see how fear can
work as a counter-practice against processes of securitization. Fear operates
in normal politics, and the fear of fear—that is, the fear of the power of the politics
of security and its consequences—is a core part of liberal theory and practice. Fear is
not a one-way street to extremity, nor does it operate only in emergency
situations. Instead, the fear of fear can act as a bulwark against such processes .
In other words, the fear of fear can within ‘normal’ or even ‘securitized’ politics act to
prevent or oppose a movement toward a more intense politics of fear—
countering a shift toward ‘security’ in its more extreme manifestations .12
 No Impact to Fear
No impact to threat con—it’s a different form of fear
Posner and Vermeule 3 --Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, The University of Chicago. **
Professor of Law, The University of Chicago. Thanks to Carli Spina and Mike Vermylen for comments and research
assistance. Posner thanks John M. Olin Foundation and the Russell Baker Scholars Fund for financial support. Vermeule
thanks the Russell J. Parsons Faculty Research Fund for the same. [Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, Law Professors
at Chicago and Harvard, Accommodating Emergencies, September, “ACCOMMODATING EMERGENCIES”] RMT
Suppose now that the simple view of fear is correct, and that it is an unambiguously
negative influence on government decisionmaking. Critics of accommodation argue that
this negative influence of fear justifies skepticism about emergency policies and strict enforcement of the Constitution.
However, this argument is implausible. It is doubtful that fear, so understood, has more
influence on decisionmaking during emergencies than decisionmaking
during non-emergencies. The panic thesis, implicit in much scholarship though rarely discussed in detail,
holds that citizens and officials respond to terrorism and war in the same way that an individual in the jungle responds to
a tiger or snake. The national response to emergency, because it is a standard fear response, is characterized by the same
circumvention of ordinary deliberative processes: thus, (i) the response is instinctive rather than reasoned, and thus
subject to error; and (ii) the error will be biased in the direction of overreaction. While the flight reaction was a good
evolutionary strategy on the savannah, in a complex modern society the flight response is not suitable and can only
interfere with judgment. Its advantage—speed—has minimal value for social decisionmaking. No national
emergency requires an immediate reaction—except by trained professionals
who execute policies established earlier—but instead over days, months, or years people make
complex judgments about the appropriate institutional response. And the asymmetrical nature of fear guarantees that
people will, during a national emergency, overweight the threat and underweight other things that people value, such as
civil liberties. But if decisionmakers rarely act immediately , then the tiger story
cannot bear the metaphoric weight that is placed on it. Indeed, the flight response has
nothing to do with the political response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the attack on September 11. The people who
were there—the citizens and soldiers beneath the bombs, the office workers in the World Trade Center—no doubt felt fear,
and most of them probably responded in the classic way. They experienced the standard physiological effects, and (with
the exception of trained soldiers and security officials) fled without stopping to think. It is also true that in the days and
weeks after the attacks, many people felt fear, although not the sort that produces a irresistible urge to flee. But this
kind of fear is not the kind in which cognition shuts down . (Some people did have more
severe mental reactions and, for example, shut themselves in their houses, but these reactions were rare.) The fear is
probably better described as a general anxiety or jumpiness, an anxiety that was probably shared by government officials
as well as ordinary citizens.53 53 Moran argues that psychologists distinguish these phenomena; see Moran, supra note
__, at 10-11. Ohman, however, does not distinguish these phenomena; see Ohman, supra note __. One might distinguish
the classic flight response associated with fear, and say that an anxious person is primed to have that response. But the
special cognitive and motivational characteristics of fear seem to carry over to the analysis of anxiety. 22While, as we have
noted, there is psychological research suggesting that normal cognition partly
shuts down in response to an immediate threat, we are aware of no research suggesting
that people who feel anxious about a non-immediate threat are incapable
of thinking, or thinking properly, or systematically overweight the threat relative to
other values. Indeed, it would be surprising to find research that clearly
distinguished “anxious thinking” and “calm thinking,” given that anxiety is a
pervasive aspect of life. People are anxious about their children; about their health; about their job
prospects; about their vacation arrangements; about walking home at night. No one argues that people’s anxiety about
their health causes them to take too many precautions—to get too much exercise, to diet too aggressively, to go to the
doctor too frequently—and to undervalue other things like leisure. So it is hard to see why anxiety
about more remote threats, from terrorists or unfriendly countries with
nuclear weapons, should cause the public, or elected officials, to place more emphasis
on security than is justified, and to sacrifice civil liberties. Fear generated by
immediate threats, then, causes instinctive responses that are not rational in the cognitive sense, not always desirable, and
not a good basis for public policy, but it is not this kind of fear that leads to restrictions of
civil liberties during wartime. The internment of Japanese Americans
during World War II may have been due to racial animus, or to a mistaken
assessment of the risks; it was not the direct result of panic; indeed there was a delay of
weeks before the policy was seriously considered.54 Post-9/11
curtailments of civil liberties, aside
from immediate detentions, came after a significant delay and much deliberation . The
civil libertarians’ argument that fear produces bad policy trades on the ambiguity of the word “panic,” which refers both to
real fear that undermines rationality, and to collectively harmful outcomes that are driven by rational decisions, such as a
bank run, where it is rational for all depositors to withdraw funds if they believe that enough other depositors are
withdrawing funds. Once we eliminate the false concern about fear, it becomes clear that the panic thesis is
indistinguishable from the argument that during an emergency people are likely to make mistakes. But if the only concern
is that during emergencies people make mistakes, there would be no reason for demanding that the constitution be
enforced normally during emergencies. Political errors occur during emergencies and nonemergencies, but the stakes are
higher during emergencies, and that is the conventional reason why constitutional constraints should be relaxed. In sum ,
the panic thesis envisions decisionmakers acting immediately when in fact
government policymaking moves slowly even during emergencies . Government is
organized so that general policy decisions about responses to emergencies are made in advance, and the
implementation of policy during an emergency is trusted to security officials who have
been trained to resist the impulse to panic. The notion of fear causing an irresistible
urge to flee is a bad metaphor for an undeniable truth: that during an emergency the
government does not have as much time as it usually does, and as a result will make more errors
than it usually does. But these errors will be driven by normal cognitive
limitations, and not the pressure of fear: thus, the errors will be normally 54 Greg
Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans 75 (2001). 23 distributed. It
is as likely that the government will curtail civil liberties too little as too much.
 Fear K2 Survival
Anxiety towards death preserves existence
Beres 96 Beres, PhD at Princeton, 96 (Louis Rene, “No Fear, No Trembling Israel, Death and the Meaning of Anxiety,”
www.freeman.org/m_online/feb96/beresn.htm)
Fear of death, the ultimate source of anxiety, is essential to human survival. This
is true not only for individuals, but also for states. Without such fear,
states will exhibit an incapacity to confront nonbeing that can hasten
their disappearance. So it is today with the State of Israel. Israel suffers acutely from insufficient
existential dread. Refusing to tremble before the growing prospect of collective disintegration - a forseeable
prospect connected with both genocide and war - this state is now unable to take the necessary steps toward
collective survival. What is more, because death is the one fact of life which is not relative but absolute, Israel's
blithe unawareness of its national mortality deprives its still living days of essential absoluteness and growth.
For states, just as for individuals, confronting death can give the most positive
reality to life itself. In this respect, a cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's
pattern of potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off
such an awareness, a choice currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the
altogether critical benefits of "anxiety." There is, of course, a distinctly ironic resonance to this
argument. Anxiety, after all, is generally taken as a negative, as a liability that cripples rather than enhances life.
But anxiety is not something we "have." It is something we (states and individuals) "are." It is true, to be sure,
that anxiety, at the onset of psychosis, can lead individuals to experience literally the threat of self-dissolution,
but this is, by definition, not a problem for states. Anxiety stems from the awareness that
existence can actually be destroyed, that one can actually become nothing. An ontological
characteristic, it has been commonly called Angst, a word related to anguish (which comes from the Latin
angustus, "narrow," which in turn comes from angere, "to choke.") Herein lies the relevant idea of birth trauma
as the prototype of all anxiety, as "pain in narrows" through the "choking" straits of birth. Kierkegaard identified
anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom," adding: "Anxiety is the reality of freedom as a
potentiality before this freedom has materialized ." This brings us back to Israel.
Both individuals and states may surrender freedom in the hope of ridding
themselves of an unbearable anxiety. Regarding states, such surrender can lead to a
rampant and delirious collectivism which stamps out all political opposition. It can also lead to a
national self-delusion which augments enemy power and hastens
catastrophic war. For the Jewish State, a lack of pertinent anxiety, of the positive aspect of Angst, has
already led its people to what is likely an irreversible rendezvous with extinction.
 Fear Good
Turn – institutionalizing fear into politics is key to check
the violent excesses of securitization
Williams 11 (Michael, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa,
“Securitization and the liberalism of fear,” Security Dialogue August-October 2011 vol. 42 no. 4-5 453-463)
In this vision, fear is central to liberal politics , but in a way very different from
those visions that see fear, emergency and ‘security’ as the defining ‘outside’
of liberal societies, as the antithesis of normal politics, or, as suggested in other analyses, as the constitutive
realm or radical otherness or enmity that stabilizes and/or energizes
otherwise decadent or depoliticized liberal orders. 9 For the liberalism of fear, fear
cannot and should not be always and in every way avoided . For one thing, it is an
inescapable part of life, something that often helps preserve us from danger. More
complexly, fear can also be a crucial element in preserving as well as constructing a liberal order, for one of the major
things to be feared in social life is the fear of fear itself. As Shklar (1998: 11) puts it in one of her most evocative phrasings:
To be alive is to be afraid, and much to our advantage in many cases, since alarm often preserves us from danger. The fear
we fear is of pain inflicted by others to kill and maim us, not the natural and healthy fear that merely warns us of avoidable
pain. And, when we think politically, we are afraid not only for ourselves but for our fellow citizens as well. We fear a
society of fearful people. This vision of liberal politics fears the politics of fear. It fears
above all collective concentrations of power that make possible
‘institutionalized cruelty’, particularly when they are abetted or accompanied by a politics of fear. Thus,
while the liberalism of fear fears all concentrations of power, it fears most the concentration of power in that most
fearsome of institutions in the modern world – the state; for while cruelty can reflect sadistic urges, ‘public cruelty is not
an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by differences in public power’ (Shklar, 1998: 11). A degree of
fear and coercion is doubtless a condition of the operation of all social orders; but, as its
first order of concern, the liberalism of fear focuses on restraining fear’s excesses. As Shklar (1998: 11) puts it: A minimal
level of fear is implied in any system of law, and the liberalism of fear does not dream of an
end to public, coercive government. The fear it does want to prevent is that
which is created by arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by
habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary and
police agents in any regime. The liberalism of fear is far from rejecting the state’s role
in the provision of social goods, including security. Indeed, these may be essential in
overcoming socially derived cruelties of many kinds. 10 But, it is continually
alert to the state’s potential to do the opposite . 11 Here, then, is a vision of
politics where fear is not confined to the realm of security; nor is fear wholly
negative. Such a vision shares with the Copenhagen School the fear that fear in politics is dangerous. But, Shklar’s
multidimensional analysis of fear allows us to see how fear can work as a counter-practice
against processes of securitization. Fear operates in normal politics, and the fear of fear –
that is, the fear of the power of the politics of security and its consequences – is a core part of liberal
theory and practice. Fear is not a one-way street to extremity, nor does it
operate only in emergency situations. Instead, the fear of fear can act as a
bulwark against such processes. In other words, the fear of fear can within
‘normal’ or even ‘securitized’ politics act to prevent or oppose a movement
toward a more intense politics of fear – countering a shift toward ‘security’
in its more extreme manifestations.

Link turns the K since the 1AC threats are real – ignorance
will cause massive deaths.
 Fear K2 VTL
Fear of death is inevitable and good—it motivates us to
make the world better
Morrow 9 (Angela, Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University's Medical College of
Virginia, licensed, practicing RN, hospice and palliative care nurse, “Scared to Death—of Death, About.com,
http://dying.about.com/od/thedyingprocess/a/fear_of_death.htm)
Fear of death is broken down into specific fears: Fear of Pain and Suffering - many people fear that they will meet death
with excruciating pain and suffering. This fear is common in many healthy people and is seen often in patients dying of
cancer or other painful diseases. Fear of the Unknown - death is the ultimate unknown--
no one has survived it to tell us what happens afterward. It's in our human
nature to want to understand and make sense of the world around us but
death can never be fully understood while we are still alive. Fear of Non-Existence - many people
fear that they will cease existing after death. This fear isn't confined only to the non-religious or atheists. Many people of
faith worry that their belief in an afterlife isn't real after all. Fear of Eternal Punishment - again this belief isn't only for the
most devout of faith. People from every religious sect and even those with no religion at all may fear that they will be
punished for what they did - or did not do - here on earth. Fear of Loss of Control - our human
nature seeks control over situations. Death is something that is out of our
realm of control which is very scary for many of us. Some people will attempt hold some
control over death with extremely careful behavior and rigorous health checks. Fear of What Will Become of Loved Ones -
probably the most common fear of death among new parents, single parents, and caregivers is the fear of what will happen
to those entrusted to our care if we die. Unhealthy Fear of Death The fear of death can be so severe
that it interferes with daily life. It can consume one's thoughts and affect the
decisions they make. If this is true for you, you might have a true phobia called thanatophobia or
necrophobia. This is an unhealthy fear and should be addressed by a trained mental health professional. Healthy Fear of
Death It's possible for the fear of death to actually be healthy. When we fear
dying, we are more careful and take appropriate precautions like wearing
seat belts and bike helmets. A healthy fear of death also reminds us to make
the most of our time here and not to take our relationships for granted. It
can push us to work hard to leave a lasting legacy and to stay current with
those we love. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I
work the more I live."
 A2 Fear Causes Denial
Catastrophes empirically cause a focus on practical
solutions---denial is false
Wuthnow 10, Gerhard Andlinger Prof of Sociology at Princeton, PhD in Sociology from Cal Berkeley, “Be
Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other
Threats,” p. 21, google books
The notable feature of the perilous times that humanity has faced over the past
half century is that the response has made them seem manageable enough
that we roll up our collective sleeves and work on practical solutions . There have been
relatively few panics involving spontaneous outbreaks of irrational behavior . Work,
family life, and other routine activities have continued. Individuals have sometimes shouldered the small tasks of learning about impending crises and pitching in
to support research or protect their families. These responsibilities, though, have seldom required great sacrifices on the part of large populations, at least not in

the Western world. Social movements have emerged and policies have been affected, but regimes have rarely been toppled as a result. None of this
can be understood simply as denial . Were denial the correct
interpretation, billions would not have been spent on weapons, deterrence
programs, research, and communication . Millions of readers and television

viewers would not have paid attention to warnings and documentaries. People
responded, but in ways that incorporated the problem solving into ordinary
roles and competencies. Nor can the normality of the response be explained by arguing that the dangers envisioned generated little
upheaval because they never happened. A nuclear holocaust did not occur, but enough destruction did take place that

people could imagine the results. There were also chemical spills, accidents at nuclear plants, terrorist attacks, and natural
disasters. Enough went wrong, even with well-intentioned planning, that danger could not be ignored. Indeed, it is truly surprising that

more chaos, more panic, more soul searching, and more enervating fear did not ensue .
Tricks
 Objective Reality
Objective reality exists beyond social construction and we
should use evidence to assess – anything else turns their
offense
Sokal, 1996 (Alan, professor of physics at New York University, “A Physicist Experiments with cultural Studies,”
June 5)
Why did I do it? While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What
concerns me is the
proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of
nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or
(when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social
Textraises important questions that no scientist should ignore -- questions, for example, about how corporate and
government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of
these matters. In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually,
the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world;
its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do
matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists
precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and
pretentious language. Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory -- meaning
postmodernist literarytheory -- carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all is
discourse and ``text,'' then knowledge of the real world is superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of
Cultural Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and ``language games,'' then internal logical consistency is
superfluous too: a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well.
Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue ; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for
evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre.
Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're
witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been
identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational

thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive
tools for combating mystifications promoted by the powerful -- not to mention
the
being desirable human ends in their own right. Therecent turn of many ``progressive'' or ``leftist'' academic
humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays
this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for
progressive social critique. Theorizing about “the social construction of
reality” won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise
strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in
history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and
falsity. The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the
American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Textliked my article because they liked
its conclusion: that ``the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the
progressive political project.'' They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the
arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.
 A2 Lanza
Inevitable uncertainty means you should err negative - we don’t
know enough about death and Lanza is advancing a theory that
hasn’t even been peer reviewed yet—defer to the side of caution
because our impact is extinction—if they’re wrong, the world is
gone forever, but if we’re wrong, you always have an escape
hatch later
Life is more than just energy
Myers, 9 (Paul Zachary, associate professor of biology, University of Minnesota Morris, “The dead are dead,” 12/10/09,
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/10/the-dead-are-dead/, Tashma)

Occam’s razor – additional complexity requires additional

evidence – you should be extremely skeptical about a theory that
posits a system as complex as the mind as ontologically
fundamental
Lanza’s is a stem-cell biologist and he doesn’t understand
physics – people aren’t particles, they are unique organizations
of particles that can’t be replicated
Myers, 9 - biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota (PZ, “The dead are dead”, 12/10,
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/the_dead_are_dead.php)
Lanza has respectable credentials as a stem cell biologist, but he's also the author of one of those all-encompassing, total-
explanation-of-the-universe, crackpot theories, which is his, and which belongs entirely to him, called "biocentrism." We
know this because his tag line in the article is "Robert Lanza, MD is considered one of the leading scientists in the world.
He is the author of "Biocentrism," a book that lays out his theory of everything." I've noticed that leading scientists tend
not to have to introduce themselves by declaring that they are a leading scientist, but that's another issue. Lanza recently
lost a sister in an accident, and most of his article seems to be a kind of emotional denial, that this tragedy cannot have
happened and his sister really is alive and well somewhere. I feel for him — I've also lost a sister, and wish I could see her
again — but this is not a reason to believe death doesn't happen. I've stubbed my toe and wished with some urgency that it
hadn't happened, but the universe is never obliging about erasing my mistakes. But then Lanza goes on to babble about
quantum physics and many-worlds theory. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling - the
'Who am I?'- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of
the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy
transcend from one world to the other? Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science
showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to
behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that
what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the
observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories
and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-
projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same
battery or agent responsible for the projection. I have heard that first argument so many times, and it is facile and
dishonest. We are not just "energy". We are a pattern of energy and matter, a very specific and precise
arrangement of molecules in movement. That can be destroyed. When you've built a pretty sand castle
and the tide comes in and washes it away, the grains of sand are still all there, but what you've lost is the
arrangement that you worked to generate, and which you appreciated. Reducing a complex functional order to
nothing but the constituent parts is an insult to the work. If I were to walk into the Louvre and set fire to
the Mona Lisa, and afterwards take a drive down to Chartres and blow up the cathedral, would anyone defend my
actions by saying, "well, science says matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, therefore, Rabid
Myers did no harm, and we'll all just enjoy viewing the ashes and rubble from now on"? No. That's crazy
talk. We also wouldn't be arguing that the painting and the architecture have transcended this universe to enter another,
nor would such a pointless claim ameliorate our loss in this universe. The rest of his argument is quantum
gobbledy-gook. The behavior of subatomic particles is not a good guide to what to expect of the behavior of large bodies.
A photon may have no rest mass, but I can't use this fact to justify my grand new weight loss plan; quantum tunnelling
does not imply that I can ignore doors when I amble about my house. People are not particles! We are the product
of the aggregate behavior of the many particles that constitute our bodies, and you cannot ignore the
importance of these higher-order relationships when talking about our fate. The rational atheist view is
simpler, clearer, and I think, more true. Lanza's sister is dead, and so is mine; that means the features of their
independent existence that were so precious to us, that made them interesting, thinking, behaving
human beings, have ceased to exist. The 20-watts of energy are dissipating as heat, and can't be brought back. They
are lost to us, and someday we will end, too. We should feel grief. Pretending that they have 'transcended' into
some novel quantum mechanical state in which their consciousness persists, or that they are shaking
hands with some anthropomorphic spiritual myth in never-never land, does a disservice to ourselves.
The pain is real. Don't deny it. Use it to look at the ones you love who still live and see what you can do to make our
existence now a little better, and perhaps a little more conducive to keeping our energies patterned usefully a little longer.

And, You’re wrong about relativistic time and your theory is

non-falsifiable
Vinod K. Wadhawan, Ajita Kamal, Posted on 14 December 2009, Biocentrism Demystified: A Response to Deepak
Chopra and Robert Lanza’s Notion of a Conscious Universe; Dr. Vinod Kumar Wadhawan is a Raja Ramanna Fellow at the
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai and an Associate Editor of the journal PHASE TRANSITIONS.
http://nirmukta.com/2009/12/14/biocentrism-demystified-a-response-to-deepak-chopra-and-robert-lanzas-notion-of-a-
conscious-universe/

In the first case Lanza seems to state that motion is logically impossible (which is a pre-relativistic view of the paradox)
and in the next case he mentions that uncertainty is present in the system (a post-relativistic model of motion). In both
cases, however, Lanza’s conclusion is the same - biocentrism is true for time. No matter what the facts about the nature of
time, Lanza concludes that time is not real. His model is unfalsifiable and therefore cannot be a part of science. What
Lanza doesn’t let on is that Einstein’s special-relativity theory removes the possibility of absolute time, not of time itself.
Zeno’s Arrow paradox is resolved by replacing the idea of absolute time with Einstein’s relativistic coupling of space and
time. Space-time has an uncertainty in quantum mechanics, but it is not nonexistent. The idea of time as a series of
sequential events that we perceive and put together in our heads is an experiential version of time. This is the way we have
evolved to perceive time. This experiential version of time seems absolute, because we evolved to perceive it that way.
However, in reality time is relative. This is a fundamental fact of modern physics. Time does exist outside of the observer,
but allows us only a narrow perception of its true nature. Space is the other property of the universe that Lanza attempts to
describe as purely a product of consciousness. He says “Wave your hand through the air. If you take everything away,
what’s left? The answer is nothing. So why do we pretend space is a thing”. Again, Einstein’s theory of special relativity
provides us with objective predictions that we can look for, such as the bending of space-time. Such events have been
observed and verified multiple times. Space is a ‘thing’ as far as the objective universe is concerned.

This is stupid mysticism – consciousness is not metaphysical

Wadhawan, ‘9 [Dr. Vinod Kumar Wadhawanis a Raja Ramanna Fellow at theBhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai
and an Associate Editor of the journalPHASE TRANSITIONS. “Biocentrism Demystified: A Response to Deepak Chopra
and Robert Lanza’s Notion of a Conscious Universe”. This article has been cited by P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula and Steven
Novella at Neurologica, and has been reposted at RichardDawkins.net http://nirmukta.com/2009/12/14/biocentrism-
demystified-a-response-to-deepak-chopra-and-robert-lanzas-notion-of-a-conscious-universe/]
8. The Nature of Consciousness One criticism of biocentrism comes from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who says “It
looks like an opposite of a theory, because he doesn’t explain how consciousness happens at all. He’s stopping where the
fun begins.” The logic behind this criticism is obvious. Without a descriptive explanation for
consciousness and how it ‘creates’ the universe, biocentrism is not useful . In
essence, Lanza calls for the abandonment of modern theoretical physics and
its replacement with a magical solution. Here are a few questions that one might ask of the idea:
What is this consciousness? Why does this consciousness exist? What is the nature of the interaction between this
consciousness and the universe? Is the problem of infinite regression applicable to consciousness itself? Even if Lanza’s
interpretation of the anthropic principle is a valid argument against modern theoretical physics, does the biocentric model
of consciousness create a bigger ontological problem than the one it attempts to solve? Consider this statement by Lanza:
“Consciousness cannot exist without a living, biological creature to embody its perceptive powers of creation.“ How can
consciousness create the universe if it doesn’t exist? How can the “living, biological creature” exist if the universe has not
been created yet? It becomes apparent that Lanza is muddling the meaning of the word ‘consciousness.’ In one sense he
equates it to subjective experience that is tied to a physical brain. In another, he assigns to consciousness a spatio-
temporal logic that exists outside of physical manifestation. In this case, the above questions become: 1. What is this
spatio-temporal logic?; 2. Why does this spatio-temporal logic exist? and so on… Daniel Dennett’s criticism of biocentrism
centres on Lanza’s non-explanation of the nature of consciousness. In fact, even from a biological perspective Lanza’s
conception of consciousness is unclear. For example, he consistently equates consciousness with subjective experience
while stressing its independence from the objective universe (see Lanza’s quote below). This is an appeal to the
widespread but erroneous intuition towards Cartesian Dualism. In this view, consciousness (subjective experience)
belongs to a different plane of reality than the one on which the material universe is constructed. Lanza requires this
general definition of consciousness to construct his theory of biocentrism. He uses it in the same way that Descartes used
it – as a semantic tool to deconstruct reality. In fact, Lanza’s theory of biocentrism is a sophisticated non-explanation for
the ‘brain in a vat’ problem that plagued philosophers for centuries. However, instead of subscribing to Cartesian Dualism,
he attempts a Cartesian Monism by invoking quantum mechanics. To be exact, his view is Monistic Idealism - the idea that
consciousness is everything- but the Cartesian bias is an essential element in his arguments. In a dualistic or idealistic
context, Lanza’s definition of consciousness as subjective experience may be acceptable. However, Lanza’s definition is
incomplete from a scientific perspective. The truth is that there are difficulties in analysing consciousness empirically. In
scientific terms, consciousness is a ‘hard problem’, meaning that its complete subjective nature places it beyond direct
objective study. Lanza exploits this difficulty to deny science any understanding of consciousness. Lanza trivializes the
current debate in the scientific community about the nature of consciousness when he says: “Neuroscientists have
developed theories that might help to explain how separate pieces of information are integrated in the brain and thus
succeed in elucidating how different attributes of a single perceived object-such as the shape, colour, and smell of a flower-
are merged into a coherent whole. These theories reflect some of the important work that is occurring in the fields of
neuroscience and psychology, but they are theories of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the
performance of these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience; and yet the difficulty in understanding
consciousness lies precisely here, in this gap in our understanding of how a subjective experience emerges from a physical
process.” This criticism of the lack of a scientific consensus on the nature of consciousness is empty, considering that
Lanza himself proposes no actual mechanism for consciousness, but still places it at the centre of his theory of the
universe. There is no need to view consciousness as such a mystery. There are some contemporary models of
consciousness that are quite explanatory, presenting promising avenues for studying how the brain works. Daniel
Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model is one. According to Dennett, there is nothing mystical about consciousness. It is an
illusion created by tricks in the brain. The biological machinery behind the tricks that create the illusion of consciousness
is the product of successive evolutionary processes, beginning with the development of primitive physiological reactions to
external stimuli. In the context of modern humans, consciousness consists of a highly dynamic process of information
exchange in the brain. Multiple sets of sensory information, memories and emotional cues are competing with each other
at all times in the brain, but at any one instant only one set of these factors dominates the brain. At the next instant,
another set of slightly different factors are dominant. At all instants, multiple sets of information are competing with each
other for dominance. This creates the illusion of a continuous stream of thoughts and experiences, leading to the intuition
that consciousness comprises the entirety of the voluntary mental function of the individual. There are other materialist
models, such as Marvin Minsky’s view of the brain as an emotional machine, that provide us with ways of approaching the
problem from a scientific perspective without resorting to mysticism. Consciousness is not something that requires a
restructuring of objective reality. It is a subjective illusion on one level, and the mechanistic outcome of evolutionary
processes on another.

Lanza’s theory fails at scientific rigor, and twelfth-grade calculus

explains away his tricks
Adam Rogers, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 200 7; Robert
Lanza doesn’t seem to be kidding, Wired Science, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/03/robert_lanza_do/
So the Q&A—and the article Lanza wrote in the American Scholar to which its pegged—are interesting because they
manage to make Lanza seem, well, kind of dopey. In both, Lanza attempts to find a unified theory of space and time not in
physics but in biology—not coincidentally his specialty. Now, there’s a long history of physicists and chemists dropping
down on the biologists to help them out with wee problems, like when Linus Pauling started mucking around with figuring
out the structure of DNA. Watson and Crick thought they were racing him to the finish line. So maybe it’s turnabout-fair-
play for a high-level biologist like Lanza to take a crack at the physicists. But if you’re going to play, you have to bring your
A-game. Lanza does not. More after the jump. Here’s Lanza’s billboard graf: Our science fails to recognize those special
properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world—biocentrism—revolves around the
way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I
have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology above the other sciences in the attempt to solve
one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century.
Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing
explanation of nature or reality. So…okay. Let’s say I’m willing to play along. The quantum mechanics and string theorists
are all wrong, we’re about to find out. Consciousness is at the center of reality. I’m starting to vaguely remember some
hazy, late-night dorm-room conversations that may or may not have been influenced by controlled substances of various
types, but hey, they were fun and Lanza’s a smart guy. So why not? Then there’s a few hundred words of throat-clearing
like the following: We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical
and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature. The ether of the 19th century,
the “spacetime” of Einstein, and the string theory of recent decades, which posits new dimensions showing up in different
realms, and not only in strings but in bubbles shimmering down the byways of the universe—all these are examples of this
speculation. Indeed, unseen dimensions (up to a hundred in some theories) are now envisioned everywhere, some curled
up like soda straws at every point in space. Today’s preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn
from the purpose of science—to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of
Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath. Ooh. Accusing scientists of being
like the Laputans. They hate that. But here comes the good stuff. Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics
are exactly balanced for animal life to exist. For example, if the big bang had been one-part-in-a billion more powerful, it
would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies to form and for life to begin. If the strong nuclear force were decreased by
two percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together. Hydrogen would be the only atom in the universe. If the gravitational
force were decreased, stars (including the sun) would not ignite. These are just three of more than 200 physical
parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that they cannot be random. Indeed, the lack of a scientific
explanation has allowed these facts to be hijacked as a defense of intelligent design. Well, he’s right about the creationists
loving this kind of exceptionalism. But it’s misguided for other reasons. For one thing, it’s entirely possible that if the laws
of our universe were different, there’d be a totally different kind of life here to observe them. And if the universe was made
of nothing but hydrogen, no one would be around to care. Lee Smolin, the theoretical physicist and string theory attacker,
has an interesting idea that universes evolve in the hearts of black holes, and the ones that produce more black holes are
more evolutionarily "fit"—ie, they breed more—which means the laws of physics have to tend toward black hole
production, which means universes tend to look a lot like this one. But I digress. Next point: Without perception, there is
in effect no reality. Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further
influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism. Our sense of the forward motion of time is really
the result of an infinite number of decisions that only seem to be a smooth continuous path. At each moment we are at the
edge of a paradox known as The Arrow, first described 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically
with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in one place during any given
instance of its flight. But if it is in only one place, it must be at rest. The arrow must then be at rest at every moment of its
flight. Logically, motion is impossible. But is motion impossible? Or rather, is this analogy proof that the forward motion
of time is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within us? Time is not an absolute reality but an
aspect of our consciousness. Zeno’s Paradox? You’re really going with Zeno’s Paradox? The same one that calculus
explains? Newton dispatched this one, baby. You don’t need quant for it. I edited a Josh McHugh story for us a while back
about a guy who said much the same thing about time—that it’s an illusion of consciousness. Everyone—Lanza included—
always points at Einstein’s breakthrough idea, that time and space depend on the position of the observer. That was his big
triumph over Newton, who thought time must be absolute. But the thing about Einstein’s point is not that time is an
illusion—it’s that it’s different depending on how you look at it. When you’re not looking at it, there’s still something called
time. Lanza then takes a tour through all the things quantum physics either can’t explain or is really weird about. Wave-
particle duality, quantum entanglement, observer dependent experimental outcomes…it’s like he read our What We Don’t
Know issue (which I appreciate). But here’s the big jump Lanza wants us to make: As unimaginable as it may seem to us,
the logic of quantum physics is inescapable. Every morning we open our front door to bring in the paper or to go to work.
We open the door to rain, snow, or trees swaying in the breeze. We think the world churns along whether we happen to
open the door or not. Quantum mechanics tells us it doesn’t. The trees and snow evaporate when we’re sleeping. The
kitchen disappears when we’re in the bathroom. When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no
longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its
seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness—or into waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from
life, not the other way around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own universe. We generate
spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence. Our planet is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, generated by
each individual human and perhaps even by each animal. Now this, clearly, is the marijuana talking. No, I kid. That was
ad hominem of me, and I apologize. What I should have said was: Dude! What? Lanza’s conclusion here is that we need to
understand the mysteries of consciousness so we can explain how individual clumps of neurons produce—from what he
does not say—little slivers of illusory universe. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there, I think. Those neurons might not
be the end of the story on how consciousness is produced (another question from What We Don’t Know, I might add) but
they are at least the beginning. And those neurons are made of molecules, which are made of atoms…which churn away
quite happily without anything observing them, just sitting there being brains and stuff. Here is the bulk of Lanza’s
penultimate graf, and I think it’s intended to deal with the problem I just raised. I’m not sure, though, because I don’t
really understand it: Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When
we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more
than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates
the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform
to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous,
therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain
before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. I’ve read this a few times, and I’m having the same tautology
problem. Spacetime produces consciousness, because neurons create spatio-temporal relationships, which are subject to
the laws of neural logic. Nope. I’m missing it still. Someone has to help me with this. Thing is, I have a lot of respect for
Lanza. His biology is really interesting and cutting edge, and I find it admirable that he’s trying to tackle the problems on
the border of physics and philosophy. They’re the fundamental stuff of reality, and they are what we should all spend some
time thinking about—addled by dorm-room smoke or not. What bothers me is that he seems to have been a little lazy
about it, and for a scientist of his caliber…that’s just weird.
 A2 Management Bad
Try or die for management – the aff’s knowledge
production about IR helps avoid violence
Levine 12 [(Daniel Levine, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Univ of Alabama) “Recovering
International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique” 2012, available on Google Books] AT
The first academic chair in international politics was established at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1919, and
the discipline of International Relations (IR) has existed in something like its present form since about the end of the
Second World War.1 The life of the contemporary discipline— as distinct from the normative traditions on which it draws
—thus spans some six to eight decades. What work is it understood to be doing? What , as Alexander Wendt
provocatively asked, is International Relations for? "; To speak very broadly, one finds an answer in the
cataclysms of its early years: two world wars, the development and use of nuclear weapons,
cycles of economic depression and upheaval, and numerous acts of genocide. The
events of the twentieth century dealt a sharp blow to the hopes of the Scottish and German
enlightenments, to the effect that an increasingly complex world might, with sufficient ingenuity, be made
automatically self-sustaining and that technical progress and moral progress moved hand in glove. Over several centuries,
a series of distinct and largely disconnected political systems had been brought ,
or forced, into a kind of global commons. 4 Many observers, most famously Immanuel Kant, though not
unmoved by the violence that accom- panied the creation of that commons, saw in its emergence a hopeful sign: the first
flowering of a better world to come.s By the mid-twentieth century, how- ever, such optimism came under intense
pressure. Human-generated violence had, it seemed, outstripped its creative
potential, threatening to destroy the commons rather than complete it.
Preventing such destruction would require active management . The job of IR—
one might go so far as to call it a vocation—was to create the kind of practical, theoretically informed
expertise by which to effect that sort of management: to build a cumulative reservoir of
knowledge for stewarding an increasingly dense, heavily armed, and persistently diverse
world, whether by the creation of new capabilities, institutions, or procedures.6 The tech- nical challenge of this effort
has been considerable, owing to complicating material developments endemic to world politics since at least the middle of
the twentieth century. These include an ever-growing global population with attendant problems of scarcity, poverty, and
competition; an increas- ingly dense network of global interdependencies that create new and unan- ticipated points of
friction and competition; and the growth and diffusion of the means for mass destruction. These same
developments, however, also created new possible configurations of interest,
community, and solidarity. The hope of IR theory as a practical, knowledge-
building enterprise has been the possibility of learning to leverage the latter
against the former, whether by preserving stable balances of power, crafting durable
international institu- tions, or propagating peaceable international norms.7
 A2 Rana
Threats are objective --- Rana’s claim is too sweeping, the
alt is impossible
Cole, 12 – professor of law at Georgetown (David, “Confronting the Wizard of Oz: National Security,
Expertise, and Secrecy” 44 Conn. L. Rev. 1617-1625 (2012), http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1085)
Rana is right to focus our attention on the assumptions that frame modern Americans’ conceptions about national security, but his
assessment raises three initial questions. First, it seems far from clear that there
ever was a “golden” era in which national security decisions were made by the
common man, or “the people themselves,” as Larry Kramer might put it.8 Rana argues that neither Hobbes nor Locke would
support a worldview in which certain individuals are vested with superior access to the truth, and that faith in the superior abilities of so-
called “experts” is a phenomenon of the New Deal era.9 While
an increased faith in scientific
solutions to social problems may be a contributing factor in our current
overreliance on experts,10 I doubt that national security matters were ever
truly a matter of widespread democratic deliberation. Rana notes that in the early days of the
republic, every able-bodied man had to serve in the militia, whereas today only a small (and largely disadvantaged) portion of society serves
in the military.11 But serving in the militia and making decisions about national security are two different matters. The early days of the
Republic were at least as dominated by “elites” as today. Rana points to no evidence that decisions about foreign affairs were any more
democratic then than now. And, of course, the nation as a whole was far less democratic, as the majority of its inhabitants could not vote at
all.12 Rather than moving away from a golden age of democratic decision-making, it seems more likely that we have simply replaced one
group of elites (the aristocracy) with another (the experts). Second, to
the extent that there has been an
epistemological shift with respect to national security, it seems likely that it
is at least in some measure a response to objective conditions , not just an
ideological development. If so, it’s not clear that we can solve the problem
merely by “thinking differently ” about national security. The world
has, in fact, become more interconnected and dangerous than it was
when the Constitution was drafted. At our founding, the oceans were a significant buffer against attacks, weapons were primitive, and travel
over long distances was extremely arduous and costly. The attacks of September 11, 2001, or anything like them, would have been
inconceivable in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Small groups of non-state actors can now inflict the
kinds of attacks that once were the exclusive province of states . But because such actors
do not have the governance responsibilities that states have, they are less susceptible to deterrence. The Internet makes
information about dangerous weapons and civil vulnerabilities far more
readily available, airplane travel dramatically increases the potential range of a hostile actor, and it is not
impossible that terrorists could obtain and use nuclear, biological, or
chemical weapons.13 The knowledge necessary to monitor nuclear weapons,
respond to cyber warfare, develop technological defenses to technological
threats, and gather intelligence is increasingly specialized . The problem is
not just how we think about security threats; it is also at least in part
objectively based .
2AC Security Link Work
Generic Links
 Apoc Rhetoric
Apocalyptic rhetoric is good when connected to solutions – the
problem is apocalyptic rhetoric that just says we're doomed –
proves perm solvency
Langbehn 11 Karen Langbehn, Doctoral Candidate: Rhetoric of Science University of South Florida 7-11-11
Apocalyptic Rhetoric, Mistakes, and Changing Behavior: How to Rhetorically Frame Climate Change Communications
(Part 2) http://karenlangbehn.wordpress.com/author/klangbehn/
Given more time and insight, however, I need to revise these definitions, because their implications are definitely more critical than I
had originally understood. Here’s what I understand now, regarding the rhetorical differences between the two: the implication of
“global warming” is that humans are the primary cause of rising temperatures, but also that because humans are the primary cause,
they are capable of changing their behaviors so that they are no longer pressing the Earth’s limits. “Global warming” implies
humans’ responsibility on multiple levels, and throughout time. If humans are primarily responsible for causing rising temperatures,
then they are also primarily responsible for learning from their mistakes and changing their behavior. Responsibility, then, works
both ways, and throughout time: past mistakes can be remedied, if the rhetorical framing of global warming/climate
change is communicated in terms that directly identify what can still be done – in the present and in the
future – terms that speak specifically to public values, terms that allow for civic engagement, and terms
that balance fear with opportunity. If resiliency means turning threats into opportunities, then a rhetoric to communicate
climate change to the public must be a rhetoric that enables civic engagement (communication of challenge appraisals); an
apocalyptic/comic rhetoric because such a rhetoric remains hopefully optimistic that there is still adequate (although decreasing)
time in which to transition to a sustainable system. As explained in previous posts, when rhetoric neglects to articulate
effective actions/solutions for productive behavior in response to environmental problems/global
warming, or when it is founded solely on fear alone, without specific actions to remedy
mistakes/unsustainable lifestyles, etc., the actions that do follow are maladaptive; they’re not
consistent, collective, or significant in addressing the change – global change – that is necessary in
sufficiently addressing an environmental problem like global warming.
 Nuclearism
Images of global war promote nuclear awareness –which solves
actual use
Robert J. Lifton, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology – CUNY and the Graduate School and University Center, Mount
Sinai School of Medicine, The Long Darkness: Psychological and Moral Perspectives on Nuclear Winter, Ed. L. Grinspoon,
1986, p. 97-98
I am struck by the possibility of transformation away from nuclearism. That transformation is enhanced by
confronting end-of-the-world imagery. Eugene Rabinowitz provides a very good example of
just this possibility when he writes about the circumstances in which he and other nuclear
scientists
drafted one of the earliest petitions against the use of a nuclear weapon : In the
summer of 1945, some of us walked the streets of Chicago vividly imagining the sky suddenly lit up by a giant fireball, the
steel skeleton of skyscrapers bending into grotesque shapes and their masonry raining into the streets below, until a great
cloud of dust rose and settled onto the crumbling city. (Rabinowitz, 1963, p. 156) This image of the "end of
the world" inspired him to urge his colleagues to return quickly to their work on
the Franck Report, which he, Franck, Szilard, and a number of others in Chicago were instrumental in creating.
To be sure, the report's recommendation that the atomic weapon not be used on a human population without warning was
not heeded. But it has become a central document in our contemporary struggle to
imagine the end of the world in order to preserve the world. Similar efforts of restitution, which restore symbols
of human continuity to our numbed imaginations, are needed by the rest of us as well. Nuclear winter becomes an
important imaginative resource here. Just as we know that we must imagine our own
death in order to live more fully, so must we now imagine the end of the world
in order to take steps to maintain human existence .
 Images of Catastrophe
Images of catastrophe cause compassion
Recuber 11 Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City. University of
New York. He has taught at Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING CATASTROPHE: AUTHENTICITY AND
EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER"
Perhaps, then, what distant consumers express when they sit glued to the television
watching a disaster replayed over and over, when they buy t-shirts or snow globes, when they mail teddy
bears to a memorial, or when they tour a disaster site, is a deep, maybe subconscious,
longing for
those age-old forms of community and real human compassion that emerge
in a place when disaster has struck. It is a longing in some ways so alien to the world
we currently live in that it requires catastrophe to call it forth , even in our
imaginations. Nevertheless, the actions of unadulterated goodwill that become
commonplace in harrowing conditions represent the truly authentic form of
humanity that all of us, to one degree or another, chase after in contemporary consumer culture
every day. And while it is certainly a bit foolhardy to seek authentic humanity through disaster-related media and culture,
the sheer strength of that desire has been evident in the public’s response to all the disasters, crises and catastrophes to hit
the United States in the past decade. The millions of television viewers who cried on
September 11, or during Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shootings, and
the thousands upon thousands who volunteered their time, labor, money,
and even their blood, as well as the countless others who created art,
contributed to memorials, or adorned their cars or bodies with disaster-
related paraphernalia— despite the fact that many knew no one who had been personally affected by any of
these disasters—all attest to a desire for real human community and compassion
that is woefully unfulfilled by American life under normal conditions today .
In the end, the consumption of disaster doesn’t make us unable or unwilling to
engage with disasters on a communal level, or towards progressive political
ends—it makes us feel as if we already have, simply by consuming. It is ultimately less a form of
political anesthesia than a simulation of politics , a Potemkin village of communal sentiment,
that fills our longing for a more just and humane world with disparate acts of cathartic consumption. Still, the
positive political potential underlying such consumption—the desire for real
forms of connection and community—remains the most redeeming feature
of disaster consumerism. Though that desire is frequently warped when various media lenses refract it,
diffuse it, or reframe it to fit a political agenda, its overwhelming strength should nonetheless
serve notice that people want a different world than the one in which we
currently live, with a different way of understanding and responding to
disasters. They want a world where risk is not leveraged for profit or political gain, but sensibly planned for with the
needs of all socio-economic groups in mind. They want a world where preemptive strategies
are used to anticipate the real threats posed by global climate change and
global inequality, rather than to invent fears of ethnic others and justify
unnecessary wars . They want a world where people can come together not
simply as a market, but as a public, to exert real agency over the policies
made in the name of their safety and security. And, when disaster does strike, they want a
world where the goodwill and compassion shown by their neighbors, by
strangers in their communities, and even by distant spectators and consumers, will be
matched by their own government. Though this vision of the world is
utopian, it is not unreasonable, and if contemporary American culture is ever to give us more than just
an illusion of safety, or empathy, or authenticity, then
it is this vision that we must advocate on
a daily basis, not only when disaster strikes.
 Ressentiment
Use of specific resentment of insecurity avoids hatred for life
William Connolly 5, Political Theory @ John’s Hopkins, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance
Machine” Political Theory 33:6 p. 880-881
The point is to discern how media presentations both do much of their work below the level of explicit attention and encourage the intense coding of those
experiences as they do so. Part of the reason, I think, is that the TV and film viewer is immobilized before a moving image and sound track, while the everyday
perceiver is either mobile or one step removed from mobility. The position of immobility amplifies the affective intensities received, just as a basketball coach feels
the
the intensities of the contest more than the players on the floor who absorb the intensities into action.'" This difference, indeed, dramatizes 

wisdom of Nietzsche's commendation to act upon specific resentments

before they ossify into ressentiment. Alongside the feminization campaign was another that deflected public attention
from how politics and show business have melded together. Talking heads on Fox News repeatedly debated the question, "Should actors take public positions on
political issues?", focusing as they did so on actors who criticized the war in Iraq. The question was not posed about business celebrities or retired generals or
several Republican candidates who had been actors. The form of the question thus encourages people to identify show business with unpatriotic criticism, instead
of discerning how critical films, rock music, selective TV dramas, and jazz are often associated with the Democratic left while country music, radio "talk shows,"
and evangelical-corporate celebrities are often linked to the right. Reiteration of the question in this form delinks the resonance machine of the right from show
business while binding its opponents to it. The result is to divert attention from how politics, religion, and advertising all participate in show business today.'6
Those who received these messages, however, were not simply manipulated by the media to accept them; many were predisposed to the message through the spirit
To expose and counter the politics of existential
of their preliminary orientations to being. VII. 

revenge does not mean that you demean specific grievances, resentments, and critical
energies that propel positive democratic energies forward. That would be to subtract
critical energies from your own cause in the name of a spurious
intellectualism that ignores the role of passion in religious practice,
economic activity , thinking, and political struggle . The target is the
congealed disposition of ressentiment, not every mode of resentment .

Seeking to change the world is a celebration of life not a

negation
Todd May 5, prof @ Clemson. “To change the world, to celebrate life,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 2005 Vol 31 nos
5–6 pp. 517–531
And that is why,in the end, there can be no such thing as a sad revolutionary.
To seek to change the world is to offer a new form of life-celebration . It is to
articulate a fresh way of being, which is at once a way of seeing, thinking, acting, and being acted upon.
It is to fold Being once again upon itself, this time at a new point, to see what that might yield. There is, as Foucault often
reminds us, no guarantee that this fold will not itself turn out to contain the intolerable. In a complex world
with which we are inescapably entwined, a world we cannot view from above or outside, there
is no certainty
about the results of our experiments. Our politics are constructed from the same
vulnerability that is the stuff of our art and our daily practices. But to refuse to experiment is to
resign oneself to the intolerable; it is to abandon both the struggle to change
the world and the opportunity to celebrate living within it. And to seek one
aspect without the other – life-celebration without world-changing , world-
changing without life-celebration – is to refuse to acknowledge the chiasm
of body and world that is the wellspring of both.
 Desire for Control
Global war and security discourse does not result from a desire
for control
David Chandler 9, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Westminster, War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War', Security Dialogue
2009; 40; 243
Western governments appear to portray some of the distinctive characteristics that Schmitt attributed to
‘motorized partisans’, in that the shift from narrowly strategic concepts of security to
more abstract concerns reflects the fact that Western states have tended to
fight free-floating and non-strategic wars of aggression without real
enemies at the same time as professing to have the highest values and the
absolute enmity that accompanies these. The government policy documents and critical
frameworks of ‘global war’ have been so accepted that it is assumed that it is the strategic
interests of Western actors that lie behind the often irrational policy
responses, with ‘global war’ thereby being understood as merely the extension of
instrumental struggles for control. This perspective seems unable to contemplate the possibility that it is
the lack of a strategic desire for control that drives and defines ‘global’ war
today. Very few studies of the ‘war on terror’ start from a study of the
Western actors themselves rather than from their declarations of intent with regard to the international sphere
itself. This methodological framing inevitably makes assumptions about strategic
interactions and grounded interests of domestic or international regulation and control, which
are then revealed to explain the proliferation of enemies and the abstract and
metaphysical discourse of the ‘war on terror’ (Chandler, 2009a). For its radical critics, the abstract,
global discourse merely reveals the global intent of the hegemonizing designs
of biopower or neoliberal empire, as critiques of liberal projections of power are ‘scaled up’ from the international to
the global.¶ Radical critics working within a broadly Foucauldian problematic have no problem grounding global war in
the needs of neoliberal or biopolitical governance or US hegemonic designs. These critics have produced
numerous frameworks,which seek to assert that global war is somehow
inevitable, based on their view of the needs of late capitalism, late modernity, neoliberalism
or biopolitical frameworks of rule or domination. From the declarations of global war and
practices of military intervention, rationality, instrumentality and strategic interests are read in a variety of ways
(Chandler, 2007). Global war is taken very much on its own terms, with the declarations of Western governments
explaining and giving power to radical abstract theories of the global power and regulatory might of the new global order
of domination, hegemony or empire The alternative reading of ‘global war’ rendered here seeks to
clarify that the declarations of global war are a sign of the lack of political
stakes and strategic structuring of the international sphere rather than
frameworks for asserting global domination. We increasingly see Western
diplomatic and military interventions presented as justified on the basis of value-based

declarations , rather than in traditional terms of interest-based outcomes . This was

as apparent in the wars of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and
Kosovo – where there was no clarity of objectives and therefore little possibility of strategic planning in terms of the
military intervention or the post-conflict political outcomes – as it is in the ‘war on terror’
campaigns, still ongoing, in Afghanistan and Iraq. There would appear to be a
direct relationship between the lack of strategic clarity shaping and
structuring interventions and the lack of political stakes involved in their
outcome. In fact, the globalization of security discourses seems to reflect the lack
of political stakes rather than the urgency of the security threat or of the
intervention. Since the end of the Cold War, the central problematic could well be
grasped as one of withdrawal and the emptying of contestation from the
international sphere rather than as intervention and the contestation for
control. The disengagement of the USA and Russia from sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans forms the backdrop to
the policy debates about sharing responsibility for stability and the management of failed or failing states (see, for
example, Deng et al., 1996). It is the lack of political stakes in the international sphere
that has meant that the latter has become more open to ad hoc and arbitrary
interventions as states and international institutions use the lack of strategic
imperatives to construct their own meaning through intervention . As Zaki Laïdi
(1998: 95) explains:¶ war is not waged necessarily to achieve predefined objectives, and it is in waging war that the
motivation needed to continue it is found. In these cases – of which there are very many – war is no longer a
continuation of politics by other means , as in Clausewitz’s classic model – but sometimes the
initial expression of forms of activity or organization in search of meaning. . . . War
becomes not the ultimate means to achieve an objective, but the most ‘efficient’ way of finding one. The lack of
political stakes in the international sphere would appear to be the precondition for the
globalization of security discourses and the ad hoc and often arbitrary decisions to
go to ‘war’. In this sense, global wars reflect the fact that the international sphere
has been reduced to little more than a vanity mirror for globalized actors
who are freed from strategic necessities and whose concerns are no longer
structured in the form of political struggles against ‘real enemies’. The
mainstream critical approaches to global wars, with their heavy reliance on recycling the work of Foucault,
Schmitt and Agamben, appear to invert this reality, portraying the use of military firepower
and the implosion of international law as a product of the high stakes involved in global struggle,
rather than the lack of clear contestation involving the strategic
accommodation of diverse powers and interests.
 Human Security
We’re a focus on human security – pirates, terrorism,
trafficking are all a direct threat to PEOPLE, not STATES – the
aff is a shift away from the traditional focus on interstate war
Framing in terms of state security interests is key to change
policy
Sudha Setty 12, Professor of Law at Western New England University School of Law, “National Security Interest
Convergence,” Harvard National Security Journal Vol 4
The same may be said for politicians in the post - 9/11 context. Rights
- protective arguments that
were once championed by Democrats in Congress — for example , curtailing
warrantless surveillance by the government, complying with international law obligations
regarding the detention and trial of terrorism suspects, and reforming the laws governing removal of immigrants —
have fallen prey to the phenomenon that Bell observed: There is simply not
enough political will to support these objectives to meaningfully alter
national security laws or policies. However, framing those initiatives in a way that
speaks to mainstream constituencies is the next - best option. ¶ The following
Subsections lay out areas in which rights - protective legislation can gain political
traction by reframing initiatives in terms that will appeal to more
legislators and their major constituencies.¶ 1. Foreign policy ¶ Effective foreign policy
depends on the ability of the United States to maintain its soft power, which in turn
depends on maintaining the respect of other nations and preserving the willingness
of our allies to cooperate with us on policy and security matters. That respect and willingness is most
forthcoming when the United States acts as a vanguard in protecting the rights of the politically powerless. The
perception that U.S. soft power in foreign relations or U.S. c ounter t errorism and intelligence
efforts might be jeopardized could — as it did in Bell’s original thesis — serve as a
persuasive means of garnering support for rights protective measures.¶ Thus,
there are two important facets to the relationship between foreign policy and rights - protective interest convergence.
First, the U.S. government has made it an imperative to win over the
support and loyalty of allied nations who are skeptical of U.S. antiterrorism
efforts that previously have been dismissive of the countries’ own priorities and cultural norms. 93 This, in many
respects, reflects the most natural application of Bell’s interest convergence
theory, which addressed the interests of the U.S. political elites in the
context of the Cold War. The Brown v. Board of Education decision helped market
the United States as a post-World War II moral authority, responsive to the concerns of
emerging democracies and to the growing international focus on human rights treaties and protocols.94 In the
post-September 11 context, government responses to concerns that the
United States has flouted its own human rights standards,95 disregarded
the rule of law,96 and lacked sensitivity to Muslims around the world,97
have served not only moral interests, but realpolitik interests as well. In this respect, the
framing of rights protection as a foreign policy matter has occurred on occasion, but
has not been consistent.
State Link
 Soveriegn Power
Including the aff breaks the link between security and
unrestrained sovereign power
Joao Reis Nunes 7, Marie Curie Fellow and PhD Candidate in International Politics at the University of Wales,
Aberystwyth, September 2007, “Politics, Security, Critical Theory: A Contribution to Current Debates on Security,”
http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Nunes-joaonunes-politicssecuritycriticaltheory.pdf
This section wishes to draw from Huysmans’ work on security as a signifier, particularly from his conception of the signifier as eminently
historical. It argues that we
must radicalize this historicity and come to see the meaning of security as
the result of a contingent crystallization, and not an ineluctable condition . In
other words, there is no fixed ‘politics of the signifier’ of security (1998:232); as Rothschild
(1995) and Wæver (2004) have shown, the meaning of security – and the set of understandings and practices that this wide order of
meaning entails – have changed through time. ¶ This section argues that the
critique of the current meaning
of security must be complemented with the definition of alternative
meanings . In other words, the aim is to go beyond current understandings of
security as the suspension of politics, not by arguing for the substitution of
security with other supposedly autonomous signifier (i.e. politics), but
rather by working within the signifier and attempting to release its
transformative potential. ¶ The theoretical reflection undertaken in the previous section can be seen as the first step of
this departure from reified assumptions about the ‘politics of the signifier’ of security. By showing that Schmitt’s
transcendental conception of sovereign power is problematic and can be
criticized at both the philosophical (Benjamin) and the social-economic-legal level
(Neumann), it opened the way for the definition of alternative normative principles of politics. In other words, it
demonstrated the possibility of conceiving different modalities for dealing with the problem of the exception, thereby allowing for a

denaturalization of the connection between security and an extreme

conception of politics based on the ‘fear of the enemy’ and on unrestrained sovereign
power . It is interesting to note that Huysmans’ himself engaged with the work of Neumann and argued that it is possible
to conceive exceptionalism in different ways, according to ‘the energetic principles of politics upon
which support for exceptionalism is based’ (2004:338). This section argues that it is possible to follow from this insight whilst
retaining the signifier of security.
State Failure
 2AC Failed States reinterpretation
Only accounting for vacuum wars in great power competition
can avoid mass conflict.
Grygiel 9—George H. W. Bush Associate Professor of International Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University[Jacob, “Vacuum Wars”, The American Interest July 1,
2009]RMT
The prevailing and traditional views of failed states reflect two separate realities.
Therefore, we should not restrict ourselves to one view or the other when
studying our options. The difference is not just academic; it has very practical consequences.
First and foremost, if we take the traditional view, failed states may pose an even
greater danger to international security than policymakers and academics currently
predict. Humanitarian disasters are certainly tragedies that deserve serious attention; yet they do not
pose the worst threats to U.S. security or world stability. That honor still belongs to the possibility of a
great power confrontation. While the past decade or so has allowed us to ignore
great power rivalries as the main feature of international relations, there is no guarantee that this
happy circumstance will continue long into the future. Second , there is no one-size-

fits-all policy option for a given failed state. Humanitarian disasters carry a set of
policy prescriptions that are liable to be counterproductive in an arena of
great power conflict. It is almost a truism that failed states require multilateral cooperation, given their global impact. But
the traditional view of failed states leads us not to seek multilateral settings
but to act preemptively and often unilaterally. Indeed, it is often safer to seek to
extend one’s control over failed states quickly in order to limit the possibility of
intervention by other great powers. Third, the role of armed forces engaged in
failed states needs to be re-evaluated in light of the traditional view . If failed states
require only “nation-building”, the
military forces of the intervening powers will have to
develop skills that are more like those of a police force: comfortable with a limited use of force, adept
at distinguishing peaceful civilians from criminals, able to enforce law and order, good at managing interactions within the societies and
many other tasks as well. However, the traditional view suggests that one must be prepared to
apply the full spectrum of military force in case of a direct confrontation
with another great power. Sending a weakly armed peacekeeping force into a situation in which such a confrontation is
possible could easily prove disastrous. Thus the United States should not focus only or overly much on
preparing for low-intensity conflicts and counterinsurgency operations to the detriment of preparing for a
major war involving another state. Rather, it should maintain and improve its ability to deny
other powers access to regions at stake and increase its readiness for a
direct confrontation. Finally, on the political level, nation-building under the
aegis of the United Nations or even NATO may not be the solution to failed states. If they
are problems not just of foreign aid and law enforcement, but also of great
power conflict and bilateral diplomacy, we should expect a reversion to an
atavistic set of state actions that were supposed to have been made obsolete by the triumph of liberal
internationalism.
 2AC Failed States Lk Turn
Failed states rhetoric reduces structural violence and removes
western interest
Kaufman 8 Kaufmann Greg, former USAF Colonel, 2008 "Stability Operations and State Building: Continuities
and Contingencies" http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?PubID=879

Malinowski argued that there were six minimal requirements for an institution: charters, personnel, norms, material
apparatus, activities and function(s) (see Figure 1.). Charters provide the socio-cultural and moral legitimacy for an
institution (i.e., the social and cultural warrants). The personnel and norms of a chartered
institution define what is now referred to as the organizational culture of
the institution.76 The material apparatus (artifacts) and the activities (observed actions), the informal culture of
organizations, contain the lived and living reality of their operation.77 Finally, we have the function of the chartered
institution which is, to use Malinowski’s words, .” . . the integral result of organized activities.”78 In the 21st
century, we rarely speak in the terms used between World Wars I and II
(e.g., of direct and indirect rule). Rather, we tend to speak of failing or failed
states, and use a political rhetoric, at the general policy level, that is more
often couched in terms of human rights, self-determination, and
humanitarian concerns.79 National interest concerns, such as access to
and control over natural resources, basing rights, trade access, etc., are
often used in the current rhetoric with highly negative connotations , and
even self-defense arguments are questioned.80 This rhetorical shift has had
a major impact on mission warrants (see Section II) which are no longer in
terms of direct or indirect rule but, frequently, in terms of temporary “co-
rule” or “crisis intervention”; the analogy is no longer to “parents” but to
“midwives” and “social workers.”81 This shift, in turn, has produced
significant limitations in both time and potential actions on what social
and cultural engineering can take place.
 Failed States True
Failed states thesis matches empirical realities and
understanding the impact of failed states is key to policymaking.
Newman 9 EDWARD NEWMAN, Senior Lecturer in International Relations and former Deputy Head of the
Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is also an International
Associate at the Center for Peace and Human Security, Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. Newman was previously
Director of Studies on Conflict and Security in the Peace and Governance Programme of the United Nations University in
Tokyo.[1] He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Civil Wars, “Failed States and International Order: Constructing a Post-
Westphalian World,” Contemporary Security Policy, Vol.30, No.3 (December 2009), pp.421–443

This suggests that international conflict and security in the 21st century – in terms¶ of
empirical patterns, and how these are studied and addressed in policy terms
–¶ reflect a broader transformation to a post-Westphalian world. This is conceived
of¶ as a world where notions of inviolable and equal state sovereignty – never actually¶ a reality but
often respected as a norm – are breaking down; where states are no¶ longer the sole or even the most
important actors in many areas of international ¶ politics; where states cannot be assumed to be viable or autonomous
agents; where¶ insecurity and conflict is primarily characterized by civil war,
insurgency and state¶ failure, rather than inter-state war; where the distinction between
domestic and¶ international politics is irreversibly blurred in terms of causes and impacts; where ¶ the nature of, and
responses to, security challenges hold implications for norms of ¶ state sovereignty and territorial integrity; and where
solidarist norms related to¶ governance and human rights are slowly – and selectively – transcending absolute ¶ norms of
sovereignty and non-interference.
Disease
 2AC Disease threats
Disease threats are real—science proves—their conspiracy theories
don’t outweigh qualified scientists.

Securitizing disease creates action and reduces structural

violence
Groves 7—Founder and Director at E-International Relations, Strategic Development Coordinator at OneWorld,
ass Business School, Oxford University, University of Wales[ADAM GROVES, “The Strengths and Weaknesses of
‘Securitizing’ Disease”,E-relations International, DEC 2 2007 http://www.e-ir.info/2007/12/02/the-strengths-and-
weaknesses-of-securitizing-disease/ ]RMT
As the UN special envoy to Africa for AIDS, Stephen Lewis, recently noted, ‘if the
world had been energized around the pandemic as it has been energized
around Afghanistan, Iraq, terrorism (…) then millions of people would still be
alive today’ (in Ramiah, 2004: 4). The US has spent over $357 billion fighting ‘the war on terror’; it is predicted
that this could increase to $2 trillion (Bilmes and Stiglitz, 2006: 1). In light of this huge spending to combat what the Bush
administrations perceives as a threat to US national security, the possible benefits of securitizing global health issues such
as HIV/AIDS become immediately apparent. NGOs and states which have a direct interest in
channelling resources to fight diseases such as HIV/AIDS can attract media
attention and extra funding to their cause by declaring it a security issue.
Copenhagen School theorists argue that security is a ‘speech act’. Waever writes that ‘the utterance itself is the act. By
saying it, something is done’ (1995: 55). Garrett concludes that ‘ clearly some advocates hope that
naming HIV/AIDS a security threat to wealthy states will result in a greater
willingness on the part of those governments to donate generously to pandemic control
and treatment efforts in poor countries’ (2005: 14). Garret’s assertion that
actors are securitizing diseases such as HIV/AIDS in an effort to stimulate
international action is supported by the rhetoric emanating from some
NGOs. A recent UNAIDS document proclaimed that ‘by drawing the world’s attention to the
security dimensions of the AIDS epidemic, the Security Council has helped
transform the way that the world views the disease’ (2005: 6). Meanwhile, the head of
UNAIDS affirmed that if AIDS were perceived as an international emergency it
‘would definitely help lift the global response to another level’ (Financial Times,
20/07/2005: 11). The securitization of the HIV/AIDS does appear to have attracted
increased funding to tackle the disease; as Hough notes, ‘essentially self-motivated
policy can contribute to the global common good’ (2004: 171). In his 2003 State of the Union
Address George Bush declared that, as ‘a work of mercy’, he was committing $15
billion to the fight against HIV/AIDS. This announcement came hot on the
heels of two reports from the National Intelligence Council and the Centre
for Strategic and International Studies which reaffirmed the national
security threat that the disease posed to the US (NIC, 2002; CSIS, 2002). This left Hough to
conclude that ‘political stability in Africa may have been the chief aim of [Bush’s]
initiative but human security was additionally enhanced as a result’ (2004: 171).
 1AR Specific to Africa
Securitizing disease in Africa boosts African agency in fighting
disease
Harman and Brown 13 [(Sophie Harman and William Brown) “In from the margins? The changing
place of Africa in International Relation” International Affairs 89: 1, 2013] AT
Perhaps one of the most influential contributions of the studies of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa has been to debates on
security, new security threats, and securitization in international relations. The framing of HIV/AIDS as
a new security threat both in the United Nations Security Council, with Resolution 1308 (2000), and within a
broad range of literature, has attracted wider attention in IR with regard to debating
what constitutes a security threat and the sources of such threats. The
securitization of HIV/AIDS offers a similar insight to that of the Chinese case-study with regard to the
ability of African states to use this frame to leverage greater financial support
for aid programmes.75 Some African states have been adept at doing this.
However, the extent to which African actors have done so is perhaps overstated, as the securitization frame was very much
the work of a global HIV/AIDS community with a long history of effective advocacy campaigns.76
 1AR Empirics
Securitized reps of disease incentivize action
Curley and Herington ’11 (Review of International Studies Review of International Studies / Volume 37 / Issue 01 /
January 2011, pp 141-166 Melissa G. Curley is Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Political Science
and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Prior to this she was Research Officer at the Centre
of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong from 1999–2005. Her research and teaching interests include East Asian
International Relations, non-traditional and human security discourse in IR theory and practice, and civil society and
democratisation in Southeast Asia. Her most recent book is Security and Migration in Asia. The dynamics of
securitisation, coedited with Wong Siu-lun (Routledge, 2008). Jonathan Herington is currently studying for his doctorate
in International Relations and ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, The Australian National
University. His research interests include the security implications of infectious disease emergencies, the ethics of
securitising infectious diseases and security as a value. He holds a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
from the University of Queensland.
Most The Vietnamese government's response to the outbreak of avian
influenza started slowly. In 2003, as the first sporadic cases of H5N1 influenza appeared, provincial
governments struggled to identify the disease and notify central and international authorities.49 Likely to a combination
of deliberate bureaucratic obfuscation and a lack of capacity, the response to these initial avian and
human outbreaks in disparate provinces was sluggish and pursued through
an under-resourced public health apparatus.50 However, once the gravity and scale of the
outbreak became apparent – and impossible to quarantine from the oversight of international organisations – in
January 2004, efforts to securitise the disease were swift. Chairing a Politburo-level National Steering Committee
on Avian Influenza, the Prime Minister demanded that the epidemic be contained by the end of February
through a widespread culling programme, which would involve ‘all State apparatuses and administrative bodies of all
levels’.51 From this point forward, the Vietnamese central government's rhetoric and the tone of its response remained
remarkably consistent. From 2004 until 2008 security language was frequently invoked, comparatively
large budgetary allocations were made and the central government reinforced its control by limiting resistance to
emergency measures. Its cooperation with the WHO and OIE, although occasionally plagued by capacity constraints,
was also consistently good.52 In the context of an ongoing and severe avian epidemic, the government's domestic
rhetoric surrounding bird flu since February 2004 has been highly securitised, and focused on placing the economic
wellbeing of the Vietnamese state as the referent object. In May 2005, after multiple bouts of culling in infected areas, the
Vietnamese government began an extraordinary effort to vaccinate all 212 million poultry in the country against H5N1
subtypes with a view to minimising the economic impact of the outbreaks.53 However, despite the initiation of this effort,
avian epidemics continued to occur in the northern and southern river deltas in late 2005. The response to these avian
epidemics is indicative of the types of securitising moves which were made. Throughout this period, newspaper articles
about the poultry farms affected by the virus and the government's control efforts appeared daily; variously referring to
avian influenza as an ‘imminent danger’, a ‘deadly threat’ to Vietnam, or even a ‘global threat’.54 Such pronouncements
underscored the government's desire to ‘mobilise the entire political system’ in the ‘fight against the H5N1-virus’.55 High
pressure statements were followed by regulations and directives,56 including one from the Prime Minister which sought
to mobilise the state, its security forces, its citizens and every resource available against the threat: The formulation and
implementation of such urgent action plans (against bird flu) must be considered an unexpected and urgent task of Party
committees and administrations of all levels and a duty of each citizen and, therefore, the strength of the whole political
system should be mobilized for this task […] To take initiative in making all necessary preparations and mobilizing every
resource to prevent and combat the type-A (H5N1) influenza among humans […] the Ministry of Health, concerned
ministries and branches and localities shall guide all medical units and establishments (even the army and police forces)
from the central to provincial, municipal, district and communal levels.57 Typical of the media statements and directives
during subsequent avian outbreaks in 2006 and 2007, such language was indicative of the Vietnamese government's
conviction that ‘the fight against bird flu is an uninterrupted war’.58 The urgency with which the government
sought to act is, in our view, a product of the avian epidemic's potential to impact
negatively upon the legitimacy of the government amongst both international and domestic audiences. The 2002 and
2003 SARS epidemic taught the Vietnamese government valuable lessons about its ability control information flows to the
international community and consequently control its image as a good-faith actor in the global public health sphere. In
particular, the praise it received for openly and competently controlling the epidemic stood in strong contrast to the
opprobrium over China's evasiveness.59 This resonates with the empirical evidence suggesting that, although Vietnamese
officials tried to quietly deal with the initial, small-scale avian outbreaks in mid-2003, they began cooperating with
the WHO and international community at the point at which the outbreaks became a national (and hence
potentially international) problem. Reinforcing this logic was the need to appear competent to avoid severe
consequences for the tourism industry and foreign direct investment.
Generic Transnational Threats
 TL Ulrichsen
**** tag
Berouk Mesfin 13 [(Berouk Mesfin, Institute for Security Studies, ) The Horn of Africa Security Complex
International Relations And Security Network 9-9-2013] AT
This chapter is the product of more than a decade of research conducted by the

author on the Horn of Africa, and draws on his numerous discussions with foremost
analysts and top-level decision-makers [1] whose policies are increasingly influenced by regional
politics. It also derives from the frustration of the author, who has seen particular overblown, trivial issues – such as the
irrepressible obsession with piracy – being amplified, whereas more pressing and substantive security challenges, such as
the lethal danger of ferocious and irreducible conflicts, are being benignly disregarded. Such a confounding situation has
simply made the author fear for the long-term security of the region. As a result, the author has tried to generally
summarise and synthesise the conflicts and security dynamics in the Horn of Africa from a regional perspective and for
the past five or six decades. Nonetheless, explaining the environment and dynamics of
regional security is necessarily an arbitrary exercise for students of
international relations, [2] depending on which elements appear to them as
most significant and on the prevalent political and strategic realities.
Fortunately, Barry Buzan offers a strong conceptual framework. From the perspective of this
chapter’s author, this conceptual framework provides an adequate unit of analysis
that facilitates comparison and generalisations to a very high degree. It has also
enabled the author to offer, in the simplest way possible, deeper insights into the
security trends in the Horn of Africa and to tell the bigger picture without directly applying the
conceptual framework to materials of the region. Accordingly, this chapter will first outline, as briefly as possible, the
major tenets of Buzan’s conceptual framework. It will then proceed to provide a basic definition of the region known as the
Horn of Africa and explain, in greater detail, the major elements and patterns of regional politics within it. What is a
security complex? First published in 1983 and republished in 1991, Buzan’s pioneering study, People, states and fear, was
the first sustained and serious attempt to put forward guiding ideas pertaining to the concept of regional security.[3] One
major benefit of Buzan’s conceptual framework is that it enables analysts to challenge
prevalent conceptions and ‘talk about regional security in terms of the
pattern of relations among members of the security complex’ .[4] The following is a
brief consideration of Buzan’s most significant precepts rather than a comprehensive survey of his conceptual framework.
In the first place, and in security[5] terms, Buzan argued that a region means that ‘a distinct and significant subsystem of
security relations exists among a set of states whose fate is that they have been locked into geographical proximity with
each other’.[6] Moreover, military and political threats are more significant,
potentially imminent and strongly felt when states are at close range. Buzan
stressed that regional security systems such as those of South Asia, for instance, with its military stand-off between India
and Pakistan, can be seen in terms of balance of power as well as patterns of amity, which are relationships involving
genuine friendship as well as expectations of protection or support, and of enmity, which are relationships set by suspicion
and fear, arising from ‘border disputes, interests in ethnically related populations [and] long-standing historical links,
whether positive or negative’. [7] According to Buzan, these patterns are confined in a particular geographical area.
Buzan used and popularised the term ‘security complex’ to designate ‘a group of states
whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely that their
national securities cannot realistically be considered apart from one
another’.[8] Such complexes ‘are held together not by the positive influences of shared interest, but by shared
rivalries. The dynamics of security contained within these levels operate across a broad spectrum of sectors – military,
political, economic, societal and environmental’.[9] Buzan’s conceptual framework provides
meaningful insights both into how different types of conflict suddenly erupt
and quickly spread in space and time, and also into the interplay between these
different types. Security complexes are exposed to four major types of threats and their interaction: balance of
power contests among great powers; lingering conflicts that emerge between neighbouring states; intra-state conflicts,
which are usually spillovers of internal politics; and conflicts that arise from transnational threats caused, for instance, by
the rise of radical Islam and informal networks, state fragility, demographic explosion, environmental degradation and
resource scarcity. The Horn of Africa Delineating the Horn of Africa In a narrow geographic sense, the Horn of Africa is
that north-eastern part of the African continent which faces the Red Sea to the east, the Indian Ocean to the south-east
and the Nile Basin to the west. The Horn of Africa conventionally comprises the key states of Ethiopia, Somalia and
Djibouti, although it embraces geopolitically the adjoining states of Sudan and Kenya.[10] It should also be pointed out
that Uganda,[11] which is a member of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and Yemen, Libya and
Egypt are no less involved in the issues and processes of the region and certainly have an impact on power balances and
developments. All these states share social and cultural values emanating from a centuries-old tradition of
interrelationships, common religious practices and economic linkages. Furthermore, the political fate of each state in the
region has always been inextricably intertwined with that of neighbouring states. Indeed, no individual state in the Horn
of Africa has been insulated from the other states’ problems, irrespective of their distance and comparative strengths or
weaknesses. The six states which make up the Horn of Africa cover an area of around five million square kilometres and
had in 2000 a total population of about 130,1 million, which grew to 170 million in 2008. The region’s average population
growth rate of not less than 2,9 per cent is one of the highest population growth rates in the world, and nearly half of the
population is under 14. In 2000 in the Horn of Africa, which is the meeting point between Muslim, Christian and Animist
cultures, Muslims constituted a slight majority, making up some 44 per cent of the total population; 43 per cent were
Christians. [12] The Horn of Africa can be characterised as the most deprived and poorest region in Africa, if not in the
world (see Table 7). It is a region where the most basic necessities (clean water, food, healthcare and education) are not
available to the majority of the population. In the Horn of Africa, per capita income, life expectancy and literacy are among
the lowest in the world, and adult and infant mortality are among the highest. The region is prone to deadly droughts that
hamper crop and livestock production. These droughts result in food deficits each year, thereby making the Horn of Africa
one of the regions with the greatest food insecurity in the world. In 2008 in the Horn of Africa, an estimated 17 million
people were in need of emergency assistance. [13] Furthermore, the Horn of Africa is the most
conflict-ridden region in the world,[14] with conflicts – exacerbated by
external interference and accompanied by widespread human rights
violations – raging sometimes simultaneously within and between states. In
fact, the African continent’s longest-running intra-state conflicts – in Eritrea and South Sudan, with an estimated death
toll of over two million – took place in the Horn of Africa. It is also generally held that, due to the
aforementioned disasters, both natural and artificial, the Horn of Africa has
the highest percentage of refugees – estimated to have reached 700 000 in 2003, which is roughly
equivalent to Djibouti’s population – and internally displaced people in Africa, a trend
that reinforces future cycles of conflict. In 2008, the total number of internally displaced people in
Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia and Uganda was estimated at 2,74 million, out of which an estimated 1,3 million were displaced
in Somalia, which is one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.[15] In 2010, in Sudan alone there were more than
four million internally displaced people, virtually Eritrea’s entire population.[16] [Table 1 Area, population and religious
composition of states in the Horn of Africa] ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex Table 1 Copyright [Table 2 Intra-
state conflicts in and around the Horn of Africa - 2 parts] ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex Table 2.1 Copyright
ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex Table 2.2 Copyright [Table 3 Selected inter-state conflicts in and around the
Horn of Africa] ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex Table 3 Copyright [Table 4 Military balance in the Horn of
Africa (1972) and Table 5 Military balance in the Horn of Africa (1989)] ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex Tables
4-5 Copyright [Table 6 Detailed military balance in the Horn of Africa (2007)] ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex
Table 6 Copyright [Table 7 Gross domestic product (GDP), per capita GDP and Human Development Index (HDI) rank in
the Horn of Africa] ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex Table 7 Copyright The colonial legacy The seeds of the
current conflicts in the Horn of Africa to a large extent go back to the European colonial experience in that region, even
though most of the conflicts’ root causes pre-date this experience.[21] Indeed, at the end of the 19th century and after the
construction of the Suez Canal,[22] the European colonial powers partitioned the previously free constituent parts of the
Horn of Africa, joining unrelated areas and peoples into territorial units. The establishment of new states (Sudan got its
independence in 1956, British and Italian Somaliland in 1960, Kenya in 1963, and Djibouti in 1977, whereas Eritrea was
federated with Ethiopia in 1952 and forcefully gained its independence in 1993, leaving Ethiopia landlocked) was,
therefore, based on misdrawn borders which were agreed upon by the colonial powers and basically ignored ethnic,
cultural, historical and religious groups’ natural lines. As a consequence, this gave rise to intra-state conflicts (in
particular, demands for autonomy from ethnic groups) and to the regimes of the newly independent states lodging
territorial claims, which, in turn, led to conflict with other states. The challenge was compounded by the fact that the
framework of colonial laws and institutions had been designed to exploit local divisions rather than to overcome them.
Colonialism also disrupted the political, social and economic lives of pastoral societies. The emergence of colonial ports as
well as the development of modern transport systems disrupted the ancient trade networks on which pastoralists
depended, and coastal markets disappeared in many cases. Moreover, transportation networks and related physical
infrastructure were designed to satisfy the needs of the colonial powers rather than support the balanced growth of an
indigenous economy. During the same period, by taking advantage of inter-European rivalries, the Ethiopian rulers
doubled through conquest the geographic size of their independent state built on the interior highlands. A vast, multi-
ethnic state was created there. The need to maintain intact the unity of this fragile and disparate entity led to the excessive
centralisation of political and economic power, which, in turn, stimulated widespread infringement upon local cultures
and led to religious coercion and political repression. Conflicts were also triggered by ethno-centrism arising from colonial
rule, which favoured certain ethnic groups by according them access to education and economic privileges. This was at the
expense of other ethnic groups in the context of the divide and rule tactics employed by the colonial powers, and inflicted
deep societal wounds in some states. In the post-colonial era, ill-advised policies have entrenched colonially designed
disparities and chronic injustice, thereby worsening ethnic animosities and antagonisms in most states of the region. Such
a legacy lives on especially in Sudan, where a pernicious conflict was resuscitated in 1983 as a result of former president
Gaafar Nimeiri’s imposition of Sharia or Islamic law on all segments of the Sudanese population – Muslims, Christians
and Animists alike. The widely perceived racial and religious discrimination against the mainly Christian and Animist
black Africans in South Sudan by the mainly Muslim Arabs from Sudan’s north and the latter’s control of Sudan’s
governing regimes and economy contributed largely to the commencement of the conflict. This conflict, which provoked
an influx of refugees into neighbouring states, including Ethiopia, presented the post-1974 Ethiopian regime with the
opportunity to reciprocate Sudan’s support for the Ethiopian rebel movements by giving support to the rebel movement
emerging in Sudan. Political and economic problems In the Horn of Africa, the nature of state
power is a key source of conflict: political victory assumes a winner-takes-all
form with respect to wealth and resources as well as the prestige and prerogatives of office. Irrespective of the official
form of government, regimes in the Horn of Africa are, in most cases, autocracies essentially relying on ethnic loyalties.
The military and security services, in recent times emerging from a liberation-front background,
ensure the hold on power of these militarised regimes. [23] By default, a controlled – not
to speak of peaceful – change of power is an exception. And insufficient accountability of leaders, lack of transparency in
regimes, non-adherence to the rule of law, and the lack of respect for human and people’s rights have made political
control excessively important and the stakes dangerously high. Also, given the highly personalised milieu in which politics
operates in the Horn of Africa, ‘strong-man benevolent leader[s]’ [24] in the likes of Mengistu Haile Mariam, Gaafar
Nimeiri or Siad Barre, who were all deeply insecure behind their ruthlessness and vindictive egomanias, were able to
shape the political destiny of a state almost single-handedly and enter into either warm or conflictual relations with other
states, inducing civilian populations to join in and converting them into military and paramilitary groups. [25] In fact,
despite the devastation they brought, such leaders and their behind-the-scenes operators
used senseless conflicts to divert popular impatience at their inability to
improve conditions. Moreover, these states suffer from a lack of trained personnel who can muster a long-
term vision and possess experience in security policy-making and management; such people prefer to go abroad in order
to better their lives or escape systematic maltreatment. Leaders exploit the international community’s laissez-faire
attitude and turn deaf ears to the advice of professional policy advisors and opinion-formers. This automatically leads to
what an observer of regional politics described as ‘short-term thinking’ [26] and clumsy ad hoc decision-making, and
eventually to shocks such as the unanticipated Ethiopia-Eritrea war of 1998–2000. Moreover, political
competition in the Horn of Africa is not rooted in viable economic systems.
All of the region’s states are barely capable of reaching a level of economic
development at which even the basic needs of their populations are met.
Economic activities are strongly skewed towards primary commodities for export, which are subject to the whims of the
fluctuating prices of the international commodity markets. Economic activities are also hampered by external dependence,
inadequate infrastructure, shortage of capital, shortage of skilled labour and misguided development policies.
Compounding this, the state is unable to provide adequate health and education services or to remedy mass
unemployment, which partly results from unsustainably high population growth. Furthermore, in order to hold on to
power, hold the state together and defend it against the claims and attacks of other states and rebel movements,
governing regimes build and maintain military forces of large dimensions
(see Tables 4, 5 and 6). They spend a large share of national expenditure on the military in disproportion to
their available economic resources and existing security threats. This kind of
excessive militarisation eventually entails an increased burden, especially in present times of dwindling resources and
economic crises. Excessive military spending is essentially wasteful, resulting in social projects in education or health
remaining stagnant or even non-existent. It also heightens the perception of mutual threat, with a wide range of
unintended political [Table 8 Military coups in and around the Horn of Africa] ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex
Table 8 Copyright consequences. On the one hand, external threats will be used, as mentioned earlier, to draw attention
from real internal problems; and on the other hand, a politicised, compromised and restless military with its proneness to
usurp state power and resources represents a grave danger to inherently fragile regimes as well as their political and
security structures. Access to shared resources and environmental degradation Even though the states of the Horn of
Africa appear to be independent of each other, ‘there may have to be a sharing of resources. An obvious example is the
flow of a river … but shared resources may also be reflected in the cross-border movements of pastoralists’. [28] The most
prominent river is the Nile, which has always been an intricate part of the geopolitics of the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia,
Sudan and Egypt are geographically partly owners and users of the river, and all three consider it a major security issue.
[29] Egypt, in particular, totally depends on the Nile River’s waters for its very existence [30] and, therefore, ‘the first
consideration of any Egyptian government is to guarantee that these waters are not threatened. This means ensuring that
no hostile power can control the headwaters of the Nile or interfere with its flow into Egypt’. [31] Accordingly, Egypt
repeatedly made it crystal clear that it would resort to the threat of military action [32] to preserve its portion of the Nile
River (the 1959 Egyptian-Sudanese Treaty allocated 55,5 billion cubic metres of the river to Egypt), even though, ‘owing to
a combination of political and economic conditions and technological limitations in [c]entral and [e]astern Africa, this
threat fortunately did not materialise for a long time’.[33] For instance, after signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979,
Egypt’s late president Anwar Sadat issued a stern warning which was well noted in Ethiopia and according to which ‘the
only matter which could take Egypt to war again is water’. This policy was aimed at preventing upstream states, especially
Ethiopia, which contributes more than 80 per cent of the water flowing to Egypt, from claiming their share of the Nile
River’s total water. Furthermore, being the Arab world’s most populous, politically influential and militarily strongest
state, Egypt entertained the long-established ambition of projecting its power towards the Red Sea. Ethiopia was exposed
to this geopolitical projection, which included overt support for the Eritrean Liberation Front, established in Cairo in 1961,
military support for Somalia during the 1977–1978 Ogaden war, military support for Eritrea during the 1998–2000
Ethiopia-Eritrea war and short-circuiting Ethiopia’s IGAD-mandated mediation in Somalia during the mid-1990s. Indeed,
a military pact was signed in 1976 between Egypt and Sudan following which Egypt stationed troops in Sudan, trained its
military personnel and undertook joint military planning so that, in the case of aggression against one, the other would
come to its rescue. Clearly, Egypt regards Sudanese territory as providing added depth to its geopolitical objectives and is
not comfortable with the idea of South Sudan attaining independence, as it ‘might jeopardise Nile security’.[34] In
addition, pastoralists have to be constantly on the move in search for areas that offer better water and grass, which ignites
conflicts among pastoralists and with sedentary agricultural communities in the Horn of Africa. However, the creation of
artificial borders and states that are interested in controlling all movements and imposing taxes limited the size of
available resources and disrupted the traditional movement patterns of pastoral societies.[35] Armed clashes, negative
state policies leading to violently expressed grievances and recurrent droughts have led to an environmental crisis and the
militarisation of pastoral societies, which, in turn, exacerbates inter-ethnic tensions. What happened in Darfur was partly
an environmentally generated antagonism over shared [Table 9 Armed cattle rustling in and around the Horn of Africa]
ISS Africa Horn of Africa Security Complex Table 9 Copyright resources, such as water systems, woodlands and grazing
land for livestock. As populations in Darfur and its surrounds increased and access to these resources became more
acutely scarce, conflicts among communities erupted and became difficult to resolve. The logic of subversion The states of
the Horn of Africa took advantage of every local tension or conflict to support rebel movements in neighbouring states.
[37] Sponsoring subversive activities had simply become a customary tool poised to destabilise and endanger the security
of another state, in what some observers called the time-honoured principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ extending
throughout the Horn of Africa.[38] This enhanced inter-state rivalries, mutual suspicion and the development of an eye-
for-an-eye mentality. One example is the long and bloody game of tit-for-tat that bedevilled relations between Ethiopia
and Sudan for over four decades.[39] It is ‘impossible to prove who was the original culprit in this long-running proxy
war’, [40] as ensuring the secrecy of the support’s details was paramount because a disclosure of its true extent would
threaten its effectiveness and risk major embarrassment to the regimes. In any case, Sudan’s support for Ethiopian rebel
movements was the reason why the Sudan People’s Liberation Army enjoyed strong and sustained support from the post-
1974 Ethiopian regime. Other examples abound in the Horn of Africa in which ‘pursuing regional foreign policy through
proxy forces in neighbouring countries has been the normal pattern of relations for decades. This activity has proved
persistent over time and has survived radical political reconfigurations, including changes of regime’.[41] ‘Mengistu
engaged Barre in a proxy guerrilla war in which they each supported the other’s insurgent’.[42] The Christian
fundamentalist Lord’s Resistance Army received support from Islamist Sudan in retaliation for Uganda’s support for the
Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Sudan’s support for the Eritrean Islamic Jihad invited Eritrean support for the Sudan
People’s Liberation Army and the National Democratic Alliance, which was even allowed to occupy the Sudanese embassy
premises in Asmara. [43] It has to be pointed out that Eritrea has become a recklessly belligerent bully especially adept at
pursuing a low-cost strategy of supporting rebel movements against Sudan and Ethiopia as well as in Somalia. Many
analysts describe Eritrea’s support for the Somali Islamist movements – despite facing its own Islamist movement – as a
proxy war that is largely opportunistic, as it cuts across ideological lines[44] (a case which will be developed in more detail
in the following sections). The logic of alliances Alliances are usually assigned to prevent or contain external disruptions of
security and to establish a viable equilibrium of forces in a region. [45] The formation of alliances, which is part of the
balance of power system, is a strategy devised and implemented in conjunction with regional or external partners. In the
Horn of Africa, alliances span a wide range of different configurations. They range from formal military alliances between
leaders or regimes to state support for rebel movements in neighbouring states and further afield, or even alliances
between rebel movements.[46] However, as in the case of subversion, alliances may not bring together like-minded
partners, whose loyalties are by no means fixed, as they may be sometimes working at cross purposes. Every alliance
‘tends to have a logic of its own when once set in motion’[47] and accordingly cannot withstand the test of time (see Table
10). It is plausible to argue that one exceptional alliance that did stand the test of time and the Cold War’s realignments
was the one established between Kenya and Ethiopia after they signed a military pact in 1963 aimed at neutralising
Somalia. In the Horn of Africa, opportunistic alliances had a relative restraining influence, but, equally, gave additional
momentum for inter-state conflict. One classical alliance behaviour is provided by the vicious spiral of alliances and
counter-alliances that emerged in the late 1970s at a time of tensions and violence in the region. US-supported Egypt,
which was engaged in conflict with Soviet-supported Libya, helped Sudan and Somalia. Ethiopia, which was drawn into
the socialist camp, fought Somalia, confronted Sudan and got associated with Libya by the 1981 Aden Treaty. Somalia was
in effect supported by Egypt and Sudan in its claims on Ethiopian territory. Sudan, which was backed especially by Egypt,
stood against its neighbours, Libya and Ethiopia. And Libya, which was not directly involved in territorial or other
disputes in the Horn of Africa, helped the enemy (Ethiopia) of its enemy’s (Egypt’s) allies, Sudan and Somalia.[48] The
latest regional alliance is the Sana’a Forum for Cooperation, which was established in 2002 and is widely perceived as an
‘alliance of convenience aimed [Table 10 Half a century of regional alliances (1959–2009)] ISS Africa Horn of Africa
Security Complex Table 10 Copyright against Eritrea’.[49] It was initially a tripartite alliance involving Ethiopia, Sudan
and Yemen, all of which had military confrontations with Eritrea and shared a deep-seated antipathy towards its regime.
Sudan and Ethiopia especially think that ‘there can never be regional stability as long as Issayas dominates the Eritrean
state’.[50] Somalia was also later included as a sideline partner, and Djibouti joined as an observer in 2008 after its
bizarre border dispute with Eritrea. The Horn of Africa’s strategic importance, and superpower interference The Horn of
Africa has never acquired a strategic importance for its raw materials or for any other continental advantage. [51]
However, the region has always been allotted a relatively important strategic value owing to its proximity to the Red Sea,
which is an important and expeditious route of international trade and communications between Europe, the Middle East
and the Far East, as well as the navigation route through which oil is transported from the Persian Gulf (in which the
largest oil deposits of the world are located) to consumers in North America and Europe.[52] Hence, the states of the Horn
of Africa were forced into economic, political and military dependence on either one of the two superpowers of the Cold
War – the US and the Soviet Union. Competing to establish positions of influence and military advantage in the
strategically significant regions of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, the two superpowers supported client states in the
adjacent Horn of Africa primarily by injecting military aid, and undermined inimical states by supporting rebel
movements and weaving unfriendly alliances and counter-alliances.[53] The interests of the US can be explained in terms
of securing access to oil for the West in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. It was, therefore, in the interests of
the US to fend off any expansion of Soviet power and influence, whether through proxies or not, in the Middle East, Indian
Ocean and the Horn of Africa. Conversely, the Soviet Union aimed at promoting its credibility as a superpower by
influencing and over-arming the largest number of strategically placed client states,[54] imperilling oil tankers bound for
the West via the Suez Canal and reducing to nil the influence of the US in the above-mentioned regions. Geopolitical logic
also required the Soviet Union, which needed to have maritime staging areas for its rapidly increasing navy, to control the
arc running from South Asia to the Horn of Africa. [55] Terrorism Since the mid-1990s, the states in the Horn
of Africa have witnessed hundreds of acts of terrorism against foreign as
well as local citizens and interests. The region is accordingly considered
both as a breeding ground and a safe haven for terrorist organisations ,
especially after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US in 2001. Hence, this region has come under increased scrutiny
in the war against terrorism. For instance, Kenya, in which approximately 10 per cent of the population is Muslim (see
Table 1), experienced the 1998 terrorist attack on the US embassy in Nairobi, the bombing of a Mombasa hotel and the
missile attack on an Israeli commercial jetliner in 2002. These acts have accentuated the fear that Kenya’s Muslim-
dominated coastal areas may fall under fundamentalist influence and affect the state’s internal structure and foreign
relations, and exacerbate latent social and ethnic conflicts. [56] In the wake of the terrorist attacks in the US, Somalia
came under the watchful eyes of Western intelligence services and military forces. In view of Somalia’s lengthy and easily
penetrable coastline and the prolonged absence of a functioning administration, the US worried that Al Qaeda might
establish training bases or use it as a conduit for money, personnel and material for future terrorist operations beyond the
Horn of Africa. Moreover, the increasing flexibility and speed of 20th century transportation and communications means
that states could expect no warning ahead of terrorist attacks. Therefore, the US created a Combined Joint Task Force-
Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) with an area of responsibility covering the Horn of Africa plus Yemen. The US is bent only on
reducing the ability of terrorist organisations to operate and move in the region. The actions of the US clearly show a
discrepancy between its own interest of fighting terrorism in the Horn of Africa and that of the regional regimes, which
have an utter disdain for US concerns. In fact, the diffusion of modern military technologies and state-of-the-art
techniques of organisation, which the US approach entailed, went beyond the modernisation of the military or the transfer
of weapons. It led to the institutionalised surveillance of entire populations and the blind, wholesale suppression of all
political opponents, leading in effect to the diffusion of ideas, such as Islamist fundamentalism, with resultant security
problems, particularly in Somalia. An observer of the Horn of Africa said that:[57] Outside actors need to respond
judiciously to the allegations of terrorism levelled against various parties to conflict in the Horn. The underlying conflicts
in the region are older than the contemporary war on terrorism and will probably outlast it. Outsiders need to recognise
the tactical value of their support and the interests at stake in representing local adversaries as associates of terrorism.
They also need to weigh the possible gains (in terms of international terrorism) from intervention against the risks of
greater radicalisation, alienation and conflict generation in the region. Conclusion and prospects The author tried to treat
the Horn of Africa, which is ‘interlinked to an even greater extent than i[s] the case in other regions of Africa’, [58] as a
unit of analysis in its own right, a unit that possesses its own internal dynamic process. He also tried to underline the
importance of such a regional focus, which links both the internal and external determinants, to provide a better
understanding of the dynamics of conflict in the Horn of Africa in which the unknown prevails and power is calculated in
terms of available weapons. Only such an understanding can release a ‘this isn’t working’ attitude, leading to a whole new
rethinking on several levels, in turn, leading to a ‘something must be done’ reaction, which may perhaps give the next
generations of the Horn of Africa a better perspective on their future. Indeed, ‘how security threats are perceived and
articulated in the Horn of Africa could provide better insights into how the region actually works’.[59] For instance, the
‘seemingly irrational stances vis-à-vis neighbours’ [60] and the rapidity of the shifts in alliances and subversive support in
the Horn of Africa suggest that regional security is intimately linked to the survival and interests of regimes in place as
well as of rebel movements, which actually all gain from conflict and are respectively a part and manifestation of the
problem rather than part of the solution.[61] They also suggest that ‘interactions between the states of the region support
and sustain the conflicts within the states of the region in a systemic way’. [62] It will be undoubtedly argued that the view
which the author presented in this chapter is, apart from being too general and speculative, unnecessarily pessimistic and
even apocalyptic. For one, the author could not bring himself to paint a rosy, ahistorical picture of the grim realities of the
region. Moreover, his view arises from the sad fact that the Horn of Africa continues to face a myriad of smothering
security challenges. One such challenge is the primal urge of the region’s states to secure and extend their geopolitical
power in ways that are threatening to other states. The author could point to the politics during the decades preceding the
conflicts in Darfur, South Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, and even the few years preceding the 1977–1978 Ogaden war or the
1998–2000 Ethiopian-Eritrean war. The turbulent political transitions in all of the region’s states and their reciprocal
fears and disputes were so durable and interlocked that, in retrospect, the outbreak of all these conflicts seems inevitable.
In fact, it should not require much analysis and imagination to understand that, in the Horn of Africa, conditions for
conflict were brewing for years, if not decades and centuries. However, and paradoxically enough, it will always be difficult
to weave together various contradictory trends as well as realistically assess precedents and multiple indices of a dynamic
nature and of many dimensions. And, despite all the dedicated seminars, conferences, presentations, briefings, articles
and voluminous books, it will always be difficult to continuously anticipate with a reasonably high degree of accuracy the
different conflicts’ exact origins, scale, sustenance and implications. Furthermore, the region’s conflicts are usually
continuations of previous conflicts spanning out of control and they, themselves, can very easily either set off or further
complicate other conflicts.[63] All in all, in the longer term, turmoil and conflict will continue to threaten large portions of
the Horn of Africa, which is shackled to its tangled history. All of the region’s states will continue to try to survive as
cohesive and united entities and to defend their territorial integrity with far greater zeal than expected. But, they will still
be unable to control unregulated population movements both within and across unresolved borders and to militarily
overcome rebel movements once and for all. Making matters worse, the states in the Horn of Africa will continue to be
engaged in a cut-throat geopolitical chess game across the region, with leaders unable to fully get into the minds of their
counterparts as well as professionally assess their real intentions, while precipitously trying to keep one step ahead of one
another in order to avoid being eclipsed. The author would like to emphasise in the strongest possible way and for
whoever is interested in the security of the entire Horn of Africa that the coming four years will define the region’s
geopolitical map for the following twenty or thirty years. Finally, to the question of whether the Horn of Africa forms, in
Buzan’s terminology, a security complex, given all the factors mentioned in this chapter, the answer is a definite yes. In
fact, the conceptual framework advanced by Buzan fits the Horn of Africa like a glove. Healy accurately noted: [64]
[H]istorical patterns of amity and enmity are deeply etched in the region. Conflicts typically stem from factors indigenous
to the region, the most enduring being centre-periphery relations in Ethiopia and Sudan. There is also a tradition of
outside powers making alignments with states within the regional security complex. Nonetheless, the author will leave the
readers of this chapter to judge whether this last answer by proxy holds or not.

Our reps are good

Ulrichsen 11 [(Kristian, Baker Institute fellow for the Middle East) “The Geopolitics of Insecurity in the Horn of
Africa and the Arabian Peninsula” Summer 2011, Volume XVIII, Number 2] AT
Regional and international responses to the emergence of transnational threats
and, increasingly, global threats to security in the Horn of Africa and Yemen thus
demonstrate the difficulties of formulating a constructive approach that
simultaneously addresses causes as well as symptoms and balances short-
and long-term needs. In addition, the appearance and strengthening of a range of
violent and nonviolent non-state actors challenges the state-centric focus of
regimes' security considerations that have long held sway in the region, as well as
conceptual approaches to international relations and world politics.54 They involve a rethinking of the
concept of security that integrates issues of domestic and international
governance and sustainable development while taking care not to securitize them in the
way that U.S. officials have done with regard to countering terrorism in Yemen. A
broader approach to regional security should be based on maintaining social cohesion, the
intangible bond that holds members of any society together and facilitates coexistence among diverse groups and
communities. This foundation stone of the sustainability of any polity has been frayed by the legacies of conflict that have
sharpened the politics of identity and notions of inclusion and exclusion throughout the region. It would also
encompass long-term and non-military threats to the security of
communities and individuals arising from the intersection of natural-resource depletion with unequal patterns of
development and distribution, demographic and generational change, and the corrosive long-term impact of climate
change and environmental degradation. The examples of Yemen and Somalia demonstrate the intractability of the
reformulation of governance and the basis of state-society relations in periods of transition or near-total state collapse.
They highlight the tensions between the reconstruction of failing institutions and the reconstitution of social relations
when these begin to break down under the strain of internal and external stresses. Renewing state legitimacy in Yemen,
for example, by channeling regional and international support to the Saleh regime may paradoxically complicate the social
reconstruction of the Yemeni polity. Without changes to the structures and distribution of power, it is likely that moves to
empower an already-contested governing structure will only sharpen the centrifugal forces fragmenting state-society
relations, further weakening what little social cohesion currently exists.55 Meanwhile, the experience of foreign
intervention in Somalia provides a deeply negative example of how the internationalization of a conflict directly changed
the internal dynamics and narratives of resistance and — in this instance — greatly empowered, even in some quarters
legitimized, the growth of Al-Shabaab.56 More problematic for officials in the GCC states is the worrying portent that
Yemen holds for the breakdown of social cohesion under the pressure of the interlocking challenges to security at their
most basic human level. Should it occur, regime failure in Yemen would indicate that the magnitude of these internal and
external problems had become unmanageable in their cumulative and corrosive effects. It is this security
dilemma that cuts to the heart of the sociopolitical and economic trajectories
of the Gulf states and redistributive polities elsewhere as they seek to
construct productive non-resource-dependent economies to buttress the
eventual depletion of natural resources. The domestic contestation occuring in
Yemen and Somalia provides a worrying indication of how relations
between and within communities and individuals can break down when
food, water and physical protection from violence can no longer be
assured.57 The cases of Yemen and Somalia thus provide prescient case studies of how dwindling resources and the
comparative absence of productive alternatives may complicate socioeconomic transitions and interact with the erosion of
political legitimacy in states that can no longer redistribute resources to co-opt political support. They suggest that
meeting the needs of individuals and communities for fair and regular access to essential commodities must become an
integral building block of any sustainable security architecture. Rebalancing state-society relations and reformulating the
nature of the social contract and redistributive frameworks of governance are vital to securing the transition to post-oil
and sustainable political economies. Only then can these societies address the tensions between the need for incremental
reforms of governing structures and hierarchies of power relations, on the one hand, and the deeper systemic problems
and market distortions that must gradually be stripped away, on the other. States in transition are more
vulnerable than most to outbreaks of political violence and ideational and
other substate challenges to legitimacy. Yemen illustrates this troubling point and carries a
warning to policy makers in the GCC states of the difficulties involved in stripping away the layers of vested interests and
reconstructing the basis of political economy. It underscores how redistributive and patronage-based states are especially
vulnerable to economic insecurity and the breakdown of mechanisms for spreading wealth and co-opting support. From
the perspective of policy makers in the GCC states, Yemen's enduring significance will become apparent in the medium to
longer term, when the Gulf states undergo their own transition to a post-oil era. The key question then will be whether
they can manage the processes of change in a more orderly and consensual manner than Yemen has. Yet, the inconvenient
truth is that the Gulf states face similar systemic and structural obstacles to reform. They enjoy greater material resources
to buttress the transition, but their dependence on oil has been both longer lasting and more deeply rooted. Systemic
challenges to governance and crises of political legitimacy and authority in
Yemen and Somalia highlight the interlocking and transnational challenges
to regional and global security in the twenty-first century. The multiple
causes of human insecurity in each region act as threat multipliers that feed
off each other at the domestic level and have significant spillover effects that
add to destabilizing flows within neighboring polities. Although originating
domestically in response to local factors, Somali- and Yemeni-based
networks of militants have demonstrated a capability to organize and
undertake attacks beyond their boundaries. This changes the regional
security dynamic by linking the localized conflicts in the Horn of Africa with
the Arabian Peninsula. It holds important implications for the stability of
the Gulf states and for international energy and maritime security. Above
all, it requires policy makers to formulate holistic approaches to conflict-
affected regions that address the totality of governance and development issues, rather than focusing merely on
countering the symptoms of malaise caused by acts of terrorism or militant attacks.
 A2 Fisher and Anderson Re-highlighting
Conclusion of our article definitely goes aff – securitization is
done by AFRICAN regimes and our aff solves it
Fisher and Anderson 15 [(JONATHAN FISHER, International Development Department Senior
Lecturer in African Politics AND DAVID M. ANDERSON, Director of PGR Studies; Co-PI for the project 'Resilience in
East African Landscapes (REAL): Identifying Critical Thresholds and Sustainable Trajectories - Past, Present and Future)
“Authoritarianism and the securitization of development in Africa” 2015 The Royal Institute of International Affairs] At
The strategies outlined above give meaning to the manner in which African
governments have restructured their relationships with western donors
through the securitization agenda. We have argued that the process of securitization is
not an accidental or coincidental outcome of the global ‘war on terror’ in the
four countries we have examined, but rather is the consequence of a deliberate and clear-
minded set of policy decisions on the part of those African regimes. Ethiopia,
Uganda, Rwanda and Chad each has its own unique set of political conditions, but there are strong similarities in their
behaviour towards donors in the field of security policy. They have to some extent learned from one another: each
has found leverage in its relations with donors, and each has successfully
imposed its own priorities onto the security policies of its western allies,
often at the expense of other development aims and goals , especially in the area of social
and governance policies. How is it that apparently weak, sometimes fractured regimes of this kind have been able to
successfully manipulate western policy for their own ends? This very question may reflect a crucial misunderstanding of
the character of the relationship that exists between Africa’s security authoritarians and their allies in the West. The
lack of ‘commitment’ on the part of western donors to specific social
development goals in their dealings with foreign aid recipients is well
established. Donors are often willing to sacrifice social development and governance
goals in exchange for perceived advantages in the security realm, even if
doing so involves the margin- alization of civil society actors. This tendency
has a particular significance in the case of authoritarian regimes,
themselves already heavily committed to militarism and according a high priority to
security policy. Such regimes know what they want from their relationship with donors, whereas the donors themselves
remain unclear as to what their goals should be and how these should be prioritized.104 Authoritarian regimes thus
negotiate with donors from a position of strength, not weakness.
 A2 Obi
Concludes that securitization is bad because it ignores Western
influence in creating insecurity – but the aff explicitly recognizes
the US role – this approach is best
Obi 09 [Cyril Obi Nordic Africa Institute “Transnational Security and African States” Presentation at the Workshop
on Africa International: agency and inter‐dependency in a changing world, October 9th 2009,] AT
Africa’s evolving security culture and institutions do indicate some agency,
but also indicate a gap between the means and ends for dealing with
transnational security challenges. The global balance of power: political, strategic and economic, does
not offer the continent much leverage, even though Africa’s place of geo-political significance remains high. It is clear that
the continent cannot be ignored in the scheme of things anymore. Yet, the ways in which the 8 8 world’s
powers are engaging Africa so far appear neither to touch the roots of the
transnational threats emanating from the continent, or the ways in which transnational
actors and policies from outside create, or exacerbate the conditions under
which such threats germinate and proliferate and cross borders. In some cases, excessive
focus is placed on the African aspect of transnational threats , without
looking into the internal conditions and forces from outside Africa that connect,
and benefit from several transnational processes. When this position is pursued further, it not only leads to
the privileging of security over development by global powers engaging with Africa,
it constrains the space for African agency in meeting emerging security
challenges. While many scholars often point to the weakness of poorly resourced African institutions, and give the
impression that throwing money at the problem would resolve it, the solution is often not straight-forward,
considering that it often lies in a mix of historical and fundamental socio-economic and political factors
that need to be addressed to set the basis for strong and effective
institutions to emerge. A more nuanced approach that balances increased resources alongside institutional
and contextual transformation is more likely to yield better results. There is no doubt that African states and
people have important roles to play in this regard. Yet, the questions remains
how these states can be transformed from their current forms into strong
developmental and democratic entities with empowered citizens holding leaders
accountable and actively participating in decision-making in ways that defend their
dignity and welfare. History teaches us that states cannot be built from the outside, just as the building up of
Africa militaries may not even guarantee regime security in the long term, nor ensure the
redistribution and development that is so important and needed in the continent. Perhaps a more constructive
option for the international community is to help nurture the space for
engaging and reinforcing African agency to better address the risks and
threats confronting the majority of African peoples, as a critical step
towards addressing the broader challenge of transnational security risks confronting the
continent.
Piracy
 2AC Securitization Good
Perm is best – securitizing piracy is necessary to avoid strategic
miscalculation – it allows us to address challenges to maritime
activities – their scholarship can’t address the complexity of
maritime issues
Jan Stockbruegger and Christian Bueger 14 [(Jan Stockbruegger and Christian Bueger, July 11,
2014, ) Into the Blue: Rethinking Maritime Security, Insights From An Esrc Sponsored Ideaslab On Maritime Security At
Cardiff University, 26-27 June 2014 6-27-2014] AT
The concept of maritime security is one of the most recent additions to the
vocabulary of international security. If security at sea used to be discussed in the frame of concepts
such as seapower, maritime safety, or less frequently maritime terrorism, maritime security offers a new umbrella term,
which to some degree replaces or subordinates the older terms and discussions. The salience of maritime
security is related to the significant challenges that issues such as maritime
terrorism, and, perhaps most prominently, maritime piracy pose. Piracy off the coast of Somalia
was one of the determining concerns that lifted maritime security on the agendas of the major security organizations,
including NATO, the European Union, but also the African Union or the Southern African Development Community.
The rise of the concept of maritime security and the increasing importance that security actors
grant to the maritime has so far been hardly reflected in the academic literature on the
subject. While piracy in Somalia, West Africa and East Asia, illegal trafficking by sea, or the rise of new naval powers
such as China have received more extensive treatment in the literature, the academic discourse is only

slowly catching up with the empirical developments . Compared to the attention land
based security questions receive, the maritime domain remains a blind spot of security
studies and international relations. Why an Ideaslab? To fill this gap, the ESRC sponsored Counter-Piracy
Governance Project at Cardiff University organized an Ideaslab to strengthen the academic discourse on maritime
security. For two days scholars and analysts working on maritime security discussed their work and ideas across
disciplines and raised general theoretical as well as practical questions pertaining to the maritime. The goal was not only
to cross-fertilize insights, but also start to understand the connections between concepts, governance and implementation
as well as the inter-linkage between issues on the maritime security agenda. The participants of the Ideaslab reflected the
multiple dimension of the maritime. Human Geographers, Security Scholars, Political Theorists, Lawyers and Architects,
analysts from the Royal Navy, the UK Maritime Information Centre and the European Union, civil society, novelists and
the private sector discussed the future agenda of maritime security studies. You can download the Programme and the
Book of Abstracts. Ideaslab2 Thinking about Maritime Security The maritime is a complex field. Discussions pointed out
that the maritime is a common space that facilitates global connections and
interactions and serves as an economic and livelihood source for many
countries and communities around the world. It is a space that connects and
disconnects. And a space that is unruly and almost uncontrollable. Moreover, it is
a space that hosts very different types of activities, stretching from trade, to
fishing, resource exploitation and tourism. There are thus multiple ways in which ‘maritime
insecurity’ can be understood, and how it affects and is dealt with by different actors and practices. Two ways of thinking –
an operational and a relational one – turned out to be particularly useful. First, from an operational perspective
maritime security is the product of a securitization process in which
different issues are rendered as challenges and require coordinated
responses. Second, from a relational perspective maritime security is best understood by the relations it has to
other challenges, including national security and seapower, the marine environment and marine safety, economic
development and the blue economy, and human security and the resilience of coastal populations. Both understandings of
maritime security allow to grasp and discuss which actors are dealing with certain issues in the maritime domain, and how
they relate to other each other, or how they should engage with each other. Securitization and Beyond The
maritime is increasingly being securitized. The African Union, the UK as
well as the EU have developed maritime security strategies. Also rising powers such as
India and China are building up their naval and maritime administration capacities. The EU and its partners are
meanwhile investing into maritime capacity building and security sector reform in Africa. Yet the proliferation of maritime
security strategies raises questions. Maritime security is often driven by the concept of Seapower as states and regional
organizations pursue their geopolitical and geostrategic interests. Territorial disputes in the South Chinese Sea and
elsewhere indicate this trend in the shadows of international law and norms. The maritime industry however is a global
one that is largely detached from national or regional affiliations. It will thus be important to put national security
strategies in the context of the global nature of the industry. Furthermore, the maritime is part of the
global commons, and maritime threats such as piracy are by nature
transnational. To get around this contradiction between national security strategies and global realities and
challenges requires problem solving and new theoretical and practical approaches. This leads to a core paradox on the
agenda. Highlighting the strategic importance of the sea by securitizing
maritime issues is core to address seablindness . Tackling many of the challenges of maritime
security however requires rather the opposite: to desecuritize the sea. Issues such as the security of offshore oil platforms
might be better addressed by environmental regulations; when it comes to deep seabed mining the focus should turn to
discussing how to construct a fair (rather than secure) redistributive and management system; and also illegal fishing and
the livelihoods of coastal populations are rather economic and development issues than security ones per se. Illegal fishing
and the protection of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) is in fact increasingly been put on the agenda of law enforcement
and development actors. Nevertheless, thinking about the maritime in terms of safety and
security will continue to be essential. Environmental arguments and EEZ claims for instance can be
put forward to achieve national strategic objectives and to justify actions that hinder freedom of navigation at sea. This in
turn could have a negative impact on global security beyond the maritime. Furthermore, without maritime
safety and security there will not be any deep seabed mining and no
revenues to be redistributed in the first place. It is thus important to balance
and mange different maritime interests, strategies and processes beyond
securitization, rather than postulating a dichotomy between securitization
and desecuritization . Materiality, Technology and the Uncontrollable and Invisible The maritime is a vast
space. Maritime domain awareness and surveillance, monitoring and control was thus one of the core themes of the
Ideaslab. The role of technologies is crucial here. The UK has for instance created an interagency Maritime Information
Sharing Centre that collects, analyses, puts together and distributes information on real time maritime traffic and affairs
to relevant governmental departments and the private sector. There are also discussions on the use of technologies such as
drones, unmanned surface and underwater vehicles, and satellites to monitor activities on the sea. The way in which these
technologies are developed and deployed by different actors and in different fields is an important area of study, as a
recent workshop on technological solutions to piracy at the Copenhagen Business School has pointed out. Yet because of
its materiality – its fluidness, vastness, depth, and mobility – the sea often escapes efforts to monitor and to control it.
Coastlines change constantly, ships sink and objects disappear. The disappearance of flight MH370 is a case in point,
showing how satellite images, complex calculation technologies, data visualisations, maps and graphs were constantly
deployed to locate the plane in the southern Indian Ocean and to make it ‘visible’. That these efforts have so far remained
unsuccessful demonstrates the limits of maritime surveillance, mapping and control technologies. The Temporarily,
International Order and the Business Model of Piracy Somali piracy remains a major issue on the maritime security
studies research agenda. It is a paradigmatic maritime security issue and many lessons can be learned from it. It shows
how the land and the sea are connected and how state fragility and maritime insecurity fuel each other. Somali piracy
demonstrates how very local issues can quickly reach transnational scale. The success in curbing it, moreover, suggests
that the international community can address maritime security challenges if working closely together. Somali piracy is
hence an important case study of contemporary maritime security governance that has both theoretical and practical
implications. Ideaslab participants argued that Somali piracy is often seen as belonging to a non-Western, irredeemably
different, temporality from which no escape, “progress” or political agency is imaginable. Pirates and Somali people, on
the other hand, by referring to issues such as illegal fishing and exploitation, locate piracy in the very Western present.
Piracy has in fact historically and presently played a broader role in constructing the international normative order
through the construction of the sea as a social space in which existing claims of international order are made and
reproduced uncritically. One such claim is that Somali piracy is a criminal business model. Produced by economists and
Anti-Money Laundering Specialists, the business model of pirates originally ‘humanized’ the enemies of mankind and
deconstructed their coastguard narrative. Yet the business model approach towards Somali piracy is unlikely to produce a
lasting solution to the problem. Not only does it ignore local grievances over illegal fishing, but playing with alternative
economic incentives stabilizes the same profit driven behaviours that have driven piracy in the first place. Whither
Maritime Security Studies? Maritime security is a rapidly growing field of analysis and
research. Many of the maritime security issues remain poorly understood. How they are linked to
each other, how they can be addressed and how weaker states can be better
assisted to secure their waters, remain open questions. Often too much intellectual
energy has been invested in studying the battles of the past, rather than the issues of the future. A new
generation of scholarship, one that takes the linkages between seapower,
marine safety, the blue economy and the resilience of coastal populations as
a starting point, is required. The vastness of ocean space escapes any single
discipline . Ocean governance that addresses maritime insecurity will have
to operate on the local, national, regional and global level alike. The new maritime security studies will have to
recognize the irreducible complexity of maritime security, and continuously work towards strengthen the links between
reflexivity and concepts on the one side, and governance, strategy and implementation on the other.
 2AC Resurgence
Resurgence of pirates coming – failure to recognize the threat
causes resurgence
One Earth Future Foundation 15 OBP Issue Paper - Will Illegal Fishing Ignite a Preventable Resurgence
of Somali Piracy?, http://oceansbeyondpiracy.org/publications/obp-issue-paper-will-illegal-fishing-ignite-preventable-
resurgence-somali-piracy
Will Illegal Fishing Ignite a Preventable Resurgence of Somali Piracy? Incident:
Two Iranian-owned fishing vessels, with 48 Iranian sailors on board, were seized and detained
on March 21st near Hobyo, a former pirate haven in Somalia Issue: Current conditions off
Somalia echo those which led to the recent piracy crisis. However, the
underreporting of small-scale attacks may be masking alarming trends.
Background: • The rise of Somali piracy between 2005-2008 is often attributed to three
factors: o Governance vacuum created “safe havens” necessary for piracy o
Foreign fishing vessels visibly exploited coastal fishing areas, fostering
resentment in coastal communities o Hijacking of fishing vessels by quasi-official
parties enjoyed popular support o As ransoms increased, piracy attracted
hardened criminals and led to exponential growth : (13 attacks in 2004, 121 in 2008, and
277 in 2011) • Current conditions are similar to start of piracy epidemic in the early
2000’s: o Governance systems in Somalia remain weak o Foreign fishing vessels
have returned to coastal areas o Popular support is increasing for local
groups to detain foreign fishing boats o Recent reports indicate investment in
piracy is growing Discussion: • Over the last two years, the perceived threat of piracy to
foreign fishing vessels has dropped, leading to an upsurge in coastal fishing •
International navies do not have a mandate to address illegal fishing (only to
monitor), resulting in resentment by coastal communities • The potential for a
rapid resurgence of piracy remains: o Piracy business model is not broken
(original investment networks remain) o Hostility towards foreign fishing
vessel is growing in coastal communities o Very few alternatives to piracy can
compete with piracy in coastal areas • Current reporting systems for piracy
largely ignore acts of piracy against fishing vessels and regional mariners: o
Ignoring incidents involving dhows and fishing vessels could be concealing a
dangerous upward trend in criminal activity Considerations: • Current focus on
suppressing attacks against merchant vessels may be missing key indicators
of a piracy resurgence: o The desire to “put piracy in the rearview mirror”
could fuel over-confidence o Alarming trends have received negligible
attention • The next outbreak of Somali piracy is preventable: o Efforts must shift to prevention
and support for long-term solutions onshore o International forces must make a stand on
foreign fishing in Somali waters o Small investments in Somalia’s future could save billions of dollars and ensure that
thousands of seafarers will not be forced to relive the nightmare of piracy
 Resurgence Possible
Piracy can resurge at any time
Gornall 14 [(Jon Gornall, journalist) Somali piracy threat always on the horizon, No Publication 12-16-2014] AT
As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Somali piracy is already a thing
of the past and attention is shifting to other regions. As piracy has faded east of Africa, for example, off the west
coast it is flourishing. This year there have been 36 attacks in the Gulf of Guinea off countries that include Ivory Coast,
Nigeria and Gabon, and already there have been calls for the navies that have done so much to quell Somali piracy to
transfer their operations across to central Africa’s Atlantic coast. In its heyday in 2010, 207 ships were
targeted by Somali piracy, and by January 2011 the pirates were holding 736 hostages and 32 vessels. For a
time, it was a vastly profitable business. One Italian oil tanker, the Enrico Ievoli, seized off Oman in December 2011, is
said to have attracted a ransom of $9 million. Figures released recently by the International
Maritime Bureau (IMB), however, show that by last month there had been just 11
attacks this year – none successful. The last ship to be taken by Somali pirates was the Smyrni, a Liberian-
flagged tanker carrying 135,000 tonnes of crude oil that was seized on May 10, 2012. Ten armed pirates in two fast-moving
skiffs boarded the vessel in the Arabian Sea, about 250 nautical miles south-east of Ras Al Madrakah in Oman, taking the
ship and its 26 crew members back to Somali waters.They were held for 10 months before a ransom was paid. Inevitably,
at the height of the problem ships sailing in and out of ports in the UAE were affected. In June 2010 the Pakistani master
of the UAE-flagged cargo ship QSM Dubai was shot dead in a gun battle between naval forces and pirates in the Gulf of
Aden, and 2011 saw a spate of attacks on several ships and dhows en route to and from Dubai. In stark contrast, such has
been the decrease in piracy that last month the organisers of the Volvo Ocean Race announced that while in the 2011/12
race yachts were shipped to and from Sharjah for legs two and three, they were confident that the race fleet would be able
to sail all the way from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi for the second leg of the race without the fear of attack. But IMB
warned this week that the Somali pirates had not gone away – they were just
biding their time and waiting for ship owners to drop their guard, and for the
various international navies patrolling their waters to sail away. “The attacks have stopped because of a
combination of factors,” says Cyrus Mody, the assistant director of IMB, which runs the international Piracy Reporting
Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “The biggest factor has been the presence of all the navies in the
region, which have been extremely proactive, going out and interrogating vessels and, if there
has been any suspicion that they could pose a potential threat, arresting the
crews on suspicion of piracy.” In December 2008 the European Union launched Operation Atalanta,
forming the European Union Naval Force Somalia to tackle piracy off the Horn of Africa, a vital crossroads through which
all seaborne trade to and from Europe and the Far East must flow. This effort has been backed by naval missions from
Nato and the 30-nation, US-led Combined Maritime Forces partnership, based in Bahrain. About 21 EU member states
and two non-EU countries contribute warships to Operation Atalanta, which in March last year was extended until
December this year. Last month, the Council of Europe pledged to fund the operation until the end of 2016. Equally
important, says Mr Mody, has been the use of armed guards on board vessels. “We started seeing an increase in the use of
private security from mid-2010, and since then vessels which have had an armed team on board have, to date, not been
successfully hijacked.” But the cost of Somali piracy has been breathtaking – and the ransoms paid have accounted for the
least of it. A report by the US-based non-profit organisation Oceans Beyond Piracy puts the cost to the global economy of
Somali piracy, in 2012 alone, at between $5.7bn and $6.1bn, of which 29 per cent was accounted for by the cost of
additional security equipment and guards on ships, and 19 per cent by military operations. Unexpectedly, 27 per cent was
down to increased fuel consumption, thanks to the higher speeds at which ships travelled through the region, while
ransom payments were thought to have accounted for a mere 1 per cent of the economic burden. Tellingly, the report
noted that very little money was being spent on addressing the root causes of piracy in Somalia. “Lamentably,” it said, only
0.64 per cent of the cost of piracy had been spent on investing in long-term solutions, which suggested that “the
international community has yet to move from treating the symptoms of piracy to treating its causes”. As a result, “ the
gains are fragile and reversible, and if counter-piracy efforts are abandoned,
there is the risk that maritime piracy might return to the crisis levels of 2010
and 2011”. The IMB too warns that regardless of the cost, vigilance off the east coast of Africa
must be maintained. “One of our concerns is that despite this reduction in the number
of incidents, which is of course a positive thing, the people who used to carry
out these attacks are still very much there and still have the capacity,” says Mr
Mody. “The risk to them now of going out is quite high, because of the navy presence and the armed guards on board ship.
Obviously, commercially it is an expensive affair to have armed teams on ships, but if owners do start to reduce security
we may see attacks resuming.” It would, fears the IMB, “take literally only one successful
hijacking of a merchant vessel to rekindle the entire Somali piracy issue”. It’s
a fear also shared by the UN. In a report in October UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon welcomed the
progress in tackling piracy off the coast of Somalia, but said the country’s continuing economic, governance and legal
failings continued to provide “fertile ground for criminal networks”. He remained concerned that “ without the
continued support provided by the international naval presence and the self-
protection measures adopted by the shipping industry, large-scale piracy may return”.
Trafficking
 Myanmar
Myanmar proves securitizing trafficking is effective
Simangan 08 [(Dahlia, PhD candidate at the Department of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of
Asia Pacific Affairs) “Securitizing Drug Trafficking: The Case of Myanmar and ASEAN” Academia.edu OSS Digest, 1 st
Quarter 2008] AT
Drug trafficking was rhetorically securitized at the ASEAN level. However, mere
rhetoric securitization and the lack of definite policies at the ASEAN level
did not hinder the Myanmar government from taking action on its own. And it
even emphasized that it will continue to eradicate drug trafficking in its
territory even without any external financial assistance. ASEAN may not be the sole reason for the implementation of
anti-drug policies inMyanmar for it already saw the problems of drugs as early as 1961. However, ASEAN gave
Myanmar a specific target date when it signed the Joint Declaration on a
Drug- Free Southeast Asia by 2020, which was subsequently advanced to 2015. Since its
membership in ASEAN, Myanmar ’s domestic policies have been channeled
towards convincing the international community that the concerted
domestic reform programs underway in various sectors will accelerate
opening the economy to full market status. And this will, in turn, eventually lead to
pluralistic governance. 36 Addressing drug problems may be one of the
effects of Myanmar’s pursuit of attaining what it calls as "disciplined democracy”.37 Myanmar’s 15-
year plan calls for a total eradication of opium cultivation and production by 2014, a year ahead of ASEAN’s target date.
Since international cooperation and consensus sustained the initial efforts of Myanmar and these efforts led to national
implementation of policies, it could be argued that there is continuity of anti-drug efforts from
the international to the national level. Since Myanmar’s signing of the ASEAN Joint Declaration of
a Drug- Free Southeast Asia by 2020 and implementation of its 15-year plan, there was a sharp decline of opium
cultivation. Responses of Myanmar to the threats of drug trafficking can be
considered extraordinary measures. There is a sense of urgency by
declaring 2014 as target date. Myanmar made efforts to cooperate with
armed national race groups through livelihood projects and peace talks, which was not previously
undertaken by the central government . And despite lack of resources and international
financial assistance, Myanmar declared that combating drug trafficking is one
of its national duties that needs urgent solution. Programs laid down by the Myanmar
government touch, at different degrees, its porous borders, poverty and economic development, health, especially the
spread of HIV/AIDS through intravenous drugs, crime, insurgency, and corruption. According to Emmers, ASEAN needs
to first crirninalize activities related to drug trafficking. In the case of Myanmar, this was done by enhancing law
enforcement strategies. Myanmar did not ignore the aspects of production,
distribution and abuse of drugs by establishing rehabilitation and
preventive programs. In terms of global addiction to drugs, Myanmar has asked other countries, especially
those in the West, to complement its efforts against drug production and distribution with their own programs of demand
reduction. With regard to the relation between Myanmar’s government and its ethnic minority groups which are
controlling most of the regions where drugs are cultivated, its generally passive position may be attributed to its priority of
peace, state stability and unification over eradication of drug problems. It must always be noted, however, that
cooperation with insurgents must be placed in the context of the security, political and economic challenges facing the
Yangon government. 38 The challenge for Myanmar is to bring an end to the ethnic and drug-fueled insurgencies that
have plagued the country since 1948. The government should be able and willing to satisfy the legitimate political
aspiration of its diverse ethnic minorities. 39 In the case of Myanmar, securitization is
successful . Though this essay acknowledges other factors behind the decline of its opium
cultivation,Myanmar’s responses to address its most pressing non-traditional
security issue paved the way to more urgent but effective actions . 40 Controlling
drug trade requires a lot of time, money and sensible policies. The challenge for Myanmar is to sustain its efforts against
drug trafficking in the long run.
Africa
 A2 IR Bad for Africa—Permutation
Permutation—a dialogue between African realities and IR
constructs is best
Harman and Brown 13 [(Sophie Harman and William Brown) “In from the margins? The changing
place of Africa in International Relation” International Affairs 89: 1, 2013] AT
Conclusion: in from the margins Africa is at the core of empirical understandings of
international relations but often at the periphery of theoretical insights. By the same token,
IR theoretical tools remain peripheral to much scholarship on Africa. Bringing Africa in from the
margins of how we think about international relations also requires a
broader engagement with issue-specific research and greater reflection on
what such empirical research says about international relations and the
assumptions and concepts used to explain it. The result would be not ‘a parochial
new methodology totally detached from the rest of the world’,96 but a more informed dialogue between
African realities and IR analytical constructs. Africa offers deep insights that challenge notions
of the state and of governance, and liberal assumptions about the nature of the international system, and these insights
would benefit the wider IR discipline as a whole. The growing nature of eastern political influence, and the coming
together of eastern, western and African ideas on the continent, present a challenge to ideas and knowledge within the
international system in which Africa is key both in the empirical and in the theoretical sense. We have argued that this
changing canvas does not require a wholesale rewriting of contemporary
international thought , but does present a challenge to how we use and
adapt such theories, and judge their relevance and applicability. Meeting such
analytical challenges would not only assist the development of the discipline of IR but would also help to address
oversights within the policy arena of external actors and international institutions.

Perm is best—rejection of orthodox IR in Africa otherizes Africa

Harman and Brown 13 [(Sophie Harman and William Brown) “In from the margins? The changing
place of Africa in International Relation” International Affairs 89: 1, 2013] AT
The underlying basis of these arguments—across a broad and varied range of literature—is
that Africa is somewhat different, or sits outside international relations, and
therefore that contemporary IR is irrelevant to explaining Africa and how it relates
to international politics. These are sweeping arguments, suggesting that all IR theory
is irrelevant. Indeed, such claims actually reinforce the notion of Africa as
an ‘other’, an exceptional region that sits outside the bounds of established
scholarship, while at the same time essentializing both African and
European history.33 In fact, the notion that IR theory is redundant often comes down to a more limited claim
that variants of Realism are redundant.34 For example, Taylor criticizes as a ‘blight’ on the discipline what he sees as
South African IR scholars’ preoccupation with Realism as the main mode of theoretical endeavour.35 Furthermore,
while some aspects of African politics sit uneasily with Realist assumptions,
this is arguably also the case for other regions, including Europe. More importantly, there
is a wide range of research that suggests the ‘separation’ of Africa from IR is
overstated and directly addresses questions of Africa’s international
relations
 A2 IR Bad for Africa—African Agency
Our focus on transnational threats and African security
reframes IR to account for African agency
Harman and Brown 13 [(Sophie Harman and William Brown) “In from the margins? The changing
place of Africa in International Relation” International Affairs 89: 1, 2013] AT
HIV/AIDS in Africa has thus made two significant contributions to IR in the field of security studies and global
governance. The aid money disbursed in response to the new security threat posed
by HIV/AIDS, and African state reactions to this intervention, demonstrate
the efficacy of security framing in international development and in getting
global attention for an issue. The new institutions of governance developed to
respond to the challenge of HIV/AIDS in Africa provide test cases of global
governance that are increasingly being reviewed and positioned as potential models
to be replicated in other areas of governance such as climate change (with the creation of the Green Climate Fund). To an
extent, African actors play a central role in how security agendas are
manipulated and governance arrangements are shaped; however, this is only part of a
much more contentious political engagement with international institutions. Africa is not only used as the empirical
basis in which these areas are explored; it is also the site of normative arguments about the
need to act in the international system. In this sense Africa is used as a site in which to assess the
rise of liberal norms and cooperation around a system of HIV/AIDS governance, how disease or another issue can become
constructed as a security threat, and the mechanisms through which aid attempts to transform state–society relations.
All of these point to core themes in IR of conflict and cooperation , agenda-
and policy-setting, and human security. Here, then, Africa not only does ‘fit’ IR but represents a
case-study that establishes the basis from which debates can be developed and existing ideas challenged, and presents the
institutional framework for new forms of multisectoral and multilevel forms of governance in international relations.
Policy implications Taken together, the cases of China and HIV/AIDS in Africa not only
show how the continent is the subject of the practice of international
relations, but also demonstrate the relevance of such practice in relation to
Africa to policy-makers in both domestic and foreign policy. On the domestic side,
ways of governing HIV/ AIDS and experiments in health systems reform offer
opportunities to test new ways of delivering old policy ideas such as public health
insurance schemes and sophisticated community engagement models. The introduction of new welfare models, pension
schemes, and technology for communications and energy extraction in Africa do not necessarily represent examples of
best practice, but they do provide insights into new policy ideas and case-studies on reform whose relevance is not limited
to African societies. In many ways Africa has been a testing ground for new policy ideas brought from Latin America, the
US and Europe. Greater recognition of such trials may assist policy-makers in the domestic context in areas such as
engaging with communities, fostering public–private partnerships in welfare provision and resource extraction, and using
technology in democracy promotion, financial transactions and public information exchange. Despite evidence that such
new policy experiments are developed in other parts of the world—for example, technology in election campaigning in the
US, public–private partnerships in Europe, and cash transfers in Latin America—Africa is a key space in which a wide
range of these new policy ideas are applied, replicated and developed. While in some cases, such as cash transfers, Africa is
the site of second-generation application of policy, in others, such as mobile technology for public service information, it
has been at the forefront. For policy-makers looking for new ideas or new ways of
applying old concepts within their own domestic space, Africa is of central
relevance. Such recognition not only acknowledges Africa as a site of policy
practice, but also begins to invert the idea that the continent is the recipient
rather than the generator of international policy. The policy implications of
a renewed engagement with Africa’s international relations extend from the
domestic sphere to the international. Policy-makers have long seen the
continent as an area to be acted on; now they have to adjust foreign policy
towards Africa to account for increased African agency in areas such as climate
change, peacekeeping and institutional reform.81 While external donors still have significant
influence, and many African leaders remain keen not to offend investors from China, the US and Europe, there is a
growing number of examples of African actors manipulating relations with
donors to their own advantage. Countries such as Rwanda have been effective in invoking the 2005
Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in seeking more national control over aid programmes and better coordination
among donors in directing how money is spent.82 Discovery of natural resources such as gas has given Tanzania, for
example, an alternative source of income. The growth of regional bodies such as the African Union and regional
development banks such as the African Development Bank gives countries greater choice as to where and how they
borrow, and more importantly leads to changes in the policies and staff of these and other lending bodies. While the
degree to which such factors will enhance African agency remains to be seen, these rapid changes on the continent do have
several repercussions for international policy-makers. Donor countries working through the OECD Development
Assistance Committee can no longer be complacent about the influence their donations buy, as alternative sources become
available to African countries. Nor can western countries assume a stable relationship between their energy sectors and
those of Africa, as not only Chinese enterprises but also Brazilian firms such as Petrobras gain increasing prominence.
Moreover, knowledge of international policy , particularly development policy, is no longer
the exclusive preserve of institutions like the World Bank which , though still very
influential, now has to respond to competing knowledge bases within both
individual countries and regional development banks. 83 In all these areas, neglect
of Africa’s international relations not only demonstrates a blind spot in the discipline of IR, it also
poses problems for policy-makers in adapting their foreign policies to new
forms of interdependence with Africa. A renewed agenda for Africa and IR The specific issues of
China and HIV/AIDS, and the wider survey above, demonstrate that there is a wealth of literature
that uses Africa as its empirical base and which also has far-reaching
implications for how we understand a broad array of processes, changes,
institutional arrangements, power configurations and security concerns in
IR. What has not emerged strongly enough from these or other issue areas is a productive dialogue between substantive
Africa-focused research on the one hand, and theoretical reflection and development in IR on the other. As Cornelissen,
Cheru and Shaw argue, it is not only mainstream IR that is guilty here; ‘scholars dedicated to the study of Africa’s
international politics have interrogated the deeper theoretical aspects of the continent’s position in the international
system in only very limited senses’.84 We highlight three challenges for those engaged in African studies in its broadest
sense and those working in IR, which together might contribute to a renewed agenda for Africa and IR. The first challenge
—by no means exclusive to African studies—is to find ways to handle the tensions that arise
between abstract universals and the empirical complexity of the continent’s
international relations. This does entail, as noted above, an attempt to use existing
models for African contexts in order to explore their limits. However, it also
requires subsequent reflection upon the models themselves. As Katharina Coleman
argues, ‘given the highly dynamic nature of African politics, all conceptual constructs—Western or otherwise—should be
reassessed over time to determine whether they continue to be useful’.85 There are examples in the literature of this kind
of iterative work—Beth Whitaker’s work on ‘soft balancing’ and Danielle Beswick’s
exploration of ‘omnibalancing’
are two good examples operating in the core field
of mainstream IR, both of which use the lessons of African international
relations to inform theoretical reflection.86 Perhaps two other areas in particular stand out as
ripe for such attention. One is the more careful scrutiny of the assumptions which lie behind the core concepts of IR
theory. Here, IR assumptions about the similarity of state form have done much to lay the ground for the criticisms
surveyed above. Ideas that states are ‘like units’ , or are liberal in form, need to be validated, or
more likely modified, before subsequent hypotheses can be easily applied in
Africa. Some versions of liberalism
and Marxism—though by no means all—here steal a march on neo-realism. Second, in order for
a
productive engagement between IR and Africa to take place, rigid
prescriptions about which issues matter most need to be reassessed . Traditional,
security-dominated issue hierarchies in IR have been under challenge for some time, and consideration of Africa in IR
adds further weight to this trend. As Shaw and his colleagues argue, and as our survey has suggested, the agenda
for African IR is a broad one that encompasses traditional foreign policy
and defence as well as new and ‘transnational’ processes of interaction
across states and regions.87 A second challenge, for scholars of Africa and IR theorists alike, is to make the
role of African political actors analytically more central. Within African studies, reflection on the position of Africa in the
international system (whether in relation to issues of intervention or in relation to the role of international institutions
and norms) tends to overemphasize the domination of the continent by external actors. As the examples of China and
HIV/AIDS show, the majority of research analyses how international politics and the interests of external parties play out
on the continent, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, casting Africa as a passive recipient of such influence. Within IR,
particularly in work that is developing a thesis not directly focused on Africa or the developing world, the tendency is to
use stereotypical images of Africa to prop up descriptions of some defective corner of the states system. Works
emphasizing quasi- and failed states,88 pre-modern states,89 coming anarchies90 or clashing civilizations91 have all had
their influence on western foreign policies, and all drag Africa onto the stage only to dismiss it as an undifferentiated
exemplar of the more disorderly areas of the international system. Though very different in orientation, what both African
studies and IR scholars achieve is a marginalization of African actors, African initiative and African choices. However,
between the alternatives prevalent in African studies and IR there is scope
for exploration of new spaces and opportunities for increased African
activity within these issue areas. Agency has been constrained and operated in tight corners,92 but
African actors are not and have never been passive. The priority here is to look for sources of
such agency, the particularities of agency in the context of Africa, and the
wider implications of such findings for how we understand influence in
international politics. Starting from the position that Africa is just a space in which external forces operate
obscures the intricacies and differences of expressions of power in international negotiation and political processes, and
places too deterministic an emphasis on structural forces. Structural social and economic forces
undoubtedly have significant influence on the region , as they do on all regions of the world
to a greater or lesser degree, in historically different and diverse ways. However, a focus on structure without a more
detailed consideration or acknowledgement of agency binds Africa’s international relations into a narrow and
predetermined position as the recipient of international affairs rather than an active player. Both African studies and IR
would benefit from a rethink. Finally, for this engagement to be a productive one that can overcome inherited western
biases in IR, African studies scholars, IR specialists and journals, and policy-makers all need to address problems of
knowledge production itself. Western academia remains massively dominant in the
production of current IR research, especially that of a more theoretical
nature.93 A number of factors to do with resources, access to networks, subject fit and academic gatekeeping
contribute to this bias. Within Africa itself there is a wide disparity between South Africa, the locale for the best-resourced
higher education and prominent thinktank-based research, and the rest of the continent. And within the South African IR
community itself there remain significant inequalities.94 Such problems are not easily addressed and go well beyond the
remit of this article,95 but need to be attended to nonetheless.
 A2 Sovereignty Bad
Sovereignty is a core organizing principle in African states
Brown 13 [(William, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at The Open
University) “SOVEREIGNTY MATTERS: AFRICA, DONORS, AND THE AID RELATIONSHIP” African Affairs (London)
(2013)]AT
As signalled earlier, this analysis relies on a conceptual simplification separating issues of sovereign rights from issues of
national political control. In actual political discourse, things are not quite so cut and dried. Indeed, the language
of sovereignty is often deployed by representatives of recipient states in
contests over national political control , including contests with donors. The argument presented
here suggests that we should not take such discourse at face value. Nevertheless, we do need to give some account as to
why such contests arise and why the language of sovereignty is used. There are two points that address these questions.
First, the language of sovereignty is used because it is a powerful rhetorical
resource with which to contest restrictions on national autonomy that themselves
threaten the bases of domestic political support for recipient regimes. Second, the language of
sovereignty is used because loss of national control over policy is perceived
to undermine some of the purpose of sovereignty. However, while both points complicate
the account given above, they do not undermine it entirely. From the early 1980s through to the present day, Western aid
policies have been dominated by a liberal vision of desirable political and economic change in recipient countries
encompassing changes to the regulative actions of states (privatization, macroeconomic orthodoxy, subsidy removal), the
constitutive basis of governmental authority (multi-partyism, respect for human rights) and the processes of policy
formation and deliberation (‘participatory’ consultative mechanisms around poverty reduction). Each of these aims
connotes a particular, liberal, understanding of how internal authority in recipient states should be constituted and
exercised. That is, a state bound by law, operating at arms length from direct relations of production, upholding property
rights and contracts and, for some donors at least, subject to electoral endorsement. Despite the rise of a notably illiberal
China, and some recent failures of nerve among donors in terms of aid effectiveness, this liberal blueprint still animates
Western thinking in the aid arena. Such aims do not directly challenge sovereignty as a right to rule, but do reveal
processes by which liberal sovereignty is ‘increasingly embedded within the system of states and increasingly serves as a
constitutive norm of domestic and international state power and agency’.70 As such they still constitute a hugely
ambitious project of change – ‘nothing less than a Great Transformation in Africa’.71 Such a project has met resistance
from some African states in part because it challenges existing political dispensations within those states. While conflict
over liberal conditionality should not be portrayed simplistically as one between liberal donors and illiberal Africans,72
nevertheless existing political economies within many recipient states are challenged by Western liberal policy aims. The
form of internal rule in African states has been variously characterized as a ‘nuanced picture of complex overlaps, fusions,
and accommodations between [tradition and modernity]’;73 ‘bifurcated’ rule;74 or a ‘compromised modernity’.75 While
we should be wary of over-generalizations, there is a widespread agreement that African regimes rely to a greater or lesser
extent on fusions of economic and political power through clientelist and patrimonial relationships of power.76
Heterogeneity in African politics means there are both barriers to, as well as proponents of, reform in African states,
contributing much to the variety of relations with donors that Whitfield and others have detailed. However, donors'
demands for a distinct ‘liberal’ political space, separate from direct economic relations, stands as a direct challenge to the
bases of political power of many African regimes, potentially eroding avenues of personal accumulation and possibilities
for rewarding constituencies of support.77 It is this that provides extensive ground for contests over the three areas of
national control identified in Table 1 (constitutional make-up, macroeconomic policy, and wider social and economic
development). In such circumstances the language of sovereignty provides a powerful
discursive resource for such regimes. However, such an instrumental account also requires a
second element, an explanation as to why the language of sovereignty can have purchase in these circumstances. Even
if struggles over national control do not challenge the principle of a
sovereign right to rule, they do relate closely to questions of sovereignty. This
is partly to do with the challenge they present to the form of internal sovereignty – the principles and practices that
establish and condition internal recognition of a state's right to rule – as noted above. However, they also relate to the
purposes of sovereignty. A right to rule is desired and defended in part because it
promises a degree of national control and resonates deeply within all
political discourse but perhaps particularly in states which have a history of
colonization. Many nationalist movements were premised on the belief that
control over national affairs would come with political independence. 78 An
absolute absence of national control would therefore mean that much of the
purpose of sovereignty is lost, reduced to a merely legal formality. Erosion
of areas of national political control therefore are easily connected to claims
of a loss of sovereignty. Such considerations certainly complicate the analytical distinction with which we
began. However, they do not undermine it entirely. First, it should be recalled that while sovereignty as a right to rule may
be a necessary condition for exercising control, it is rarely if ever sufficient.79 This is particularly so in a world where
liberal norms and a capitalist world economy restrict state action. Second, the accounts that emphasize a
loss of control due to aid policies often overstate the extent to which donors
have been able to dominate African internal affairs. Relations with donors are highly
variable and aid has time and again proven to be a limited tool with which to influence internal change in Africa. Finally,
sovereignty remains a necessary component of such national aims and still
endows those who carry such authority with enormous and unique power. It
is therefore never just a formal legal matter: recognition of sovereignty
changes the nature of the interaction between African states and external
actors and has material effects on the outcome of contests over issue of
control. As Robert Jackson succinctly concludes: The classical view of sovereignty as political independence is
sometimes dismissed as mere legality. Of course it is legality. But legality, i.e., legal authority and right, is not something
that is trivial or of little interest or concern to practical politicians. On the contrary, in the case of sovereignty it is of
profound interest and concern.80 Far from being a myth, sovereignty plays a central role in
constituting the aid relationship and has significant political impact on the
conduct of that relationship. As we have seen, it provides the basis from which
recipients can negotiate and bargain, whether the political strategy taken is
one of accommodation and collaboration with donors , as at times in Tanzania, or one
of more forceful rejection of donor conditions , as at times in Rwanda. It is sovereign states
that are the focus of such strategic decision making and political contestation. An analytical emphasis that
we find in the aid literature, on a denial of sovereignty, tends to obscure these points. It
is not the removal of authority from recipient states but the attempt to influence change in an independent polity that is at
the heart of the aid relationship. The reading of sovereignty set out in this article has important, wider consequences.
First, it changes our understanding of the politics of aid relations. The analytical distinction between issues of sovereign
authority and issues of control helps to identify more precisely the areas of national politics that aid impacts upon in
African states. A focus on the specific issue of the recognition of a right to rule also allows us to see how sovereignty
provides the constitutive basis for aid relations as well as the material effects this has on the struggles for control over
other areas of national policy and politics. Secondly, this re-reading of its place within aid
relations reinforces the centrality of sovereignty as a key institution
organizing Africa's international relations more generally. Far from
sovereignty being a myth in Africa's contemporary international relations, it
is the nationalist assumption of freedom from external control that needs to be
critiqued. This analysis therefore also brings into question the bolder assertions that are made about the continuities
between colonial and postcolonial periods in Africa's international relations. If sovereignty remains a
central organizing device in contemporary aid relations then it reinforces
rather than questions the relevance of International Relations to African studies.
 A2 African States Illiberal
Their argument about opposition between a Western liberal
agenda and African states is reductionist and ignores history
Harrison 04 [(Graham, editorial board of the journals Review of African Political Economy and New Political
Economy and is currently the Politics department’s Director of Postgraduate Research at University of Sheffield) “The
World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance States” Google Books] AT
Second, and relatedly, there is a need to deal with the repercussions of Williams's partially-hidden epistemological
relativism. The force of Williams's critique derives from the dualised image it
constructs - of a liberal imperialism and a non-liberal subject of
intervention. Although this dualism is not fullv defined, it remains as the ontological tension that
allows the Bank to be analysed as an agency of disciplinarian intervention .
This then creates a profound social tension between the Bank and the societies into
which it interjects: [The World Bank is] attempting to transform existing institutions, atti- tudes, norms, and
patterns of conduct. Resistance to the reconstruc- tion of persons and governments should not be seen as simple
ignorance of the necessary conditions for peoples' material well-being; rather, resistance should be seen as arising out of
pre-existing attitudes, norms, and patterns of conduct. (Williams 1999: 97-8, emphasis added) The implication
here is that non-liberal selves arc being forged into liberal ones. If this was
not the case, then what purpose would Williams's analysis serve, or at least what would justify
Williams's critical tone? But this opposition is not historically tenable because Western political agencies
have been intervening powerfully in African societies since the late 1800s, ushering in forces of proletarianisation,
resistance against state regula- tions, migrations, new forms of taxation and chieftaincy, different articula- tions of local
community and nation/world, new syncretisms of religious belief and practice and so on. But it is out of this
lurching and violent history that we are to extrapolate a non-liberal self with
some form of immanent opposition to liberal forms of identity. One can imagine
how, say, lineage societies have been variously, partially and reciprocally integ- rated into 'modern' social practices over
the generations. Societies might maintain a substantial internal coherence based in historically embedded mores and
beliefs; they might re-invent' traditional identities; or they might embrace liberal codes of social interaction; but no society
is untouched by 'modernity', expressed through international currencies, firms, traders, radios and government offices.
And once we see liberalisms historical record in Africa as a multi-
generational and complex series of inconclusive encounters (Berry 1993) we have
to question the mileage that Williams can get out of the ontological
bipolarity which powers his critique. Even if previous brutal episodes of
Western liberal 'mission' have not produced ready-made liberal individuals, they certainly have
intro- duced sufficient social turbulence and hybridity to render the notion
of non-liberal selves and communities problematic.Returning to the Williams quotation
above, it is noteworthy that in general conversation during research on the Bank by this author in Uganda and Tanzania,
people would criticise the Bank for acting in cahoots with the highest
echelons of government. This also came across periodically in letters and editorials in the daily newspapers.
This suggests that previous constructions of social identity, based in notions of
civic nationalism, have left a liberal and civic legacy that now opposes the
Bank's modus operandi caricatured in regal-feudal terms. The purpose of this point is
not to make a grand counter-claim to Williams as much as to suggest that the opposition of liberal and
non-liberal selves, owing to a certain ahistoricism, excludes any
consideration of the fact that the liberal project' has been around for a good
while and has already created 'hybrid' selves that are a good deal more
complex than the characterisation 'non liberal'. The question of the epistemology of history
also closely relates to that of how change happens, that is, the issue of agency. In Williams's view, agents are individuals
whose acts are an expression of the broader cultural-normative field within which they exist. It is easy to read Williams's
critique as part of a history of the expansion and consolidation of liberalism itself." Liberalism represents an Idea whose
historic destiny
 X Shitty Cards
We’re a better form of IR
Harman and Brown 13 [(Sophie Harman and William Brown) “In from the margins? The changing
place of Africa in International Relation” International Affairs 89: 1, 2013] AT
Perhaps surprisingly, given the long-standing claims about Africa and IR surveyed above,
there is in fact a
burgeoning literature on Africa’s international relations which broadly falls
into two groups: first, a set of analyses that apply existing IR theoretical
models to African cases; and second, a much larger and more empirically
focused literature which explores different dimensions of international
relations within Africa, but with much less conceptual or theoretical reflection. Work in this second category
does not fall into the camp of what Vale identifies as ‘airport literature’ that describes a homogeneous relationship
between Africa and ‘globalization’, devoid of any engagement with IR theory,36 but rather uses particular countries and
issues in Africa as a means to explore ideas in contemporary IR. Constructivism —in line with its rise
as a theoretical approach within IR more generally— has been increasingly
used to explain a wide range of issues in Africa. These have ranged from the
changing nature of cooperation between donors on the continent37 to
institutional design and change within the African Union ,38 the ideational bases for a
‘west African peace’,39 EU policy towards Africa40 and the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.41
Similarly, liberal institutionalist models and variants of regime theory are used to provide helpful insights into explaining
EU and US policy towards Africa and the development of peace and security arrangements within the African Union.42
Realist accounts of interstate collaboration (or lack thereof ) and English
School-inspired accounts of the struggle of emerging powers such as South
Africa to gain recognition in the international system43 also feature, as does
criticism of such accounts.44 Neo-Gramscian analyses of state–society relations and of the external
influence of global economic forces and international institutions such as the World Bank have offered explanations of
both the impact of external actors on states in (particularly, East) Africa and the implications of such an impact for how we
understand the work of such institutions and hegemony in the region.45 Indeed, the range of empirical
issues widens much further once one brings into consideration research
conducted on Africa in the field of development studies, much of which
touches on diverse aspects of the continent’s international interactions.
Development studies and international relations are in many ways both
natural and uneasy bedfellows. For some, international relations is one
aspect of development studies; for others, international development falls
under the broader umbrella of international relations. As a result, those who conduct
research into Africa and international relations can and do straddle both camps.46 A number of things are suggested by
this wide range of research, and by the application of mainstream IR theory in the attempt to explain and understand a
variety of aspects of Africa’s international politics. The first is that there has been something of a shift
in the literature within the past decade or so, before which such mainstream
applications of IR theory to Africa were rather rarer. It appears that, for
some analysts at least, IR theory can be applied productively to exploring
aspects of Africa’s international politics , and that Africa’s ‘absence’ from IR
is less marked than it perhaps was.47 However, we should note that such theory is commonly applied
to explaining the formation of liberal or western notions of institutions and policy processes. As such, while standing as
something of a rebuff to the claims of a lack of fit between IR theory and Africa, it remains susceptible to the counter-claim
that such analysis shoehorns African processes, policy and institutions into existing western theoretical models. As a
result, second, such applications of theory stimulate further debate and
contention over the validity and suitability of those theoretical models. This
is clear in the debates over the application and relevance of neo-realism.
Even so, in this literature Africa does provide a testing ground for the
application of IR theory rather than being viewed as a continent so
divorced from accepted assumptions about politics and society that existing
theory needs to be rejected outright. In the end this position is not radically different from that of
any area studies literature that is engaged with debates arising from the application of necessarily abstract ‘universal’
analytical models to the particularities of a specific region. As Taylor summarizes: ‘ Mature analysis of
Africa’s place in the world necessitates an understanding of how … state–
society relations, the society of states and the non-state world interact with
the global political economy and influence the affairs of [sub-Saharan
Africa’s] peoples and communities.’48 The second group of literature is less
theoretically engaged, being concerned rather with analysing a variety of substantive
issues or cases covering many different aspects, topics and practices of
Africa’s international politics. This is evident in the recourse to Africa as an empirical base for
understanding changes in foreign policy, new security threats, and the political economy of development. The wealth of
empirically based analyses of migration,49 health, transnational crime,50 the environment and technology51 in Africa
shows how the continent is used as a—often the primary—case-study for
exploring such issues, the changing nature of international policy and
governance towards them, and their impact on questions of sovereignty in
the region.52 Analyses of changes in South African foreign policy and African peacekeeping, or ‘African solutions to
African problems’,53 are often used as a basis on which to construct an understanding of African solidarity, South–South
cooperation, and the growth of alternative ideas and interventions in the international system.54 Accounts of shifts in
foreign policy towards Africa on the part of states such as the United Kingdom demonstrate the changing patterns of
European engagement with the international system.5 Indeed, the scope and diversity of areas in which Africa is used as a
case-study are huge, perhaps the greatest for all areas of the world. Perhaps most importantly, what is clear from these
varied studies is that these accounts not only reveal much about Africa’s international relations but also tell us a
substantial amount about international politics and policy challenges more broadly. To explore further the problems and
potential that African IR might hold, we focus here on two issues that are prominent in the literature on Africa and
international politics: first, China’s role in changing global power relations; and second, HIV/AIDS. These represent what
may be seen (rather misleadingly) as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ issues in international politics; they are issues that are important
within Africa; and they are indicative of how African cases are used as empirical evidence for claims about wider changes
in international relations. However, more importantly for our purposes, they are issues that show the potential for work
on Africa to contribute to a better understanding of both IR and policy challenges more widely.

Tag
Death 12 [(Carl, Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester, and co-
convener of the British International Studies Association ‘Africa and International Studies’ working group)
“INTRODUCTION: AFRICA’S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS”] AT
If globalization – as a concept associated with International Studies – gets short shrift from Bayart and Cooper, it is
interesting to reflect upon the other concepts which unite some of the articles in this special issue. Most
important is perhaps sovereignty. Will Brown provides the most explicit
engagement with, and defence of, the importance of this concept to
explaining African politics (in his case aid relationships). He concludes that ‘sovereignty
remains a central organizing device’ in African politics, and this ‘reinforces
rather than questions the relevance of International Relations to African
studies.’9 Jonathan Fisher’s article on Uganda’s 2007 intervention into Somalia also
emphasizes the importance of the relationship between Uganda and its
donors, and the ways in which the intervention enabled Museveni to secure
Ugandan agency and bolster its national image. 10 Paul D. Williams and Arthur Boutellis
explore the relationship between the UN and the African Union, particularly the rather tense issue of international
interventions into sovereign states. 11 Danielle Beswick shows how international aid and support – particularly in the
form of military capacity building – can work to strengthen state sovereignty in certain cases (such as Rwanda).12 Even
forms of intervention intended to weaken states – such as UN sanctions against Eritrea – can end up being
instrumentalized by regimes and used to bolster internal sovereignty.13 A connected set of concepts
closely associated with International Relations include
war, conflict, and violence. Indeed, this is
one of the classic ways in which international politics is distinguished from
domestic politics: for Kenneth Waltz ‘[n]ational politics is the realm of authority, administration, and of law.
International politics is the realm of power, of struggle and of
accommodation.’14 African politics, as many have noted, poses certain challenges to this division,15 and
therefore studies of conflicts and violence in Africa can be used to develop and
deeper our understandings of struggle and power more broadly. Sharath
Srinivasan explores contested and politicized discourses of conflict, war,
peace and negotiations in Darfur; 16 David Anderson and Jacob McKnight chart the changing forms of Al
Shabaab in its conflicts in Somalia and Kenya;17 and Maggie Dwyer unpacks some of the implications of mutinies and
their relationship to politicized militaries involved in external peacekeeping operations in West Africa.18 Thirdly, IR
scholarship has often focused upon the significance of shifting great
power politics for regions like Africa. 19 Here one of the most crucial contemporary questions is
clearly the rising role of China in Africa (alongside other rising powers like India and Brazil). Daniel Large’s article in
2008 presciently identified the Sino-Africa relationship as one that would increasingly dominate popular discussion of
Africa’s international relations,20 and Giles Mohan and Ben Lampert pick up the important theme of African agency,
arguing that at various levels African actors have negotiated, shaped, and even driven Chinese engagements in significant
ways. 21 This virtual collection provides a revealing overview of some of the best research on Africa’s international
relations in recent years, but it also reinforces a number of challenges for the linkages between International Relations and
African studies. These could be formulated as questions about the basic units of the discipline, the values and norms
underpinning research, and the prevailing balance between theoretical generalization and empirical analysis.22 First, IR
theory tends to assume that states are the pre-eminent actors and that
relations between states in an anarchic system constitute a distinct realm of
politics. African studies – whilst sometimes reproducing methodological nationalism (or ‘country-ism’) –
tends to be less committed to a stark analytical distinction between domestic
and international politics, and draws our attention to a diverse range of
scales and actors including regions, locales, ethnic or linguistic groups,
classes and so on. Yet it remains true that African agency in international politics is
often mediated through the state, and sovereignty continues to be an
important strategic resource for less powerful groups in world politics. 23 My
own research on the politics of a UN Summit held in Johannesburg in 2002 revealed both ‘the blurring and
interpenetration of urban, provincial, national, regional, continental and global politics’, as well as the constitutive role of
national sovereignty in these sites (it was, after all, an international negotiation between sovereign states).24 Second,
there is a question about whether the values, assumptions and norms that the discipline of IR explicitly or implicitly
promotes are neutral and universal, or whether there are tensions between the underlying assumptions of IR and African
studies (and by implication, African societies). Cooper presents a powerful critique of the universalizing pretensions of
concepts like globalization, modernization and urbanization, instead arguing that ‘[u]nderstanding indigenous categories
– be they those of a French colonial minister, an African trade unionist, or an Islamic religious leader – requires asking
how people put their thoughts together; in other words, scholars must make an effort to get out of their own categories’.25
In a slightly different vein, it is frequently argued that IR scholarship has marginalized questions of poverty, race, gender
and the environment in a prevailing focus on issues of international order, war, and Great Power politics.26 The
broader debate here is the degree to which Africa constitutes such a specific
and particular part of the world that generalizations to wider global politics
become untenable. Finally, IR as a discipline tends to be characterized by higher levels of theoretical
abstraction than some other disciplines, including African studies. Sometimes there is also a sense amongst IR scholars
that there is an assumed division of labour in which places like ‘Africa’ are seen as ‘the field’, a source of primary ‘data’,
whilst the added value of theory-building is done elsewhere. This has had the result that ‘disciplinary generalists looked
down upon their Area Studies colleagues, who produced the “thick descriptions” they needed to theorise grandly about the
world’.27 Surely, however, the collection of articles in this virtual issue demonstrates
the value of both theoretically-informed empirical research, and
empirically-based theoretical reflections. The work here shows that rich local
research informed by extensive fieldwork can produce theoretical
innovations of broader relevance, and that theoretical reflection and conceptual
sophistication can produce new categories and hypotheses to help make
sense of complex empirical worlds.
 To cut
William Brown, ‘Sovereignty matters: Africa, Donors, and the aid relationship’, African Affairs 112,
447 (2013), p. 282.
Brown, ‘Africa and International Relations’.

Sharath Srinivasan, ‘Negotiating violence: Sudan's peacemakers and the war in Darfur’, African Affairs
113, 450 (2014), pp. 24-44.

Robert O. Ostergard, ‘Politics in the hot zone: AIDS and national security in Africa’, Third World Quarterly
23: 2, 2002, pp. 333–50; Peter W. Singer, ‘AIDS and international security’, Survival 44: 2, 2002, pp. 145–58. 71 Harman,
‘Fighting HIV and AIDS’; Kondwani Chirambo, ‘AIDS and democracy in Africa’, in Nana Poku,
Alan Whiteside and Bjorg Sandkjaer, eds, AIDS and governance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 67–92. 72 Tony Barnett,
‘HIV/AIDS and development concern us all’, Journal of International Development 16: 7, 2004, pp.
943–9. 73 Colin McInnes, ‘HIV/AIDS and security’, International Affairs 82: 2, 2006, pp. 315–26; Colin McInnes and
Simon Rushton, ‘HIV, AIDS and security: where are we now?’, International Affairs 86: 1, Jan. 2010, pp.
225–45; Stefan Elbe, ‘Should HIV/AIDS be securitized? The ethical dilemmas of linking HIV/AIDS and
security’, International Studies Quarterly 50: 1, 2006, pp. 121–46. 74 Stefan Elbe, ‘Risking lives: AIDS, security and three
concepts of risk’, Security Dialogue 39: 2–3, 2008, pp.
177–98.
Democracy
 Empirics
We control empirics—Democracy key to peace
Muravchik 1 (Josh, Resident Schoalr – AEI, “Democracy and Nuclear Peace”, July, http://www.npec-web.org/Syllabus/Muravchik.pdf)

The greatest impetus for world peace -- and perforce of nuclear peace -- is
the spread of democracy. In a famous article, and subsequent book, Francis Fukuyama argued that democracy's
extension was leading to "the end of history." By this he meant the conclusion of man's quest for the right social order, but he also meant
the "diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states." 1 Fukuyama's phrase was intentionally provocative, even tongue-
in-cheek, but he was pointing to two down-to-earth historical observations: that democracies are more peaceful than other kinds of
government and that the world is growing more democratic. Neither point has gone unchallenged. Only a few decades ago, as
distinguished an observer of international relations as George Kennan made a claim quite contrary to the first of these assertions.
Democracies, he said, were slow to anger, but once aroused "a democracy … fights in anger … to the bitter end." 2 Kennan's view was
strongly influenced by the policy of "unconditional surrender" pursued in World War II. But subsequent experience, such as the negotiated
settlements America sought in Korea and Vietnam proved him wrong. Democracies are not only slow to anger but also quick to
compromise. And to forgive. Notwithstanding the insistence on unconditional surrender, America treated Japan and that part of Germany
that it occupied with extraordinary generosity. In recent years a burgeoning literature has discussed the peacefulness of democracies.
Indeed the
proposition that democracies do not go to war with one another has
been described by one political scientist as being "as close as anything we
have to an empirical law in international relations." 3 Some of those who find enthusiasm for democracy off- putting have challenged this proposition, but their challenges have only served as empirical tests that have confirmed its robustness. For example, the

academic Paul Gottfried and the columnist-turned-politician Patrick J. Buchanan have both instanced democratic England's declaration of war against democratic Finland during World War II. 4 In fact, after much procrastination, England did accede to the pressure of its Soviet ally to declare war against Finland which was allied with Germany. But the declaration was purely formal: no fighting ensued between England and Finland. Surely this is an exception that proves the rule. The
strongest exception I can think of is the war between the nascent state of Israel and the Arabs in 1948. Israel was an embryonic democracy and Lebanon, one of the Arab belligerents, was also democratic within the confines of its peculiar confessional division of power. Lebanon, however, was a reluctant party to the fight. Within the councils of the Arab League, it opposed the war but went along with its larger confreres when they opted to attack. Even so, Lebanon did little fighting and
soon sued for peace. Thus, in the case of Lebanon against Israel, as in the case of England against Finland, democracies nominally went to war against democracies when they were dragged into conflicts by authoritarian allies. The political scientist Bruce Russett offers a different challenge to the notion that democracies are more peaceful. "That democracies are in general, in dealing with all kinds of states, more peaceful than are authoritarian or other non- democratically constituted

states … is a much more controversial proposition than 'merely' that democracies are peaceful in their dealings with each other, and one for which there is
Russett cites his own and other statistical explorations which show that
little systematic evidence," he says. 5
while democracies rarely fight one another they often fight against others. The trouble with
such studies, however, is that they rarely examine the question of who started or
caused a war. To reduce the data to a form that is quantitatively measurable, it is easier to determine whether a conflict has
occurred between two states than whose fault it was. But the latter question is all important. Democracies may often
go to war against dictatorships because the dictators see them as prey or
underestimate their resolve. Indeed, such examples abound. Germany might have behaved more cautiously in the summer of 1914 had it realized that England would fight to vindicate Belgian neutrality and to support France. Later, Hitler was emboldened by his notorious contempt for the flabbiness of the democracies. North Korea

almost surely discounted the likelihood of an American military response to its Page 2 invasion of the South after Secretary of State Dean Acheson publicly defined America's defense perimeter to exclude the Korean peninsula (a declaration which merely confirmed existing U.S. policy). In 1990, Saddam Hussein's decision to swallow Kuwait was probably encouraged by the inference he must have taken from the statements and actions of American officials that Washington would offer
no forceful resistance. Russett says that those who claim democracies are in general more peaceful "would have us believe that the United States was regularly on the defensive, rarely on the offensive, during the Cold War." 6 But that is not quite right: the word "regularly" distorts the issue. A victim can sometimes turn the tables on an aggressor, but that does not make the victim equally bellicose. None would dispute that Napoleon was responsible for the Napoleonic wars or Hitler for
World War II in Europe, but after a time their victims seized the offensive. So in the Cold War, the United States may have initiated some skirmishes (although in fact it rarely did), but the struggle as a whole was driven one-sidedly. The Soviet policy was "class warfare"; the American policy was "containment." The so-called revisionist historians argued that America bore an equal or larger share of responsibility for the conflict. But Mikhail Gorbachev made nonsense of their theories
when, in the name of glasnost and perestroika, he turned the Soviet Union away from its historic course. The Cold War ended almost instantly--as he no doubt knew it would. "We would have been able to avoid many … difficulties if the democratic process had developed normally in our country," he wrote. 7 To render judgment about the relative peacefulness of states or systems, we must ask not only who started a war but why. In particular we should consider what in Catholic Just
War doctrine is called "right intention," which means roughly: what did they hope to get out of it? In the few cases in recent times in which wars were initiated by democracies, there were often motives other than aggrandizement, for example, when America invaded Grenada. To be sure, Washington was impelled by self-interest more than altruism, primarily its concern for the well-being of American nationals and its desire to remove a chip, however tiny, from the Soviet game board.
But America had no designs upon Grenada, and the invaders were greeted with joy by the Grenadan citizenry. After organizing an election, America pulled out. In other cases, democracies have turned to war in the face of provocation, such as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to root out an enemy sworn to its destruction or Turkey's invasion of Cyprus to rebuff a power-grab by Greek nationalists. In contrast, the wars launched by dictators, such as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, North
Korea's of South Korea, the Soviet Union's of Hungary and Afghanistan, often have aimed at conquest or subjugation. The big exception to this rule is colonialism. The European powers conquered most of Africa and Asia, and continued to hold their prizes as Europe democratized. No doubt many of the instances of democracies at war that enter into the statistical calculations of researchers like Russett stem from the colonial era. But colonialism was a legacy of Europe's pre-democratic
times, and it was abandoned after World War II. Since then, I know of no case where a democracy has initiated warfare without significant provocation or for reasons of sheer aggrandizement, but there are several cases where dictators have done so. One interesting piece of Russett's research should help to point him away from his doubts that democracies are more peaceful in general. He aimed to explain why democracies are more peaceful toward each other. Immanuel Kant was the

There is a deeper explanation. Democracy is not just a

first to observe, or rather to forecast, the pacific inclination of democracies. He reasoned that "citizens … will have a great hesitation in … calling down on themselves all the miseries of war." 8 But this valid insight is incomplete.

mechanism; it entails a spirit of compromise and self-restraint. At bottom,

democracy is the willingness to resolve civil disputes without recourse to
violence. Nations that embrace this ethos in the conduct of their domestic
affairs are naturally more predisposed to embrace it in their dealings with
other nations. Russett aimed to explain why democracies are more peaceful toward one another. To do this, he constructed two
models. One hypothesized that the cause lay in the mechanics of democratic decision-making (the "structural/institutional model"), the
other that it lay in the democratic ethos (the "cultural/normative model"). His statistical assessments led him to conclude that: "almost
always the cultural/normative model shows a consistent effect on conflict occurrence and war. The structural/institutional model
sometimes provides a significant relationship but often does not." 9 If it is the ethos that makes democratic states more peaceful toward
each other, would not that ethos also make them more peaceful in general? Russett implies that the answer is no, because to his mind a
critical element in the peaceful behavior of democracies toward other democracies is their anticipation of a conciliatory attitude by their
counterpart. But this is too pat. The attitude of live-and-let-live cannot be turned on and off like a spigot. The
citizens and
officials of democracies recognize that other states, however governed,
have legitimate interests, and they are disposed to try to accommodate
those interests except when the other party's behavior seems threatening or
outrageous.

Prefer empirics
Rodwell 5—PhD candidate, Manchester Met. (Jonathan, Trendy But Empty: A Response to Richard Jackson,
http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm, AMiles)

The larger problem is that without clear causal links between material ly identifiable events and
factors any assessment within the argument actually becomes nonsensical. Mirroring the early
inability to criticise, if we have no traditional causational discussion how can we know what is

happening? For example, Jackson details how the rhetoric of anti-terrorism and fear is
obfuscating the real problems. It is proposed that the real world killers are not terrorism,
but disease or illegal drugs or environmental issues. The problem is how do we know this? It
seems we know this because there is evidence that illustrates as much – Jackson himself quoting to Dr David King who argued global warming is a greater that
than terrorism. The only problem of course is that discourse analysis has established (as argued by Jackson) that King’s argument would just be self-contained
discourse designed to naturalise another arguments for his own reasons. Ultimately it would be no more valid than the argument that excessive consumption of
Sugar Puffs is the real global threat. It is worth repeating that I don’t personally believe global terrorism is the world’s primary threat, nor do I believe that Sugar
Puffs are a global killer. But without the ability to identify real facts about the world we can simply say anything, or we can say nothing. This is clearly ridiculous
and many post-structuralists can see this. Their argument is that there “are empirical ly more persuasive explanations .”[xi] The phrase
‘empirically persuasive’ is however the final undermining of post-structural discourse analysis. It is a seemingly fairly obvious reintroduction of traditional
implies things that can be seen to be right regardless of perspective
methodology and causal links. It

or discourse. It again goes without saying that logically in this case if such an assessment is
possible then undeniable material factors about the word are real and are knowable
outside of any cultural definition. Language or culture then does not wholy constitute
reality. How do we know in the end that the world not threatened by the onslaught of an oppressive and
dangerous breakfast cereal? Because empirically persuasive evidence tells us this is the case. The

question must then be asked, is our understanding of the world born of evidential
assessment, or born of discourse analysis? Or perhaps it’s actually born of utilisation of many different possible
explanations.
 A2 Root Cuase
No consistent root cause of war, but democracy definitely solves
it
Moore 4—chaired law prof, UVA. Frm first Chairman of the Board of the US Institute of Peace and as the
Counselor on Int Law to the Dept. of State (John, Bordering on Terror Global Business in Times of Terror, 17 Transnat'l
Law. 83, Lexis, AMiles)

We will start with what we generally know about the causes of war. There is a short list of some of the major things that
we hear over and over about the causes of war. Certainly, there are specific disputes among nations;
ideological disputes; ethnic and religious differences; proliferation of weapons and arms races;
social and economic injustice ; imbalance of power; competition for resources; incidents; accidents; and
miscalculation. The old Marxists believed that wars were caused by economic determinism. There are many other
theories, but what do we really know about the causes of war? The answer is that nothing on the list of the most important traditional causes
of war powerfully correlates with war. If we look from the opposite perspective there is another list, which in many respects builds on the
causes of war list described above. That is to say, looking at traditional approaches for avoidance of war rather than causes of war, there are
collective security,
a number of mechanisms including, diplomacy, balance of power, third party dispute settlement,

arms control, and resolving underlying causes. However, once again, the point is that
there is nothing on this list that we know to have a robust correlation with
wars. This is not to suggest that these approaches are not important . They are
collectively an important part of the human arsenal for dealing with war and conflict. For example, if we want to focus on the issue of
However, these
weapons of mass [*84] destruction, it would be an error not to focus on the importance of arms control.

approaches, by themselves, are not the answer to understanding war.

Rather, the most important empirical correlation found to date, which is
quite robust, is the finding that democracies rarely, if ever, wage war
against other democracies. 1 This finding is called the Democratic Peace. According to Bruce Russett, the Chairman of
the International Relations Department at Yale, "A striking fact about the world comes to bear on any discussion about international
relations ... [when we consider that] democracies have almost never fought each other."
China
 Navy Add-On
No link – our navy add-on isnt’ a China rise argument and
doesn’t view China as power-seeking or support containment –
our argument is that China will increase its navy to protect its
sea routes
 A2 Self Fulfilling Prophecy
China “Self fulfilling prophecy” wrong – our reps avoid
extinction
Blumenthal et al 11 ( Dan Blumenthal is a current commissioner and former vice chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission, where he directs efforts to monitor, investigate, and provide recommendations on the national security implications of the economic relationship
between the two countries. “Avoiding Armageddon with China” nkj)
The balancing and hedging strategy should involve options to avoid what Traub rightfully describes as
"Armageddon." We call for a myriad of conventional options short of striking the nuclear-armed PRC, in
the hope that such a strategy enhances deterrence in the first place and avoids Armageddon should
deterrence fail. The strategy aims to slow escalation rather than quicken it. The idea of a
self-fulfilling prophecy -- of turning China into an enemy by treating it as
one -- is like a unicorn; it is a make believe creature that still has its
believers. The United States has done more than any other country to "turn
China into a friend" by welcoming it into the international community. Alas,
China has not fulfilled this U.S. "prophesy of friendship." Instead China has
built what all credible observers call a destabilizing military that has
changed the status quo by holding a gun to Taiwan's head even as Taiwan
makes bold attempts at peace, by claiming ever more territory in the South
China Sea, and by attempting to bully and intimidate Japan. Traub asks whether our
allies and partners will be willing to participate in an "anti-Chinese coalition," as he
describes it. As the paper says, all allies, partners, and potential partners are already

modernizing their militaries in response to China. And they will continue to

do so regardless of whether the U.S. pursues what Traub would see as an "anti-China"
strategy. Even laid-back Australia has plans to double its submarine fleet -- it is not doing so to defend against Fiji. The paper argues that it is
time for the United States to offer more serious assistance so that matters do not get out of hand. A
strong U.S. presence and commitment to the region's security can help avoid a regional
nuclear arms race, for example. The United States can be a force multiplier by providing
the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance that only Washington
possesses, and by training, and equipping our allies and friends. This
strategy is one way of beginning to put Asia back in balance as China
changes the status quo. Not doing so, we fear, would lead to Armageddon.
 A2 China Predictions Bad
China’s behavior is based on empirical patterns—we can predict
their actions
Krolikowski 8 (Alanna is a doctoral student in International Relations at the Department of Political Science of the University of
Toronto. She completed an MA in International Relations at the Munk Centre for International Relations of the University of Toronto in
August 2006; State Personhood in Ontological Security Theories of International Relations and Chinese Nationalism: A Sceptical View:
http://www.utoronto.ca/ethnicstudies/Krolikowski_2008.pdf)
According to such an approach, the history of the Chinese state-as-actor suggests that it
should be a relatively straightforward case of unhealthy basic trust and
ontological insecurity. Historians and political scientists studying China, from SSu-yu Teng and John Lewis Fairbank
onward, have stressed the profound civilizational rupture that China experienced with its first “encounter with the West.”37 The
traumas associated with subsequent colonization and exploitation shattered
China’s self-understanding as the beneficent “Middle Kingdom ” and exposed as illusory
its long-held beliefs about the pacific nature of its external environment and its own place within it.38 These processes can be
understood as having lead to a deep form of existential crisis that, while being in a sense ‘acute,’ has
also been sustained over generations.39 The numerous upheavals experienced
by the Chinese civilization during the 20th century , especially the most recent
Tiananmen Square Massacre and ensuing international isolation, can no
doubt count among the major disruptions to China’s sense of a continuous
“biographical” narrative. As Chih-yu Shih recounts, the issue of outwardly oriented self-representation has also “been
intrinsically related to China’s domestic institutional array”:40 One witnesses the change of China’s self-image from a ‘socialist China’
externally allied with the Soviet Union and internally embodied in central planning and land reform, to a ‘revolutionary China’ externally
antagonistic toward both superpowers and internally plagued by the Cultural Revolutions, and then to an ‘experimental China’ externally
lauding independence and internally praising decentralisation. The most recent shift is toward a ‘normal China’ externally looking for
partnership and internally enforcing economic reform. All these changes have required a new theory of the world.  While this series of
redefinitions certainly suggests the capacity for identity change, because these historical changes have
required fundamental and often violent reconstitutions of the Chinese state
and sweeping reassessments of the international environment, they should be understood as traumatic
disruptions rather than reflexive developments of China’s self-identity. The
resulting sense of existential anxiety about its own self-identity and the
nature of its environment should make of China an ontologically insecure
actor with rigid basic trust. The condition of unhealthy basic trust which
prevents China from quelling its existential anxiety and ontological
insecurity should, according to the theory, compel China to engage in routinizing
behaviours as a means of achieving a stable self-identity and a sense of
ontological security. More specifically, we should expect ontological insecurity to
prompt the reinforcement of an existing identity through routinized
relationships. A state locked into this type of condition should
systematically reproduce similar forms of behaviour with other actors as a means
of stabilizing its identity. We should observe constant patterns in the state’s behaviour,
including rigid, inflexible positions on international issues; a persistent loyalty to states with which it has routinized friendly or
cooperative relations; and lasting animosity, hostility or rivalry with states that it is used to
regarding as threats. Empirical observations disconfirming this hypothesis would include the absence of such patterns and, in their
stead, change over time, flexibility in the state’s responses to different situations, adaptation and learning. 
 Reject Their Scholars
Their authors have flawed information
Chan 4—PhD in Political Science from Minnesota U, Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Colorado U at Boulder (Steve, Asian Affairs,
Vol 31, No. 3 (Fall, 2004), “Extended Deterrence in the Taiwan Strait: Learning from Rationalist Explanations in International Relations”, JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30172621, p. 167, RBatra)
Rationalist interpretations do not imply that people are omnipotent in their ability to procure and process information. We know all too well that people are subject
to a variety of cognitive and perceptual errors (for example, Jervis 1976; Levy 1997; Kahneman and Tversky 2000; Tversky and Kahneman 1977). This recognition
of limits to rationality, however, hardly warrants general attributions of naiveté , even stupidity, to government leaders. On the contrary, it seems sensible to start
officials know their counterparts far better than scholars may
from the premise that

wish to acknowledge. Washington, Beijing, and Taipei, for instance, invest

enormous time, effort, and resources in trying to gain an accurate
understanding of each other. Academics have a hard time claiming any special
insight or unique source of wisdom, whether it is based on mastery of the
other side's language, intimate familiarity with its culture, or access to
timely and sensitive information with restricted distribution. If anything,
they are usually at a considerable disadvantage on these scores when
compared to diplomats, intelligence analysts, and even journalists and business people.
Indeed, academics in fields such as history and political science typically
operate in the realm of common knowledge, outdated information, and
mundane data. This confession in turn implies that at least for some of us, our individual and collective forte lies with the analysis of persistent
empirical patterns and the formulation of general models of foreign policy conduct.
Warming/BioD
 Warming/BioD
Their critique of the environment ignores the facts—the threat is
real and it comes first—this debate is key
Crist 2004—Professor at the Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology in Society, Doctorate from
Boston in Sociology (Against the Social Construction of Nature and Wilderness, Environmental ethics vol 26, no 1 p.14-16,
http://www.sts.vt.edu/faculty/crist/againstsocialconstruction.pdf, chm)

The project of "the social history of nature" is not intrinsically at odds with what has been called
the extinction holocaust, the death of birth, biological meltdown, or biological
the end of natural history, the end of nature,

Armageddon. 29 At the level of analysis, however, instead of attending to the degradation of

natural systems, constructivism focuses exclusive attention on human
discourses about it. 30 This approach to environmental issues obeys standard
constructivist moves, which either bracket "nature itself' as extraneous to sociocultural exegeses
about it, or regard "natural reality" as outcome rather than source of scientific representations. 3] But the

epistemological construal 27 Skepticism has been injected into constructivism by the

appeal to two philosophical theses as (ironically) sweepingly true: the "underdetermination thesis" (all theories are underdetermined by evidence), and the "theory-
Social Construction of
laden ness of observation" (data are always mediated by interpretation, techniques, paradigms, etc.). Hacking,

What? p. 73. 28 For philosophical expositions of the incoherence of skepticism, see the late Wittgenstein influenced analyses of Jeff Coulter, Mind inAction:
Stanley Cavell Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): and Hearne, Adam's Task. 29 It

reflects the severity of the biodiversity crisis that recent scientific literature
often characterizes the human-driven annihilation of plants, animals, and
ecosystems in such value oriented terms. For constructivists, expressions like
"holocaust" or "Armageddon" would be construed as a "rhetoric of calamity "
(Hannigan, Environmental Sociology, p. 36), or as environmentalist "morality play " (Ross, Chicago Gangster Theory of

Life, p. 31). Such a constructivist standpoint must remain blindly focused on the

words, rather than looking at the realities compelling scientists and others to use
them. 30 Constructivists even express skepticism about the diagnosis that we in the midst of "an environmental crisis." For example, Hannigan,
Environmental Sociology, p. 30. 31 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The ConstruCTion of Sciemific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986). Spring 2004 SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF NATURE AND WILDERNESS 15 of sociocultural input as sufficiently explanatory of, or constitutive force
behind, " natural reality" grants power to human practices that reflect and
reinforce our species' capacity for colossal arrogance; it generates the
familiar logical and political problems associated with relativism 32 ; and funnels all
fascination about knowledge creation as a story about people-rather than revelation, conjecture, distortion, etc., regarding nature. Taking a

human-driven ending of natural history seriously presupposes admitting the

independent reality of what is ending; and it requires trust in the scientific discourses
charged with understanding the building-blocks and processes of natural
history. Insurmountable roadblocks to these prerequisites seem built into constructivist reasoning-for both scientific inquiry and its submitted views about
natural history are regarded as socioculturally negotiated, provisional configurations. But coming to terms with the

predicament of complex life on Earth necessitates that the relevant

biological knowledge be taken at face value-a very different stance from deconstructing and/or bracketing its
status as realistic representation, or regarding its content as the outcome (rather than source) of inquiry. Taking science seriously means that instead of

an exclusive meta-discursive focus on how scientific "claims" are made,

there is receptivity to the validity of biological findings; and instead of focusing on how scientific
assessments are "contested"-a favorite constructivist tack-what scientists are agreeing on is (also) attended to. Crucially for the argument presented here, life
scientists concur that we are in the midst of a human-driven biodiversity crisis . 33 The gravity of this diagnosis is not marred by the
biological science-
caveat that scientific estimates of extinction rates often diverge widely. The significant point is that

conservation biology, especially- is the key source of knowledge about biodiversity losses, regardless of the obstacles in
producing precise quantitative expressions. 34 The reality of this crisis is documented with urgency by a burgeoning biological literature; as E. O. Wilson puts it,
"the evidence is persuasive: a real problem exists, and it is worthy of your serious attention."35 32 See James Proctor, "The Social Construction of Nature:
Relativist Accusations, Pragmatist and Critical Realist Responses," Annals Of the Association of American Geographers 8 (1998): 352-76. 33E. O. Wilson, The
Future of Life (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002); John Terborgh, Requiem for Nature (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1999); Paul Ehrlich, "Extinction: What is
Happening Now and What Needs to be Done," in David K. Elliott, ed., Dynamics of Extinction (New York: John Wiley, 1986), pp. 157-64; Peter Raven,
"Disappearing Species: A Global Tragedy," The Futurist, October 1985, pp. 9-14; "What Have We Lost, What Are We Losing?" in Michael J. Novacek, ed., The
Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts, American Museum of Natural History Book (New York: New Press, 2001); StuartPimm, "Can We Defy Nature's End?"
Science Yet, constructivist analyses of "nature" favor remaining in the comfort zone of zestIess agnosticism and noncommittal meta-discourse. As David Kidner
suggests, this intellectual stance may function as a mechanism against facing the
devastation of the biosphere-an undertaking long underway but gathering
momentum with the imminent bottlenecking of a triumphant global
consumerism and unprecedented population levels . Human-driven
extinction-in the ballpark of Wilson's estimated 27 ,000 species per year-is so unthinkable a fact that choosing to ignore it
may well be the psychologically risk-free option. Nevertheless, this is the opportune historical
moment for intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences to join forces
with conservation scientists in order to help create the consciousness shift
and policy changes to stop this irreversible destruction. Given this outlook, how
students in the human sciences are trained to regard scientific knowledge,
and what kind of messages percolate,;" to the public from the academy about
the nature of scientific findings, matter~, immensely. The "agnostic stance" of
constructivism toward "scientific claims" t about the environment-a stance supposedly mandatory for discerning how'l ' scientific knowledge is "socially
striving to interpret the world at an hour that is
assembled"36-is, to borrow a legendary one- r liner,

pressingly calling us to change it.

Terror
 2AC Terror
East African insecurity causes nuclear terror
Grossman-Vermaas 10 [(Rita Grossman-Vermaas, Senior International Policy Advisor in the
Persistent Surveillance Division at Logos Technologie; Konrad Huber, UNICEF’s peacebuilding adviser in Indonesia
between 2001 and 2003, now works for the Office of Transition Initiatives of USAID; Alexandra Kapitanskaya, Strategic
Conflict Resolution Group) “Minimizing Threat Convergence Risks in East Africa and the Horn of Africa: Prospects for
Achieving Security and Stability” Center for the Study of Threat Convergence May 2010] AT
Nonetheless, a home-grown jihadist presence has increased in Somalia since the 1990s,
particularly with the emergence of an alliance of Islamist groups from Somalia’s civil war in the early 1990s known as
alItihaad al-Islamiya (or the Islamic Union, commonly referred to as AIAI). AIAI enjoyed short-lived success in
controlling far-flung parts of Somalia, including Bosaso in the northeast and Kismayo in the southeast. But after
political and military setbacks, it reverted to controlling smaller clan bases
in the south. Ogadeni clan allegiances led AIAI to gravitate to the Somali
regions of Ethiopia, where it established a presence in the midto-late 1990s. In 1996, it
carried out bombing attacks against hotels and government officials in
Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, provoking an Ethiopian military strike against AIAI’s Somali base in Lu’uq.
With a stated goal of creating an Islamic caliphate in the Horn of Africa and
connections to al-Qaeda, AIAI leaders cooperated with the latter’s East
Africa branch, which was responsible for the high-profile terrorist attacks
against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in 1998 and against the Israeli-owned Paradise
Hotel, north of Mombasa, in 2002.37 By the early years of the new millennium, AIAI functioned more as a loosely
operating network of personal alliances than a cohesive organization. It gave rise to a new jihadist construct in 2003-04
which eventually became known as al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab’s influence in Somalia grew
through an alliance with other Islamist political forces assembled under the Union of
Islamic Courts (UIC).38 The UIC briefly ruled most of south-central Somalia during the second half of 2006 until an
Ethiopian invasion force forced the Courts from power in January 2007.39 Al-Shabaab’s subsequent opposition to the
two-year-long Ethiopian occupation further honed its battlefield tactics and greatly raised its profile as a political-military
actor to be reckoned with, but as of late 2009, this ascendancy has not ensured its universal control of south-central
Somalia. Since the Ethiopian withdrawal in early 2009, al -Shabaab has largely directed its attacks
toward domestic Somali political opponents, namely the Transitional Federal Government
(TFG) and African Union peacekeepers. The year 2009 saw a series of highly lethal attacks. Burundian
peacekeepers suffered a suicide attack against their base in February, and in June an al-
Shabaab attack in the town of Baladwyane killed the TFG’s security minister and 35 others. A September 2009
suicide car-bombing of the AMISOM headquarters left 17 dead , including Burundian
and Ugandan troops and Somali civilians. In early December 2009, a suicide attacker, widely suspected to be an al-
Shabaab operative, detonated a bomb at a Mogadishu hotel where a graduation ceremony for medical students was taking
place. Three TFG ministers were among the two dozen victims. From a regional counter-terrorism standpoint, there are
four key elements about alShabaab’s current role and operations which demonstrate its potential to pose a considerable
terrorist threat in the region. First, numerous analysts in East Africa and the US commented on the
increasing sophistication of al-Shabaab’s attacks over time, particularly in
the smaller size, greater lethality, and increased accuracy of the improvised explosive
devices (IEDs) it uses in remotely-detonated attacks.40 This trend, together with the introduction of suicide-bombing
techniques, suggests that the exposure of Somalis to foreign battle zones and/or al-
Qaeda training of operatives in Somalia have led to a worrisome
improvement in al-Shabaab’s skills in unconventional warfare. 41 Second, it is clear
that al-Shabaab continues to recruit foreign fighters to its cause. 42 Propaganda tools,
such as highly sophisticated recruitment videos distributed over the Internet, seek to position al-Shabaab as al-Qaeda’s
ally in the context of a global jihadist struggle against the Christian West, their proxies (like Ethiopia or AMISOM), and
‘apostate’ Muslim regimes, including that of the Islamist president of the TFG, Sheikh Sharif.43 Most estimates of the
numbers of foreign fighters in Somalia, whether alShabaab or al-Qaeda recruits, are in the low hundreds.44 Nonetheless,
the countries of origin of such recruits will likely face an increased threat of
domestic terrorism in the event that any return to their home countries. While exact numbers or even reliable
estimates are impossible to come by, it is thought that foreign fighters in south-central comprise non-Somalis who come
primarily from the Gulf and Yemen, as well as ethnic Somalis hailing from Kenya, the Gulf, and even Western countries
like the UK and the US.45 There are also reports that some come from as far as Pakistan and Chechnya.46 A third
dynamic with serious implications for regional security is al-Shabaab’s capacity to
carry out attacks beyond its immediate territori al sphere of influence. In October 2008, al-
Shabaab suicide operatives detonated a series of coordinated bombs in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, and Bosaso,
the capital of Puntland, killing twenty-one people in total. Similar attacks, though on a smaller scale, were carried out in
Somilaland and Puntland in November-December 2009, killing military officers in the Somaliland and a judge and
policemen in Puntland. On December 13, 2009, the Puntland vice-president survived a bomb attack on his motorcade
outside of Bosaso. While al-Shabaab might be sufficiently occupied with protecting or advancing its current political-
military position in south-central to be engaged in planning for other regional attacks, it has shown that it has the
capacity to expand its operations and to recruit fighters from, or infiltrate
operatives into, ethnic Somali communities elsewhere in the region.47 Al-Shabaab
has also issued repeated threats against Kenya, including most recently in October 2009.48 In
addition, an initial story in Kenya’s Daily Nation reported that al-Shabaab was planning three bomb attacks around the
time of US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s visit to Nairobi in August 2009.49 Kenyan officials suggest, however, that
the original reporting was erroneous.50 51 A fourth factor helps to temper concerns about the scale and likelihood of an
al-Shabaablinked regional terrorist threat: that is, Somalia’s domestic political context and alShabaab’s internal divisions.
The current environment actually serves to discourage, rather than encourage, any faction in al-Shabaab that harbors
ambitions to execute a regional attack. Al-Shabaab’s heterogeneous components are, in fact, an alliance of convenience,
unified in their opposition to the TFG and AMISOM, and able to control some territory and command certain sub-clan
allegiances. Similarly, other opponents to the TFG such as Hizbul Islam, which is headed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys,
an exAIAI leader and an erstwhile ally of President Sheikh Sharif and al-Shabaab during the Islamic Courts period, also
represent several factions.52 With greater political skill, the TFG, which itself constitutes an uneasy accommodation
between certain clan and Islamist interests, could expand its base and exert greater control over south-central. Some
analysts maintain that the TFG could isolate the hardest-line al-Shabaab elements geographically, militarily, and
politically. In response, al-Shabaab could direct their efforts toward transnational terrorist attacks. As discussed in greater
detail below, Kenya, Uganda, and Burundi could be likely targets, but others could emerge. Realistically, however, and
where this fourth factor acts as a likely curb on al-Shabaab regional terrorist ambitions, it is improbable that the TFG will
muster the political skill, mobilize the requisite support, and demonstrate its ability to govern in the short-tomedium
term. Rather, south-central Somalia is more likely to remain mired in deadly but inconclusive conflict that will keep al-
Shabaab focused on more narrow interests at home, unless it receives substantially more outside support.53 Al-Qaeda in
East Africa Al-Qaeda has actively sought a nuclear capability . It demonstrated
an “ unmatched commitment” to acquiring a nuclear device , both in Sudan in the
mid-1990s and again in Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban in 2001.54 Al-Qaeda in East Africa has
been weakened considerably in recent years, making its use of East Africa to transit materials or
potentially carry out an attack a highly improbable event, but not one that can be dismissed entirely.
There is also the danger that the region might be used for Al-Qaeda recruitment,
smuggling, staging and financing purposes.55 Al-Qaeda operatives first arrived in Somalia from
Sudan in the early 1990s to oppose the US-led intervention in Somalia, and some ended up inter-marrying with Somalis
and operating under the protection of family and clan ties afforded by such relationships. A recent analysis argues that
“bin Laden had deployed cadres of operatives into the Horn of Africa [starting
after 1992] in an effort to spread Salafism and the doctrine of jihad, but al-Qaeda's Africa Corps
ultimately failed to create a lasting front on the continent.”56 Foreign jihadists, including the alleged leaders of al-Qaeda’s
East Africa branch,57 used Somalia as a safe haven and a base for training and operations in the region. The most
notorious of these al-Qaeda regional players have been targeted by US
military strikes for their involvement in transnational terrorist incidents ,
namely, the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. They include Sudanese-born Abu Talha alSudani,
killed in January 2007, and most recently, Kenyan-born Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, killed in September 2009. The other
high-profile al-Qaeda leader allegedly remaining in Somalia is Comoros-born Fazul Abdullah Mohamed.58 Meanwhile,
arising out of the links between AIAI and al-Qaeda, some members became al-Shabaab leaders who spent time in
Afghanistan where they received training and operational experience.59 US strikes against al-Qaeda have degraded the
cohesiveness and capacities of the organization, but have not displaced it completely from the area. Al-Qaeda has
continued to recruit foreign fighters to Somalia, and it allegedly runs a series of training camps around the town of
Afmadow in the Lower Juba region, adjacent to Kenya.60 Historically, Kenya has been among the
more accessible and functional places in the region from which al-Qaeda is
said to operate. Parts of its Muslim population are considered vulnerable to radical Salafist or even jihadist
appeals, and its society is more open and its institutions and infrastructure more developed than the majority of its
neighbors—particularly Somalia. A recent review of al-Qaeda documents reveals that “[d]espite two major al-Qa'ida
attacks on Western targets in 1998 and 2002, the group's operatives continued to move about
the country freely, establish businesses in Mombasa, Nairobi and Lamu, operate Islamic charities,
find local brides, rent light aircraft to come and go from Somalia, hold meetings,
communicate with al-Qa'ida figures outside the country, transfer money,
stockpile weapons and engage in years of undetected reconnoitering of
possible targets.”61 This supports independent analysis suggesting that Somalia may be less attractive as an
operational base for transnational terrorists than countries that are more stable and possess a more developed
infrastructure, such as Kenya.62 There is no recent evidence that al-Qaeda in East Africa is actively operating in Kenya at
present. The Kenyan government is among the strongest supporters of western counter-terrorism efforts in the region,
including through efforts to bolster capacities of civilian and military authorities. However, al-Shabaab has
clearly taken advantage of long, porous borders with Somalia and limited
state presence in the northeast to carry out cross-border operations like
kidnappings. Potential Targets in the Region US and East African analysts and practitioners suggest that while Al-Shabaab
and/or alQaeda in East Africa may be the most likely instigators of a transnational attack in the region, they would have
little need for a radiological device. In fact, these observers assert that these organizations would most likely resort to
“sufficiently” lethal conventional explosives, suicide bombers, and/or small arms for their purposes.63 Nevertheless,
there are potential targets in the region about which planners and
policymakers should be aware. US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania have already
been the site of high-profile attacks by al-Qaeda in 1998 and 2002. Despite the fact that both
Kenyan-born Somalis and Somalis from Somalia have deeply vested interests in Kenya,64 the country is likely to remain a
target, especially given the potential for al-Shabaab to recruit from Somali communities in Eastleigh (a Nairobi
neighborhood), Dadab (where Somali refugees have lived in northeastern Kenya since the start of the civil war in the early
1990s) and/or the Mundera region of the northeast (where ethnic Somalis have traditionally lived). Kenya’s
commercial infrastructure and the large presence of international interests,
including a major regional hub for the UN in Nairobi, constitute potentially
attractive targets. In addition, Mombasa’s port serves as a catchment area for importing and distributing vital
commodities including fuel and food throughout the region. The area that depends on Mombasa for such international
commerce extends well beyond just Kenya and Uganda to southern Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, and even parts of eastern
DRC. The port and/or its road and rail links to the interior could easily be
crippled, with devastating effects for a large region, as underscored by the relatively brief
but severe cutoff during Kenya’s internecine violence caused by the late-December 2007 electoral crisis. As noted above,
Al-Shabaab has issued repeated threats against Kenya , including most recently in October
2009.65 Potential targets are not limited to those in Kenya, as attacks against major ports in Tanzania and Djibouti would
also be highly disruptive to the region. Djibouti has the additional attraction of hosting
international military forces such as those of former colonial power France,
the headquarters of the US Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of
Africa (CJTF-HOA), and international anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden.
Meanwhile, Addis Ababa is home to the headquarters of the AU, which sponsors AMISOM and, together with the UN, is
involved in a peace process designed to strengthen the TFG and marginalize al-Shabaab and other groups. The Ethiopian
capital has been the site of Somali-linked terrorist attacks in the past. Burundi and Uganda also
present relatively “soft” targets that would be potentially attractive to al-
Shabaab and/or al-Qaeda due to their contribution of peacekeepers to
AMISOM and their relative openness as countries.66 Al-Shabaab has, in fact, issued threats
against the two countries, immediately prompting Somali community leaders in Uganda to offer assistance
to the government in tracking and reporting suspected operatives infiltrating into the country.67 While these and other
locations in East Africa might be potential targets for terrorism, the likelihood of an attack by present-day organizations
using radiological materials in the near future is considered low, based on their known history of tactics, expertise, and
motivation to use such materials. Nuclear Trafficking and Illicit Trading in East Africa and the Horn Despite the low
probability of the region being a possible target for a radiological attack, there is a possibility for it to be
used as a transshipment route for radiological materials or weapons
components. Reported cases of trafficking through Tanzania and Kenya involve
materials allegedly originating from the DRC. In addition, the region as a whole
is contiguous with the Middle East, Central and Southern Africa, and it is
accessible to South and Southeast Asia by sea. Thus, transportation links abound. For example,
Kenyan-based Somali traders operate a massive air cargo network from Dubai and Sharjah in the Gulf (sometimes via
Mogadishu) to the Eldoret international airport in Kenya’s Rift Valley. From Eldoret, electronics and other relatively light,
high-value consumer products are shipped by road throughout Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and elsewhere in the Great
Lakes and southern African regions. There is no evidence that such transport networks, including return routes, have been
used by extremist groups or for trafficking radioactive material, but contraband, such as drugs, have
allegedly been moved through this system making it vulnerable to such
use.68 Ocean routes are similarly subject to abuse, including, for example, in Zanzibar’s port,
where unregistered and unmonitored passengers and cargo are openly loaded and off-loaded. Zanzibar is a short distance
by speedboat to Tanzania’s mainland and capital, Dar-es-Salaam, and it acts as a major drug transshipment route from
South and Southeast Asia.69 A recent incident involved the alleged smuggling of 15 rocket-propelled grenades to Dar-es-
Salaam via a dhow from Zanzibar.70 As a result, Zanzibar’s porosity, and substandard port security in Dar-es-Salaam
itself, should be of considerable concern for policymakers.71 (See Map 1 for trafficking and transportation routes
throughout the region.) Given the region’s relative openness in terms of cross-border movements (both licit and illicit) and
strained capacities on infrastructure and central control, East Africa and the Horn present
numerous opportunities for transiting the region with radioactive material.
The IAEA, working closely with Tanzanian authorities, has warned that materials trafficked through
East Africa could be used to make a “dirty bomb” in the region.72 Moreover,
authorities and experts have noted that the nuclear trafficking market is heavy on supply , but
relatively weak on demand—which is a positive trade balance in this case. There are relatively few buyers with the
resources and sophistication to generate much demand. Uranium deposits exist in and nearby East Africa, including in
Somalia, Tanzania, and the DRC. At present, Somalia’s deposits in the central and northwestern parts of the country are
neither commercially exploited, nor is there any local capacity to transform such materials into potentially usable
substances for a WMD or RDD attack.73 Tanzania’s recent discoveries of uranium in Dodoma and Ruvuma will likely
place it among the top ten producers in the world within about two years, which will require a significant geographic and
technical expansion of the Tanzania Atomic Energy Commission and other entities. However, these sites are still a couple
of years away from commercial mining.74 The expansion of uranium mines could create an
increase in theft, but the security implications of such thefts would not be significant. Mines could
become a greater nuclear proliferation challenge if the uranium is procured
by states pursuing the development and acquisition of nuclear weapons. 75
Historically, a problematic source of potential radioactive material has been the
DRC’s Triga research reactor, located just outside of the capital of Kinshasa. First established in the late
1950s as part of the US government’s Atoms for Peace program,76 the facility, known as CREN-K, was upgraded in the
early 1970s and operated until late 2003.77 Two fuel rods were stolen in the 1970s. One was recovered in Italy almost a
decade later, reportedly found in the hands of a group linked to the Mafia.78 The second fuel rod is “presumably, still at
large.”79 CREN-K continues to store fresh and spent LEU fuel. Negotiations are still underway with the US to have the
spent fuel returned to the US.80 In addition, orphaned materials have occasionally been uncovered in the region,
including one case in Ethiopia where a quantity of americium-241 was discovered; the IAEA was consulted on its handling
and disposal.81 Fragmentary reporting from the region and the IAEA indicates that there have been cases
of attempted trafficking of radioactive material in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania,
and the DRC.82 In the majority of these cases, couriers who were apprehended claimed that the material came
from the DRC, but this has been difficult to verify.83 In general, the material had trace amounts of radiation. According to
authorities, fraudulent peddling of material that sellers claim is radioactive has also occasionally occurred in these
countries as well as in Ethiopia,84 perhaps indicating that a misperception exists among both buyers and sellers of the
value of goods. It is believed that in trafficking cases around the world, sellers tend not to verify what they are offering. In
all cases, the motivation for trafficking has been deemed to be profit, rather than terrorism.85 From 1996-2006, Tanzania
reported 13 illicit trafficking incidents to the IAEA.86 These incidents involved radionuclides, such as cesium-137,
uranium-238, uranium oxide and radium-226, all at varying stages of radioactivity. Most of these incidents, according to
one study, originated outside of Tanzania, indicating that Tanzania is a transit country or
destination for nuclear smugglers. The cases were discovered through informants who tipped off
police, who then recovered the materials and/or apprehended the alleged traffickers. The last such case dates from 2007,
when a man was apprehended in Dar-esSalaam carrying a concealed container with markings indicating radioactive
contents. The Tanzanian military became involved and alerted the Tanzania Atomic Energy Commission (TAEC), which
removed the item to a secure facility in Arusha. It is not clear how the container, which allegedly originated in the DRC,
entered Tanzania or whether it actually contained radioactive material.87 The case was still under investigation at the
time that this report was written. Though members of the TAEC have described cooperation among law enforcement
agencies to combat nuclear trafficking in Tanzania as “adequate,”88 officials remain concerned about
potential proliferation incidents due to, inter alia, a lack of radiation detection
equipment and insufficient safety precautions exercised by law enforcement
when handling fissile material. Kenya has had similar experiences, including five reported cases since
2006.89 In late 2008, the media reported one case in which a Ugandan national and a Congolese national tried to
smuggle a container with uranium from the DRC for onward sale in Kenya.90 The cylinder was said to contain uranium
hexafluoride packed in 1993. In these cases, law enforcement and/or security forces had generally learned of illicit activity
through informants, the alleged radioactive material has been recovered, and in a couple of instances, cases have gone to
court. According to authorities, the Congolese remains in jail in Kenya as a result of the December 2008 arrests.91

Extinction
Barrett et al 13—PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, Fellow in the RAND
Stanton Nuclear Security Fellows Program, and Director of Research at Global Catastrophic Risk Institute—AND Seth
Baum, PhD in Geography from Pennsylvania State University, Research Scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of
Science, and Executive Director of Global Catastrophic Risk Institute—AND Kelly Hostetler, BS in Political Science from
Columbia and Research Assistant at Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (Anthony, 24 June 2013, “Analyzing and Reducing
the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia,” Science & Global Security: The Technical
Basis for Arms Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation Initiatives, Volume 21, Issue 2, Taylor & Francis)
War involving significant fractions of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals,
which are by far the largest of any nations, could have globally catastrophic
effects such as severely reducing food production for years, 1 potentially
leading to collapse of modern civilization worldwide, and even the extinction
of humanity. 2 Nuclear war between the United States and Russia could occur by various routes, including
accidental or unauthorized launch; deliberate first attack by one nation; and inadvertent attack. In an accidental or
unauthorized launch or detonation, system safeguards or procedures to maintain control over nuclear weapons fail in such
a way that a nuclear weapon or missile launches or explodes without direction from leaders. In a deliberate first attack, the
attacking nation decides to attack based on accurate information about the state of affairs. In an inadvertent attack, the
attacking nation mistakenly concludes that it is under attack and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes is a
counterattack. 3 (Brinkmanship strategies incorporate elements of all of the above, in that they involve intentional
manipulation of risks from otherwise accidental or inadvertent launches. 4 ) Over the years, nuclear strategy was aimed
primarily at minimizing risks of intentional attack through development of deterrence capabilities, and numerous
measures also were taken to reduce probabilities of accidents, unauthorized attack, and inadvertent war. For purposes of
deterrence, both U.S. and Soviet/Russian forces have maintained significant capabilities to have some forces survive a first
attack by the other side and to launch a subsequent counter-attack. However, concerns about the extreme
disruptions that a first attack would cause in the other side's forces and
command-and-control capabilities led to both sides’ development of
capabilities to detect a first attack and launch a counter-attack before
suffering damage from the first attack. 5 Many people believe that with the end of the Cold War and
with improved relations between the United States and Russia, the risk of East-West nuclear war was significantly
reduced. 6 However, it also has been argued that inadvertent nuclear war between the United
States and Russia has continued to present a substantial risk . 7 While the United States
and Russia are not actively threatening each other with war, they have remain ed
ready to launch nuclear missiles in response to indications of attack. 8 False
indicators of nuclear attack could be caused in several ways. First, a wide range of events have already been mistakenly
interpreted as indicators of attack, including weather phenomena, a faulty computer chip, wild animal activity, and
control-room training tapes loaded at the wrong time. 9 Second, terrorist groups or other actors
might cause attacks on either the United States or Russia that resemble some
kind of nuclear attack by the other nation by actions such as exploding a
stolen or improvised nuclear bomb, 10 especially if such an event occurs
during a crisis between the United States and Russia. 11 A variety of nuclear
terrorism scenarios are possible . 12 Al Qaeda has sought to obtain or
construct nuclear weapons and to use them against the United States. 13 Other
methods could involve attempts to circumvent nuclear weapon launch control safeguards or exploit holes in their security.
14 It has long been argued that the probability of inadvertent nuclear war is
significantly higher during U.S.–Russian crisis conditions , 15 with the Cuban Missile
Crisis being a prime historical example. It is possible that U.S.–Russian relations will significantly deteriorate in the
future, increasing nuclear tensions. There are a variety of ways for a third party to raise
tensions between the United States and Russia, making one or both nations more
likely to misinterpret events as attacks. 16

Reducing the risk of terror turns their kritik

Krebs 13 – Ronald R., associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota (“Military Conflict and
the Politics of Narrative: Explaining the Rise and Fall of the Cold War Consensus,” University of Minnesota, 8/30/13,
Online)
Contemporaries and historians have often blamed the errors and tragedies
of US policy during the Cold War—from military brinkmanship and imprudent intervention to
alliance with rapacious autocrats and brutal rebels to an inflated defense budget—on the
“Cold War consensus.” By this account, an ideological and policy consensus so took
hold by 1948 that alternatives to militarized global containment could not get a
hearing. That consensus dragged the United States into the disastrous Vietnam War, and it unraveled only amidst the trauma of
Vietnam in the late 1960s.1 This story of the Cold War consensus’ rise and fall appears to fit well with a well-established
and intuitive theory of change in major foreign policy ideas and discourses .
That theory avers that large-scale shocks, often unexpected military defeats,
unsettle settled minds and discredit dominant ideas with respect to national
security policy and thus are crucial drivers of change.2 This article shows that the standard history of the Cold
War consensus is wrong and develops an alternative theoretical architecture to explain its
consolidation and collapse. It points toward a reinterpretation of major puzzles of the Cold War, but it also has substantial
theoretical stakes: how we explain fundamental change in the national
security arena and in other policy domains as well. Scholars have long invoked the Cold War consensus, but they have failed to
study it rigorously. This article attempts to do so by conceptualizing the Cold War consensus as a dominant public narrative of national
security and by tracking that narrative via a content analysis of foreign affairs editorials. The consensus’ history then looks quite different:
the zone of narrative agreement was narrower than many believe; this narrow Cold War narrative did not achieve dominance—that is, the
consensus did not coalesce—until well into the 1950s; it began to erode before the Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965; and a new
dominant narrative (or consensus) did not take its place. How
to explain the Cold War narrative’s rise
to dominance and its subsequent fall from that perch? The answer cannot lie simply with
the shifting realities of global politics: the narrative was most dominant
precisely when the communist bloc was becoming more diverse—that is,
when the consensus was least apropos—and no new consensus took its place in the 1960s. This article
points rather to the surprising domestic politics surrounding triumph and frustration on Cold War battlefields. In a nutshell, the argument
is that the politics of protracted military failure impede change in the national
security narrative in whose terms government officials had legitimated the
mission, while victory generates space for unorthodox ideas to penetrate.
Dominant narratives of national security , such as the Cold War consensus, depict the protagonists and
the setting of security competition, and they define the range of sustainable policy options. They
endure as long as leading political and cultural elites continue to reproduce
them, and their dominance erodes when elites publicly challenge key tenets. However,
early on in an uncertain and protracted military campaign, battlefield
setbacks give both doves (war opponents) and hawks (war supporters) in the opposition incentives
to criticize the war’s conduct while reaffirm ing the underlying narrative .
While opposition doves pull their rhetorical punches to avoid bearing the political
costs of wartime criticism, opposition hawks are moved by the prospect of gain, but the effect is the same: to
blunt the scope of wartime critique and to bolster the underlying narrative
of national security. In contrast, victory creates a political opening for its
“owners” to advance an alternative: riding a political high, they can argue
that, as a result of their wise and resolute policies, the world has changed, that a
different narrative is now more apposite. In short, this article argues that, when it comes to public
narratives of national security, the conventional wisdom has it backwards: military failure
promotes the consolidation or continuation of narrative dominance , while
victory opens space for narrative challenge. Applying this theoretical argument to the two signal events
of the first half of the Cold War, I show how the frustrations of the Korean War facilitated the Cold War narrative’s rise to dominance, while
the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possible the consensus’ breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. The
high
costs of the Korean War might have undermined the Cold War globalism in
whose name the United States had waged the war. But leading Republican
opponents, who supported the war but opposed its globalist logic, insisted that the war had resulted
from the fact that the Truman administration’s battle against communism
had not been global enough. They thus helped consolidate the global Cold War that they
feared would yield an imperial presidency and an imposing national-security state.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, seen at the time as a one-sided triumph for John F.
Kennedy, paradoxically created political space for the young president to deviate publicly
from the previously dominant narrative, from the Cold War consensus. Kennedy had long
privately articulated a more sophisticated view of the Soviet Union’s
ambitions, the diversity of communist regimes, and the superpowers’ shared interests, but only after his great
victory did he feel free to articulate publicly the narrative foundation for
détente. Hawkish opponents drew precisely the opposite lesson: that the crisis was proof of the wisdom of the Cold War narrative’s
core propositions. As a result, no new national security narrative emerged as dominant in the crisis’ wake. Documenting and explaining the
rise and fall of the Cold War narrative is intrinsically important, as it speaks to enduring questions of the Cold War—from the origins of
America’s national-security state to the conditions of possibility for détente to the drivers of the US intervention in Vietnam. But the Cold
War consensus is also an important case. Hardly
questioned narratives often structure
national debates over security and foreign policy for a time. We know them by shorthand
expressions that encapsulate their portraits of the protagonists, scene, and action of a global drama: the civilizing mission of liberal empire,
the Nazi obsession with “living space,” the Gaullist vision of French restoration and grandeur, the communist faith in capitalist aggression
most
and imperialism, the Iranian Revolutionary regime’s Great and Little Satans, the Israeli discourse of “no partner for peace,” and
recently the War on Terror. These constitute what the historian Ernest May once termed the
“axiomatic” dimension of foreign policy : the “broad formulation that fixes
priorities and provides standards by which the appropriate choices among
alternatives may be made.”3 Scholars have devoted the lion’s share of their attention, however, to what May called the
“calculated”: the level of effort expended, the scope of targets, the means states employ. Even Legro, in his important work on states’ ideas
about international society, focuses on collective “causal beliefs” about the “effective means for achieving interests” in international
politics.4 The narrative underpinnings of policy debate have received far less attention, yet are arguably more important. Through its
examination of the Cold War consensus, this article suggests rethinking conventional theories of change in foreign policy—and perhaps in
other arenas too.
 Their Scholarship Bad
Their evidence is cherry-picked
Jones 11 (David Jones, Martin Smith, Senior Lecturer, School of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, M.L.R., Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London,
London, United Kingdom, “Terrorology and Methodology: A Reply to Dixit and Stump,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
Volume 34, issue 6)
In our original review we particularly took issue with the belief , held by a number
of contributors to Critical Studies on Terrorism , and reflected in British and Australian university programs,
that conventional terrorism research deliberately conspires both to delegitimize the critical
voice and marginalize the non-Western “other.” In this regard, we found that critical theory
engages in sweeping generalizations about the Western media presentation of
terrorism and assumes or cherry picks facts to demonstrate political bias and a
predetermined state conspiracy. Such a critical worldview again unconsciously mirrors the weakness of traditional terror
studies during the Cold War, where writers like Claire Sterling in The Terror Network detected the hidden-hand of the
Soviet Union behind every significant violent sub-state actor of the time. As we stated in our review, conventional and
critical approaches often seem two sides of the same debased coin. More generally, the soi disant critical orientation of
Critical Studies on Terrorism embraces the uncritical assumption that
Western democracies have engaged in a conspiracy to demonize resistance by third
world and particularly Muslim non-state actors. The critical approach thus places the
assumption of the questionable and malign motivation of democratic governments
(that nevertheless, and somewhat ironically, support the critical research agenda
through the grant giving machinery) above conceptual precision and hypothesis
testing. In the process, critical thinking problematically imports the paranoid outer reaches of the blogosphere into
academia, thus legitimizing the conspiracies of hidden-hands, sinister schemes, malign forces, secret agendas, and
controlling systems of power purveyed on websites like Spinwatch and Neocon Europe.
 Terror Scholarship Good
Our authors are self-reflexive
Boyle & Horgan 08 – [Michael J. Boyle, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, and
John Horgan, International Center for the Study of Terrorism, Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University,
April 2008, “A Case Against Critical Terrorism Studies,” Critical Studies On Terrorism, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 51-64]
Jackson (2007c) calls for the development of an explicitly CTS on the basis of what he argues preceded it, dubbed ‘Orthodox
Terrorism Studies’. The latter, he suggests, is characterized by: (1) its poor methods and
theories, (2) its state centricity, (3) its problemsolving orientation, and (4) its institutional and
intellectual links to state security projects. Jackson argues that the major defining characteristic of CTS, on the other
hand, should be ‘a skeptical attitude towards accepted terrorism
“knowledge”’. An implicit presumption from this is that terrorism scholars
have laboured for all of these years without being aware that their area of
study has an implicit bias , as well as definitional and methodological
problems . In fact, terrorism scholars are not only well aware of these
problems, but also have provided their own searching critiques of the field
at various points during the last few decades (e.g. Silke 1996, Crenshaw 1998, Gordon 1999, Horgan
2005, esp. ch. 2, ‘Understanding Terrorism’). Some of those scholars most associated with the
critique of empiricism implied in ‘Orthodox Terrorism Studies’ have also
engaged in deeply critical examinations of the nature of sources, methods,
and data in the study of terrorism. For example, Jackson (2007a) regularly cites the handbook produced by
Schmid and Jongman (1988) to support his claims that theoretical progress has been limited. But this fact was well recognized by the
authors; indeed, in the introduction of the second edition they point out that they have not revised their chapter on theories of terrorism
in the field. The
from the first edition, because the failure to address persistent conceptual and data problems has undermined progress
point of their handbook was to sharpen and make more comprehensive the result of
research on terrorism, not to glide over its methodological and definitional failings (Schmid and Jongman 1988, p. xiv).
Similarly, Silke’s (2004) volume on the state of the field of terrorism research performed a similar function, highlighting the shortcomings
of the field, in particular the lack of rigorous primary data collection. A non-reflective community of scholars does not produce such
scathing indictments of its own work.
 Winning Solves
Reducing the risk of terror turns their kritik
Krebs 13 – Ronald R., associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota (“Military Conflict and
the Politics of Narrative: Explaining the Rise and Fall of the Cold War Consensus,” University of Minnesota, 8/30/13,
Online)
Contemporaries and historians have often blamed the errors and tragedies
of US policy during the Cold War—from military brinkmanship and imprudent intervention to
alliance with rapacious autocrats and brutal rebels to an inflated defense budget—on the
“Cold War consensus .” By this account, an ideological and policy consensus so took
hold by 1948 that alternatives to militarized global containment could not get a
hearing. That consensus dragged the United States into the disastrous Vietnam War, and it unraveled only amidst the trauma of
Vietnam in the late 1960s.1 This story of the Cold War consensus’ rise and fall appears to fit well with a well-established
and intuitive theory of change in major foreign policy ideas and discourses .
That theory avers that large-scale shocks, often unexpected military defeats,
unsettle settled minds and discredit dominant ideas with respect to national
security policy and thus are crucial drivers of change.2 This article shows that the standard history of the Cold
War consensus is wrong and develops an alternative theoretical architecture to explain its
consolidation and collapse. It points toward a reinterpretation of major puzzles of the Cold War, but it also has substantial
theoretical stakes: how we explain fundamental change in the national
security arena and in other policy domains as well. Scholars have long invoked the Cold War consensus, but they have failed to
study it rigorously. This article attempts to do so by conceptualizing the Cold War consensus as a dominant public narrative of national
security and by tracking that narrative via a content analysis of foreign affairs editorials. The consensus’ history then looks quite different:
the zone of narrative agreement was narrower than many believe; this narrow Cold War narrative did not achieve dominance—that is, the
consensus did not coalesce—until well into the 1950s; it began to erode before the Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965; and a new
dominant narrative (or consensus) did not take its place. How
to explain the Cold War narrative’s rise
to dominance and its subsequent fall from that perch? The answer cannot lie simply with
the shifting realities of global politics: the narrative was most dominant
precisely when the communist bloc was becoming more diverse—that is,
when the consensus was least apropos—and no new consensus took its place in the 1960s. This article
points rather to the surprising domestic politics surrounding triumph and frustration on Cold War battlefields. In a nutshell, the argument
is that the politics of protracted military failure impede change in the national
security narrative in whose terms government officials had legitimated the
mission, while victory generates space for unorthodox ideas to penetrate.
Dominant narratives of national security , such as the Cold War consensus, depict the protagonists and
the setting of security competition, and they define the range of sustainable policy options. They
endure as long as leading political and cultural elites continue to reproduce
them, and their dominance erodes when elites publicly challenge key tenets. However,
early on in an uncertain and protracted military campaign, battlefield
setbacks give both doves (war opponents) and hawks (war supporters) in the opposition incentives
to criticize the war’s conduct while reaffirm ing the underlying narrative .
While opposition doves pull their rhetorical punches to avoid bearing the political
costs of wartime criticism, opposition hawks are moved by the prospect of gain, but the effect is the same: to
blunt the scope of wartime critique and to bolster the underlying narrative
of national security. In contrast, victory creates a political opening for its
“owners” to advance an alternative: riding a political high, they can argue
that, as a result of their wise and resolute policies, the world has changed, that a
different narrative is now more apposite. In short, this article argues that, when it comes to public
narratives of national security, the conventional wisdom has it backwards: military failure
promotes the consolidation or continuation of narrative dominance , while
victory opens space for narrative challenge. Applying this theoretical argument to the two signal events
of the first half of the Cold War, I show how the frustrations of the Korean War facilitated the Cold War narrative’s rise to dominance, while
the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possible the consensus’ breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. The high
costs of the Korean War might have undermined the Cold War globalism in
whose name the United States had waged the war. But leading Republican
opponents, who supported the war but opposed its globalist logic, insisted that the war had resulted
from the fact that the Truman administration’s battle against communism
had not been global enough. They thus helped consolidate the global Cold War that they
feared would yield an imperial presidency and an imposing national-security state.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, seen at the time as a one-sided triumph for John F.
Kennedy, paradoxically created political space for the young president to deviate publicly
from the previously dominant narrative, from the Cold War consensus. Kennedy had long
privately articulated a more sophisticated view of the Soviet Union’s
ambitions, the diversity of communist regimes, and the superpowers’ shared interests, but only after his great
victory did he feel free to articulate publicly the narrative foundation for
détente. Hawkish opponents drew precisely the opposite lesson: that the crisis was proof of the wisdom of the Cold War narrative’s
core propositions. As a result, no new national security narrative emerged as dominant in the crisis’ wake. Documenting and explaining the
rise and fall of the Cold War narrative is intrinsically important, as it speaks to enduring questions of the Cold War—from the origins of
America’s national-security state to the conditions of possibility for détente to the drivers of the US intervention in Vietnam. But the Cold
War consensus is also an important case. Hardly
questioned narratives often structure
national debates over security and foreign policy for a time. We know them by shorthand
expressions that encapsulate their portraits of the protagonists, scene, and action of a global drama: the civilizing mission of liberal empire,
the Nazi obsession with “living space,” the Gaullist vision of French restoration and grandeur, the communist faith in capitalist aggression
most
and imperialism, the Iranian Revolutionary regime’s Great and Little Satans, the Israeli discourse of “no partner for peace,” and
recently the War on Terror. These constitute what the historian Ernest May once termed the
“axiomatic” dimension of foreign policy : the “broad formulation that fixes
priorities and provides standards by which the appropriate choices among
alternatives may be made.”3 Scholars have devoted the lion’s share of their attention, however, to what May called the
“calculated”: the level of effort expended, the scope of targets, the means states employ. Even Legro, in his important work on states’ ideas
about international society, focuses on collective “causal beliefs” about the “effective means for achieving interests” in international
politics.4 The narrative underpinnings of policy debate have received far less attention, yet are arguably more important. Through its
examination of the Cold War consensus, this article suggests rethinking conventional theories of change in foreign policy—and perhaps in
other arenas too.
 ---1AR Winning Solves
That outweighs
Krebs 11 – Ronald R., associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota (“Military Conflict and the Politics of
Narrative: The Rise and Fall of the Cold War Consensus,” pp. 1-2, 3/7/11, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gpa/globalnotes/Krebs,%20MIRC
%202011_final.pdf)
When it comes to many political phenomena, including the dominant discourses and ideas
that underpin the making of foreign policy, the prevailing view is that inertia is the norm
and that substantial innovation comes only in the wake of massive policy failure.
Failure may not itself dictate the new path, but it discredits dominant ideas, reworks power structures, and shakes up stagnant
organizations. When it comes to political language, however, a common view is
that changeability is the norm: politicians adopt and jettison formulations
as they see fit, maneuvering according to the political winds. This paper argues that
these familiar perspectives both have it wrong when it comes to the rise and fall of dominant
narratives of national security. First, such narratives exhibit far more stability than
the realist view suggests, and they are marked by discontinuities, rather
than continuous flux. Among scholars, there is growing awareness of the ways in which language structures politics and
shapes contestation,1 which would be impossible if it were not often relatively stable.2 Second, the politics of failure
trump its psychology. As a result, even substantial foreign policy failure is not
likely to prompt a narrative revolution. In fact, policy success, more than failure, can
open space for change in dominant narratives. These claims are provocative, but they nicely fit the history of the so-
called Cold War consensus, as the paper shows. Its logic legitimated US intervention in two
wars widely seen as frustrating failures. Yet the Korean War did not
undermine, but rather consolidated the emerging narrative. The Vietnam
War, often portrayed as the moment of that narrative’s unraveling, was
nothing of the sort, because the prior consensus had begun to erode well
before the war’s Americanization, let alone the Tet Offensive. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, liberal
Cold Warriors increasingly argued that the rules of the international game had changed, that demonstrated American power and will had
finally persuaded the Soviet Union of shared interests. Narrative
divergence thus preceded the
Vietnam War. If anything, the war limited the extent of the liberal-left’s
challenge, and it even promoted a new consensus, as long-standing conservative skeptics finally jumped fully and enthusiastically
onto the internationalist wagon. What accounts for this complex mix of stability and change in the Cold War
narrative, and perhaps more generally in narratives of national security? I argue that
the answer lies in the social-political production of conflict outcomes.
Failures of military ventures do not reveal themselves as such all at once.
Early on, political opponents have incentives to hedge their rhetorical bets,
critique the war from the terrain of the dominant narrative, and thus
reproduce or at best emend that narrative —as did conservative nationalists during Korea and liberal
internationalists during Vietnam. Military failure provides the impetus for a challenge to
the dominant security narrative, but its politics deprive alternatives of
powerful advocates. In contrast, even though military success does not
provide actors with strong reasons to challenge the underlying narratives, it
does create conducive political conditions if they are so inclined: success can be
interpreted as proving the wisdom of the status quo, but it can also can be interpreted as having been so
successful as to require a new framework. Indeed, some liberals made precisely this argument after the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Success, however, legitimates alternatives without delegitimizing the status quo, and the result, therefore, is not the
establishment of a new dominant narrative, but rather the collapse of consensus.
 Derrida
Terrorism is unacceptable and condemning it is good
Derrida 3 - Jacques Derrida, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and
Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, 2003, Philosophy in a
Time of Terror, interviewed by Giovanni Borradori, p. 98-99
Do you
Borradori: Earlier you emphasized the essential role of international organizations and the need to cultivate a respect for international law.

think that the kind of terrorism linked to the al Qaeda organization and to bin Laden
harbors international political ambitions? Derrida: What appears to me
unacceptable in the "strategy" (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the "bin
Laden effect" is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life , the disrespect for law, for women, the use of
what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such

actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. If we
are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political scene, of the
"world" itself, then there is, it seems to me, nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter.
What is being proposed, at least implicitly, is that all capitalist and modern techno scientific forces be put in the service of an interpretation, itself dogmatic, of the
Nothing of what has been so laboriously secularized in the forms of the "political," of
Islamic revelation of the One.

"democracy," of "international law," and even in the nontheological form of sovereignty (assuming, again, that the value of
sovereignty can be completely secularized or detheologized, a hypothesis about which I have my doubts), none of this seems to have any

place whatsoever in the discourse "bin Laden." That is why, in this unleashing of violence
without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation ,

well, I would . Despite my very strong reservations about the American , indeed European, political
posture , about the "international antiterrorist" coalition, despite all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy, international law, and
the very international institutions that the states of this "coalition" themselves founded and supported up to a certain point, I would take the

side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to
perfectibility in the name of the "political," democracy, international law,
international institutions, and so on. Even if this "in the name of" is still merely an assertion and a purely verbal commitment. Even in its most cynical

mode, such an assertion still lets resonate within it an invincible promise . I

don't hear any such promise coming from "bin Laden ," at least not one for this world.
 A2 Fear Bad
Fearing terrorism is the only rational response
Krauthammer 4 (Charles, 10/18, The Case for Fearmongering, http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,995420,00.html, AG)

Never in American history has fear been a

Such piety is always ridiculous but never more ridiculous than today.

more appropriate feeling. Never has addressing that fear been a more relevant issue in a political campaign. Shortly after Hiroshima,
wrote physicist Richard Feynman in his memoirs, "I would go along and I would see people building a bridge ... and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't
understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless." Useless because doomed. Futile because humanity had no future. That's what
happens to a man who worked on the Manhattan Project and saw with his own eyes at Alamogordo intimations of the apocalypse. Feynman had firsthand
knowledge of what man had wrought--and a first-class mind deeply skeptical of the ability of his own primitive species not to be undone by its own cleverness.
Feynman was not alone. The late 1940s and ' 50s were so pervaded by a general fear of nuclear
annihilation that the era was known as the Age of Anxiety. That anxiety
dissipated over the decades as we convinced ourselves that deterrence (the threat of mutual
annihilation) would assure our safety. Sept. 11 ripped away that illusion.

Deterrence depends on rationality. But the new enemy is the embodiment of

irrationality: nihilists with a cult of death, yearning for the apocalypse--armed,
ready and appallingly able. The primordial fear that haunted us through the first days and weeks after 9/11

has dissipated. Not because the threat has disappeared but for the simple reason that in our ordinary lives we simply cannot sustain that level of
anxiety. The threat is as real as it was on Sept. 12. It only feels distant because it is

psychologically impossible to constantly face the truth and yet carry on day
to day. But as it is the first duty of government to provide for the common defense, it is the first duty of any post-9/11
government to face that truth every day--and to raise it to national consciousness at least once every four years, when
the nation chooses its leaders. Fearmongering? Yes. And very salutary. When you live in an age of terrorism with

increasingly available weapons of mass destruction, it is the absence of fear

that is utterly irrational.
 A2 Root Cause
We solve the root cause – cooperation and democracy
There’s no root cause of terrorism and addressing alleged
causes is appeasement that only invites more aggression
Dershowitz 2 – criminal law professor, Harvard (Alan, Why Terrorism Works, p 24-5, AG)

The current mantra of those opposed to a military response to terrorism is a plea to

try to understand and eliminate the root causes of terrorism. There are several reasons why this is
exactly the wrong approach. The reason terrorism works-and will persist unless there are significant changes in
the responses to it-is precisely because its perpetrators believe that by murdering innocent

civilians they will succeed in attracting the attention of the world to their perceived grievances and
their demand that the world "understand them" and "eliminate their root causes." To
submit to this demand is to send the following counterproductive message to those with
perceived grievances: if you resort to terrorism, we will try harder to understand your

grievances and respond to them than we would have if you employed less violent methods. This is precisely the criterion for success established by the
terrorist themselves. Listen to the words of Zehdi Labib Terzi, the Palestine Liberation Organization's chief observer at the United Nations: "The first several
hijackings aroused the consciousness of the world and awakened the media and the world opinion much more-and more effectively-than twenty years of pleading
at the United Nations." If this is true-and the Palestinians surely believe it is-then it should come as no surprise that hijackings and other forms of terrorism
increased dramatically after the Palestinians were rewarded for their initial terrorism by increased world attention to its "root causes"-attention that quickly
resulted in their leader being welcomed by the U.N. General Assembly, their organization being granted observer status at the United Nations, and their
We must commit
"government" being recognized by dozens of nations. We must take precisely the opposite approach to terrorism.

ourselves never to try to understand or eliminate its alleged root causes, but
rather to place it beyond the pale of dialogue and negotiation. Our message must be this: even if you have
legitimate grievances, if you resort to terrorism as a means toward eliminating them we will simply not listen to you, we will not try to

understand you, and we will certainly never change any of our policies toward you. Instead, we will hunt

you down and destroy your capacity to engage in terror. Any other approach will encourage
the use of terrorism as a means toward achieving ends -whether those ends are legitimate, illegitimate, or

anything in between. Nor is there any single substantive root cause of all, or even most,

terrorism. If there were-if poverty, for example, were the root cause of all terrorism-then by fixing that problem we could address the root cause of
specific terrorist groups without encouraging others. But the reality is that the " root causes " of terrorism are as varied as

human nature. Every single "root cause" associated with terrorism has existed for
centuries, and the vast majority of groups with equivalent or more compelling causes-and with far greater poverty and
disadvantage-have never resorted to terrorism. There has never even been a direct

correlation-to say nothing of causation-between the degrees of injustice experienced by a given group and the willingness of that group to resort to
terrorism. The search for "root causes" smacks more of after-the-fact political justification than inductive scientific inquiry. The variables that distinguish aggrieved
groups willing to target innocent civilians from equally situated groups unwilling to murder children have far less to do with the legitimacy of their causes or the
suffering of their people than with religious, cultural, political, and ethical differences. They also relate to universalism versus parochialism and especially to the
value placed on human life. To focus on such factors as poverty, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, and others all too common around our imperfect world is to fail to
explain why so many groups with far greater grievances and disabilities have never resorted to terrorism. Instead, the focus must be on the reality that using an act
addressing the root causes of that act only encourages other groups
of terrorism as the occasion for

to resort to terrorism in order to have their root causes advanced on the

international agenda. Put another way, the "root cause" of terrorism that must be eliminated is its success.
 A2 State Terrorism
Identifying one form of terrorism doesn’t prevent identifying
other forms – the ONLY STANCE taken by the aff is that we
should stop ISIS and pirates from killing people
 A2 Blowback
We turn their blowback argument – US military presence is
exactly the militaristic approach to terror they critique
Turse 13 [(Nick Turse, managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute, ) Tomgram: Nick
Turse, Blowback Central, No Publication 6-18-2013] AT
The Gulf of Guinea was one of the primary areas in Africa where “stability,” the command spokesman assured me, had
“improved significantly,” and the U.S. military had played a major role in bringing it about. But what did that say about so
many other areas of the continent that, since AFRICOM was set up, had been wracked by coups, insurgencies, violence,
and volatility? A careful examination of the security situation in Africa suggests that
it is in the process of becoming Ground Zero for a veritable terror diaspora
set in motion in the wake of 9/11 that has only accelerated in the Obama years. Recent history indicates that
as U.S. “stability” operations in Africa have increased, militancy has spread,
insurgent groups have proliferated, allies have faltered or committed
abuses, terrorism has increased, the number of failed states has risen, and
the continent has become more unsettled. The signal event in this tsunami of blowback was the
U.S. participation in a war to fell Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi that helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported
bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, prompting the intervention of the French military with U.S.
backing. The situation could still worsen as the U.S. armed forces grow ever more involved. They are already expanding air
operations across the continent, engaging in spy missions for the French military, and utilizing other previously
undisclosed sites in Africa. The Terror Diaspora In 2000, a report prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army War
College’s Strategic Studies Institute examined the “African security environment.” While it touched on “internal separatist
or rebel movements” in “weak states,” as well as non-state actors like militias and “warlord armies,” it made no mention of
Islamic extremism or major transnational terrorist threats. In fact, prior to 2001, the United States did not recognize any
terrorist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, a senior Pentagon official claimed that the
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan might drive “terrorists” out of that country and into African nations. “Terrorists associated
with al Qaeda and indigenous terrorist groups have been and continue to be a presence in this region," he said. "These
terrorists will, of course, threaten U.S. personnel and facilities.” When pressed about actual transnational dangers, the
official pointed to Somali militants but eventually admitted that even the most extreme Islamists there “really have not
engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.” Similarly, when questioned about connections between Osama bin Laden’s
core al-Qaeda group and African extremists, he offered only the most tenuous links, like bin Laden’s “salute” to Somali
militants who killed U.S. troops during the infamous 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident. Despite this, the U.S. dispatched
personnel to Africa as part of Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) in 2002. The next year, CJTF-
HOA took up residence at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, where it resides to this day on the only officially avowed U.S. base
in Africa. As CJTF-HOA was starting up, the State Department launched a multi-
million-dollar counterterrorism program, known as the Pan-Sahel Initiative, to bolster the
militaries of Mali, Niger, Chad, and Mauritania. In 2004, for example, Special Forces training teams were sent to Mali as
part of the effort. In 2005, the program expanded to include Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia and was
renamed the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Schmidle
noted that the program saw year-round deployments of Special Forces personnel “to train local armies at battling
insurgencies and rebellions and to prevent bin Laden and his allies from expanding into the region.” The Trans-Saharan
Counterterrorism Partnership and its Defense Department companion program, then known as Operation Enduring
Freedom-Trans-Sahara, were, in turn, folded into U.S. Africa Command when it took over military responsibility for the
continent in 2008. As Schmidle noted, the effects of U.S. efforts in the region
seemed at odds with AFRICOM’s stated goals. “Al Qaeda established
sanctuaries in the Sahel, and in 2006 it acquired a North African franchise [Al-
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb],” he wrote. “Terrorist attacks in the region increased in both
number and lethality.” In fact, a look at the official State Department list of
terrorist organizations indicates a steady increase in Islamic radical groups
in Africa alongside the growth of U.S. counterterrorism efforts there -- with the
addition of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in 2004, Somalia’s al-Shabaab in 2008, and Mali’s Ansar al-Dine in 2013.
In 2012, General Carter Ham, then AFRICOM’s chief, added the Islamist militants of Boko Haram in Nigeria to his own
list of extremist threats. The overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya by an interventionist coalition including the U.S., France, and
Britain similarly empowered a host of new militant Islamist groups such as the Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades, which have
since carried out multiple attacks on Western interests, and the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia, whose fighters assaulted
U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other
Americans. In fact, just prior to that attack, according to the New York Times, the CIA was tracking “an array of armed
militant groups in and around” that one city alone. According to Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Libya, that country is now “fertile
ground” for militants arriving from the Arabian Peninsula and other places in the
Middle East as well as elsewhere in Africa to recruit fighters, receive training, and recuperate. “It’s really become a new
hub,” he told me. Obama’s Scramble for Africa The U.S.-backed war in Libya and the CIA’s efforts in its aftermath are just
two of the many operations that have proliferated across the continent under President Obama. These include a multi-
pronged military and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, consisting of intelligence operations, a secret prison,
helicopter attacks, drone strikes, and U.S. commando raids; a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State
Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony and his top
commanders in the jungles of the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo; a
massive influx of funding for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; and, in just the last four years, hundreds of
millions of dollars spent arming and training West African troops to serve as American proxies on the continent. From
2010-2012, AFRICOM itself burned through $836 million as it expanded its
reach across the region, primarily via programs to mentor, advise, and tutor
African militaries. In recent years, the U.S. has trained and outfitted soldiers from
Uganda, Burundi, and Kenya, among other nations, for missions like the hunt for Kony. They
have also served as a proxy force for the U.S. in Somalia , part of the African Union
Mission (AMISOM) protecting the U.S.-supported government in that country’s capital, Mogadishu. Since 2007, the State
Department has anted up about $650 million in logistics support, equipment, and training for AMISOM troops. The
Pentagon has kicked in an extra $100 million since 2011. The U.S. also continues funding African armies through the
Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership and its Pentagon analog, now known as Operation Juniper Shield, with
increased support flowing to Mauritania and Niger in the wake of Mali’s collapse. In 2012, the State Department and the
U.S. Agency for International Development poured approximately $52 million into the programs, while the Pentagon
chipped in another $46 million. In the Obama years, U.S. Africa Command has also built a sophisticated logistics system
officially known as the AFRICOM Surface Distribution Network, but colloquially referred to as the “new spice route.” Its
central nodes are in Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in
Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base,
Camp Lemonnier. In addition, the Pentagon has run a regional air campaign using drones and manned aircraft out of
airports and bases across the continent including Camp Lemonnier, Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia, Niamey in Niger, and
the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, while private contractor-operated surveillance aircraft have flown missions out
of Entebbe, Uganda. Recently, Foreign Policy reported on the existence of a possible drone base in Lamu, Kenya. Another
critical location is Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, home to a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment and the
Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift Support initiative that, according to military documents, supports “high
risk activities” carried out by elite forces from Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara. Lieutenant Colonel Scott
Rawlinson, a spokesman for Special Operations Command Africa, told me that the initiative provides “emergency casualty
evacuation support to small team engagements with partner nations throughout the Sahel,” although official documents
note that such actions have historically accounted for just 10% of monthly flight hours. While Rawlinson demurred from
discussing the scope of the program, citing operational security concerns, military documents indicate that it is expanding
rapidly. Between March and December of last year, for example, the Trans-Sahara Short Take-Off and Landing Airlift
Support initiative flew 233 sorties. In just the first three months of this year, it carried out 193. AFRICOM spokesman
Benjamin Benson has confirmed to TomDispatch that U.S. air operations conducted from Base Aerienne 101 in Niamey,
the capital of Niger, were providing “support for intelligence collection with French forces conducting operations in Mali
and with other partners in the region.” Refusing to go into detail about mission specifics for reasons of “operational
security,” he added that, “in partnership with Niger and other countries in the region, we are committed to supporting our
allies… this decision allows for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations within the region.” Benson also
confirmed that the U.S. military has used Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport in Senegal for refueling stops as
well as the “transportation of teams participating in security cooperation activities” like training missions. He confirmed a
similar deal for the use of Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in Ethiopia. All told, the U.S. military now has
agreements to use 29 international airports in Africa as refueling centers. Benson was more tight-lipped about air
operations from Nzara Landing Zone in the Republic of South Sudan, the site of one of several shadowy forward operating
posts (including another in Djema in the Central Africa Republic and a third in Dungu in the Democratic Republic of
Congo) that have been used by U.S. Special Operations forces. “We don’t want Kony and his folks to know… what kind of
planes to look out for,” he said. It’s no secret, however, that U.S. air assets over Africa and its coastal waters include
Predator, Global Hawk and Scan Eagle drones, MQ-8 unmanned helicopters, EP-3 Orion aircraft, Pilatus planes, and E-8
Joint Stars aircraft. Last year, in its ever-expanding operations, AFRICOM planned 14 major joint-training exercises on
the continent, including in Morocco, Uganda, Botswana, Lesotho, Senegal, and Nigeria. One of them, an annual event
known as Atlas Accord, saw members of the U.S. Special Forces travel to Mali to conduct training with local forces. “The
participants were very attentive, and we were able to show them our tactics and see theirs as well,” said Captain Bob
Luther, a team leader with the 19th Special Forces Group. The Collapse of Mali As the U.S.-backed war in Libya was taking
down Qaddafi, nomadic Tuareg fighters in his service looted the regime’s extensive weapons caches, crossed the border
into their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that country. Anger within the country’s armed forces
over the democratically elected government’s ineffective response to the rebellion resulted in a military coup. It was led by
Amadou Sanogo, an officer who had received extensive training in the U.S. between 2004 and 2010 as part of the Pan-
Sahel Initiative. Having overthrown Malian democracy, he and his fellow officers proved even less effective in dealing with
events in the north. With the country in turmoil, the Tuareg fighters declared an independent state. Soon, however,
heavily-armed Islamist rebels from homegrown Ansar al-Dine as well as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Libya’s Ansar
al-Sharia, and Nigeria’s Boko Haram, among others, pushed out the Tuaregs, took over much of the north, instituted a
harsh brand of Shariah law, and created a humanitarian crisis that caused widespread suffering, sending refugees
streaming from their homes. These developments raised serious questions about the efficacy of U.S. counterterrorism
efforts. “This spectacular failure reveals that the U.S. probably underestimated the complex
socio-cultural peculiarities of the region, and misread the realities of the
terrain,” Berny Sèbe, an expert on North and West Africa at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom,
told me. “This led them to being grossly manipulated by local interests over
which they had, in the end, very limited control.” Following a further series of Islamist
victories and widespread atrocities, the French military intervened at the head of a coalition of Chadian, Nigerian, and
other African troops, with support from the U.S. and the British. The foreign-led forces beat back the
Islamists, who then shifted from conventional to guerrilla tactics, including
suicide bombings. In April, after such an attack killed three Chadian soldiers, that country’s president
announced that his forces, long supported by the U.S. through the Pan-Sahel Initiative, would withdraw from Mali.
“Chad’s army has no ability to face the kind of guerrilla fighting that is emerging," he said. In the meantime, the remnants
of the U.S.-backed Malian military fighting alongside the French were cited for gross human rights violations in their bid
to retake control of their country. After the French intervention in January, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said,
“There is no consideration of putting any American boots on the ground at this time.” Not long after, 10 U.S. military
personnel were deployed to assist French and African forces, while 12 others were assigned to the embassy in the Malian
capital, Bamako. While he’s quick to point out that Mali’s downward spiral had much to do with its corrupt government,
weak military, and rising levels of ethnic discontent, the Carnegie Endowment’s Wehrey notes that the war in Libya was “a
seismic event for the Sahel and the Sahara.” Just back from a fact-finding trip to Libya, he added that the effects of the
revolution are already rippling far beyond the porous borders of Mali. Wehrey cited recent findings by the United Nations
Security Council's Group of Experts, which monitors an arms embargo imposed on Libya in 2011. “In the past 12 months,”
the panel reported, “the proliferation of weapons from Libya has continued at a
worrying rate and has spread into new territory: West Africa, the Levant [the
Eastern Mediterranean region], and potentially even the Horn of Africa. Illicit flows [of
arms] from the country are fueling existing conflicts in Africa and the
Levant and enriching the arsenals of a range of non-state actors, including
terrorist groups.” Growing Instability The collapse of Mali after a coup by an American-trained officer and
Chad’s flight from the fight in that country are just two indicators of how post-9/11 U.S. military efforts in Africa have
fared. “In two of the three other Sahelian states involved in the Pentagon’s pan-Sahelian initiative, Mauritania and Niger,
armies trained by the U.S., have also taken power in the past eight years,” observed journalist William Wallis in the
Financial Times. “In the third, Chad, they came close in a 2006 attempt.” Still another coup plot involving members of the
Chadian military was reportedly uncovered earlier this spring. In March, Major General Patrick Donahue, the commander
of U.S. Army Africa, told interviewer Gail McCabe that northwestern Africa was now becoming increasingly “problematic.”
Al-Qaeda, he said, was at work destabilizing Algeria and Tunisia. Last September, in fact, hundreds of Islamist protesters
attacked the U.S. embassy compound in Tunisia, setting it on fire. More recently, Camille Tawil in the CTC Sentinel, the
official publication of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, wrote that in Tunisia
“jihadis are openly recruiting young militants and sending them to training camps in the mountains, especially along
Algeria’s borders.” The U.S.-backed French intervention in Mali also led to a January revenge terror attack on the Amenas
gas plant in Algeria. Carried out by the al-Mulathameen brigade, one of various new al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb-
linked militant groups emerging in the region, it led to the deaths of close to 40 hostages, including three Americans.
Planned by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a veteran of the U.S.-backed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was
only the first in a series of blowback responses to U.S. and Western interventions in Northern Africa that may have far-
reaching implications. Last month, Belmokhtar’s forces also teamed up with fighters from the Movement for Unity and
Jihad in West Africa -- yet another Islamist militant group of recent vintage -- to carry out coordinated attacks on a
French-run uranium mine and a nearby military base in Agadez, Niger, that killed at least 25 people. A recent attack on
the French embassy in Libya by local militants is also seen as a reprisal for the French war in Mali. According to the
Carnegie Endowment’s Wehrey, the French military’s push there has had the additional effect of reversing the flow of
militants, sending many back into Libya to recuperate and seek additional training. Nigerian Islamist fighters driven from
Mali have returned to their native land with fresh training and innovative tactics as well as heavy weapons from Libya.
Increasingly battle-hardened, extremist Islamist insurgents from two
Nigerian groups, Boko Haram and the newer, even more radical Ansaru,
have escalated a long simmering conflict in that West African oil giant. For
years, Nigerian forces have been trained and supported by the U.S. through the Africa Contingency Operations Training
and Assistance program. The country has also been a beneficiary of U.S. Foreign Military Financing, which provides
grants and loans to purchase U.S.-produced weaponry and equipment and funds military training. In recent years,
however, brutal responses by Nigerian forces to what had been a fringe Islamist sect have transformed Boko Haram into a
regional terrorist force. The situation has grown so serious that President Goodluck Jonathan recently declared a state of
emergency in northern Nigeria. Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke out about “credible allegations that
Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel
extremism.” After a Boko Haram militant killed a soldier in the town of Baga, for example, Nigerian troops attacked the
town, destroying more than 2,000 homes and killing an estimated 183 people. Similarly, according to a recent United
Nations report, the Congolese army’s 391st Commando Battalion, formed with U.S. support and trained for eight months
by U.S. Special Operations forces, later took part in mass rapes and other atrocities. Fleeing the advance of a recently
formed, brutal (non-Islamic) rebel group known as M23, its troops joined with other Congolese soldiers in raping close to
100 women and more than 30 girls in November 2012. “This magnificent battalion will set a new mark in this nation's
continuing transformation of an army dedicated and committed to professionalism, accountability, sustainability, and
meaningful security," said Brigadier General Christopher Haas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command Africa at
the time of the battalion’s graduation from training in 2010. Earlier this year, incoming AFRICOM commander General
David Rodriguez told the Senate Armed Services Committee that a review of the unit found its “officers and enlisted
soldiers appear motivated, organized, and trained in small unit maneuver and tactics” even if there were “limited metrics
to measure the battalion’s combat effectiveness and performance in protecting civilians.” The U.N. report tells a different
story. For example, it describes “a 14 year old boy… shot dead on 25 November 2012 in the village of Kalungu, Kalehe
territory, by a soldier of the 391 Battalion. The boy was returning from the fields when two soldiers tried to steal his goat.
As he tried to resist and flee, one of the soldiers shot him.” Despite years of U.S. military aid to the Democratic Republic of
Congo, M23 has dealt its army heavy blows and, according to AFRICOM’s Rodriguez, is now destabilizing the region. But
they haven’t done it alone. According to Rodriguez, M23 “would not be the threat it is today without external support
including evidence of support from the Rwandan government.” For years, the U.S. aided Rwanda through various
programs, including the International Military Education and Training initiative and Foreign Military Financing. Last
year, the U.S. cut $200,000 in military assistance to Rwanda -- a signal of its disapproval of that government’s support for
M23. Still, as AFRICOM’s Rodriguez admitted to the Senate earlier this year, the U.S. continues to “support Rwanda’s
participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa.” After years of U.S. assistance, including support from
Special Operations forces advisors, the Central African Republic’s military was recently defeated and the country’s
president ousted by another newly formed (non-Islamist) rebel group known as Seleka. In short order, that country’s army
chiefs pledged their allegiance to the leader of the coup, while hostility on the part of the rebels forced the U.S. and its
allies to suspend their hunt for Joseph Kony. A strategic partner and bulwark of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, Kenya
receives around $1 billion in U.S. aid annually and elements of its military have been trained by U.S. Special Operations
forces. But last September, Foreign Policy’s Jonathan Horowitz reported on allegations of “Kenyan counterterrorism death
squads... killing and disappearing people.” Later, Human Rights Watch drew attention to the Kenyan military’s response
to a November attack by an unknown gunman that killed three soldiers in the northern town of Garissa. The “Kenyan
army surrounded the town, preventing anyone from leaving or entering, and started attacking residents and traders,” the
group reported. “The witnesses said that the military shot at people, raped women, and assaulted anyone in sight.”
Another longtime recipient of U.S. support, the Ethiopian military, was also involved in abuses last year, following an
attack by gunmen on a commercial farm. In response, according to Human Rights Watch, members of Ethiopia’s army
raped, arbitrarily arrested, and assaulted local villagers. The Ugandan military has been the
primary U.S. proxy when it comes to policing Somalia. Its members were,
however, implicated in the beating and even killing of citizens during
domestic unrest in 2011. Burundi has also received significant U.S. military support and high-ranking
officers in its army have recently been linked to the illegal mineral trade, according to a report by the environmental
watchdog group Global Witness. Despite years of cooperation with the U.S. military,
Senegal now appears more vulnerable to extremism and increasingly
unstable, according to a report by the Institute of Security Studies. And so it goes across the continent. Success
Stories In addition to the Gulf of Guinea, AFRICOM’s chief spokesman pointed to Somalia as another major U.S. success
story on the continent. And it’s true that Somalia is more stable now than it has been in years, even if a weakened al-
Shabaab continues to carry out attacks. The spokesman even pointed to a recent CNN report about a trickle of tourists
entering the war-torn country and the construction of a luxury beach resort in the capital, Mogadishu. I asked for other
AFRICOM success stories, but only those two came to his mind -- and no one should be surprised by that. After all, in
2006, before AFRICOM came into existence, 11 African nations were among
the top 20 in the Fund for Peace’s annual Failed States Index. Last year, that
number had risen to 15 (or 16 if you count the new nation of South Sudan). In 2001, according to the
Global Terrorism Database from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the
University of Maryland, there were 119 terrorist incidents in sub-Saharan Africa. By
2011, the last year for which numbers are available, there were close to 500.
A recent report from the International Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies counted 21
terrorist attacks in the Maghreb and Sahel regions of northern Africa in 2001. During the Obama years, the figures have
fluctuated between 144 and 204 annually. Similarly, an analysis of 65,000 individual incidents of political violence in
Africa from 1997 to 2012, assembled by researchers affiliated with the International Peace Research Institute, found that
“violent Islamist activity has increased significantly in the past 15 years, with
a particular[ly] sharp increase witnessed from 2010 onwards. ” Additionally,
according to researcher Caitriona Dowd, “there is also evidence for the geographic spread of violent Islamist activity both
south- and east-ward on the continent.” In fact, the trends appear stark and eerily mirror statements from AFRICOM’s
leaders. In March 2009, after years of training indigenous forces and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on
counterterrorism activities, General William Ward, the first leader of U.S. Africa Command, gave its inaugural status
report to the Senate Armed Services Committee. It was bleak. “Al-Qaeda,” he said, “increased its
influence dramatically across north and east Africa over the past three years
with the growth of East Africa Al-Qaeda, al Shabaab, and al-Qaeda in the
Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).” This February, after four more years of military engagement,
security assistance, training of indigenous armies, and hundreds of millions of dollars more in funding, AFRICOM’s
incoming commander General David Rodriguez explained the current situation to the Senate in more ominous terms.
“The command’s number one priority is East Africa with particular focus on
al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda networks. This is followed by violent extremist [movements] and al-Qaeda
in North and West Africa and the Islamic Maghreb. AFRICOM’s third priority is Counter-LRA [Lord’s Resistance Army]
operations.” Rodriguez warned that, “with the increasing threat of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, I see a greater risk of
regional instability if we do not engage aggressively.” In addition to that group, he declared al-Shabaab and Boko Haram
major menaces. He also mentioned the problems posed by the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa and Ansar al-
Dine. Libya, he told them, was threatened by “hundreds of disparate militias,” while M23 was “destabilizing the entire
Great Lakes region [of Central Africa].” In West Africa, he admitted, there was also a major narcotics trafficking problem.
Similarly, East Africa was “experiencing an increase in heroin trafficking across
the Indian Ocean from Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In addition, “in the Sahel region of North
Africa, cocaine and hashish trafficking is being facilitated by, and directly benefitting, organizations like al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb leading to increased regional instability.” In other words, 10 years after Washington
began pouring taxpayer dollars into counterterrorism and stability efforts
across Africa and its forces first began operating from Camp Lemonnier, the
continent has experienced profound changes, just not those the U.S. sought.
The University of Birmingham’s Berny Sèbe ticks off post-revolutionary Libya, the collapse of Mali, the rise of Boko
Haram in Nigeria, the coup in the Central African Republic, and violence in Africa’s Great Lakes region as evidence of
increasing volatility. “The continent is certainly more unstable today than it was in
the early 2000s, when the U.S. started to intervene more directly,” he told me. As
the war in Afghanistan -- a conflict born of blowback -- winds down, there will be greater incentive and opportunity to
project U.S. military power in Africa. However, even a cursory reading of recent history
suggests that this impulse is unlikely to achieve U.S. goals. While correlation doesn’t
equal causation, there is ample evidence to suggest the United States has
facilitated a terror diaspora, imperiling nations and endangering peoples
across Africa. In the wake of 9/11, Pentagon officials were hard-pressed to show evidence of a major African terror
threat. Today, the continent is thick with militant groups that are increasingly
crossing borders, sowing insecurity, and throwing the limits of U.S. power
into broad relief. After 10 years of U.S. operations to promote stability by
military means, the results have been the opposite. Africa has become
blowback central.
 “Terrorists” Word Good
The word “terrorism” avoids obfuscation
Laqueur 03 – historian, has taught at Brandeis University, Georgetown, Harvard, University of Chicago, Tel
Aviv and John Hopkins university; expert in terrorism and one of the founders of its study; holocaust survivor [No end to
war: terrorism in the twenty-first century
According to an old and widespread sophism, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This is true
in the sense that criminals and victims will seldom agree on the nature of a crime; quite frequently people do not agree
about a traffic accident. It is as true as saying that St. Francis and Mother Teresa had many admirers, but so
had Hitler and Stalin and that therefore there is not really much to choose between them. But there is no
room for moral relativism (or nihilism) in a civilized society, and there are yardsticks by which to
measure human actions. Eichmann and Pol Pot, even if they had sympathizers, will not be proposed for sainthood. Why
the great coyness concerning the use of the word “terrorism” and “terrorists”? Why the use of ludicrous terms such as
“armed struggle” or “Red Army” or “guerrilla” or “Red Brigade”?This was not always the case. The Russian revolutionaries
of a century ago were far less sensitive and openly talked about their terrorist struggle. Boris Savinkov, the head of the
terrorist organization of the Russian Social Revolutionaries, called his recollections, published before World War I,
Memoirs of a Terrorist. It became a classic and was translated into many languages. Why should Western media eighty
years later think such a choice of terms impermissible? It had, of course, to do with the change that has taken place in
terrorist practice; it was one thing to plan the assassination of a dictator or a police chief, which would generate support at
least on the part of some of the public. The in discriminate murder of innocent people, of small children and elderly
people, does not make for good public relations. In other words, the new terrorism is different from the old, and while
today’s terrorists want to practice it, they resent the label. The media were quite willing to respect their sensitivity. There
have been, as always, a few exceptions when ideologues of terrorism have made no bones about their views and strategies.
Thus, for instance, Sheikh Azzam bin Laden’s teacher, who has been mentioned more than once in these pages: We are
terrorists, and terrorism is our friend and companion. Let the West and East know that we are terrorists and that we are
terrifying as well. We shall do our best in preparation to terrorize Allah’s enemies and our own. Thus terrorism is an
obligation in Allah’s religion. There is the unfortunate and often ridiculous practice in some of the media to call a spade
not a spade but an agricultural implement. It is understandable that, to give but one example, international news agencies
such as Reuters feel uneasy about the use of the term “terrorist” because it might offend the terrorists and perhaps even
endanger their correspondents in Gaza, on the West Bank, and other parts of the world. But it would have been more
honest if Steven Jukes, head of the Reuters news department, had admitted that the use of terms such as “militants”
‘or “activists” to identify terrorists is motivated by fear and perhaps also the wish not to lose customers, rather
than the desire to be objective and tell the truth. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) followed a more selective
policy—not using the term “terrorist” in the Middle East but feeling free to use it in other parts of the world. The Chicago
Tribune decided to forgo the use of the term “terrorism” because “it is tendentious and propagandistic, and because
today’s terrorist sometimes turns out tomorrow’s statesman.” By the same token, every political term could and should be
dismissed as tendentious and even propagandistic, and while today’s terrorist may indeed be tomorrow’s statesman, this
does not change the fact that at one stage he practiced terrorism. Reuters’s decision provoked a great deal of cynical
comment: Why not call Jack the Ripper an “amateur abdominal surgeon” and Timothy McVeigh (of Oklahoma
City fame) “a person who left a volatile cargo in a non parking zone”? Why not redefine Pol Pot a recruiter for farming
work or Eichmann an activist demographer? Like Humpty Dumpty, some of the media decided that when they use a term
“it means just what they choose it to mean.”But the issue is, of course, a serious one. To call a terrorist an “activist or
a “militant” is to blot out the dividing line between a suicide bomber and the active member of a trade
union or a political party or a club. It is bound to lead to constant misunderstanding: If an Indian journal
publishes statistics about political activists killed in Jammu and Kashmir in the1990s, the figures do not refer to people
who have killed but were killed: candidates in elections. If Reuters’s head office in London or that of the Chicago Tribune
were destroyed in a bomb attack or if their staff male and female, would have their throats cut by a group of invaders while
sitting at their desks, it is unlikely that their colleagues would call the perpetrators “activists.”

This definition of terrorism solves terrorism

Ganor 1 (Boaz, Director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, “Defining Terrorism”]
The prevalent definitions of terrorism entail difficulties, both conceptual and syntactical. It is thus not surprising that alternative concepts with more positive connotations—guerrilla movements, underground movements, national liberation
movements, commandos, etc.—are often used to describe and characterize the activities of terrorist organizations. Generally these concepts are used without undue attention to the implications, but at times the use of these definitions is

By resorting to tendentious definitions of terrorism,

tendentious, grounded in a particular political viewpoint. such

terrorist organizations and their supporters seek to gloss over the realities
of terrorism establishing their activities on more positive
, thus foundations. and legitimate

terms not opposed to the basic values of democracies

Naturally, liberal , such as “revolutionary violence,” “national liberation,”

carry fewer negative connotations

etc., than the term, “terrorism.” Terrorism or Revolutionary Violence? Salah Khalef (Abu Iyad) was Yasser Arafat’s deputy and one of
the leaders of Fatah and Black September. He was responsible for a number of lethal attacks, including the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In order to rationalize such actions, he used the tactic of confounding “terrorism”
with “political violence,” stating, “By nature, and even on ideological grounds, I am firmly opposed to political murder and, more generally, to terrorism. Nevertheless, unlike many others, I do not confuse revolutionary violence with terrorism, or

operations that constitute political acts with others that do not.”[4] Abu Iyad tries to present terrorism and political violence as two different and unconnected phenomena. The implication of this statement is that a political motive

makes the activity respectable , and the end justifies the means. I will examine this point below.

Terrorism or National Liberation? A rather widespread attempt to make all definitions of terrorism meaningless is to lump together terrorist activities and the struggle to achieve national liberation. Thus, for instance, the recurrently stated
Syrian official position is that Syria does not assist terrorist organizations; rather, it supports national liberation movements. President Hafez el-Assad, in a November 1986 speech to the participants in the 21st Convention of Workers Unions in
Syria, said the following: We have always opposed terrorism. But terrorism is one thing and a national struggle against occupation is another. We are against terrorism… Nevertheless, we support the struggle against occupation waged by national
liberation movements.[5] The attempt to confound the concepts of “terrorism” and “national liberation” comes to the fore in various official pronouncements from the Arab world. For instance, the fifth Islamic summit meeting in Kuwait, at the
beginning of 1987, stated in its resolutions that: The conference reiterates its absolute faith in the need to distinguish the brutal and unlawful terrorist activities perpetrated by individuals, by groups, or by states, from the legitimate struggle of
oppressed and subjugated nations against foreign occupation of any kind. This struggle is sanctioned by heavenly law, by human values, and by international conventions.[6] The foreign and interior ministers of the Arab League reiterated this
position at their April 1998 meeting in Cairo. In a document entitled “Arab Strategy in the Struggle against Terrorism,” they emphasized that belligerent activities aimed at “liberation and self determination” are not in the category of terrorism,
whereas hostile activities against regimes or families of rulers will not be considered political attacks but rather criminal assaults.[7] Here again we notice an attempt to justify the “means” (terrorism) in terms of the “end” (national liberation).
Regardless of the nature of the operation, when we speak of “liberation from the yoke of a foreign occupation” this will not be terrorism but a legitimate and justified activity. This is the source of the cliché, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s
freedom fighter,” which stresses that all depends on the perspective and the worldview of the one doing the defining. The former President of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, made the following statement in April 1981, during the visit of the
Libyan ruler, Muamar Qadhafi: “Imperialists have no regard either for the will of the people or the laws of history. Liberation struggles cause their indignation. They describe them as ‘terrorism’.”[ 8] Surprisingly, many in the Western world have
accepted the mistaken assumption that terrorism and national liberation are two extremes in the scale of legitimate use of violence. The struggle for “national liberation” would appear to be the positive and justified end of this sequence, whereas
terrorism is the negative and odious one. It is impossible, according to this approach, for any organization to be both a terrorist group and a movement for national liberation at the same time. In failing to understand the difference between these
two concepts, many have, in effect, been caught in a semantic trap laid by the terrorist organizations and their allies. They have attempted to contend with the clichés of national liberation by resorting to odd arguments, instead of stating that
when a group or organization chooses terrorism as a means, the aim of their struggle cannot be used to justify their actions (see below). Thus, for instance, Senator Jackson was quoted in Benyamin Netanyahu’s book Terrorism: How the West

The idea that one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another’s ‘freedom fighter’

Can Win as saying,

cannot be sanctioned. Freedom fighters or revolutionaries don’t blow up

buses containing non-combatants; terrorist s do. murderer Freedom fighters don’t set out to capture and slaughter schoolchildren;
terrorist murderers do . . . It is a disgrace that democracies would allow the treasured word ‘freedom’ to be associated with acts of terrorists.[9] Professor Benzion Netanyahu also assumed, a priori, that freedom fighters are incapable of
perpetrating terrorist acts: For in contrast to the terrorist, no freedom fighter has ever deliberately attacked innocents. He has never deliberately killed small children, or passersby in the street, or foreign visitors, or other civilians who happen to
reside in the area of conflict or are merely associated ethnically or religiously with the people of that area… The conclusion we must draw from all this is evident. Far from being a bearer of freedom, the terrorist is the carrier of oppression and
enslavement . . .[10] This approach strengthens the attempt by terrorist organizations to present terrorism and the struggle for liberation as two contradictory concepts. It thus plays into the terrorists’ hands by supporting their claim that, since
they are struggling to remove someone they consider a foreign occupier, they cannot be considered terrorists. The claim that a freedom fighter cannot be involved in terrorism, murder and indiscriminate killing is, of course, groundless. A
terrorist organization can also be a movement of national liberation, and the concepts of “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” are not mutually contradictory. Targeting “the innocent”? Not only terrorists and their allies use the definition of terrorism
to promote their own goals and needs. Politicians in countries affected by terrorism at times make political use of the definition of terrorism by attempting to emphasize its brutality. One of the prevalent ways of illustrating the cruelty and
inhumanity of terrorists is to present them as harming “the innocent.” Thus, in Terrorism: How the West Can Win, Binyamin Netanyahu states that terrorism is “the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to
inspire fear for political ends.”[11] This definition was changed in Netanyahu’s third book, Fighting Terrorism, when the phrase “the innocent” was replaced by the term “civilians”: “Terrorism is the deliberate and systematic assault on civilians to
inspire fear for political ends.”[12] “Innocent” (as opposed to “civilian”) is a subjective concept, influenced by the definer’s viewpoint, and therefore must not be the basis for a definition of terrorism. The use of the concept “innocent” in defining
terrorism makes the definition meaningless and turns it into a tool in the political game. The dilemma entailed by the use of the term “innocent” is amply illustrated in the following statement by Abu Iyad: As much as we repudiate any activity
that endangers innocent lives, that is, against civilians in countries that are not directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we feel no remorse concerning attacks against Israeli military and political elements who wage war against the
Palestinian people . . . Israeli acts of vengeance usually result in high casualties among Palestinian civilians—particularly when the Israeli Air Force blindly and savagely bombs refugee camps—and it is only natural that we should respond in
appropriate ways to deter the enemy from continuing its slaughter of innocent victims.”[13] Abu Iyad here clarifies that innocent victims are civilians in countries that are not directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict (implying that civilians in
Israel, even children and old people, are not innocent), while he describes Palestinian civilians as innocent victims. Proposing a Definition of Terrorism The question is whether it is at all possible to arrive at an exhaustive and objective definition

of terrorism, which could constitute an accepted and agreed-upon foundation for academic research, as well as facilitating operations on an international scale against the perpetrators of terrorist activities. The
definition proposed herestates that terrorism is the intentional use of violence
, or threat to use

against civilians or againstcivilian targets , in order to attain political aims. This distinction between the target of the attack and its aims shows that the discrepancy between “terrorism” and
“freedom fighting” is not a subjective difference reflecting the personal viewpoint of the definer. Rather it constitutes an essential difference, involving a clear distinction between the perpetrators’ aims and their mode of operation . As noted, an
organization is defined as “terrorist” because of its mode of operation and its target of attack, whereas calling something a “struggle for liberation” has to do with the aim that the organization seeks to attain. Diagram 2 illustrates that non-
conventional war (between a state and an organization), may include both terrorism and guerrilla activities on the background of different and unrelated aims. Hiding behind the guise of national liberation does not release terrorists from
responsibility for their actions. Not only is it untrue that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” but it is also untrue that “the end justifies the means.” The end of national liberation may, in some cases, justify recourse to violence,
in an attempt to solve the problem that led to the emergence of a particular organization in the first place. Nevertheless, the organization must still act according to the rules of war, directing its activities toward the conquest of military and
security targets; in short, it must confine itself to guerrilla activities. When the organization breaks these rules and intentionally targets civilians, it becomes a terrorist organization, according to objective measures, and not according to the
subjective perception of the definer. It may be difficult at times to determine whether the victim of an attack was indeed a civilian, or whether the attack was intentional. These cases could be placed under the rubric of a “gray area,” to be decided
in line with the evidence and through the exercise of judicial discretion. The proposed definition may therefore be useful in the legal realm as a criterion for defining and categorizing the perpetrators’ activities. In any event, adopting the proposed

terrorist organizations
definition of terrorism will considerably reduce the “gray area” to a few marginal cases. Defining States’ Involvement in Terrorism Continues… supporting terrorism –

often rely on the assistance of a sympathetic civilian population. An effective

instrument in the limitation of terrorist activity is to undermine the ability
of the organization to obtain support, assistance, and aid from this
population . A definition of terrorism could be helpful here too by determining new rules of the game in both the local and the international sphere. Any organization contemplating the use of terrorism to attain its political
aims will have to risk losing its legitimacy, even with the population that supports its aims. Public relations – a definition that separates terrorism out from other violent actions will enable the initiation of an international campaign designed to
undermine the legitimacy of terrorist organizations, curtail support for them, and galvanize a united international front against them. In order to undermine the legitimacy of terrorist activity (usually stemming from the tendency of various
countries to identify with some of the aims of terrorist organizations), terrorist activity must be distinguished from guerrilla activity, as two forms of violent struggle reflecting different levels of illegitimacy. The Attitude of Terrorist Organizations

reaching international
Toward the Definition The definition of terrorism does not require that the terrorist organizations themselves accept it as such. Nevertheless,

agreement will be easier the more objective the definition , and the more the definition takes into account the

The proposed definition

demands and viewpoints of terrorist organizations and their supporters. , as noted, draws a distinction between terrorism and guerrilla warfare at both the conceptual

could challenge organizations that are presently involved in

and moral levels. If properly applied, it

terrorism to abandon it so as to engage exclusively in guerrilla warfare. As noted, most

organizations active today in the national and international arena engage in both terrorist activities and guerrilla warfare; after all, international convention makes no distinction between the two. Hence, there are no rules defining what is
forbidden and what is allowed in non-conventional war, and equal punishments are imposed on both terrorists and guerrilla fighters. People perpetrating terrorist attacks or engaging in guerrilla warfare know they can expect the same
punishment, whether they attack a military installation or take over a kindergarten. The terrorist attack may be more heavily censored because it involves children, but the legitimacy of these actions will be inferred from their political aims. In
these circumstances, why not prefer a terrorist attack that will have far more impact, and will be easier to accomplish, with much less risk? The international adoption of the proposed definition, with its distinction between terrorism and guerrilla
warfare—and its concomitant separation from political aims—could motivate the perpetrators to reconsider their intentions, choosing military targets over civilian targets—guerrilla warfare over terrorism–both because of moral considerations
and because of “cost-benefit” considerations. The moral consideration – many terrorist organizations are troubled by the moral question bearing on their right to harm civilians, and this concern is reflected in their literature and in interviews
with terrorists. Thus, for instance, an activist of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Walid Salam, argued in December 1996 that “among activists of the Popular Front, more and more are opposed to military activities against
civilians, as the one near Ramallah on Wednesday. They do not say so publicly because of internal discipline and to preserve unity.”[27] We can also see something of this moral dilemma in Sheik Ahmad Yassin, the leader of Hamas: “According
to our religion it is forbidden to kill a woman, a baby, or an old man, but when you kill my sister, and my daughter, and my son, it is my right to defend them.”[28] This concern might explain why, after attacks on civilian targets, organizations
such as Hamas often make public statements proclaiming that they have attacked military targets. The moral dilemma does exist, and the opponents of terrorism must intensify it. When countries acknowledge the principle of relying on guerrilla
warfare to attain legitimate political aims, and unite in their moral condemnation of terrorism, they increase the moral dilemma that is already prevalent in terrorist organizations. The utilitarian consideration – If the perpetrators know that
attacking a kindergarten or other civilian target will never be acceptable; that these attacks will turn them into wanted and extraditable terrorists and will undermine the legitimacy of their political goals—and that, when apprehended, they will be
punished much more harshly than would guerrilla fighters—they may think twice before choosing terrorism as their modus operandi. Adopting the proposed definition of terrorism, formulating rules of behavior, and setting appropriate
punishments in line with the proposed definition will sharpen the “cost-benefit” considerations of terrorist organizations. One way of encouraging this trend among terrorist organizations is, as noted, to agree on different punishments for those
convicted of terrorism and those convicted of guerrilla warfare. Thus, for instance, the possibility should be considered of bringing to criminal trial, under specific charges of terrorism, individuals involved in terrorist activities, while allotting
prisoner of war status to those accused of involvement in guerrilla activities. The proposed definition of terrorism may indeed help in the struggle against terrorism at many and varied operative levels. An accepted definition, capable of serving as
a basis for international counter-terrorist activity, could above all, bring terrorist organizations to reconsider their actions. They must face the question of whether they will persist in terrorist attacks and risk all that such persistence entails—
loosing legitimacy, incurring harsh and specific punishments, facing a coordinated international opposition (including military activity), and suffering harm to sources of support and revenue. The international community must encourage the
moral and utilitarian dilemmas of terrorist organizations, and establish a clear policy accompanied by adequate means of punishment on the basis of an accepted definition. Summary We face an essential need to reach a definition of terrorism
that will enjoy wide international agreement, thus enabling international operations against terrorist organizations. A definition of this type must rely on the same principles already agreed upon regarding conventional wars (between states), and
extrapolate from them regarding non-conventional wars (betweean organization and a state). The definition of terrorism will be the basis and the operational tool for expanding the international community’s ability to combat terrorism. It will
enable legislation and specific punishments against those perpetrating, involved in, or supporting terrorism, and will allow the formulation of a codex of laws and international conventions against terrorism, terrorist organizations, states
sponsoring terrorism, and economic firms trading with them. At the same time, the definition of terrorism will hamper the attempts of terrorist organizations to obtain public legitimacy, and will erode support among those segments of the

the operative use of the definition of terrorism could

population willing to assist them (as opposed to guerrilla activities). Finally,

motivate terrorist organizations, due to moral or utilitarian considerations,

to shift from terrorist activities to alternative courses in order to (such as guerrilla warfare)

attain their aims, thus reducing scope of international terrorism the . The struggle to define terrorism is
sometimes as hard as the struggle against terrorism itself. The present view, claiming it is unnecessary and well-nigh impossible to agree on an objective definition of terrorism, has long established itself as the “politically correct” one. It is the
aim of this paper, however, to demonstrate that an objective, internationally accepted definition of terrorism is a feasible goal, and that an effective struggle against terrorism requires such a definition. The sooner the nations of the world come to
this realization, the better
 Ideology Key
Ideology MUST factor into the explanation of terrorism,
background itself can’t. Only military solutions solve.
Epstein 5 (Alex, analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, BA in Philosophy from Duke University, “Fight the Root of
Terrorism With Bombs, Not Bread”, San Fransisco Chronicle, 8/14)
In light of the recent suicide bombings in London, and the general inability of the West to prevent terrorist attacks,
there is much talk about fighting the "root cause" of terrorism. The most popular
argument is that terrorism is caused by poverty. The United Nations and our European and Arab "allies" repeatedly tell us
to minimize our military operations and instead dole out more foreign aid to poor countries--to put down our guns and
pick up our checkbook. Only by fighting poverty, the refrain goes, can we address the "root cause" of terrorism. The
pernicious idea that poverty causes terrorism has been a popular claim since the attacks of September 11. U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan has repeatedly asked wealthy nations to double their foreign aid, naming as a cause of terrorism "that
far too many people are condemned to lives of extreme poverty and degradation." Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
agrees: "We have to put hope back in the hearts of people. We have to show people who might move in the direction of
terrorism that there is a better way." Businessman Ted Turner also concurs: "The reason that the World Trade Center got
hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life."   Indeed,
the argument that poverty causes terrorism has been central to America’s botched war in Iraq--which has focused, not on
quickly ending any threat the country posed and moving on to other crucial targets, but on bringing the good life to the
Iraqi people.   Eliminating the root of terrorism is indeed a valid goal--but properly
targeted military action, not welfare handouts, is the means of doing so.
Terrorism is not caused by poverty. The terrorists of September 11 did not
attack America in order to make the Middle East richer. To the contrary, their stated goal was
to repel any penetration of the prosperous culture of the industrialized "infidels"
into their world. The wealthy Osama bin Laden was not using his millions to build electric power plants or
irrigation canals. If he and his terrorist minions wanted prosperity, they would seek to emulate the United States--not to
destroy it.   More fundamental, poverty as such cannot determine anyone's code of morality. It is the ideas that
individuals choose to adopt which make them pursue certain goals and values. A
desire to destroy wealth and to slaughter innocent, productive human beings cannot be
explained by a lack of money or a poor quality of life--only by anti-wealth,
anti-life ideas. These terrorists are motivated by the ideology of Islamic Fundamentalism. This other-
worldly, authoritarian doctrine views America's freedom, prosperity, and pursuit of
worldly pleasures as the height of depravity. Its adherents resent America's success, along with
the appeal its culture has to many Middle Eastern youths. To the fundamentalists, Americans are "infidels"
who should be killed. As a former Taliban official said, "The Americans are fighting so they can live and enjoy
the material things in life. But we are fighting so we can die in the cause of God."   The terrorists hate us
because of their ideology--a fact that filling up the coffers of Third World governments will do nothing to
change.
 A2 “Islamic” terror bad
Referring to the threat as radical Islamism is more accurate –
strong research of motives confirms – anything else is
inaccurate and makes counterterrorism impossible
Lohman 15 [(Walter, Director of The Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center) “Call It What It Is: Islamist
Extremism and Terrorism” Daily Signal January 16, 2015] AT
The initiative has produced a number of major research projects. Analysts initially
looked at religious liberty in the largest Muslim-majority countries in the world, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and
Bangladesh. Additionally, we have published other reports to expand on our policy
recommendations and to address changing circumstances and trends in
particular countries. Heritage has hosted multiple speakers and guest researchers over the years, Muslim and
non-Muslim, on the topic. Most recently, Heritage released Pursuing a Freedom Agenda Amidst Rising Global Islamism
and held a related public program to promote it. The report itself took more than a year of consultation to produce. It
was thoroughly reviewed by a range of experts both internally and
externally. Very early on in the Islam and Liberty initiative, we wrestled with what to call the
threat. We settled on “Islamist extremism and terrorism.” We did so because, on the
one hand, through our experience with Muslim friends and colleagues over the years we know that the threat to
liberty is not from Muslims because they are Muslims. The threat emanates
from a particular extreme interpretation of the faith – essentially a violent
political ideology cast in religious terms. On the other hand, the threat cannot be
honestly separated from its religious context. ISIS and al-Qaeda and the myriad of other
violent Muslim extremist groups around the world may well be cults of murder masquerading as
piety. However, we are not theologians. It is not up to us to say what Islam is and what it is not. When people
kill or tyrannize populations in the name of religion, we must take them at
their word. We must because we are engaged in a war of ideas. One cannot
combat a tactic, terrorism. “Extremism” alone is meaningless. Calling the
threat “Islamist” allows us to distinguish friend from foe and empower the
good guys. There are Muslims among our friends in this fight and enemies among non-Muslims. In the end, we
only aid our enemies by not calling the threat what it is.
 A2 De-naturalize the state
De-naturalizing makes social studies impossible – the state
being contingent doesn’t refute the fact that they are a primary
actor and they’re conceptually useful
Jones 11 (David Jones, Martin Smith, Senior Lecturer, School of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, M.L.R., Department of War Studies, King's College, University of London,
London, United Kingdom, “Terrorology and Methodology: A Reply to Dixit and Stump,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
Volume 34, issue 6)
In this context, Dixit and Stump's proposal to advance critical inquiry by “de-naturalizing the state” is less
reinforces the obsessive suspicion of the state that
than helpful, not least because it merely
defines critical terrorology's worldview. In particular, Dixit and Stump's suggestion is based on the
reductionist claim by Weldes, Laffey, Gusterson and Duvall that the whole field of “security studies” (an ill-defined subject
area at the best of times) is predicated on immutable state threats. Consequently: Actors and their insecurities are
naturalized in the sense that they are treated as facts that, because they are given by the nature of the interstate system,
can be taken for granted. Taken as natural facts, states and other organized actors become the foundational objects the
taken-for-granted of which serves to ground security studies.3 The proposed “de-naturalizing” of the state rests on this
flimsy criticism of security studies, which raises more questions than it answers. What, we might ask, does “de-
naturalizing” the state really mean? Taken to its logical conclusion it implies that we cannot
discuss states as social facts. Nor can a de-naturalized perspective accept that the international
system is primarily composed of states that express themselves through
collective identities and interests and give material form to these through
institutions and symbols that range from flags and anthems to national airlines and armed forces. From the
constructivist ontology that Dixit and Stump embrace it appears that because there are no social facts that are not socially
constituted there can be no such thing as facts at all. But if states cannot at a minimum be
construed as social facts with histories and interests then how, we might wonder, can we begin
to study their actions? In their subsequent discussion of terrorism as practice, the world Dixit and Stump
inhabit is comprised purely of discourses and practices. Even a state's terror strategy, from this
perspective, erroneously assumes an “objectively existing phenomenon.”4 Extending
the process of de-naturalization, moreover, leads to some bizarre and nihilistic conclusions. The logic of
constructivism would entail “de-naturalizing” not just the state, but all social
arrangements, and any human organization, from nationalities, governments, and sub-state actors, to
universities, academic journals, language and the constitution of the self itself. Ultimately, such “de-
naturalization” undermines the foundations of social inquiry . All human
institutions, from the state downwards, rest on assumptions and practices that are
socially and historically constituted. All institutions and social structures can therefore be deconstructed.5
Fundamentally, there is nothing particularly novel about this insight that in fact began with the ancient Greek distinction between nomos
all
and physis.6 Yet, if a program of inquiry simply regards constitutive processes as the only thing worth studying, then
phenomena collapse back into language, which robs everything, including
constructivism itself, of meaning. As the Australian philosopher John Anderson observed of this style of
thinking, it functions “as a substitute at once for philosophy and for a real
theory of language.”7 The point is, as we argued in our review, that to achieve a genuine understanding we must
either investigate the facts that are talked about or study the fact that they are talked about in a certain way. If we
concentrate on the uses of language we are in danger of taking our discoveries about manners of speaking as answers to
questions about what is there. This path leads not to any meaningful insight, but to the paradoxes of idealism Jorge Luis
Borges explored in his Ficciones. In Borges's short story “Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the metaphysicians of the imaginary
world of Tln (or the world conceived by constructivism) do not seek “for the truth, or even for verisimilitude,”8 which they
consider devoid of interest, but instead pursue a “kind of amazement.”9 For, ultimately, if human agents are
themselves, as Dale Copeland notes, merely “puppets of the ideational system in which they find
themselves” then “each would exist as a socially conditioned 'Me', without the free-
willed 'I' capable of resisting the socialization process.”10 Such a condition of linguistic
mutability, in fact, undermines any transformative possibility for the international
system, or indeed anything else. Yet, ironically, this is the very thing constructivists and critical theorists want to show is
possible. Furthermore, if Dixit and Stump do not accept the logic of their constructivism, which abandons academic
engagement for the path of Tlnist astonishment, then they must assert, somewhat arbitrarily, that we should de-naturalize
the state, yet leave all other social institutions in their “natural” state. Such a method only frames the
debate in a way that favors a set of ideological preferences, which inevitably
prejudices the outcome of any inquiry by determining that all problems are
the fault of the state and its insidious systems of exclusion. Dixit and Stump's proposed de-
naturalization of the state, therefore, fails any adequate standard of hypothesis testing.
Put simply, you cannot “de-naturalize” the one thing you might object to in the current
political system, but leave all other practices and social arrangements, including the constitutive positions
you occupy, naturalized as if you existed in Olympian detachment. As we pointed out in our review, at best this
position is intellectually incoherent, and at worst hypocritical. We exemplified this point in our initial review with
reference to Ken Booth's contradictory assertion that critical theorists must recognize that they inhabit a world constituted
by powerful ideological systems, yet must themselves “stand outside” those systems.11 Such schemes repeat the
asserting that everyone, apart from the critically
Marxian fallacy of false consciousness,
initiated, has their understanding distorted by the ideology in dominance.
Critical theory apparently endows its disciples with the unique capacity to “stand outside” these systems of dominance and see through the
othering processes of the state. Meanwhile, those trapped in the quotidian reality of the state have no access to this higher insight. Booth's
article in Critical Studies on Terrorism shows where this style of thinking leads: to the conviction that the followers of critical theory alone
can transcend the mundane and the political.
2AC Capitalism/Imperialism
Settler Colonialism
 Can’t Solve [A2 Byrd]
They can’t explain military presence in Uganda –
A. We don’t own any land in Uganda – it’s a cooperative security
location which means the base is owned by the Ugandan
government
B. Their ev cites Congress’s ability to make treaties through the
Commerce Clause – the deployment in Uganda was done
through executive-only interactions and doesn’t concern
Congress at all, and there’s no formal treaty
C. It doesn’t prove causality – only that Congress interacted with
BOTH tribes and foreign nations at the same time – no reason
one causes the other
 A2 Natives tied to Land
Their description of natives as tied to the land reinforces
colonialist attitudes about the superior complexity of Western
culture
Appadurai, 88
Arjun Appadurai, Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Cultural Anthropology;
February 1988, Volume 3, No.1, Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory,pp. 36-49, Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,
JSTOR
Who is a "native" (henceforth without quotation marks) in the anthropological usage? The quick answer to this
question is that the native is a person who is born in (and thus belongs to) the place the anthropologist is
observing or writing about. This sense of the word native is fairly narrowly, and neutrally, tied to its Latin
etymology. But do we use the term native uniformly to refer to people who are born in certain places
and, thus, belong to them? We do not. We have tended to use the word native for persons and groups
who belong to those parts of the world that were, and are, distant from the metropolitan West. This
restriction is, in part, tied to the vagaries of our ideologies of authenticity over the last two centuries. Proper
natives are somehow assumed to represent their selves and their history, without distortion or residue. We exempt
ourselves from this sort of claim to authenticity because we are too enamored of the complexities of our
history, the diversities of our societies, and the ambiguities of our collective conscience. When we find authenticity
close to home, we are more likely to label it folk than native, the former being a term that suggests authenticity
without being implicitly derogatory. The anthropologist thus rarely thinks of himself as a native of some
place, even when he knows that he is from somewhere.

Juxtaposition perm- Juxtaposing “western thinking” or

“domination” with indigenous metaphysics romanticizes Native
connection to the environment
Bosworth 10 (Kai A Bosworth - B.A.: Environmental Studies, Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, 1/1/2010. “Straws in
the Wind: Race, Nature and Technoscience in Postcolonial South Dakotan Wind Power Development,”
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=envi_honors)

Some contemporary environmentalist discourses have built images of

“authentic” ¶ indigenous experience, people, or knowledge to legitimate and
authorize exclusionary ¶ and privileging practices (Braun 2002, Moore et. al.
2003). Romanticized images of ¶ Native American spiritual, physical,
beneficial, and/or harmonious relationships to nature ¶ have become
centralized around a discourse that anthropologist Shepard Krech has
called ¶ the “Ecological Indian” (1999).¶ 5¶ These discourses are complex, and
are articulated in ¶ different ways through social movements (Nadasdy 2005,
Li 2000), popular television ¶ shows and movies (Sturgeon 2009), discourses
of science and social science (Agrawal ¶ 1995, Latour 1993), and through
economic development, tourism, and environmental ¶ politics (Braun 2002).
For Braun, many contemporary conservation discourses have ¶ assumed, ¶
that safeguarding indigenous cultures would help protect nature, because ¶
indigenous peoples are thought to have an interest and/or expertise in
sustaining ¶ existing ecological relations; or, alternately, that the
preservation of nature is ¶ necessary to preserve indigenous cultures,
because they are seen to have a ¶ necessary relation to nature… Indigenous
identities are defined and contained ¶ within the environmental
imaginaries of European environmentalists and the ¶ postcolonial nation-
state” (2002, 81).
That internal link turns their colonialism impacts
Bosworth 10 (Kai A Bosworth - B.A.: Environmental Studies, Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, 1/1/2010. “Straws in
the Wind: Race, Nature and Technoscience in Postcolonial South Dakotan Wind Power Development,”
http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=envi_honors)

This shift has also changed the ways in which institutions relate to Native ¶ American people and knowledge practices.
Just as some past mainstream environmental ¶ movements lauded and
romanticized Native American values and lifestyles (even as they ¶ made
these lifestyles impossible to maintain), current environmental politics has ¶
produced a vision of clean energy that has often assumed consistency with a
supposed Native American vision of life in harmony with nature, often
without involving Native ¶ American people in the development of this vision
or in major decision making. It ¶ becomes natural that all Native American people would desire wind
power, and any sort ¶ of heterogeneity in what methods and knowledges wind power produces, or what ¶ meanings
indigenous people bring to this technology, are rendered less important. An ¶ articulation of nature out
of balance – global warming – cannot be the fault of Native ¶ Americans, but
it seems natural that indigenous people or knowledge can repair the ¶
damage.¶ In many ways, the romanticization of indigeneity in contemporary
environmental ¶ discourses ignores the operations of contemporary
colonialism and environmental racism in North America. In the last
hundred years, rural Native American land assumed to be ¶ worthless has at
various times been reconfigured as useful land for the public interest. ¶ The
history of the dispossession of Native land has been well documented, especially by ¶ Laduke (1999, 2005) and Churchill
(2002). At various times, indigenous land has been ¶ used as bombing ranges; nuclear
test and storage sites; uranium, coal, and gold mines; ¶ methane and petroleum drilling and refineries;
national parks; hunting grounds; major ¶ dam projects; and a whole host of other colonial
purposes (Honor the Earth forthcoming, ¶ Jacoby 2001, Kuletz 1998, Laduke and Churchill 1992, Laduke 1999,
2005, Lawson ¶ 1994, Solnit 1994). For all intents and purposes, the Southwest and the area around the ¶ western half of
the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming have been treated as “national ¶ sacrifice areas” (Laduke and Churchill 1992, 253).
The uneven application of these ¶ environmental harms has been the
ongoing result of a history of dispossession and ¶ structural violence that has
left many Native American communities devastated.
 Reform Key
Turn—rejecting reform of institutions of domination makes the
entire postcolonial project self-defeating
Dirlik 98 – Prof Social Science, History and Anthropology, U Oregon (Arif, The Postcolonial Aura, p ix, AG)
questioning of totalizing
Postcolonial criticism has quickly spent its critical power, however, as its
solutions has turned into exclusion from criticism of the historical and the
structural contexts for the local, without reference to which criticism itself is
deprived of critical self-consciousness and, as it celebrates itself, knowingly or unknowingly also celebrates the
conditions that produced it. Whether postcolonial criticism has been
appropriated by those who did not share its initial critical
intentions is a moot question, as its methodological denial of structures
and its methodological individualism has facilitated such appropriation . Rather than a
critique of earlier radicalisms from the inside as initially intended, postcolonialism in its unfolding has
turned into a repudiation of the possibility of radical challenges to the
existing system of social and political relations. Its
preoccupation with local encounters and the politics of identity
rules out a thoroughgoing critique of the structures of
capitalism, or of other structurally shaped modes of exploitation
and oppression, while also legitimizing arguments against
collective identities that are necessary to struggles against
domination and hegemony.
 Essentialism DA
Opposition between Western and indigenous epistemologies is
rooted in essentialism. Criticism of so-called Western
epistemological forms undermines struggles against
colonialism.
Chris ANDERSEN Michif (Métis) from western Canada. He is an associate professor in the
Faculty of Native Studies @ Alberta ‘9 “critical indigenous studies From Difference to Density” Cultural Studies Review 15
(2) p. 80-84

In two recent articles,3 American Indian studies professor Duane Champagne

challenges ‘Western’ academic disciplines’ epistemological ability to analyse
contemporary Indigeneity.4 Specifically, their failure to consider Indigenous
collectivities’ active role in colonial contexts in terms not readily discernable
in Western forms of knowledge means these disciplines miss large elements
of Indigeneity and, as such, fail to offer a plausible basis for its analysis. Champagne contends that despite its
current failure to do so, American Indian studies—extrapolated here to include all Indigenous studies—
should instead assume this mantle by presuming the distinctive agency of
Indigenous peoples, including a focus on exploring our relations according
to our distinctive epistemologies and according to the goals and mandates set by
Indigenous communities. Not only will this distinguish Native studies from the rest of the academia, it will
better position it to assist Indigenous peoples in righting their relationships with dominant, ‘whitestream’ society.5 I
agree with Champagne’s assertion that Indigenous studies—whether within or outside specific departments
and faculties—should exist in contemporary academia and that Indigenous communities ought to constitute a
central focus to this endeavour. Despite his obvious love for the discipline (a fidelity I share), however, his peculiar
positioning of Indigenous studies as different needlessly marginalises our
density and, in doing so, unnecessarily gives ground to disciplinary turf long
claimed by older disciplines. Thus, although he usefully positions Indigenous communities as producers
of complex knowledge about indigeneity, his separation of Indigenous from white society unnecessarily marginalises two
elements of our density critical to this relationship: 1) the extent of Indigenous communities’ knowledges about whiteness
(a social fact which requires an expertise in ‘Western’ concepts); and 2) the extent to which the production of academic
knowledge through Indigenous studies is shaped by the ‘whitestream’ academic relations of power, marking it in tension
with other forms of knowledge (such as community knowledge). Both are unfortunate omissions. Regarding the first, the
epistemological aprioris of whiteness are a dominant representational
source through which Western societies produce and consume Indigeneity .
As such, Champagne recklessly jettisons so- called Western disciplinary
concepts and methodologies as immutable precisely where and when
they are most necessary . Regarding the second, he dismisses the contextual importance of accounting for
the academic institutional conditions under which native studies units (are allowed to) exist. My sympathetic critique of
Champagne’s argument is divided into three major parts and a conclusion. Part one extrapolates his analysis of current
native studies and his prescriptions for how to fix it. In this context I examine his charge that
‘Western’ disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology and so on) are too
epistemologically constricted to properly explain Indigenous agency or
communities and I emphasise his failure to account for the conditions of
possibility under which Native American studies entered into academic
history (to borrow Foucauldian phraseology).6 This latter element challenges the
relationships he posits between both Indigenous studies and other academic
disciplines and Indigenous knowledge within and outside the academy. Part
two unpacks his tropes to reveal an epistemological and ontological essentialism
which positions Indigeneity as separate from (his notion of) colonialism,
such that an endogamous focus on the former obviates the need for accounting for
the influence of the latter (or at least, that native studies can analyse the former in a manner which
separates it from the Western academic herd). I argue that Champagne reproduces a variant strain
of ‘Aboriginalism’ 7 that oversimplifies contemporary Indigeneity and overstates the immutability of concepts
emanating from existing ‘Western’ disciplines. In doing so, he unnecessarily limits the contributions Indigenous studies is
ideally positioned to make in deconstructing Aboriginalist discourses and in doing so produces an oddly parochial
formulation of the discipline. Finally, in part three I offer my own prescriptions for an Indigenous studies anchored in
Indigenous density (rather than difference). The temporal and epistemological complexity of our relationships with
whitestream society means that Indigenous studies must counter hegemonic representations of Indigeneity which
marginalise or altogether ignore our density. Following in the footsteps of Geonpul scholar Moreton-Robinson’s path-
breaking work, I argue that Indigenous studies’ study of both Indigeneity and
whiteness must use all available epistemologies, not just those which
apparently distance Western disciplines from Indigenous studies analysis.8
While Champagne’s formulation can possibly be stretched to examine whiteness, the epistemological strategies he
proposes for analysing Indigeneity capture only specific, isolated elements of our complexity. The essay ends with a
discussion of the implications of this argument. I Locating (Champagne in) the discipline of native studies Native studies
‘state of the discipline’ pieces often begin by differentiating our scholarship from that of longer-standing disciplines.9
Though these are as often prescriptive as reflective of actual practice, such immanent analysis signals a healthy and
growing discipline. American Indian scholar Clara Sue Kidwell suggests that, at least in native studies, these debates often
play themselves out in a tension between two poles of analysis: essentialism/difference and adaptation/assimilation.10
She suggests that the essentialism cluster is rooted in an extreme form of post-colonialism
which ‘implies that American Indian ways of thinking existed before colonialism and remain unknowable by
anyone outside those cultures. Native American studies/American Indian studies can recover the
long-suppressed values, epistemologies, and voices from colonial
oppression’.11 Conversely, adaptation clusters typically emphasise the agency of Indigenous collectivities in the face
of whitestream colonialism. Like the essentialism cluster, however, Kidwell argues that in its extreme variant: the idea of
adaptation, or acculturation, or agency represents the ultimate disappearance of Indian identity into American society. If
Indians dress like everyone else, speak like everyone else, attend public schools, are citizens of the state in which they live
and citizens of the United States, how can they justify claims to a distinctive identity?12 Like others taking the essentialist
position in the debate,13 Champagne contends that Indigeneity and Indigenous
communities are fundamentally different in ways which elide the
epistemological premises of Western disciplines (more on this in part two).
These disciplines employ data collection concepts and practices saturated
with a concern for ‘examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations
that confront American or Western civilization ’.14 Indigenous issues are merely positioned as
a specific instance of more general patterns of minority oppression.15 Such thinking has, he suggests,
detracted intellectual energy from the more laudable Indigenous studies
disciplinary goal of ‘conceptuali[s]ing, researching, and explaining patterns
of American Indian individual and collective community choices and
strategies when confronted with relations with the American state and
society’.16 Champagne suggests that most native studies departments are multidisciplinary in character with faculty
scattered in numerous disciplines teaching theories and concepts from numerous academic fields, to students as often as
not from non-Aboriginal backgrounds, with a vague mandate for increasing or generating broader awareness about
Indigenous history and contemporary realities.17 He admits that this multidisciplinarity is often advantageous in that
‘programs could be constructed from long-standing disciplines, and often seasoned scholars could be called upon to
provide guidance and support’.18 However, to the extent that concepts central to Western disciplines remain ‘oriented
toward examining the issues, problems, and conceptualizations that confront American or Western civilization’,19 these
approaches effectively stifle the ability of American Indian studies to produce disciplinarily endogamous theory and
methodology. The existing Indigenous studies academic landscape is thus, Champagne explains, littered with disjointed
and epistemologically scattered forays into (and about) Indigenous communities. The current inability to produce
distinctive theory and method has exacerbated institutional marginality (his context is American but this is readily
extrapolated more broadly): fiscal conservativism limits the likelihood that even well-meaning administrators will build-in
the solid, permanent funding required for stable Native studies departments (since money made available for ‘Aboriginal
issues’ is just as likely to go to more wellregarded disciplines such as anthropology, history or education); broader
multicultural or diversity concerns overshadow the distinctiveness of Indigenous experiences by linking them to broader
forms of ‘minority’ oppression (thus the seemingly natural fit of native studies departments within ‘ethnic studies’
faculties); and mainstream theorising and methodological thinking has shown a reluctance to ‘think outside the box’ of
Western modes of analysis.20 Champagne argues in a nutshell that: the university
bureaucratic environment, weak resource support, the emphasis on race
and ethnic paradigms over an indigenous paradigm, and the relegation of
Indian Studies to serve general diversity interests for the university will
continue to constrain, and often will prevent,
full development of indigenous studies
departments and programs at many universities.21 Champagne’s
understanding of native
studies’ relationship to the academy is reminiscent of the humanism
Foucault critiques in his examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
sexuality regulation.22 Foucault takes such explanations to task for their
tendency to position power repressively as an entity which prevents actions
and curtails freedoms. Foucauldian notions of power instead stress its repressive and
constitutive character. They emphasise how discursive power shapes the formation of subjectivities which, in
turn, shape the conditions under which subjects ‘enter into history’. Wedded to a repressive understanding of power,
Champagne makes a homologous correlation between the current academic
institutional marginality of Native studies and the forms of marginality
Indigenous communities experience outside the academy . Thus correlated,
he argues that a robust and holistic Indigenous paradigm can assist in
rectifying this repression . For Champagne, then, academic and nonacademic
Indigenous knowledge are comrades-in-arms, with Indigenous studies —
anchored in an Indigenous paradigm—providing the missing link . In this guise, his Indigenous
paradigm places Indigenous communities and nations at its centre , instead of
colonial critique. Native studies, Champagne explains, ‘cannot center on a critique of the colonial
experience but rather must focus on the individual and community choices
American Indians make to realize their culture, values, and political and
economic interests within the constraints and opportunities presented by
changing colonial contexts’.23 While colonial critique can be useful for examining external forces relating
to political, legal and market conditions, it ‘exclude[s] choice and social action on the part of Native historical and cultural
experience, and in effect American Indians are not analyzed as players in their own historical contexts but rather viewed
as billiard balls knocked around by powerful colonial powers and forces’.24 Champagne thus draws a
clear distinction between, on the one hand, what he thinks Western disciplines ,
with their focus on colonialism, can explain about indigeneity and on the other, what makes
Indigenous peoples truly Indigenous and, presumably, what these disciplines
remain unable to explicate . Perhaps equally importantly, he assumes that such boundaries are discrete
and readily discernable, such that he effectively erases the object–subject relationship
within which all other academic disciplines produce knowledge .25 Champagne’s
ostensible focus on Indigenous communities reflects a central disciplinary trope of native studies. For example, Cook-
Lynn states bluntly that ‘Indian Studies as an academic discipline was meant to have as it constituencies the native tribal
nations of America and its major purpose the defense of lands and resources and the sovereign right to nationtonation
status’.26 This emphasis on tribally specific knowledge is also emphasised by Muskogee scholar Craig Womack, who
argues the need for ‘more attention devoted to tribally specific concerns’ in a literary context,27 part of a larger ‘literary
nationalism’ movement with broadly allied concerns.28 Holm et al. argue even more specifically that native studies should
emphasise the exploration and support of and for what they term ‘peoplehood’, positioned to include language, sacred
history, territory and ceremony,29 while Kidwell suggests that native studies should endeavour to emphasise Indigenous
relationships with land, the inclusion of Indigenous intellectual traditions, our inherent sovereignty and the importance of
our Indigenous languages.30 Thus, while Champagne’s focal concerns are not abnormal, his attempt to
isolate Indigenous communities epistemologically from the broader social
fabric of dominant, whitestream society effectively removes a large part of
our arsenal for combatting the damaging representations of Indigeneity
woven into larger society. Parts of his argument turn on the idea that colonialism exists external to
Indigenous communities and nations, as something we are subject to. Thus, it isn’t that we don’t suffer
(from) colonialism; rather, its power resides outside our communities.
From this perspective, theories of colonialism are explanatory tools but are
not enough in-and-of-themselves because their externality precludes their
ability to fully comprehend and analyse our communities’ distinctiveness . In
line with the repressive formulation of power which anchors his understanding of Indigenous studies, for
Champagne colonialism = sameness/assimilation and indigeneity =
difference/freedom. I will have more to say on this below, but suffice it to say for now that his prescriptions
become particularly problematic when he attempts to circumscribe the theories and methods native studies should use in
analysis of/with Indigenous communities. One can perhaps forgive Champagne’s diagnosis in this context, since it
represents only part of his argument and, as I said, is a common trope of Indigenous studies. However, consider a fuller
example of his positioning of colonialism: Colonial theories emphasize external forces such as political, legal, market, and
cultural constraints and hegemonies to which American Indian communities are subject. Colonial arguments are powerful
tools and explain much change in American Indian communities, but the kind of change that is explained is externally
enforced and often coercive. Such change is often subtly resisted and not internalized. [footnote omitted] An old Spanish
saying is ‘I bend my knee but not my heart’.31 While his statements might legitimately swell our hearts with pride at the
ways our ancestors resisted colonialism/oppression while retaining their dignity, traditions and collective self
consciousness, they nonetheless avoid questions about how the cultural power of nationstates do not merely oppress, but
seduce as well.32 Champagne’s essentialism in effect marginalises the complex
ways in which our Indigenous habitus (to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu) is inevitably and
irrevocably constituted in and by the fields of struggle we occupy .33 His
colonialism thus staggers between a vulgar Marxism which stresses an
autonomous subject who can/must reject (or accept) colonialism and an
equally vulgar structural-functionalism that measures Indigenous agency
and collective choices against a Cartesian indigeneity which exists outside
the life and reach of contemporary nation-states’ cultural power .
Link Turns
 MP = Capitalism
US military presence abroad is the lynchpin of colonialism – the
plan is a link turn.
The Monthly Review, “US Military Bases and Empire,” Volume 53, Number 10, March 2002,
http://monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm
U.S. global political, economic, and financial power thus require the
periodic exercise of military power. The other advanced capitalist countries tied into this system
have also become reliant on the United States as the main enforcer of the rules of the game . The positioning of
U.S. military bases should therefore be judged not as a purely military
phenomenon, but as a mapping out of the U.S.-dominated imperial sphere
and of its spearheads within the periphery. What is clear at present and bears repeating is that
such bases are now being acquired in areas where the United States had previously lost much of its “forward presence,”
such as in South Asia, the Middle East/Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, or in regions where U.S. bases have
not existed previously, such as the Balkans and Central Asia. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the last
remaining superpower is presently on a course of imperial expansion, as a
means of promoting its political and economic interests, and that the
present war on terrorism, which is in many ways an indirect product of the
projection of U.S. power, is now being used to justify the further projection
of that power. For those who choose to oppose these developments there should be no illusion. The global
expansion of military power on the part of the hegemonic state of world capitalism is an integral part of economic
globalization. To say no to this form of military expansionism is to say no at the
same time to capitalist globalization and imperialism and hence to
capitalism itself.
 AT: Enlightenment Thought
( ) Enlightenment thought is inescapable – and giving up on it guarantees extinction.
Tony Davies, Prof. of English @ Birmingham, 1997, Humanism, 130-132
So there will not after all be, nor indeed could there be, any tidy definitions. The several humanisms – the civic
humanism of the quattrocento Italian city-states, the Protestant humanism of sixteenth century northern Europe, the
rationalistic humanism that attended at the revolutions of enlightened modernity, and the romantic and positivistic
humanisms through which the European bourgeoisies established their hegemony over it, the revolutionary humanism that
shook the world and the liberal humanism that sought to tame it, the humanism of the Nazis and the humanism of their
victims and opponents, the antihumanist humanism of Heidegger and the humanist antihumanism of Foucault and Althusser
– are not reducible to one, or even to a single line or pattern . Each has its distinctive historical curve, its
particular discursive poetics, its own problematic scansion of the human. Each seeks, as all discourses must, to impose its
own answer to the question of ‘which is to be master’. Meanwhile, the problem of humanism remains, for the
present, an inescapable horizon within which all attempts to think about the ways in which
human being have, do, might live together in and on the world are contained. Not that the actual
humanisms described here necessarily provide a model, or even a useful history, least of all for those very numerous people,
and peoples, for whom they have been alien and oppressive. Some, at least, offer a grim warning. Certainly it should no
longer be possible to formulate phrases like ‘the destiny of man’ or ‘the triumph of human reason’ without an instant
consciousness of the folly and brutality they drag behind them. All humanisms, until now, have been
imperial. They speak of the human in the accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a ‘race’. Their embrace
suffocates those whom it does not ignore. The first humanists scripted the tyranny of Borgias, Medicis and
Tudors. Later humanisms dreamed of freedom and celebrated Frederick II, Bonaparte, Bismarck, Stalin. The liberators of
colonial America, like the Greek and Roman thinkers they emulated, owned slaves. At various times, not excluding the
present, the circuit of the human has excluded women, those who do not speak Greek or Latin or English, those whose
complexions are not pink, children, Jews. It is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in the
name of humanity. At the same time, though it is clear that the master narrative of
transcendental Man has outlasted its usefulness, it would be unwise simply to abandon the
ground occupied by the historical humanisms. For one thing, some variety of humanism
remains, on many occasions, the only available alternative to bigotry and persecution. The
freedom to speak and write, to organize and campaign in defence of individual or
collective interests, to protest and disobey: all these, and the prospect of a world in which
they will be secured, can only be articulated in humanist terms. It is true that the Baconian
‘Knowledge of Causes, and Secrett Motions of Things’, harnessed to an overweening rationality and an unbridled
technological will to power, has enlarged the bounds of human empire to the point of endangering the
survival of the violated planet on which we live. But how, if not by mobilizing collective
resources of human understanding and responsibility of ‘enlightened self-interest’ even,
can that danger be turned aside?
 AT: Calculative Thought
( ) Calculative thought is inevitable – complete rejection ensures political inaction.
Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, 2004, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a
Politics of Radical Engagement, 3-5
“Instrumental reason” was seen as merging with what Marx termed the “commodity form”
underpinning capitalist social relations. Everything thereby became subject to the
calculation of costs and benefits. Even art and aesthetic tastes would become defined by a “culture industry”—intent only
upon maximizing profits by seeking the lowest common denominator for its products. Instrumental rationality was thus seen
as stripping the supposedly “autonomous” individual, envisioned by the philosophes, of both the means and the will to resist
manipulation by totalitarian movements. Enlightenment now received two connotations: its historical epoch was grounded in
an anthropological understanding of civilization that, from the first, projected the opposite of progress. This gave the book its
power: Horkheimer and Adorno offered not simply the critique of some prior historical moment in time, but of all human
development. This made it possible to identify enlightenment not with progress, as the philistine bourgeois might like to
believe, but rather—unwittingly—with barbarism, Auschwitz, and what is still often called “the totally administered society.”
Such is the picture painted by Dialectic of Enlightenment.. But it should not be forgotten that its authors were concerned with
criticizing enlightenment generally, and the historical epoch known as the Enlightenment in particular, from the standpoint of
enlightenment itself: thus the title of the work. Their masterpiece was actually “intended to prepare the way for a positive
notion of enlightenment, which will release it from entanglement in blind domination.”4 Later, in fact, Horkheimer and
Adorno even talked about writing a sequel that would have carried a title like “Rescuing the Enlightenment” (Rettung der
Aufklarung).5 This reclamation project was never completed, and much time has been spent speculating about why it wasn’t.
The reason, I believe, is that the logic of their argument ultimately left them with little positive to
say. Viewing instrumental rationality as equivalent with the rationality of domination , and
this rationality with an increasingly seamless bureaucratic order, no room existed any longer for a concrete
or effective political form of opposition: Horkheimer would thus ultimately embrace a quasi-religious
“yearning for the totally other” while Adorno became interested in a form of aesthetic resistance grounded in
“negative dialectics.” Their great work initiated a radical change in critical theory, but its metaphysical
subjectivism surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political insti -
tutions. Neither of them ever genuinely appreciated the democratic inheritance of the Enlightenment and thus,
not only did they render critique independent of its philosophical foundations,6 but also of any practical inter est
it might serve. Horkheimer and Adorno never really grasped that, in contrast to the system builder, the
blinkered empiricist, or the fanatic, the philosophe always evidenced a “greater interest in the things of this
world, a greater confidence in man and his works and his reason, the growing appetite of curiosity and the
growing restlessness of the unsatisfied mind—all these things form less a doctrine than a spirit.”7 Just as
Montesquieu believed it was the spirit of the laws, rather than any system of laws, that manifested the
commitment to justice, the spirit of Enlightenment projected the radical quality of that commit ment and a
critique of the historical limitations with which even its best thinkers are always tainted. Empiricists may deny
the existence of a “spirit of the times.” Nevertheless, historical epochs can generate an ethos, an existential
stance toward reality, or what might even be termed a “project” uniting the diverse participants in a broader
intellectual trend or movement. The Enlightenment evidenced such an ethos and a peculiar stance toward
reality with respect toward its transformation. Making sense of this, however, is impossible without recognizing
what became a general stylistic commitment to clarity, communicability, and what rhetoricians term “plain
speech.” For their parts, however, Horkheimer and Adorno believed that resistance against the incursions of the
culture industry justified the extremely difficult, if not often opaque, writing style for which they would
become famous—or, better, infamous. Their esoteric and academic style is a far cry from that of Enlightenment
intellectuals who debated first principles in public, who introduced freelance writing, who employed satire and
wit to demolish puffery and dogma, and who were preoccupied with reaching a general audience of educated
readers: Lessing put the matter in the most radical form in what became a popular saying—”Write just as you
speak and it will be beautiful”—while, in a letter written to D’Alembert in April of 1766, Voltaire noted that
“Twenty folio volumes will never make a revolution: it’s the small, portable books at thirty sous that are
dangerous. If the Gospel had cost 1,200 sesterces, the Christian religion would never have been established.”9
Appropriating the Enlightenment for modernity calls for reconnecting with the vernacular.
This does not imply some endorsement of anti-intellectualism . Debates in highly specialized
fields, especially those of the natural sciences, obviously demand expertise and insisting that intellectuals must
“reach the masses” has always been a questionable strategy. The sub ject under discussion should define the
language in which it is discussed and the terms employed are valid insofar as they illuminate what cannot be
said in a simpler way. Horkheimer and Adorno, however, saw the matter differently. They feared
being integrated by the culture industry, avoided political engagement, and turned freedom
into the metaphysical-aesthetic preserve of the connoisseur. They became increasingly
incapable of appreciating the egalitarian impulses generated by the Enlightenment and the
ability of its advocates—Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and Rousseau— to
argue clearly and with a political purpose .1’ Thus, whether or not their “critical” enterprise
was “dialectically” in keeping with the impulses of the past, its assumptions prevented
them from articulating anything positive for the present or the future .
 AT: Calculative Thought
( ) Calculative thought is inevitable – only the plan calculates for the Other.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, 255-57, 2002
This excess of justice over law and calculation, this overflowing of the unpresentable over the determinable,
cannot and should not [ne peut pas et ne doit pas] serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-
political battles, within an institution or a state, between institutions or states. Abandoned to
itself, the incalculable and giving [donatrice] idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the
worst for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation . It is always possible,
and this is part of the madness of which we were speaking. An absolute assurance against this risk can only saturate or suture
the opening of the call to justice, a call that is always wounded. But incalculable justice commands
calculation. And first of all, closest to what one associates with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one cannot
isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which one cannot separate it, which
intervene in it and are no longer simply fields: the ethical , the political, the economical, the
psycho-sociological, the philosophical, the literary, etc. Not only must one [il faut] calculate, negotiate the
relation between the calculable and the incalculable , and negotiate without a rule that would not have to
be reinvented there where we are “thrown’ there where we find ourselves; but one must [il faut] do so and take it as far as
possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality, politics, or law,
beyond the distinctions between national and international , public and private, and so on. The order of
It only belongs to either realm by exceeding
this il faut does not properly belong either to justice or to law.
each one in the direction of the other—which means that, in their very heterogeneity, these two
orders are undissociable: de facto and de jure [en fait et en droit]. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if
it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism, or a triviality, one must recognize in it the following
consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret the
very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited. This was
true for example in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipatory
battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world, for men and for women.
Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. One cannot attempt to
disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, without at least some thoughtlessness and without
forming the worst complicities. It is true that it is also necessary to re-elaborate, without renouncing, the concept
of emancipation, enfranchisement, or liberation while taking into account the strange structures we have been describing. But
beyond these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the grand geo-political scale, beyond all self-serving
all determined and particular reappropriations of international law,
misappropriations and hijackings, beyond
other areas must constantly open up that can at first resemble secondary or marginal areas. This marginality also
signifies that a violence, even a terrorism and other forms of hostage taking are at work. The examples closest to us would be
found in the area of laws [lois] on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the military use of
scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception, bio-engineering, medical
experimentation, the “social treatment” of AIDS, the macro- or micro-politics of drugs, homelessness, and so on, without
forgetting; of course, the treatment of what one calls animal life, the immense question of so-called animality. On this last
problem, the Benjamin text that I am coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his
propositions on this subject remain quite obscure or traditional.

( ) Calculative thought is vital to ethics and survival.

David Campbell, Prof. of International Politics @ University of Newcastle, 1999, MORAL SPACES: RETHINKING ETHICS
AND WORLD POLITICS, 56.
Levinas has also argued for a politics that respects a double injunction. When asked "Is not ethical obligation to the other a
purely negative ideal, impossible to realize in our everyday being-in-the-world," which is governed by "ontological drives
and practices"; and "Is ethics practicable in human society as we know it? Or is it merely an invitation to apolitical
acquiescence?" Levinas's response was that "of course we inhabit an ontological world of
technological mastery and political self-preservation. Indeed, without these political and
technological structures of organization we would not be able to feed mankind . This is the greatest paradox
of human existence: we must use the ontological for the sake of the other, to ensure the survival of the other we
must resort to the technico-political systems of means and ends ."
Heg Good
 2AC Ethical
Heg is ethical
Christian Reus-Smit 4 IR @ Australian Nat’l, American Power and World Order p.
109-115
The final ethical position — the polar opposite of the first — holds that the exercise of hegemonic power is never ethically justifiable. One source of such a position might be pacifist thought, which
abhors the use of violence even in unambiguous cases of self-defence. This would not, however, provide a comprehensive critique of the exercise of hegemonic power, which takes forms other than
overt violence, such as economic diplomacy or the manipulation of international institutions. A more likely source of such critique would be the multifarious literature that equates all power with

Postmodernists (and anarchists, for that matter) might argue that

domination.

behind all power lies self-interest and a will to control, both of which are antithetical to genuine human freedom and diversity. Radical liberals
might contend that the exercise of power by one human over another transforms the latter from a moral agent into a moral subject, thus violating their integrity as self-governing individuals.
Whatever the source, these ideas lead to radical scepticism about all institutions of power, of which hegemony is one form. The idea that the state is a source of individual security is replaced here
with the idea of the state as a tyranny; the idea of hegemony as essential to the provision of global public goods is A framework for judgement Which of the above ideas help us to evaluate the ethics
of the Bush Administration's revisionist hegemonic project? There is a strong temptation in international relations scholarship to mount trenchant defences of favoured paradigms, to show that the
core assumptions of one's preferred theory can be adapted to answer an ever widening set of big and important questions. There is a certain discipline of mind that this cultivates, and it certainly
brings some order to theoretical debates, but it can lead to the 'Cinderella syndrome', the squeezing of an ungainly, over-complicated world into an undersized theoretical glass slipper. The study of
international ethics is not immune this syndrome, with a long line of scholars seeking master normative principles of universal applicability. My approach here is a less ambitious, more pragmatic
one. With the exceptions of the first and last positions, each of the above ethical perspectives contains kernels of wisdom. The challenge is to identify those of value for evaluating the ethics of
Bush's revisionist grand strategy, and to consider how they might stand in order of priority. The following discussion takes up this challenge and arrives at a position that I tentatively term
'procedural solidarism'. The first and last of our five ethical positions can be dismissed as unhelpful to our task. The idea that might is right resonates with the cynical attitude we often feel towards
the darker aspects of international relations, but it does not constitute an ethical standpoint from which to judge the exercise of hegemonic power. First of all, it places the right of moral judgement
in the hands of the hegemon, and leaves all of those subject to its actions with no grounds for ethical critique. What the hegemon dictates as ethical is ethical. More than this, though, the principle

The idea that might is never

that might is right is undiscriminating. It gives us no resources to determine ethical from unethical hegemonic conduct.

right is equally unsatisfying. It is a principle implied in many critiques of imperial power, including of American power. But like its polar opposite, it is
utterly undiscriminating. No matter what the hegemon does we are left with one blanket assessment . No procedure, no selfless goal is

worthy of ethical endorsement. This is a deeply impoverished ethical posture , as it raises the critique of power above all other

human values. It is also completely counter-intuitive. Had the United States intervened militarily to prevent

the Rwandan genocide, would this not have been ethically justifiable ? If one answers no,
then one faces the difficult task of explaining why the exercise of hegemonic

power would have been a greater evil than allowing almost a million people
to be massacred. If one answers yes, then one is admitting that a more discriminating set of ethical principles is needed than the simple yet enticing proposition that might
is never right.
 2AC Decreases Interventions

Heg is key to decease excess American interventionism

Kagan and Kristol, 2k (Robert and William, “Present Dangers”, Kagan is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, and Kristol is the editor of The Weekly Standard, and a political analyst and commentator, page 13-14 )
http://www2.uhv.edu/fairlambh/asian/present_dangers.htm

a foreign policy premised on American hegemony, and on the blending of

It is worth pointing out, though, that

principle with material interest, may in fact mean fewer, not more, overseas interventions than under the
"vital interest" standard. (13). The question , then, is not whether the US should intervene

everywhere or nowhere. The decision Americans need to make is whether

the US should generally lean forward, as it were, or sit back. A strategy aimed at
preserving American hegemony should embrace the former stance, being more rather
than less inclined to weigh in when crises erupt, and preferably before they erupt.
This is the standard of a global superpower that intends to shape the international environment to its own advantage. By contrast, the vital interest standard is that
of a "normal" power that awaits a dramatic challenge before it rouses itself into action.
Spanos
 A2 West Shouldn’t Define Others
Allowing the West to define others spurs liberation – it’s
uniquely key to resist Imperialism
Spanos 11 [(William V. Spanos is a highly acclaimed author, World War II
Veteran, POW at Dresden, distinguished professor of English and
Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and well known in the
competitive world of high school and intercollegiate academic debate.
Interview with Christopher Spurlock who rocks inordinate amount of
awesome; http://kdebate.com/spanos.html)]
CS: Some of the most contentious arguments in the debate community about your work revolve around questions of identity. You criticize structures of whiteness that serve to maintain the
hegemony of metaphysical imperialism, but the alternative you offer of identityless identities in multiple places in your work, especially America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire, seems like a
privileged position to take. It is certainly easy for the majority of debaters as white, privileged males to adopt a nomadic or fluid identity- but what does the strategy of identityless identities do for
those who are facing the brunt of oppression or cultural destruction now? Is this intended to be a strategy for them? WVS: Of course, identity is crucial in the struggle of oppressed peoples against
tyranny. Being a Palestinian, for example, is absolutely necessary to the natives of Palestine who would resist the depredations inflicted on them by the powerful Israeli regime. It enables solidarity

identity, as a cultural phenomenon, is a

and endows strength to the cause of resistance. But what I have been calliing poststructuralist theory has also taught us that

historical construct, not a fact of nature. It is, as I have been suggesting, the consequence of a
mode of knowledge production structured in domination, one, that is, that reverses
the primal priority of difference (the many) and identity (the one). In prioritizing identity
(the One) over difference (the many) this ontological fiction thus devalues and subordinates

the latter and renders it colonizable. On the surface, this disclosure, which now posits difference as ontologically prior to identity, would
suggest that the relay of minority terms in this binary logic, insofar as it has been denied a natural solidarity, are rendered powerless. But this is not necessarily so, since poststructuralist theory--

subaltern) identites that have been established historically (by the

Gayatri Spivak comes to mind here-- has also taught us that the (

dominant culture) can be used strategically against its oppressors . This strategic
appropriation of identity in the cause of resistance is too complicated to spell out here, but its efficacy (not least for debaters who would resist the established debate frame) can be suggested briefly
by my referring to a well known literary text and a well known (in my mind epochal) modern historical event that have something basic in common: Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener", and the
Vietnam War. In both, the focus is on the nobodies --those who are as *nothing*, who don't count, in a binarist system in which what counts is determined by material power, Wall Street and the

forwarding American war machine, In both, as well, the weak "nobodies" defeat the powerful Somebodies,
not by confronting the latter head on, in the forwarding terms of encounter it assumes, but simply be
refusing to be answerable to the "Truth" of the powerful !. It was Bartleby's "I prefer not to" that
disintegrated the certainty of his arrogant lawyer boss's Wall Street (democratic/capitalist) ethos. And it was the National Liberation Front's ( the Viet Gong's)

refusal to fight their war of liberation according to the forwarding dictates of the
American imperial regime that resulted in the disintegration of the American
military juggernaut. Appropriating the very subordinate terms by which the
dominant parties represented them, both Bartleby and the National Liberation Front were
enabled to transform them into a weapon that defeated a far more powerful aggressor. It's worth recalling,

at this juncture, Edward Said's appeal to the "damaged life" of Theodor Adorno in his effort to envision a mode of resistance in an age when those who don't

count don't otherwise stand a chance: "'In an intellectual hierarchy which

constantly makes everyone answerable, unanswerabilty alone can call the
hierarchy directly by its name."' (Culture and Imperialism).
 Alt Fails
The alt fails and degenerates into political failure—the aff’s
pragmatism is key to emancipation
Lewandowski 94 [Associate Professor and Philosophy Program Coordinator at The University of Central
Missouri Philosophy and Social Criticism, “Heidegger, literary theory and social criticism,” Philosophy Social
Criticism.1994; 20: 109-122]
What is provocative (and, as we shall see, problematic) about such a positive account of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of destruction is
precisely the way in which it links destruction to emancipation in ways that most literary appropriations of deconstruction have
hitherto failed to manage. In Spanos’s reading of Heidegger and critique of deconstructive tendencies to hypostatize ’textuality’ and
Marxian tendencies toward essentialisms, destructive hermeneutics emerges as the emancipatory alternative
for a critical theory of the sociopolitical power structures of modernity. Demonstrating whether and how ’destruction’ is
emancipatory and a viable alternative to ’oppositional intellectuals’ is the crucial and difficult move in Heidegger and
Criticism. Indeed, in many ways this move is most difficult for Spanos, considering Heidegger’s denigration of existing subjects to a
fallenness into idle chatter and a forgetfulness of their (a)historical destiny and Being. Spanos senses the obstacles posed by
Heidegger’s tendency to abstraction and dehistoricization, to make the ’really existing’ ( ontic ) subject and his history
into essentialized abstractions , and realizes how a truly critical theory cannot afford such
abstractions. Spanos says [i]t is true that Heidegger focused his interrogation of the dominant discourse of modernity on the most
rarified site on the indissoluble continuum of being.... It is also true that this focus blinded him to the other more ’concrete’ or ’worldly’ sites, most
notably - and it must be conceded, irresponsibly - the site of European politics. (p.150) So he turns to Foucault in order to tame Heidegger’s
superfoundationalism : Thinking Heidegger with Foucault thematizes the tendency of Heidegger’s discourse to
abstract history : to overlook (or distort) the historical specificity of modern power relations (the sociopolitical sites
on the ontic continuum). (p. 20) Yet in this turn to Foucault, Spanos also wants to offer a Heideggerian critique of genealogy. Genealogy, in its
ostensible analyses of the ’historical specificity of modern power relations’, misses ’the ultimate ontotheological origins of panopticism or the
regime of truth;’ (p. 174). Insofar as Heidegger’s destruction emphasized the ontological construction of
modernity (its philosophical ground) it was, as we have seen, a limited agency of critical
practice . But insofar as Foucault (and other contemporary worldly critics) emphasizes its sociopolitical construction (its
scientific/technological ground), his genealogy too constitutes a limited agency of critique.... A dialogue between their discourses will
show that the overdetermined sciences and the ’residual’ humanities ... are, in fact, different instruments of the anthropo-logos, the discourse of
Man, and thus complicitous in the late capitalist West’s neoimperial project of planetary domination. (p. 152) In this thinking Heidegger with
Foucault, and in a ’dialogue between their discourses’, Spanos thinks he has the necessary grounding for a structured theory of social
relations with critical intent, a kind of theory that American literary theory, from Brooks to de Man, has been unable (or
unwilling) to articulate, and a kind of theory neither Heidegger nor Foucault adequately articulated. Heidegger shares many of
the problems that faced an earlier generation of critical theorists interested in Heidegger (here I am thinking of Marcuse), and many of
the problems that face contemporary philosophical hermeneutics (here I am thinking mostly of Gadamer and Vattimo). Remember that
Marcuse’s dissatisfaction with Heidegger grew, in fact, not simply out of Heidegger’s political engagements but more so out of
his failure to link his fundamental ontology to any historically concretized praxis (a

problem Spanos is aware of , as I suggested earlier, but never resolves via genealogy - a point I shall return to
shortly). Heidegger never has much to say about agents and their capacity for historically realizable emancipation : for Heidegger, it
is always a freedom that possesses man, a historical destiny that awaits or calls us, and not the other way around. Thomas McCarthy raises this
problematic in his essay on ’Heidegger and Critical Theory’: Heidegger, Marcuse wrote, ’remained content to talk of the nation’s link with destiny,
of the ‘heritage’ that each individual has to take over, and of the community of the ‘generation’, while other dimensions of facticity were treated
under such categories as ‘they’ and ‘idle talk’ and relegated in this way to inauthentic existence. [He] did not go on to ask about the nature of this
heritage, about the people’s mode of being, about the real processes and forces that are history.’ (p. 96) The point to be made here is that
Heidegger’s politics are not the only (or necessarily the largest) obstacle to coupling him with critical theory. Hence much of
Spanos’s energetic defense of Heidegger against his ’humanist detractors’ (particularly in his defiant concluding chapter, ’Heidegger,
Nazism, and the ‘Repressive Hypothesis’: The American Appropriation of the Question’) is misdirected. For as McCarthy rightly points out, ’the
basic issues separating critical theory from Heideggerean ontology were not raised post hoc in reaction to Heidegger’s political misdeeds but were
there from the start. Marcuse formulated them in all clarity during his time in Freiburg, when he was still inspired by the idea of a materialist
analytic of Dasein’ (p. 96, emphasis added). In other words, Heidegger succumbs quite readily to an immanent critique. Heidegger’s
aporias are not simply the result of his politics but rather stem from the internal limits of his questioning of the ’being that lets
beings be’, truth as disclosure, and destruction of the metaphysical tradition, all of which divorce reflection from social practice
and thus lack critical perspective. Spanos, however, thinks Foucault can provide an alternative materialist grounding for an
emancipatory critical theory that would obviate the objections of someone such as Marcuse. But the turn to Foucault is no less
problematic than the original turn to Heidegger. Genealogy is not critical in any real way. Nor can it tame or augment what Spanos
calls Heidegger’s ’overdetermination of the ontological site’. Foucault’s analysis of power, despite its
originality, is an ontology of power and not, as Spanos thinks, a ’concrete diagnosis’ (p.138) of power mechanisms.3 Thus it dramatizes, on a
different level, the same shortcomings of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. The ’affiliative relationship’ (p. 138) that Spanos
tries to develop between Heidegger and Foucault in order to avoid the problem Marcuse faced simply cannot work . Where
Heidegger ontologizes Being, Foucault ontologizes power . The latter sees power as a strategic and
intentional but subjectless mechanism that ’endows itself’ and punches out ’docile bodies’, whereas the former sees Being as that neutered term
and no-thing that calls us.
2AC - Environment
Anthro
 2AC Anthro
The aff makes unlimited assumptions they can critique, which is
unpredictable and too broad and vague to engage – evaluating
the plan’s hypothetical enactment provides a stable basis for
engagement and preserves topic education
Focused debates on specific military policies holds policymakers
accountable
Ewan E. Mellor 13, Ph.D. candidate, Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, 2013, “Why
policy relevance is a moral necessity: Just war theory, impact, and UAVs”
This section of the paper considers more generally the need for just war theorists to
engage with policy debate about the use of force , as well as to engage with the more
fundamental moral and philosophical principles of the just war tradition. It draws on John Kelsay’s conception of just war
thinking as being a social practice,35 as well as on Michael Walzer’s understanding of the role of the social critic in
society.36 It argues that the just war tradition is a form of “practical discourse”
which is concerned with questions of “ how we should act .”37 Kelsay argues that: [T]he
criteria of jus ad bellum and jus in bello provide a framework for structured
participation in a public conversation about the use of military force . . .
citizens who choose to speak in just war terms express commitments . . . [i]n the
process of giving and asking for reasons for going to war, those who argue in
just war terms seek to influence policy by persuading others that their
analysis provides a way to express and fulfil the desire that military actions be
both wise and just.38 He also argues that “good just war thinking involves continuous
and complete deliberation, in the sense that one attends to all the standard criteria at war’s inception, at
its end, and throughout the course of the conflict.”39 This is important as it highlights the need for just war scholars to
engage with the ongoing operations in war and the specific policies that are involved. The question of whether a particular
war is just or unjust, and the question of whether a particular weapon (like drones)
can be used in accordance with the jus in bello criteria , only cover a part of
the overall justice of the war. Without an engagement with the reality of war,
in terms of the policies used in waging it, it is impossible to engage with the
“moral reality of war,”40 in terms of being able to discuss it and judge it in
moral terms. Kelsay’s description of just war thinking as a social practice is similar to Walzer’s more general
description of social criticism. The just war theorist, as a social critic, must be involved with his
or her own society and its practices. In the same way that the social critic’s distance from his or her
society is measured in inches and not miles,41 the just war theorist must be close to and must understand the language
through which war is constituted, interpreted and reinterpreted.42 It is only by understanding the
values and language that their own society purports to live by that the social
critic can hold up a mirror to that society to demonstrate its hypocrisy and to
show the gap that exists between its practice and its values .43 The tradition
itself provides a set of values and principles and, as argued by Cian O’Driscoll, constitutes a “language of
engagement” to spur participation in public and political debate.44 This language
is part of “our common heritage, the product of many centuries of arguing about war.”45 These principles and
this language provide the terms through which people understand and come
to interpret war, not in a deterministic way but by providing the categories necessary
for moral understanding and moral argument about the legitimate and
illegitimate uses of force .46 By spurring and providing the basis for political
engagement the just war tradition ensures that the acts that occur within war are considered
according to just war criteria and allows policy-makers to be held to account on this basis.
Engaging with the reality of war requires recognising that war is , as Clausewitz
stated, a continuation of policy. War, according to Clausewitz, is subordinate to politics and to
political choices and these political choices can, and must, be judged and critiqued.47
Engagement and political debate are morally necessary as the alternative is
disengagement and moral quietude, which is a sacrifice of the obligations of
citizenship.48 This engagement must bring just war theorists into contact with
the policy makers and will require work that is accessible and relevant to policy
makers, however this does not mean a sacrifice of critical distance or an abdication of
truth in the face of power. By engaging in detail with the policies being pursued and their
concordance or otherwise with the principles of the just war tradition the policy-makers will be forced
to account for their decisions and justify them in just war language. In contrast to the view, suggested by
Kenneth Anderson, that “the public cannot be made part of the debate” and that “[w]e are necessarily committed into the
hands of our political leadership”,49 it is incumbent upon just war theorists to ensure that
the public are informed and are capable of holding their political leaders to
account. To accept the idea that the political leadership are stewards and that accountability will not benefit the
public, on whose behalf action is undertaken, but will only benefit al Qaeda,50 is a grotesque act of intellectual
irresponsibility. As Walzer has argued, it is precisely because it is “our country” that we are “especially obligated to
criticise its policies.”51 Conclusion This paper has discussed the empirics of the policies of drone strikes in the ongoing
conflict with those associate with al Qaeda. It has demonstrated that there are significant moral questions raised by the
just war tradition regarding some aspects of these policies and it has argued that, thus far, just war scholars
have not paid sufficient attention or engaged in sufficient detail with the
policy implications of drone use . As such it has been argued that it is necessary for just
war theorists to engage more directly with these issues and to ensure that
their work is policy relevant, not in a utilitarian sense of abdicating from
speaking the truth in the face of power, but by forcing policy makers to justify
their actions according to the principles of the just war tradition, principles which they invoke themselves in
formulating policy. By highlighting hypocrisy and providing the tools and
language for the interpretation of action, the just war tradition provides the
basis for the public engagement and political activism that are necessary for
democratic politics.52

Extinction outweighs – also kills all non-human life on earth –

prioritize impacts that affect both humans and animals
Perm do the plan and ___
Reflexive anthropocentrism solves best
Barry 99 (John politics lecturer Keele University, RETHINKING GREEN POLITICS, 1999,
p. 7-8)
Ecological stewardship, unlike ecocentrism, seeks to emphasize that a
self-reflexive, long-term
anthropocentrism, as opposed to an 'arrogant' or 'strong'
anthropocentrism can secure many of the policy objectives of
ecocentrism, in terms of environmental preservation and conservation. As argued in Chapter 3, a
reformed, reflexive anthropocentrism is premised on critically
evaluating human uses of the non-human world, and distinguishing
'permissible' from 'impermissible' uses. That is, an 'ethics of use', though anthropocentric and
rooted in human interests, seeks to regulate human interaction with the environment by distinguishing legitimate
'use' from unjustified 'abuse'. The
premise for this defence of anthropocentric
moral reasoning is that an immanent critique of 'arrogant
humanism' is a much more defensible and effective way to
express mere moral concerns than rejecting anthropocentrism
and developing a 'new ecocentric ethic'. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3,
ecocentric demands are premised on an over-hasty dismissal of
anthropocentrism which precludes recognition of the positive resources
within anthropocentrism for developing an appropriate and practicable moral idiom to cover social-
environmental interaction.

The alt can’t generate real change – pragmatic concern for

animal impacts through a human frame is best
Mendenhall 9 [(Beth, 2011 CEDA champ, graduated from Kansas state, studied philosophy and political
science). “The Environmental Crises: Why We Need Anthropocentrism.” Stance, Volume 2, April 2009]
The weakly anthropocentric view avoids the difficulties of justifying an environmental ethic from either end of
the spectrum. On one hand, it avoids controversy over the existence of intrinsic value in non-human
organisms, objects, and ecological systems. This is one important characteristic of a nonanthropocentric ethic like Deep
Ecology– finding intrinsic value in all living things.3 By intrinsic value, I mean value that exists independent of any
observer to give it value. For example, a nonanthropocentric ethicist would see value in an animal that no human could
ever benefit from or even know about, simply because of what it is. While possibly justifiable, an ethic that
treats all living things and possibly even ecological systems as intrinsically valuable may
seem very radical to a large portion of the public. It seems that even the philosophical
community remains divided on the issue. On the other hand, our ethic avoids making felt human desire
the loci of all value by showing how considered human values can explain the value in our environment. In other words,
what humans value, either directly or indirectly, generates value in the environment. In this way, we avoid unchecked felt
preferences that would not be able to explain why excessive human consumption is wrong. Avoiding these controversial
stances will contribute substantially to the first advantage of a weakly anthropocentric environmental ethic: public appeal.
The importance of public appeal to an environmental ethic cannot be overstated. We
are running out of time to slow or reverse the effects of past environmental
degradation, and we will need the support of society to combat them effectively. Hence, the
most important advantage of a weakly anthropocentric ethic over a nonanthropocentric one is public appeal because many
people feel that nonanthropocentrism is just too radical and contrary to common sense. For many, all value does come
from humans, since they believe we are the only species capable of rational thought. Opinions about the environment are
certainly changing, but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that most reasons given for increasing
environmental protection all reduce to anthropocentrism. For example, the 2004 book
The Meat You Eat, by Ken Midkiff, explains why factory farming should be rejected,
with a focus on its detrimental effects to human health. The vegan and vegetarian
movements have increasingly focused on this angle of the factory farming debate, perhaps because of the broader appeal
of human-focused motivations. As Midkiff says, “It is simply impossible to raise animals in concentrated operations and to
slaughter these animals by the thousands… without severe health consequences among humans. By treating these animals
as units of production, the industrial methods, ultimately and inevitably, produce meats that are unfit to eat.”4 Even if
this justification for ending factory farming is not one defended by deep ecologists, isn’t
actual change more important? Common justifications for species protection include parents wanting
their children to know what an elephant, or a leopard, or a panda look like, how the beauty of animals increases human
satisfaction in much the same way that an art gallery would, or the genetic information they can provide which might cure
human diseases. In fact, almost every justification printed or aired in major news media reflects a anthropocentric bias.
For example, an April 2008 article from the BBC, entitled “Species Loss Bad for Our Health”, surveys “a wide range of
threatened species whose biology could hold secrets to possible treatments for a growing variety of ailments.”5 President-
elect Barack Obama has consistently spoken about global warming in terms of its impact on future human generations. In
a 2007 speech at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he stressed the urgency of the issue by saying that “the polar ice caps are
now melting faster than science had ever predicted… this is not the future I want for my daughters.”6 As for the last
premise, most people agree that human consciousness is intrinsically valuable. That is the reason why this value needs
little explanation. Even if this justification isn’t perfect, I believe that the ecological ends justify the
philosophical means.
Human centeredness does not cause destruction of minority
cultures or peoples
Lee, Philosophy Professor at Bloomsburg, ‘9 (Wendy, Spring, “Restoring Human-Centerednes to
Environmental Conscience: The Ecocentrist's Dilemma, the Role of Heterosexualized
Anthropomorphizing, and the Significance of Language to Ecological Feminism” Ethics and the
Environment, Vol 14 No 1, Project Muse)
Second, then, is that however indigenous, no necessary implications for ethnicity,
gender, sex, or sexual identity follow from human-centeredness (or follow for our concepts
of ethnicity, etc.). That we are, for instance, bipedal, color vision equipped, big-brained,

sentient mammals implies no particular trajectory for human institutions

other than for what falls within the range of physical, cognitive, and
epistemic possibility for this species of animal. That we cannot see out the backs of our heads no doubt affects
our experience of our somatic and existential conditions, that we are sentient creatures able to experience not only physical but psychological pain certainly
Specific capacities and
contributes substantially to the ways in which our points of view identify us as specific loci of experience.

limitations are not, however, determinations—while species membership delimits the possible, it
does not define, for example, the "normal" or "natural" in any other terms but what
can be. Nothing necessarily follows for human institutions like government ,
marriage, or family, however otherwise chauvinistic, sexist, racist, or
heterosexist they may be. While human-centeredness is a defining characteristic of human consciousness, the ways in which we realize
it is not.

A total rejection of anthropocentrism fails and reinscribes

human-centric ideals – middle ground that preserves beneficial
human ethics while acknowledging our flaws is best
Hayward 97 [Tim Hayward (Professor of Politics at University of Edinburgh), “Anthropocentrism: A
Misunderstood Problem,” Environmental Values 6 (1997): 49-63] AZ
But if the project of overcoming speciesism can be pursued with some expectation of success, this is not the case with the
overcoming of anthropocentrism. What makes anthropocentrism unavoidable is a
limitation of a quite different sort, one which cannot be overcome even in principle
because it involves a non-contingent limitation on moral thinking as such. While
overcoming speciesism involves a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge of relevant similarities and differences
between humans and other species, the criteria of relevance will always have an
ineliminable element of anthropocentrism about them . Speciesism is the arbitrary refusal
to extend moral consideration to relevantly similar cases; the ineliminable element of
anthropocentrism is marked by the impossibility of giving meaningful
moral consideration to cases which bear no similarity to any aspect of human cases. The emphasis is on the
‘meaningful’ here: for in the abstract one could of course declare that some feature of the nonhuman world was morally
valuable, despite meeting no determinate criterion of value already recognised by any human, but because the new value is
completely unrelated to any existing value it will remain radically indeterminate as a guide to action. If the ultimate point
of an ethic is to yield a determinate guide to human action, then, the human reference is
ineliminable even when extending moral concern to nonhumans. So my argument
is that one cannot know if any judgement is speciesist if one has no
benchmark against which to test arbitrariness; and, more specifically, if we are
concerned to avoid speciesism of humans then one must have standards of
comparison between them and others. Thus features of humans remain the benchmark. As long as the valuer is a
human, the very selection of criteria of value will be limited by this fact. It
is this fact which precludes
the possibility of a radically nonanthropocentric value scheme, if by that is meant
the adoption of a set of values which are supposed to be completely unrelated to any existing human values. Any
attempt to construct a radically non-anthropocentric value scheme is liable not only to be arbitrary –
because founded on no certain knowledge – but also to be more insidiously anthropocentric in
projecting certain values, which as a matter of fact are selected by a human, onto nonhuman beings without certain
warrant for doing so. This, of course, is the error of anthropomorphism, and will inevitably, I believe, be committed in any
attempt to expunge anthropocentrism altogether. But is admitting this unavoidable element of anthropocentrism not
tanta- mount to admitting the unavoidability of human chauvinism? My claim is that it is not. What is unavoidable is that
human valuers make use of anthropocentric benchmarks; yet in doing so, they may find that in all consistency they must,
for instance, give priority to vital nonhuman interests over more trivial human interests. For the human chauvinist, by
contrast, interests of humans must always take precedence over the interests of nonhumans. Human chauvinism does not
take human values as a benchmark of comparison, since it admits no comparison between humans and nonhumans.
Human chauvinism ultimately values humans because they are humans. While the human chauvinist may officially claim
there are criteria which provide reasons for preferring humans – such as that they have language, rationality, sociality etc.
– no amount of evidence that other beings fulfil these criteria would satisfy them that they should be afforded a similar
moral concern. The bottom line for the human chauvinist is that being human is a necessary and sufficient condition of
moral concern. What I am pointing out as the ineliminable element of anthropocentrism is
an asymmetry between humans and other species which is not the product of chauvinist
prejudice. To sum up, then, what is unavoidable about anthropocentrism is precisely
what makes ethics possible at all. It is a basic feature of the logic of obligation: if an
ethic is a guide to action; and if a particular ethic requires an agent to make others’ ends her ends, then they become just
that – the agent’s ends. This is a non- contingent but substantive limitation on any attempt to
construct a completely nonanthropocentric ethic. Values are always the values of the
valuer:3 so as long as the class of valuers includes human beings, human values are ineliminable. Having argued that this
is unavoidable, I also want to argue that it is no bad thing.
 Humans First
Humans first—this ev is comparative
Daly and Frodeman, chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University
of North Texas, 8 (Erin and Robert, Ethics and the Environment, “Separated at Birth, Signs of Rapprochement,” Spring 2008,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ethics_and_the_environment/v013/13.1.daly.html, CJin)

Beside Earth, the most likely place in our galaxy to support life is Mars (McKay
1982). There are two possibilities here: either there is currently life of some sort on Mars, or

the planet is abiotic but could, with modifications, support future life . Currently
Mars is thought to be far too cold and dry to allow the sort of life found on Earth, but this conclusion [End Page 144] could be wrong.
Scientists' understanding of life is necessarily limited to terrestrial biology; there is no real way to know what biochemical forms life might
Recent discoveries of extremophiles have proven that even
take elsewhere in the universe.

on Earth life is remarkably persistent and can exist in extremely harsh environments.
Microorganisms have been found a foot beneath the sands of the Chilean Atacaman Desert—one of the driest places on Earth and previously
thought sterile (Mahoney 2004). Whole ecosystems thrive in hydrothermal vents 2000 meters below sea level, in complete absence of
sunlight. Microbes discovered under ice in Greenland have survived at least 120,000 years (and perhaps as long as a million years) in
subzero temperatures, low oxygen levels, and minimal nutrients (Britt 2004). Halobacteria live in highly concentrated saline environments
such as those that might exist, or may have existed, in many locations on Mars (Landis 2001). These and other similar recent
discoveries have renewed scientists' hope that some form of life could
survive the harsh Martian environment, either present or past.9
Terraforming is the use of planetary engineering techniques to alter the environment of a planet in order to improve the chances of survival
of an indigenous biology or to allow the habitation of most, if not all, terrestrial life forms (McKay 1990, 184–85). There is a sizeable body of
science, rationale, and potential benefits of bringing life to Mars . The
literature on the

mechanics of terraforming essentially consist of warming the Martian

climate by the release of carbon dioxide or other gases into the environment .
This process is the same one that warms the climate of Earth—the greenhouse effect. It is thought that we will be able to do this in the
foreseeable future, using contemporary or imminent technology (Zubrin & McKay 1997).
An argument in favor of terraforming is that such a grand experiment would yield valuable information about the complex interworkings of
ecosystem processes on Earth. Robert Haynes suggests "we will never adequately understand the workings of our own biosphere until we
the project
have made a serious attempt at least to design, if not actually to generate, another one" (Haynes 1990).11 Indeed,

would significantly advance our scientific knowledge of the nature of life. It is

feasible to imagine that such understanding could have a dramatic effect on our ability to solve ecological problems on Earth. [End Page
145]
Of course, the issue of terraforming is not exclusively a scientific or technological one. Indeed, a number of talented scientists have noted
thatterraforming must be dealt with by those qualified to address ontological
and theological questions about the nature of life (e.g., Haynes 1990).12 Few philosophers have
approached the question—the majority of literature considering the ethics of such a project has been written by scientists. Those

who have written about the ethical implications of terraforming (both

scientists and philosophers) have tended to appeal to the intrinsic value
issues involved in introducing terrestrial life to Mars. The questions usually take the following
forms: Is life better than non-life? Is there value in nature absent the presence of life? Should we preserve the natural state of the red planet,
or might we have an ethical obligation to populate the universe?
David Grin-spoon likens the issue to that of planting a garden in a
The answer to the last question is often a qualified yes.

vacant lot— if no life exists on Mars, then we have a duty to bring life to it: "Mars belongs to
us [life] because this universe belongs to life" (Grinspoon 2004). Of course, a vacant lot is a human creation, and thus is a questionable
McKay voices a similar position: "Life has
analogy to a planet which happens to be naturally abiotic. Christopher

precedence over non-life," he states; "life has value. A planet Mars with a natural global-scale biota has value vis-à-vis a
planet with only sparse life or none at all" (McKay 1990).
Zubrin, one of the most energetic and unequivocal spokesman of the case for bringing life to Mars, claims that the
Robert

act of terraforming the Red Planet will prove that " the worlds of the heavens
themselves are subject to the human intelligent will " (Zubrin 2002). Zubrin has called the
argument that we should forgo the terraforming project if native life is found on
Mars "immoral and insane," because humans are more important than
bacteria. "In securing the Red Planet on behalf of life, humans will perform an act of improving creation so dramatic that it will
affirm the value of the human race, and every member of it. There could be
no activity more ethical" (Zubrin 2002, 179–80).
The terraforming project does not receive universal approval. An advocate of the 'hands-off' approach, or what has come to be called cosmic
preservationism, is Rolston, who assigns value to the "creative projects" of nature, regardless of the existence of life or consciousness. [End
Page 146] "Humans ought to preserve projects of formed integrity, wherever found…." [We should] "banish soon and forever the bias that
only habitable places are good ones, and all uninhabitable places empty wastes, piles of dull stones, dreary, desolate swirls of gases"
(Rolston 1986, 170–71). Alan Marshall, another preservationist, advocates strict enforcement measures to ensure that the planet continues
to exist in its natural state. For Marshall, all of nature should receive respect; rocks, for instance, exist in "a blissful state of satori only
afforded to non-living entities" (Marshall 1993).
Martyn Fogg, on the other hand, notes that efforts to protect a barren environment are
often misanthropic critiques of human nature emphasizing our capacity for
evil, or sentimental illusions based on ou tof date ecology. He offers as an example the
ecocentrist notion of ecological harmony—"that there exists an ideal balance in nature that is perfect, unchanging, and

which nurtures and sustains" (Fogg 2000a, 209). Such a state is a cozy sentimentality, he claims . "Nature is…
better regarded as a continuous state of flux dominated by chaos and disharmony" (ibid.). Fogg counters Alan Marshall's argument that
rocks don't think, don't act and don't care. They
rocks exist in a state of 'blissful satori' by stating, "

cannot have values of their own" (ibid., 210).

The question, however, of whether e.g., rocks have intrinsic value is different from whether they have values of their own. Abiotic nature
can also have value through the relatedness of nature and natural objects to human beings. This value resides in the daily presence of
humans in nature, humans as part of nature—something not (yet) true of the extraterrestrial world. We may be confident that rocks do not
think, or have values of their own. But humans can nonetheless value rocks for their own sake
—they can be experienced as beautiful, sublime, or sacred. Metaphysical, aesthetic, and theological questions such as these must be included
as we address issues of terraforming.

Rational thought and ability to classify based on prior knowledge makes

humans uniquely important
Lee and George 8- prof of bioethics and prof of jurisprudence (Patrick and Robert P., Ratio Juris, “The Nature and Basis of
Human Dignity,” http://www.patrickleebioethics.com/dignity--ratio_juris.pdf, da 5/13, mat)

be the type of substantial entity they are, rather than any accidental attributes they possess. True, it is not self-contradictory to hold that the
person himself is valuable, but only in virtue of some accidental attributes he or she possesses. Still, it is more natural, and more
theoretically economical, to suppose that what has full moral status, and that in virtue of which he or she has full moral status, are the same.
Second, this position more closely tracks the characteristics we tend to think are found in genuine care or love. Our genuine love for a
person remains, or should remain, for as long as that person continues to exist, and is not dependent on his or her possessing further
attributes. That is, it seems to be the nature of care or love that, at least ideally, it should be unconditional, that we should continue to desire
the well-being or fulfillment of someone we love for as long as he or she exists. Of course, this still leaves open the question whether
continuing to live is always part of a person’s well-being or fulfillment; we also maintain that a person’s life always is in itself a good, but
that is a distinct question from the one being considered just now (see Lee and George 2007, chap. 5). The point is that caring for someone is
a three-term relation. It consists in actively willing that a good or benefit be instantiated in a person, viewed as a subject of existence, in
other words, as a substance. And this structure is more consonant with the idea that the basis of dignity or moral worth is being a certain
sort of substance, rather than possessing certain attributes or accidental characteristics. 3. The Difference in Kind between Human Beings
Human beings are fundamentally different in kind from other
and Other Animals

animals, not just genetically but in having a rational nature (that is, a nature characterized by
basic natural capacities for conceptual thought, deliberation, and free choice) .

Human beings perform acts of understanding, or conceptual thought, and such acts are
fundamentally different kinds of acts from acts of sensing, perceiving, or imaging. An act
of understanding is the grasping of, or awareness of, a nature shared in common by
many things. In Aristotle’s memorable phrase, to understand is not just to know water (by sensing or perceiving this water), but
to know what it is to be water (Aristotle 1961, Bk. III, Ch. 4). By our senses and perceptual abilities we know the individual qualities and
quantities modifying our sense organs— this color or this shape, for example. But by understanding (conceptual thought), we apprehend a
nature held in common by many entities—not this or that instance of water, but what it is to be water. By contrast, the object of the sensory
powers, including imagination, is always an individual, a this at a particular place and a particular time, a characteristic, such as this red,
this shape, this tone, an object that is thoroughly conditioned by space and time. contrast is evident upon examination of language. Proper
names refer to individuals, or groups of individuals that can be designated in a determinate time and place. Thus, “Winston Churchill” is a
name that refers to a determinate individual, whereas the nouns “human,” “horse,” “atom,” and “organism” are common names. Common
names do not designate determinate individuals or determinate groups of individuals (such as “those five people in the corner”). Rather,
they designate classes. Thus, if we say, “Organisms are composed of cells,” the word “organisms” designates the whole class of organisms, a
class that extends indefinitely into the past and indefinitely into the future. All syntactical languages distinguish between proper names and
common names. But a class is not an arbitrary collection of individuals. It is a collection of individuals all of whom have something in
common. There is always some feature (or set of features), some intelligible nature or accidental attribute, that is the criterion of
membership for the class. Thus, the class of organisms is all, and only those, that have the nature of living bodily substance. And so, to
understand the class as such, and not just be able to pick out individuals belonging to that class, one must understand the nature held in
common. And to understand the class as a class (as we clearly do in reasoning) one must mentally apprehend the nature or features (or set
of features) held in common by the members of the class, and compare this to those individual members. Thus, to understand a proposition
such as, “All organisms require nutrition for survival,” one must understand a nature or universal content designated by the term
Human
“organism”: The term designates the nature or feature which entities must have in them in order to belong to that class.

beings quite obviously are aware of classes as classes. That is, they do more than
assign individuals to a class based on a perceived similarity; they are aware
of pluralities as holding natures or properties in common (see Wallman 1992, esp. chapters
5 and 6). For example, one can perceive , without a concept, the similarity between two square

shapes or two triangular shapes, something which other animals do as well as human beings. But
human beings also grasp the criterion, the universal property or nature, by which the
similars are grouped together (cf. Connell 1981, 87–93; Haldane 2000; Adler 1990; Pannier and Sullivan 2000; Ross
1992). There are several considerations tending to confirm this fact. First, many universal judgments require an understanding of the
nature of the things belonging to a class. If I understand, for example, that every organism is mortal, because every composite living thing is
mortal, this is possible only if I mentally compare the nature, organism, with the nature, composite living thing, and see that the former
entails the latter. That is, my judgment that every composite living thing can be decomposed and thus die, is based on my insight into the
nature of a composite living thing. I have understood one nature, subject to death, is entailed by the other nature, composite living being,
and from that knowledge I then advert to the thought of the individuals which possess those natures. I judge that individual composite living
beings must be included within the class of individuals that are subject to death, but I judge that only in virtue of my seeing that the nature,
being subject to death, is necessitated by the nature, composite living being. This point is also evident from the fact that I judge that a
composite living being is necessarily capable of dying. 8 By the senses, one can grasp only an individual datum. Only by a distinct capacity,
The capacity for
an intellect, only by apprehending the nature of a thing, can one grasp that a thing is necessarily thus or so. 9

conceptual thought in human beings radically distinguishes them from

other animals known to us. This capacity is at the root of most of the other
distinguishing features of human beings. Thus, syntactical language, art,
architecture, variety in social groupings and in other customs, 10 burying the dead,
making tools, religion, fear of death (and elaborate defense mechanisms to ease living with that fear), wearing

clothes, true courting of the opposite sex (Scruton 1986), free choice, and 8 True, something extrinsic could preserve it from death,
but it is the sort of thing that is, by its nature, subject to death. This is the basis for the major premise in the classic example of a syllogism:
All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. 9 Another example will illustrate this point. When children arrive at
the age at which they can study logic, they provide evidence of the ability to grasp a nature or property held in common by many. They
obviously do something qualitatively distinct from perceiving a concrete similarity. For example, when studying elementary logic, the child
(or young man or woman) grasps the common pattern found in the following arguments: A. If it rains then the grass is wet. The grass is not
wet. Therefore, it is not raining. B. If I had known you were coming, I would have baked you a cake. But I did not bake you a cake. So, (you
can see that) I did not know you were coming. We understand the difference between this type of argument, a modus tollens argument, and
one that is similar but invalid, namely, the fallacy of affirming the consequent (If A then B, B, therefore A). But, what is more, we
understand why the fallacy of affirming the consequent is invalid—namely, some other cause (or antecedent) could be, or could have been,
present to produce that effect. A computer, a mechanical device, can be programmed to operate according to the modus tollens and to react
differently to (give a different output for) words arranged in the pattern of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. But understanding the
arguments (which humans do) and merely operating according to them because programmed to do so (the actions of computers) are
entirely different types of actions. The first does, while the second does not, require the understanding or apprehending of a form or nature
as distinct from its instances. (This is not to say that the nature exists separately from the individuals instantiating it, or as a universal,
outside the mind. We hold that the nature exists in the mind as universal, but outside the mind as multiplied and individuated. Of course in
propositional knowledge the mind apprehends the particular as well as the universal. 10 Mortimer Adler (1990) noted that, upon extended
observation of other animals and of human beings, what would first strike one is the immense uniformity in mode of living among other
animals, in contrast with the immense variety in modes of living and customs among human beings. 184 Patrick Lee and Robert P. George ©
2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Ratio Juris, Vol. 21, No.morality—all of these
and more, stem from the ability to reason and understand. Conceptual
thought makes all of these specific acts possible by enabling human beings
to escape fundamental limitations of two sorts. First, because of the capacity for conceptual thought,
human beings’ actions and consciousness are not restricted to the spatio-temporal
present. Their awareness and their concern go beyond what can be perceived or imagined as connected immediately with the present
(Reichmann 2000, chap. 2; see also Campbell 1994). Second, because of the capacity for conceptual thought, human beings

can reflect back upon themselves and their place in reality, that is, they can attain an
objective view, and they can attempt to be objective in their assessments and
choices. Other animals give no evidence at all of being able to do either of
these things; on the contrary, they seem thoroughly tied to the here and now, and unable to
take an objective view of things as they are in themselves, or to attempt to do so (Baker 2000, chap. 3; Campbell 1994). The capacity for
conceptual thought is a capacity that human beings have in virtue of the kind of entity they are. That is, from the time they come to be they
are developing themselves toward the mature stage at which they will (unless prevented from doing so by disability or circumstances)
perform such acts. Moreover, they are structured—genetically, and in the non-material aspect of themselves—in such a way that they are
every human being, including human infants and unborn human beings, has
oriented to maturing to this stage. 11 So,

this basic natural capacity for conceptual thought. 12 Human beings also have the basic natural
capacity or potentiality to deliberate among options and make free choices, choices that are not determined by the events that preceded
them, but are determined by the person making the choice in the very act of choosing. That is, for some choices, the antecedent events are
not sufficient to bring it about that these 11 The genetic structure orients them toward developing a complex brain that is suitable to be the
substrate for conceptual thought; that is, it is capable of providing the kind of sense experience and organization of sense experience that is
suitable for data for concepts. Since the object of conceptual thought is not restricted to a particular place and time, this is evidence that the
power of conceptual thought is non-material. So, we hold that human beings have a non-material aspect, the powers of conceptual thought
and free choice. 12 It is not essential to the defense of human dignity to argue that only humans have this power of conceptual thought and
. It
(to be discussed in a moment) free choice. However, there is not evidence of such conceptual thought or free choice in other animals

is sometimes argued that perhaps some nonhuman animals do have minds

like humans do, only at a diminished level. Perhaps, it is speculated, it is only the complexity of the human
brain, a difference only in degree, that distinguishes humans from other animals. Perhaps other primates are intelligent but they have
such speculation is misguided. While intelligence
lacked the opportunities to manifest their latent intelligence. But

it is unreasonable to think that an intelligence of the same

is not directly observable,

type as human intelligence, no matter how diminished, would not manifest itself in at least some of
its characteristic effects. If a group of beings possesses a power , and possesses that
power over many years (even decades or centuries), it is implausible to think that such a power

would not be actualized. choices be made in this way rather than another way. In such choices, a person could have
chosen the other option, or not chosen at all, under the very same conditions. If a choice is free, then, given everything that happened to the
person up to the point just prior to his choice—including everything in his environment, everything in his heredity, everything in his
understanding and in his character—it was still possible for him to choose the other option, or not to choose at all. Expressed positively: He
himself in the very act of choosing determines the content of his willing. Human beings are ultimate authors of their own acts of will and
partial authors (together with nature and nurture) of their own character (Kane 1998). How, then, does a person finally choose one course
of action rather another? The person by his own act of choosing directs his will toward this option rather than that one, and in such a way
that he could, in those very same circumstances, have chosen otherwise. 13 A good case can be made to support the position that human
beings do make free choices. 14 First, objectively, when someone deliberates about which possible action to perform, each option (very
often, in any case) has in it what it takes to be a possible object of choice. When persons deliberate, and find some distinctive good in
different, incompatible, possible actions, they are free, for: (a) they have the capacity to understand the distinct types of good or fulfillment
found (directly or indirectly) in the different possible courses of action, and (b) they are capable of willing 13 Hence the position we are
proposing is an incompatibilist view of free choice. Having alternate possibilities, that is, the ability to will otherwise, is essential to free
choice and moral responsibility. It seems to us that the Frankfurt alleged counterexamples (proposed to disprove the principle of alternate
possibilities) are not genuine counterexamples. On these alleged counterexamples there is a first agent who deliberates and decides, but
there is a second, more powerful agent who in some way monitors the first agent and is ready and able to cause the first agent to do the act
desired by the second agent if the first agent begins to will or perform otherwise than the desired outcome. It turns out, however, (on the
imagined scenario) that the first agent decides on his own to do the act which the second agent was ready to compel him to do. So, according
to advocates of Frankfurt examples, the first agent acted freely, was morally responsible, and yet could not have willed or acted otherwise
(see Frankfurt 1969). For a recent defense of this approach, see Fischer and Ravizza 1998. The problem is that the monitoring device,
however it is imagined, will be unable to alert the second agent that the first agent is about to, or has begun to, act otherwise than the second
agent plans. The act of willing is not determinate prior to its occurrence and so cannot be known before it occurs. And once it has occurred,
it is too late to prevent it. (This was the ground for Aquinas’s position that not even God can know a future contingent precisely as future,
that is, as it exists in its causes, but he can know it only as it is in act—yet, since God is not in time, what is future with respect to us is not
future with respect to God. See Aquinas 1981 Pt. I, q. 14, a. 13.) The second agent could prevent the physical, external action carrying out the
choice, but the act of will is free and undetermined even if the external behavior executing the choice is prevented. Although his argument
against the Frankfurt examples is not precisely the one presented here, an article that overlaps somewhat with this argument is Woodward
2002. 14 A more extended argument can be seen in Boyle, Grisez, and Tollefsen 1976; see also van Inwagen 1986 and 2002. 186 Patrick Lee
and Robert P. George © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Ratio Juris, Vol. 21, No. 2whatever they
understand to be good (fulfilling) in some way or other. 15 That is, each alternative offers a distinct type of good or benefit, and it is up to the
person deliberating which type of good he will choose. For example, suppose a student chooses to go to law school rather than to medical
school. When he deliberates, both options have a distinctive sort of goodness or attractiveness. Each offers some benefit the other one does
not offer. So, since each alternative has some intelligible value in it (some goodness that is understood), then each alternative can be willed.
And, second, while each is good, to a certain extent, neither alternative (at least in many situations) is good, or better, in every respect. Here
the role of conceptual thought, or intellect, becomes clear. The person deliberating is able to see, that is, to understand, that each alternative
is good, but that none is best absolutely speaking, that is, according to every consideration, or in every respect. And so, neither the content
of the option nor the strength of one or another desire, determines the choice. Hence there are acts of will in which one directs one’s will
toward this or that option without one’s choosing being determined by antecedent events or causes. Human persons, then, are
fundamentally distinct from other animals in that they have a nature entailing the potentialities for conceptual thought and free choice. 4.
Having a Rational Nature, or Being a Person, Is the Criterion for Full Moral Worth Neither sentience nor life itself entails that those who
possess them must be respected as ends in themselves or as creatures having full moral worth. Rather, having a rational nature is the
ground of full moral worth. The basis of this point can be explained, at least in part, in the following way. When one chooses an action, 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 infinite. 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. Such ultimate reasons for choice are not arbitrarily selected. Intrinsic goods—that is, human
goods that as basic aspects of human well-being and fulfillment provide more-than-merely-instrumental reasons for choices and actions—
are not just what we happen to desire, perhaps different objects for different people. 16 Rather, the intellectual apprehension that a 15 The
argument here is indebted to Aquinas (see, e.g., Aquinas 1981, I–II, q. 10, aa. 1–2). 16 The Humean notion of practical reason contends that
practical reason begins with given ends which are not rationally motivated. However, this view cannot, in the end, make sense condition or
activity is really fulfilling or perfective (of me and/or of others like me) is at the same time the apprehension that this condition or activity is
a fitting object of pursuit, that is, that it would be worth pursuing. 17 These fundamental human goods are the actualizations of our basic
potentialities, the conditions to which we are naturally oriented and which objectively fulfill us, the various aspects of our fulfillment as
human persons. 18 They include such fulfillments as human life and health, speculative knowledge or understanding, aesthetic experience,
friendship or personal community, harmony among the different aspects of the self. 19 The conditions or activities understood to be
fulfilling and worth pursuing are not individual or particularized objects. I do not apprehend merely that my life or knowledge is
intrinsically good and to be pursued. I apprehend that life and knowledge, whether instantiated in me or in others, is good and worth
pursuing. For example, seeing an infant drowning in a shallow pool of water, I apprehend, without an inference, that a good worth
preserving is in danger and so I reach out to save the child. The feature, fulfilling for me or for someone like me, is the feature in a condition
or activity that makes it an ultimate reason for action. The question is: In what respect must someone be like me for his or her of the fact
that we seem to make objective value judgments, not contingent on, or merely relative to, what this or that group happens to desire—for
example, the judgments that murder and torture are objectively morally wrong. Moreover, the Humean view fails to give an adequate
account of how we come to desire certain objects for their own sake to begin with. A perfectionist account, on the contrary, one that
identifies the intrinsic goods (the objects desired for their own sake) with objective perfections of the person, is able to give an account of
these facts. For criticisms of the Humean notion of practical reason: Boyle 2001, 177–97; Wallace 1990, 355–87; Korsgaard 1996; Brink
1997; Finnis 1983, 26–79; Raz 1986, 288–368. 17 The idea is this: What is to be done is what is perfective. This seems trivial, and perhaps is
obvious, but it is the basis for objective, practical reasoning. The question, what is to be done? is equivalent to the question, what is to be
actualized? But what is to be actualized is what actualizes, that is, what is objectively perfective. For human beings this is life, knowledge of
truth, friendship, and so on. 18 This claim is derived from Thomas Aquinas, and has been developed by Thomists and Aristotelians of
various types. It is not necessary here to assume one particular development of that view against others. We need only make the point that
the basic principles of practical reason come from an insight—which may be interpreted in various ways—that what is to be pursued, what is
worth pursuing, is what is fulfilling or perfective of me and others like me. For more on this see: Grisez, Boyle, and Finnis 1988; Finnis,
Boyle, Grisez 1987, chaps. 9–11. Finnis 1983; Finnis 1998; Chappell 1998; Oderberg 2000b; McInerny 1992; Murphy 2002. 19 Once one
apprehends such conditions or activities as really fulfilling and worthy of pursuit, the moral norm arises when one has a choice between one
option the choice of which is fully compatible with these apprehensions (or judgments) and another option that is not fully compatible with
those judgments. The former type of choice is fully reasonable, and respectful of the goods and persons involved, whereas the latter type of
choice is not fully reasonable and negates, in one way or another, the intrinsic goodness of one or more instances of the basic goods one has
already apprehended as, and recognized to be, intrinsically good. 188 Patrick Lee and Robert P. George © 2008 The Authors. Journal
compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Ratio Juris, Vol. 21, No. 2fulfillment to be correctly viewed as worth pursuing for its own sake
in the same way that my good is worth pursuing? The answer is not immediately obvious to spontaneous, or first-order, practical reasoning,
or to first-order moral reasoning. That is, the question of the extension of the fundamental goods genuinely worthy of pursuit and respect
needs moral reflection to be answered. By such reflection, we can see that the relevant likeness (to me) is that others too rationally shape
their lives, or have the potentiality of doing so. Other likenesses—age, gender, race, appearance, place of origin, etc—are not relevant to
making an entity’s fulfillment fundamentally worth pursuing and respecting. But being a rational agent is relevant to this issue, for it is an
object’s being worthy of rational pursuit that I apprehend and which makes it an ultimate reason for action, and an intrinsic good. 20 So, I
ought primarily to pursue and respect not just life in general, for example, but the life of rational agents—a rational agent being one who
either immediately or potentially (with a radical potentiality, as part of his or her nature) shapes his or her own life. 21 Moreover, I
understand that the basic human goods are not just good for me as an individual, but for me acting in communion—rational cooperation
and real friendship—with others. Indeed, communion with others, which includes mutual understanding and self-giving, is itself an
irreducible aspect of human well-being and fulfillment—a basic human good. But I can act in communion—real communion—only with
beings with a rational nature. So, the basic goods are not just goods for me, but goods for me and all those with whom it is possible (in
principle, at least) rationally to cooperate. All of the basic goods should be pursued and respected, not just as they are instantiable in me,
but as they are instantiable in any being with a rational nature. In addition, by reflection we see that it would be inconsistent to respect my
fulfillment, or my fulfillment plus that of others whom I just happen to like, and not respect the fulfillment of other, immediately or
potentially, rational agents. For, entailed by rational pursuit of my good (and of the good of others I happen to like) is a demand on my part
that others respect my good (and the good of those I like). That is, in pursuing my fulfillment I am led to appeal to the reason and freedom of
others to respect that pursuit, and my real fulfillment. But in doing so, consistency, that is reasonableness, demands that I also respect the
rational pursuits and real fulfillment of other rational agents—that is, any entity that, immediately or 20 The argument presented here is
similar to the approaches found in the following authors: Lombardi 1983; Goldman 2001; Zanardi 1998. 21 The position that the criterion
for full moral worth cannot be an accidental attribute, but is the rational nature, that is, being a specific type of substance, is defended in Lee
2004. See also Stretton 2004, and Lee 2007. The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity 189 Ratio Juris, Vol. 21, No. 2 © 2008 The Authors.
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.potentially (that is by self-directed development of innate or inherent natural
capacities), rationally directs his or her own actions. In other words, the thought of the Golden Rule, basic fairness, occurs early on in moral
reflection. One can hope that the weather, and other natural forces, including any non-rational agent, will not harm one. But one has a
moral claim or right (one spontaneously makes a moral demand) that other mature rational agents respect one’s reasonable pursuits and
real fulfillment. Consistency, then, demands that one respect reasonable pursuits and real fulfillment of others as well. Thus, having a
rational nature, or, being a person, as traditionally defined (a distinct subject or substance with a rational nature) is the criterion for full
moral worth. 5. Marginal Cases On this position every human being, of whatever age, size, or stage of development, has inherent and equal
fundamental dignity and basic rights. If one holds, on the contrary, that full moral worth or dignity is based on some accidental attribute,
then, since the attributes that could be considered to ground basic moral worth (developed consciousness, etc.) vary in degree, one will be
led to the conclusion that moral worth also varies in degrees. It might be objected against this argument, that the basic natural capacity for
rationality also comes in degrees, and so this position (that full moral worth is based on the possession of the basic natural capacity for
rationality), if correct, would also lead to the denial of fundamental personal equality (Stretton 2004). However, the criterion for full moral
worth is having a nature that entails the capacity (whether existing in root form or developed to the point at which it is immediately
exercisable) for conceptual thought and free choice—not the development of that basic natural capacity to some degree or other. The
criterion for full moral worth and possession of basic rights is not the possession of a capacity for conscious thought and choice considered
as an accidental attribute that inheres in an entity, but being a certain kind of thing, that is, having a specific type of substantial nature.
Thus, possession of full moral worth follows upon being a certain type of entity or substance, namely, a substance with a rational nature,
despite the fact that some persons (substances with a rational nature) have a greater intelligence, or are morally superior (exercise their
power for free choice in an ethically more excellent way) than others. Since basic rights are grounded in being a certain type of substance, it
follows that having such a substantial nature qualifies one as having full moral worth, basic rights, and equal personal dignity. An analogy
. Certain properties follow upon being an animal, and so are
may clarify our point

possessed by every animal, even though in other respects not all animals are equal. For example, every animal has
some parts which move other parts, and every animal is subject to death (mortal). Since various animals are equally animals—and since
being an animal is a type of substance rather than an accidental attribute—then every animal will equally have those properties, even though
Similarly,
(for example) not every animal equally possesses the property of being able to blend in well to the wooded background.

possession of full moral worth follows upon being a person (a distinct

substance with a rational nature) even though persons are unequal in many
respects (intellectually, morally, etc.). These points have real and specific implications for the great controversial issues in
contemporary ethics and politics. Since human beings are intrinsically valuable as subjects of rights at all times that they exist—that is, they
do not come to be at one point, and acquire moral worth or value as a subject of rights only at some later time—it follows that human
embryos and fetuses are subjects of rights, deserving full moral respect from individuals and from the political community. It also follows
that a human being remains a person, and a being with intrinsic dignity and a subject of rights, for as long as he or she lives: There are no
subpersonal human beings. Embryo-destructive research, abortion, and euthanasia involve killing innocent human beings in violation of
human beings are animals of a special
their moral right to life and to the protection of the laws. In sum,

kind. They differ in kind from other animals because they have a rational
nature, a nature characterized by having the basic natural capacities for conceptual
thought and deliberation and free choice. In virtue of having such a nature, all

human beings are persons; and all persons possess profound, inherent, and equal
dignity. Thus, every human being deserves full moral respect . (

moral imperative – governments have a pragmatic obligation to

protect the humans they are built for
Rhonheimer 05 [(Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE
POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON:
RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70]
It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical,
for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but
must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of
political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical
contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would
abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the “idea of the good” or of “the
just” (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy
must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 14 Briefly: political philosophy is not

unlike
metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover,

moral norms in general—natural law included,—which rule the actions of a person—“my acting” and pursuing the good—, the logic of the political
is characterized by acts like framing institutions and establishing legal rules by which not only personal
actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over

others. Political actions are , thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of

citizens. 15 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by

nature subjects , we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the “domestic” and the “political” kind of rule 16 : unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common

interest and harmoniously striving after the same good [despotism] and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially “despotic,” political rule is exercised over free

persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The
exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of

consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers.
 2AC: Anthro Inev
Anthropocentrism is so ingrained that the alternative is
impossible
Frank B. Cross, Assoc. Prof. Bus Law @ Texas, March 1989, “Natural Resource Damage Valuation,” 42 Vand. L.
rev. 269, LN

Perhaps the argument over the intrinsic worth of natural resources is largely pointless. Political realists contend that
concern for inherent animal welfare lacks public credibility. Whatever the metaphysical basis for nature's
intrinsic value, the advocates of this position risk being considered impractical and fuzzy-headed, if not
outright crackpots. Their arguments are treated with more ridicule than respect. n136 Perhaps these critics are partly
correct. As long as government is making the legal rules and as long as only humans vote, the concerns of
nature never will be reflected directly in our nation's governmental policy. Most environmental laws
enacted to date focus on protecting people's [*296] interest in the natural environment. n137 Nature's
influence on people may be felt in a myriad of ways, but legislation is not among them. Inasmuch as the question is
phrased in public policy terms, the answer must come from humans alone. n138 Indeed, the terminology from
a discussion of natural resources seems antithetical to intrinsic valuation. The term "resource" implies
usefulness to man. n139 Similarly, "value" may require a human subject to express a preference regarding the natural
object. n140 Remove the human subject, and the concept of value loses meaning. n141 The legal valuation of
natural resources is a human undertaking that is limited inescapably to human understanding and
choice. Of course, one may be persuaded that nature has intrinsic value for which government should account.
Enlightened human preference thus may capture at least a portion of intrinsic value, but the preference
is predicated necessarily on an informed human understanding of intrinsic value, not on the value itself.
n142 This recognition also helps defeat the antidemocratic and elitist features potentially existing in concepts of intrinsic
value. n143
 2AC: Alt --> Radicalism
The alt fragments resistance and causes radicalism and
extinction
Martin Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for International Studies at Duke
University. Green Delusions, 1992 p 6-7

Those who condemn radical environmentalism usually do so on the grounds that it represents a massive threat to human
society, to civilization, and material progress as we have come to know them. This is hardly surprising, since many eco-
radicals proudly claim this to be their intent. But the core argument of this work is that green extremism should be more
deeply challenged as a threat to nature itself. Because this thesis is seemingly paradoxical, it is necessary to outline in
unambiguous terms how nature’s most fervent champions could also unwittingly be among its most dangerous foes. A
Green Threat to Nature The most direct way in which eco-extremists threaten the environment is simply by
fueling the anti-environmental countermovement. When green radicals like Christopher Manes (1990) call
for the total destruction of civilization, many begin to listen to the voices of reaction. Indeed, the mere
linking of environmental initiatives to radical groups such as Earth First! often severely dampens what would otherwise be
widespread public support (see Gabriel 1990:64). As radicalism deepens within the environmental movement, the
oppositional anti-ecological forces accordingly gain strength. The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a
think tank for the so-called wise use movement, has, for example, recently published a manifesto calling for such outrages
as the opening of all national parks to mineral production, the logging of all old-growth forests, and the gutting of the
endangered species act. This group’s ideologues contend that certain environmental philosophies represent nothing less
than mental illnesses, a theory anonymously propounded in the “intellectual ammunition department” of their Wise Use
Memo (Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise 1990:2). Even more worrisome is the fact that a former high-ranking
CIA agent is now spreading rumors that environmental scientists are presently attempting to concoct a virus that could
destroy humankind (See “Tale of a Plot to Rid Earth of Humankind,” San Francisco Examiner, April 14, 1991: A-2). My
fear is that if green extremism captures the environmental movement’s upper hand, the public would be
much less likely to recognize such a claim as paranoid fantasy, while a handful of ecoradicals would be
happy to destroy humanity, such individuals also reject science and thus would never be able to act on
such convictions. More frightening, and more immediate, is the specter of a few radicals actually
opposing necessary environmental reforms. Such individuals conclude that “reform environmentalism”
is “worse than useless because by correcting short-term symptoms it postpone)s ] the necessary
reconstruction of the entire human relationship with the natural world” (Nash 1989:150). From here it is a
short step to argue that reform would only forestall an ecological apocalypse —which some evidently
believe is a necessary precondition for the construction of an environmentally benign social order . The
insanity of pushing the planet even closer to destruction in order to save it in the future should be readily
apparent.
 Transhumanism Turn
Speciesism is key to Transhumanism
CALVERLY ‘6 (David; Center for the Study of Law, Science and Technology – Arizona State University, “Android Science
and Animal Rights, Does an Analogy Exist?” Connection Science, 18:4, December)

Even more fundamentally, there are concerns that arise at the earliest stages of development of a machine
consciousness. The endeavour itself is replete with moral and ethical pitfalls. If the same logic as urged for animal
rights, or for the rights of foetuses, is applied to a machine consciousness, some of these issues could have the
potential to curtail radically the development of a conscious entity. If part of the process of developing a machine
consciousness is an emergent learning process (Lindblom and Ziemke 2006), or even a process of creating various
modules that add attributes of consciousness such as sentience, nociception, or language, in a cumulative fashion,
some could argue that this is immoral. As posed by LaChat (1986: 75–76), the question becomes ‘Is the AI experiment
then immoral from its inception, assuming, that is, that the end (telos) of the experiment is the production of a
person? . . . An AI experiment that aims at producing a self-reflexively conscious and communicative “person” is prima
facie immoral’. Must designers of a machine consciousness be aware that as they come closer to their goal, they may
have to consider such concerns in their experimentation? Arguably yes, if human equivalence is the ultimate goal.
Failure to treat a machine consciousness in a moral way could be viewed as a form of speciesism (Ryder 1975). The
utilitarian philosopher J. J. C. Smart (1973: 67) has observed ‘if it became possible to control our evolution in such a
way as to develop a superior species, then the difference between species morality and a morality of all sentient
beings would become much more of a live issue’.

Transhuman focus means we address existential risks – those outweigh

Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University, The Transhumanist FAQ- A General Introduction,
Version 2.1 (2003), google.

Yes, and this implies an urgent need to analyze the risks before they materialize and to take steps to reduce them.
Biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence pose especially serious risks of accidents and abuse. [See
also “ If these technologies are so dangerous, should they be banned? What can be done to reduce the risks?” ] One
can distinguish between , on the one hand, endurable or limited hazards, such as car crashes, nuclear reactor
meltdowns, carcinogenic pollutants in the atmosphere, floods, volcano eruptions, and so forth, and, on the other
hand, existential risks – events that would cause the extinction of intelligent life or permanently and drastically
cripple [halt] its potential. While endurable or limited risks can be serious – and may indeed be fatal to the people
immediately exposed – they are recoverable; they do not destroy the long-term prospects of humanity as a whole .
Humanity has long experience with endurable risks and a variety of institutional and technological mechanisms have
been employed to reduce their incidence. Existential risks are a different kind of beast . For most of human history,
there were no significant existential risks, or at least none that our ancestors could do anything about. By definition,
of course, no existential disaster has yet happened. As a species we may therefore be less well prepared to
understand and manage this new kind of risk. Furthermore, the reduction of existential risk is a global public good
(everybody by necessity benefits from such safety measures, whether or not they contribute to their development),
creating a potential free-rider problem, i.e. a lack of sufficient selfish incentives for people to make sacrifices to
reduce an existential risk. Transhumanists therefore recognize a moral duty to promote efforts to reduce existential
risks.
 Aliens Turn
The rules of anthropocentrism would be justifiably applicable to extra-
terrestrial life
Huebert and Block ‘7 (J.H. and Walter , 2007, J.D. - University of Chicago and Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar
Endowed Chair in Econmics - College of Business Administration - Loyola University, "Space Environmentalism, Property
Rights, and the Law" 37 U. Mem. L. Rev. 281, Winter, ln
Some observers, such as Roberts, believe that bodies "with the potential for harboring biotic or prebiotic activity"
present a special case for which different rules must apply. Roberts states that where life exists or even potentially
exists, we must apply the "precautionary principle," which would place the burden of proof on those engaged in a
"challenged activity" and prohibit development that threatens evidence of past life or the existence of present or
"potential" life. n96 We disagree. First, we note that there is no evidence that life exists or has ever existed anywhere in
the solar System except Earth. n97 Further, there is a strong consensus that to the extent that life might exist or have
ever existed elsewhere, such as on Mars or Europa, it is limited to extremely simple microscopic organisms. n98 The
likelihood of sentient or even plant life existing elsewhere in the solar System appears to be zero , and the question of
life on planets outside the solar System is very hypothetical, even for an article on space law. n99 Therefore, a
presumption against the existence of actual life where no evidence to the contrary exists seems proper . Further,
space environmentalists have failed to make the case that environmental regulations are necessary to protect whatever
extraterrestrial life (or evidence thereof) may exist. Humans are fascinated by the prospect of the existence of any kind of
extraterrestrial life. Anyone who bothers to go to space for any purpose is likely to be interested in checking for signs of past
or present life on his property (or prospective property) before acting in a way that might destroy it. For the intellectually
uncurious, there would still be financial incentives. For example, scientific or environmental organizations could offer prize
money for discovery of evidence [*303] of extraterrestrial life; a property owner who discovers evidence of life could sell
scientists, journalists, and others rights to access, study, and publicize information about the discovery. Only governmental
intervention (e.g., stripping individuals of property rights when something of scientific interest is found on their property) is
likely to cause incentives to run in any other direction. n100 Suppose there were the proverbial "little green creatures"
discovered on Mars or on any other planet humans colonized. What rights would they have? What obligations would
we have to respect these rights? If they were smarter/stronger than we, the shoe of course would be on the other foot.
There are several options. If they had the intelligence/ability of dogs or cats, then we would treat them as we now do
those animals. But suppose they were an intermediate between us and the smartest of earth animals (chimps,
porpoises), or had human qualities but looked like a cross between an octopus and a giraffe. According to Rothbard, n101
if they could communicate with us, promise to respect our personal and property rights, and adhere to such
undertakings, then and only then would we be obligated to treat them as we do each other (well, better, hopefully).

Embracing aliens leads to extinction

Leake, Writer for the Sunday Times, 10
[Jonathon, The Sunday Times, “Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking” 4/25/10
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece ,accessed 6/21/11,HK]

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out , at least according to Stephen
Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking
them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. The suggestions
come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest
Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist
thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating
in interplanetary space. Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he
points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars . In such
a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved . “To my
mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real
challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” The answer, he suggests, is that
most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of
its history. One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing
on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing
fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of
a few
the moons of Jupiter. Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that
life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a
species could be devastating for humanity. He suggests that aliens might simply raid
Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life
might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships,
having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would
perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can
reach.” He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky ”.
He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher
Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native
Americans.” The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by
motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three
years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming. John Smithson,
executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general
audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.” Hawking has
suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs,
such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common
phenomenon. So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used
to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances. Another breakthrough is the
discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve
there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds. Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good
scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too,
suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look. Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer
royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding. “I suspect
there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t
understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”
 Environment Turn
Human-centeredness is key to environmental sustainability
Schmidtz 2k – Professor of Philosophy @ Arizona
David Schmidtz, 2k. Philosophy, University of Arizona, Environmental Ethics, p. 379-408
Like economic reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about equilibria and perturbations that keep systems from
converging on equilibria. Like economic reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about competition and unintended
consequences, and the internal logic of systems, a logic that dictates how a system responds to attempts to manipulate it.
Environmental activism and regulation do not automatically improve the environment. It is a truism in ecology, as in
economics, that well-intentioned interventions do not necessarily translate into good results. Ecology (human and nonhuman)
is complicated, our knowledge is limited, and environmentalists are themselves only human. Intervention that works with the
system’s logic rather than against it can have good consequences. Even in a centrally planned economy, the shape taken by
the economy mainly is a function not of the central plan but of how people respond to it, and people respond to central plans
in ways that best serve their purposes, not the central planner’s. Therefore, even a dictator is in no position simply to decide
how things are going to go. Ecologists understand that this same point applies in their own discipline. They understand that
an ecology’s internal logic limits the directions in which it can be taken by would-be ecological engineers. Within
environmental philosophy, most of us have come around to something like Aldo Leopold’s view of humans as plain citizens
of the biotic community.[21] As Bryan Norton notes, the contrast between anthropocentrism and biocentrism obscures the
fact that we increasingly need to be nature-centered to be properly human-centered; we need to focus on "saving the
ecological systems that are the context of human cultural and economic activities." [22] If we do not tend to what is good for
nature, we will not be tending to what is good for people either. As Gary Varner recently put it, on purely anthropocentric
grounds we have reason to think biocentrically.[23] I completely agree. What I wish to add is that the converse is also true:
on purely biocentric grounds, we have reason to think anthropocentrically. We need to be human-centered to be
properly nature-centered, for if we do not tend to what is good for people, we will not be tending to what is good for
nature either. From a biocentric perspective, preservationists sometimes are not anthropocentric enough. They
sometimes advocate policies and regulations with no concern for values and priorities that differ from their own . Even
from a purely biocentric perspective, such slights are illegitimate. Policy makers who ignore human values and human
priorities that differ from their own will, in effect, be committed to mismanaging the ecology of which those ignored
values and priorities are an integral part .
 Defense
Human-centeredness is key to environmental sustainability
Schmidtz 2k – Professor of Philosophy @ Arizona
David Schmidtz, 2k. Philosophy, University of Arizona, Environmental Ethics, p. 379-408
Like economic reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about equilibria and perturbations that keep systems from
converging on equilibria. Like economic reasoning, ecological reasoning is reasoning about competition and
unintended consequences, and the internal logic of systems, a logic that dictates how a system responds to attempts to
manipulate it. Environmental activism and regulation do not automatically improve the environment. It is a truism in
ecology, as in economics, that well-intentioned interventions do not necessarily translate into good results. Ecology
(human and nonhuman) is complicated, our knowledge is limited, and environmentalists are themselves only human.
Intervention that works with the system’s logic rather than against it can have good consequences. Even in a centrally
planned economy, the shape taken by the economy mainly is a function not of the central plan but of how people
respond to it, and people respond to central plans in ways that best serve their purposes, not the central planner’s.
Therefore, even a dictator is in no position simply to decide how things are going to go. Ecologists understand that this
same point applies in their own discipline. They understand that an ecology’s internal logic limits the directions in
which it can be taken by would-be ecological engineers. Within environmental philosophy, most of us have come
around to something like Aldo Leopold’s view of humans as plain citizens of the biotic community.[21] As Bryan
Norton notes, the contrast between anthropocentrism and biocentrism obscures the fact that we increasingly need to
be nature-centered to be properly human-centered; we need to focus on "saving the ecological systems that are the
context of human cultural and economic activities." [22] If we do not tend to what is good for nature, we will not be
tending to what is good for people either. As Gary Varner recently put it, on purely anthropocentric grounds we have
reason to think biocentrically.[23] I completely agree. What I wish to add is that the converse is also true: on purely
biocentric grounds, we have reason to think anthropocentrically. We need to be human-centered to be
properly nature-centered, for if we do not tend to what is good for people, we will not be tending to what is
good for nature either. From a biocentric perspective, preservationists sometimes are not anthropocentric
enough. They sometimes advocate policies and regulations with no concern for values and priorities that
differ from their own. Even from a purely biocentric perspective, such slights are illegitimate. Policy makers
who ignore human values and human priorities that differ from their own will, in effect, be committed to
mismanaging the ecology of which those ignored values and priorities are an integral part .

Equating speciesism with racism/sexism is offensive and absurd

NICOLL and RUSSELL ‘1 (Charles, Prof. Integrative Biology @ UC Berkeley, and Sharon, Dept. Physiology-
Anatomy @ UC Berkeley, in “Why Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research”, Ed. Paul and
Paul, p. 161-162)

Some advocates for animals, including Singer, do not believe that animals deserve to have rights in the same sense that we
accord tern to humans.5° Instead, they argue that because animals meet their criteria of "moral relevance," they are entitled
to equal moral consideration with human beings. If we are willing to exploit animals in any way, we should be willing to
do likewise to people since humans are not more "morally relevant" than animals. When we regard animals to be less
than our moral equals, we are practicing a kind of interspecies discrimination that these advocates call "speciesism,"
an attitude they analogize to types of intraspecies discrimination such as sexism and racism. Richard Ryder claims credit for
coining the term "speciesism" in 1970.51 In 1985 the term was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "[d]iscrimination
against or exploitation of certain animal species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind's superiority."52 Singer
has stated that [s]peciesism ... is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and
against those of members of other species."53 To support the correctness of their opinion about the immorality of
speciesism, animal activists claim that it is comparable to discrimination on the basis of sex or race. We object
strongly to this kind of equation. To quote Cohen again, "[t]his argument is worse than unsound: it is atrocious."54
Sexism and racism are not justifiable because normal men and women of all racial and ethnic groups are, on average,
intellectually and morally equal, and their behavior can be judged against the same moral standards. Animals do not
have such equivalence with humans

. To deny rights or equal consideration on the basis of sex or race is immoral because all normal humans, regardless
of sex, ethnicity, or race, can claim the rights and considerations that they deserve, and they know what it means to be
unjustly denied them. No animals have these abilities. Speciesism, as defined by Ryder and Singer, is a normal kind of
discrimination displayed by all social animals, but racism and sexism are widely considered to be morally indefensible
practices. By equating racism and sexism with speciesism, Ryder and Singer degrade the struggle to achieve racial and sexual
equality.55 In addition to having this ethical problem, the concept of speciesism is also biologically absurd; we consider this
below.

Their ethic is biologically impossible

Duckler 8 – PhD in Biology
Geordie, ARTICLE: TWO MAJOR FLAWS OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, PhD in Biology, JD from Northwestern, 14
Animal L. 179
Those of us at the heart of the animal law movement envision a world in which the lives and
interests of all sentient beings are respected within the legal system, where companion animals have good, loving
homes for a lifetime, where wild animals can live out their natural lives according to their instincts in an environment
that supports their needs - a world in which
animals are not exploited, terrorized, tortured or
controlled to serve frivolous or greedy human purposes. This vision guides in working toward a
far more just and truly humane society. n83  A workable definition of "sentience" or "sentient beings"
notwithstanding, one
would have to ignore the last hundred and fifty years of accumulated
rigorous scientific study of how evolution by natural selection actually works in the
natural world to sincerely make such a  [*197]  plea. n84 A world "in which animals are
not exploited, terrorized, tortured or controlled to serve frivolous or greedy human
purposes" n85 is an unobtainable, inherently biologically impossible world. Moreover,
the world of nature to which Tischler fervently hopes to return animals already is a world in which animals
are "exploited, terrorized, tortured or controlled" n86 to serve the frivolous or greedy
purposes of other animals, including conspecifics and kin.

Morality fails to apply across animalia – other animals won’t respect

morality
Duckler 8 – PhD in Biology
Geordie, ARTICLE: TWO MAJOR FLAWS OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, PhD in Biology, JD from Northwestern, 14
Animal L. 179
Another example of ethical conflict created by the animal rights position is that the
entire animal world must be seen to be inherently immoral because the new "rights"
will never be respected between and among animals other than humans. n89 God help
the activist who tries valiantly to hold long onto the argument that it is morality that
demands legal rights for animals: A basic biology text would stop them absolutely
cold at the early chapter describing the major division of all  [*198]  life into
prokaryotes and eukaryotes. n90 If activists gleaned their information from a college science lesson instead
of from a religious tome, they would find that prokaryotes engage in immoral acts: Throughout earth
history, prokaryotes have created immense global "crises

of starvation, pollution, and extinction" n91 that make human parallels appear trivial
in comparison. Prokaryotes destroy other organisms by the great multitude, routinely
transfer genetic material freely from individual to individual, fool around with genetic
engineering, create "chimeras" at a level that our most ill-advised laboratory
technicians could only dream about, and fundamentally alter the biotic and abiotic
world in doing so. n92

Human separation from nature is inevitable and good- the transition to

small ag leads to poverty and environmental destruction
Bailey 6 – Economic Philosopher
Ronald, Economic Philosopher and Science Editor for Reason Magazine, The Lingering Stench of Malthus,
http://www.reason.com/news/show/117481.html
The further good news is that the movement of humanity's burgeoning population into the thousand of
megacities foreseen that Rifkin is part of a process that ultimately will leave more land for nature. Today cities
occupy just 2 percent of the earth's surface, but that will likely double to 4 percent over the next half century. In order
to avoid this ostensibly terrible fate Rifkin proclaims, "In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way
to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet
for our fellow creatures." Actually, he's got it completely backwards. Humanity must not reintegrate into nature-
that way lays disaster for humanity and nature. Instead we must make ourselves even more autonomous than
we already are from her. Since nothing is more destructive of nature than poverty stricken subsistence farmers,
boosting agricultural productivity is the key to the human retreat from wild nature. As Jesse Ausubel, the
director for the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, points out: "If the world farmer
reaches the average yield of today's US corn grower during the next 70 years, ten billion people eating as
people now on average do will need only half of today's cropland. The land spared exceeds Amazonia."
Similarly all of the world's industrial wood could be produced on an area that is less than 10 percent of the
world's forested area today leaving 90 percent of the world's forests for Nature.
 AT: Rocks are People
Solidifies the human/nature divide by treating humans as uniquely
responsible for “observing” the cosmos while other entities can act.
Harman, 2005 (Graham, critically acclaimed Heidegger scholar who spent 10 years reading everything Heidegger
wrote [even in German,] Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University of Cairo, “Guerrilla
Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things,” p. 241-245)
The theme of representation is one of the recurrent problems of philosophy. Certain special entities known as sentient
organisms are granted a unique ability to perceive images of the world, rather than merely responding to it with blind causal
force as subsentient entities are supposed to do. The hermeneutic school ofHeidegger and his successors claims to have left
the problem of representation in the past. For hermeneutics there is supposedly no magical gap between humans and the
world, since humans are always already involved with objects, and hence there is no pure representation of the world free of
the prior interpretation and use of objects. In one sense this is a clear step forward, but in another it yields no progress at all.
For with the notion that human beings are rooted in a specific factical life rather than
standing at a distance from the world and observing bloodless images of it, we do come one step
closer to dethroning the privilege of human beings in philosophy. Yet hermeneutics
still ascribes to humans (and perhaps even to animals) an apparently miraculous power: the ability
to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures or simulacra of such impact. Humans still transcend the
world and contemplate it, even if only partially, and this makes humans different in kind from mere paper, sand,
or gold. It is still humans alone who can perceive the world, and the philosophical gap between sentient
and inanimate or object and appearance is still taken as a given. This in itself would not be so bad, since
most of us would willingly concede important differences in the structure of conscious and unconscious objects. But the
question is whether the gap between conscious and unconscious entities is so unspeakably vast that it needs to be built into
the very foundation of ontology in a way that the chasms between mammal and reptile or plant and fungus never are. For
hermeneutics, there is still an absolute gulf between two types of entities, with humans and
possibly animals on one side and all remaining objects on the other . A crucial ontological structure-the
as-structure-is ascribed to certain entities and denied to others. But this means that Heidegger grounds his ontology in an
ontic rift between specific types of objects. And in fact, he has no hope of explaining how the as-structure magically arises only
for certain objects and not others. Nor does he ever attempt such an explanation. I have suggested that the real stakes in
ontology lie at a far more primitive level than any of the well-known special properties of human being. The as-structure is
found even in inanimate matter; the dual axes of the world are everywhere and not just in some anxious, mournful human
space that would exclude such supposed inferiors as almonds and glass. One
possible antidote to this bias would
be to embrace panpsychism and claim that even rocks and milkweed must already show crude
traces of cognitive power. Such doctrines are now wildly out of fashion, and are generally exiled to the wastelands and
gullies of the philosophical world, the eternal homeland of renegades, outliers, pariahs, hermits, vagabonds, and unemployable
cranks. It would take a short memory to think that such theories will remain unfashionable forever: most abandoned concepts
return someday in modified form, as the crop rotation of history brings every fallow field back to life sooner or later. Yet
reviving panpsychism would not solve our current problem, since this refreshingly
freewheeling theory actually preserves the central problem of human-centered philosophy :
namely, it still assumes that cognition is something so poignantly special that ontology
cannot live without it. After all, no one ever claims that inanimate matter must possess
other human features in germinal form, such as five-fingered hands, a spinal cord, taste
buds, laughter, or musical skill. I have yet to hear anyone speculate that rocks and maple
sap display a primitive form of language. In this respect, even philosophical cranks have proven themselves to have
limited imaginations. For some reason it is sentient perception alone that is deemed so important
that certain fringe schools allow it to balloon into an ontological feature of objects as a
whole. And this merely displays the well-worn assumption that there is something
magically unique and inexplicable about the ability to create images of things rather than merely
submitting to their blows. When hunters and gatherers came to develop agriculture, few historians deny that this change is of
staggering importance for human history. This shift is much more than a difference of degree: it is a revolution that triggers
the unforeseen rise of cities, armies, monarchies, and bureaucratic specialists. Even so, no one tries to convert agricultural life
into some sort of magic ontological principle; no philosopher carves up reality into entities that farm and entities that do not.
When birds first developed wings at some point in their evolutionary history, this was a crucial shift
that opened a new reality and new lifestyle to these creatures, inviting them for the first time to long-distance
migration and the building of nests in trees. Despite
this landmark step in the history of animals, no philosopher
sees the gap between winged and nonwinged creatures as immeasurably vast. No
school of "panpteristsȐ' steps forth to claim that even dirt and sunlight must have wings in some
imperceptible, germinal form. Heidegger makes an important mistake by locating one of his pivotal ontological features (the
as-structure) in certain kinds of objects at the expense of others. For him, only one kind of entity transcends, nihilates, or rises
above the world to see it "as" what it is, and that entity is human Dasein. To use a term that Heidegger himself avoids, only one
kind of entity is conscious, and for this reason the very existence of human beings is supposed to introduce a vital cleft into
being itself. This is not only a typical case of human arrogance in philosophy, but also has an air of
voodoo or fetish about it-like some tribal myth in which the world was a lifeless soil
until sprinkled with talking magic beans. We will never overcome this voodoo ontology by
joining forces with the panpsychists and demanding that the special powers of
human consciousness also be divvied up among dust, cactus, water, and melons. Instead,
we overcome it only by denying that the special features of human consciousness are
built into the heart of ontology at all. The history of the universe is packed with numerous
fateful revolutions: the emergence of the heavier elements from hydrogen; the birth of solar systems; the
breakup of Pangaea into multiple continents; the emergence of muticellular life, the beaks of birds,
and the gills of fish; the first dreams in early animals; the domestication of cows and dogs; the shift from papyrus
to paper; navigation across open sea rather than playing it safe along the coasts; electricity and telephones;
phenomenology, quantum theory, and psychoanalysis; the atomic bomb, smart weapons, credit cards, steam engines,
atonal music, internal combustion, and blood transfusions. My claim is that sentient consciousness, human theory,
and language all belong on the same list with these other examples, and not on some
sanctified ontological throne from which they might proclaim that conscious images of the world are infinitely
different from the inanimate causal impacts of that world. There is no absolute gap between objects and
images, but only ubiquitous gaps between one object and the next. Images are merely sensual
objects, and sensual objects lie always and only on the interior of real ones.
 General Link Answers
---No link to the aff.
(A.) Considering human impacts doesn’t require
anthropocentrism --- Prudential and non-prudential
justifications are mutually reinforcing.
Plumwood 2002
Val, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, pg. 129
Similarly, the ideal of avoiding human-centeredness does not imply at all that humans should not
be prudent, or that we cannot
consider the effect of environmental damage on our own human
interests along with the effect of our actions on other species and on nature generally. The criticis’
objection rests on identifying prudence with something much stronger – with a kind of species selfishness
that treats other beings solely as means to our own , human ends. Kant tells us that humans are to be
conceived as ends-in-themselves and cannot be treated as merely means to our ends, and though Kant himself restricted this kind of
standing to humans, environmental philosophy typically proposes to generalize it. But the crucial phrase here is ‘no more than’. We
must inevitably treat the natural world to some degree as a means, for example, as a means to food,
shelter and other materials need in order to survive, just as we must treat other people to some degree as
means. In the circus, the performers may make use of one another by standing on one anothers’ shoulders, for example, as a means of
reaching the trapeze, but our obligation to avoid using others solely as means (or instrumentalising them, as philosophers term it) does
not imply banning the circus. What is prohibited is unconstrained or total use of others as no more than means, reducing others to
means – tying some of the performers up permanently, for example, to use as steps.In short, then, prudential reasons and
non-prudential reasons for action are not mutually exclusive; prudential and non-
prudential reasons can combine and reinforce one another, and may not always be sharply
separate, since any normal situation of choice always involves a mixture. The problem lies rather in
the refusal to go beyond questions of human well-being and the exclusion of non-humans from morality and value as no more than
tools, unworthy of any moral consideration in their own right. Only by identifying prudence with this radical kind of species
selfishness can critics discover a malaise in environmental ethics. There is a difference between prudence and
egocentrism, between a sensible concern which considers our own interests, perhaps
together with the interests of others, and a selfish and exclusive preoccupation with our own
interests which fails to consult the interests of others at all. (One can see why the dominant global order
might have wanted us to confuse them, and in whose interests it would be to do so).

(B.) Rejecting anthropocentric utilitarianism is

counterproductive --- We can use anthropocentric concepts to
get others onboard with nonhuman defense and recognition.
Litfin 2003
Karen, University of Washington, Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecology: Towards a New Story,
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ECPR/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/grenoble/ws6/litfin.pdf
From any particular worldview comes a specific ethical proclivity. Under the secular worldview, obilizationiz
utilitarianism has been the dominant ethical orientation. According to this orientation, instrumental rationality
should be applied to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number, where “good” is defined in material terms as
comfort, efficiency, and longevity. In the past, the sovereign state was taken as the container in which this good was to
be evaluated. More recently, the twin problems of global inequality and ecological finitude are casting doubt upon
both utilitarian ethics and the ability of the territorial state to apply it. In this context, the temptation to
reject an anthropocentric stance altogether is understandable. Yet we should
resist that temptation. Because an integral worldview accepts all manifest forms as emanations of Spirit,
it therefore (like deep ecology) acknowledges the intrinsic value of all living things, but it also allows for value
distinctions that ground a coherent environmental ethos. Representing the emergence of reflective self-consciousness
in the evolution of spirit, humans “are presently first among equals” (Kealey 1990: 81).
This position accords with our basic moral intuition that in the pursuit of
our vital needs, we should consume or destroy as little complexity and
depth of consciousness as possible (Wilber 1996: 334-35). Moreover, in acknowledging
humanity’s unique role at this evolutionary juncture, an integral
worldview stresses our special ethical responsibilities at least as much as
our special rights.

---Permutation do both --- Reject anthropocentrism and <aff>

---The permutation solves best
(A.) It’s try or die for the Aff --- Even if they win a long term
inevitability claim, the alternative has zero mechanism for
resolving the political structures of knowledge production that
facilitate nuclear violence against the Chinese government. The
permutation is the only option that allows the Earth to survive
long enough to implement the alternative.
(B.) Combing anthropocentrism with concern for nonhuman
life, even within the framework of instrumental rationality, is
the only pragmatic first step towards challenging human
domination.
Litfin 2003
Karen, University of Washington, Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecology: Towards a New Story,
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ECPR/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/grenoble/ws6/litfin.pdf
A second critical development is the extension of “rights” to nonhuman species, a development which represents a
rudimentary yet significant departure from secularism’s self-consciously human-centeredness. While the
threat of massive species extinction continues apace, moves to protect
endangered species, both in domestic legislation and international treaties, suggests a growing
recognition that other species also deserve to exist. In many cases, it is an
instrumental anthropocentric rationality that seeks to protect other
species because of their utility to humans, rather than an acknowledgement of the rights of
other species. Yet this deployment of instrumental rationality itself represents
a significant departure from secularism’s presumption of human domination, for it
recognizes the web interdependence among species and the
embeddedness of humans in that web. That recognition, while not by itself
representing an integral worldview, may be nonetheless an important
step in that direction because it undercuts the humanist presumptions of
secularism. We should also note that since the project of universalizing humanity, a latent dream of secularism, is still
under way, we should not expect to see any full-scale shift towards an integral perspective of the biosphere anytime
soon.

(C.) The alternatives sudden abandonment of all human

management is catastrophic for both human and non human
life. This also answers the ‘human extinction good’ claims that
will come out in the block.
Zizek 2008
Slavoj, Violence, or ........ Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses http://www.lacan.com/zizecology2.htm
while
The lesson to be fully endorsed is thus that of another environmental scientist who came to the result that,
one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions
into geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to stop
abruptly its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its
balanced course, the result would have been a total breakdown, an imaginable
catastrophe. “Nature” on Earth is already to such an extent “adapted” to
human interventions, the human “pollutions” are already to such an
extent included into the shaky and fragile balance of the “natural”
reproduction on Earth, that its cessation would cause a catastrophic
imbalance. This is what it means that humanity has nowhere to retreat:
not only “there is no big Other” (self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of
Meaning); there is also no Nature qua balanced order of self-reproduction
whose homeostasis is disturbed, thrown off the rails, by the imbalanced
human interventions. Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting
nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.
LINKS
 A2 Omission Link
No omission – our Ulrichsen evidence proves transnational
crime is a threat including environmental crime
 A2 Human Impacts Link
Representing human impacts is necessary to environmental
ethics
Plumwood 2 (Val, PF PHILOSOPHY - UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY, Environmental Culture: The ecological
crisis of reason, PG. 138-40)
Recognition, prudence and survival But by providing reasons for considering nature based on human prudence, are we
not perpetuating the verv human-centredness and instrumentalism we should seek to combat, considering nature only in
relation to our own needs and as means to meet those needs? This issue reveals another major area of difference between
the cosmic model implying elimination of human bearings and the liberation model of human-cent redness of the sort I
have given. Only in the confused account of anthropocentrism as cosmic anthropocentrism
is it essential to avoid anything which smacks of human bearings and
preferences in the interests of pursuing superhuman detachment. On the liberation account of human-centred
ness, there is no problem or inconsistency in introducing some prudential
considerations to motivate change, or to show why, for example, human-centredness is not benign
and must lead to damaging consequences for humankind. To gain a better understanding of the role of prudence in the
kinds of changes that might be required, let us return to the marital example of Bruce and Ann. Let us suppose that
instead of leaving right away, Ann persuades Bruce to try a visit to a marriage counsellor to see if Bruce can change
enough to save their relationship. (We will have to assume that Bruce has some redeeming features I have not described
here to explain why Ann considers it worthwhile going to all this trouble). After listening to their stories, the counsellor
diagnoses Bruce as a textbook case of egocentrism, an individual version of the centredness structure set out above. Bruce
seems to view his interests as somehow radically separate from Ann's, so that he is prepared to act on her request for
more consideration only if she can show he will get more pleasure if he does so, that is, for instrumental reasons which
appeal to a self-contained conception of his interests. He seems to see Ann in instrumental terms not as an independent
person but as someone defined in tenus of his own needs, and claims it is her problem if she is dissatistied or miserable.
Bruce sees Ann as there to service his needs, lacks sensitivity to her needs and does not respect her independence or
agency. 24 Bruce, let us suppose, also devalues the importance of the relationship, denies his real dependency on Ann,
backgrounds her services and contribution to his lite, and seems to be completely unaware of the extent to which he
might suffer when the relationship he is abusing breaks down. Bruce, despite Ann's warnings, does not imagine that it
will, and is sure that it will all blow over: after a few tears and tantrums Ann will come to her senses, as she has always
done before, according to Bruce. Now the counsellor, June, takes on the task of pointing out to Bruce that his continued
self-centredness and instrumental treatment of Ann is likely to lead in short order to the breakdown and loss of his
relationship. The counsellor tries to show Bruce that he has underestimated both Ann's determination to leave unless
there is change, as well as the sustaining character of the relationship. June points out that he may, like many similar
people the counsellor has seen, sutler much more severe emotional stress than he realises when Ann leaves, as she surely
will unless Bruce changes. Notice that June's initial appeal to Bruce is a prudential one; June tries to point out to Bruce
that he has misconceived the relationship and to make him understand where his real interests lie. There is no
inconsistency here; the counsellor can point out these damaging consequences of instrumental relationship for Bruce
without in any way using, endorsing or encouraging instrumental relationships. In the same way, the critic of human-
centredness can say with perfect consistency, to a society trapped in the centric logic ofthe One and the Other in relation
to nature, that unless it is willing to give enough consideration to nature's needs, it too could lose a relationship whose
importance it has failed to understand, has systematically devalued and denied - with, perhaps, more serious
consequences for survival than in Bruce's case. The account of human-centredness I have given, then, unlike the cosmic
account demanding self-transcendence and self-detachment, does not prohibit the use of certain forms of prudential
ecological argument, although it does suggest certain contexts and qualifications for their use. In the case of Ann and
Bruce, June the counsellor might particularly advance these prudential reasons as the main reasons for treating Ann with
more care and respect at the initial stages of the task of convincing Bruce of the need for change. Prudential arguments
need not just concern the danger of losing the relationship. June may also try to show Bruce how the structure of
egocentrism distorts and limits his character and cuts him off from the main benefits of a caring relationship, such as the
sense of the limitations ofth~ self and its perspectives obtained by an intimate encounter with someone else's needs and
reality. Prddential arguments of all kinds for respect are the kinds of arguments that are especially useful in an initial
context of denial, while there is still no realisation of that there is a serious problem, and resistance to the idea of
undertaking work for change. In the same way, the appeal to prudential considerations of
ecological damage to humans is especially appropriate in the initial context
of ecological denial. where there is still no systematic acknowledgement of human attitudes as a problem, and
resistance to the idea of undertaking substantial social change. Although reasons of advantage or
disadvantage to the self cannot be the only kinds of considerations in a framework
which exhibits genuine respect for the other, the needs of the self do not have to be excluded
at any stage from this process, as the fallacious view of prudence as always instrumental and egocentric
suggests.
 Baudrillard Turn
“Anthro” K – the attempt to escape from anthropocentrism is,
itself, anthropocentric and firmly cemented in egotistical
humanism – the Aff tries to posit and include otherness as a
non-self – this destroys the bottomless intimacy of inner
experience
Morton 10 (Timothy Morton The Ecological Thought Published by: the President and Fellows of
Harvard College 2010
Pg 75-78) [m leap]

The deep green objection is that the parrots aren't really animals and that the
film's view is anthropocentric. Here that we run into one of the greatest
obstacles to the ecological thought, the sign saying, "No anthropo-centrism."
It' s a dead end. The danger in political and philosophical thinking is to
reckon that we have seen beyond ideology, that we can stand outside, say,
"humanist" reality. This idea is itself humanism. Anthropocentrism assumes an
"anthro" that is "centric." The problem resides not so much in the content as it does in the attitude that
comes bundled with the accusation. The idea of anthropocentrism is that the "human"
occupies a privileged nonplace, simultaneously within and outside the
mesh. One accuses others of anthropocentrism from that place .¶ Everything
we think becomes suspect, as we assume that there is a Nature from which our thinking can deviate.
And deviancy must be punished. The position of hunting for
anthropocentrism is anthropocentrism . To claim that someone's distinction of animals and
humans is anthropo-centric, because she privileges reason over passion, is to deny reason to nonhumans. We can't
in good faith cancel the difference between hu mans and nonhumans. Nor can we
preserve it. Doing both at the same time would be inconsistent. We're in a bind. But don't despair: kings felt less for
peasants than they did for pheasants. The bind is a sign of an emerging democracy of life forms. ¶ Putting
strange strangers in a box damages them . One box is the "anything-but-human" one—the
Gaia box, the "web of life" box, or the "more-than-human world" box. Another is
the "all sentient beings are really just like humans" box. Another, newer,
subtler box is the "sentient beings are neither human nor nonhuman" box.
If there is no true self, then perhaps there is a nonself. There are many terms for this in
contemporary philosophy, such as assemblage, cyborg, postidentity, or posthumanity. Likewise, if there is no Nature,
perhaps there is a non-Nature, a world of interlocking machines, or a world where all was one and therefore God—
pantheism, or philosopher Arne Naess's deep ecological version. ¶ Naess claims, "identification [with the natural world can
be] so deep that one's own self is no longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or organism. One experiences oneself
to be a genuine part of all life."92 The "ego or organism," doesn't delimit "One," but one can mysteriously still "experience
oneself." Thus there is a nonself. Ideas like this merely "upgrade" the self . (To detect this, try
substituting "England" or "Englishness" for "the natural world" and "life.") Ideas that there is a nonself 'and that there is a
non-Nature domesticate the strange stranger. A true reductionist would stick with the idea that there is no self, not that
there is a nonself. And isn't the self a paradox in any case? The phrase "I am me"
shows how slippery the so-called self is, in "itself." There is no guarantee
that the me who is telling you that I am me is the same as the me about
whom I'm saying, "I am me."¶ Remember the Menger sponge, the fractal cube infinitely filled with in-
finitesimal holes: "an infinitely porous, spongy or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in
other caverns."93 The mesh isn't really a sponge—you can't wash your back with it. And the strange stranger is not a
spongy self—you can't squeeze it. Menger sponges are good for thinking with—just don't expect to see one "over yonder"
any time soon. They are infinite. Consider the ancestor of the Menger sponge, the Cantor set. There are infinitely many
points in the Cantor set; likewise, it contains infinitely many no-points. There is not something there;
there is not nothing there. The ecological thought is not an unthinkable
mystery—that would result in theism or nihilism. The ecological thought
opens onto "un-thinking." Yet this doesn't mean that we should stop. It
means that "thought" and "beyond thought" are not as opposed as we might
think . It doesn't hurt that life forms tend to express DNA in fractal geom etries that
approach infinity. DNA plots branches, blood vessels, heartbeats, and
forests like this. Infinity implies intimacy : "To see a world in a grain of sand ... Hold infinity in
the palm of your hand" (Blake, Auguries of Innocence, lines 1-3)94 Immediately following this cry of the heart, Blake's
poem flips between animal cruelty and social misery. That's the paradox of the ecological thought: "A dog starv'd at his
master's gate / Predicts the ruin of the state" (lines o~io). Blake shows us infinity on this side of reality, not "over yonder"
in some abstract ideal realm. The ecological thought concerns itself with personhood, for want of a better word. Up close,
the ecological thought has to do with warmth and tenderness; hospitality, wonder, and love; vulnerability and
responsibility. Although the ecological thought is a form of reductionism, it must
be personal, since it refrains from adopting a clinical, intellectual, or
aesthetic (sadistic) distance. Believing in an ineffable Nature or Self is
wrong. But so is claiming that there is a thrilling, infi nitely plastic post-
Thing out there waiting to be completely manipulated. Both the Nature people and the
post-Nature people have it in for, well, people. The ecological thought is about people—it is people. ¶ Coexistence means
nothing if it means only the proximity of other machines or sharing components with other machines. Upgraded
models of "post-Nature" deprive us of intimacy . The ecological thought must
think something like Georg Hegel's idea of the "night" of subjectivity, the "interior
of nature." At the bottomless bottom, subjectivity is an infinite void.95 When
I encounter the strange stranger, I gaze into depths of space , far more vast
and profound than physical space that can be measured with instruments.
The disturbing depth of another person is a radical consequence of inner
freedom. It's a mistake to think that the mesh is "bigger than us." Everything
is intimate with everything else. The ecological thought is vast, but strange
strangers are right next to us. They are us. Inner space is right here, "nearer
than breathing, closer than hands and feet."96 Rather than a vision of inclusion, we
need a vision of intimacy. We need thresholds, not spheres or concentric
circles , for imagining where the strange stranger hangs out.
Impact D
 Anthro =/= Destruction
Human centeredness does not cause destruction of minority
cultures or peoples
Lee, Philosophy Professor at Bloomsburg, ‘9 (Wendy, Spring, “Restoring Human-Centerednes to
Environmental Conscience: The Ecocentrist's Dilemma, the Role of Heterosexualized
Anthropomorphizing, and the Significance of Language to Ecological Feminism” Ethics and the
Environment, Vol 14 No 1, Project Muse)
Second, then, is that however indigenous, no necessary implications for ethnicity,
gender, sex, or sexual identity follow from human-centeredness (or follow for our concepts
of ethnicity, etc.). That we are, for instance, bipedal, color vision equipped, big-brained,

sentient mammals implies no particular trajectory for human institutions

other than for what falls within the range of physical, cognitive, and
epistemic possibility for this species of animal. That we cannot see out the backs of our heads no doubt affects
our experience of our somatic and existential conditions, that we are sentient creatures able to experience not only physical but psychological pain certainly
Specific capacities and
contributes substantially to the ways in which our points of view identify us as specific loci of experience.

limitations are not, however, determinations—while species membership delimits the possible, it
does not define, for example, the "normal" or "natural" in any other terms but what
can be. Nothing necessarily follows for human institutions like government ,
marriage, or family, however otherwise chauvinistic, sexist, racist, or
heterosexist they may be. While human-centeredness is a defining characteristic of human consciousness, the ways in which we realize
it is not.
 Human Values Good
Abandoning human values leaves us unable to act and causes
extinction
Ketels 96 (Violet B, Associate Professor of English at Temple University, “‘Havel to the Castle!’ The Power of the
Word,” 548 Annals 45, November, Sage)
In the Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders
were given, repeated, widely broadcast; and men, wom[y]n, and children were herded into death camps. Their offshore
signals, cries for help, did not summon us to rescue. We had become inured to the reality of
human suffering. We could no longer hear what the words meant or did not credit
them or not enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims perished in the cold blankness of inhumane silence. ¶ We were
deaf to the apocalyptic urgency in Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we must check the disastrous course of
history. We were heedless of the lesson of his experience that only the unbending
strength of the human spirit, fully taking its stand on the shifting frontier of
encroaching violence and declaring "not one step further," though death may be
the end of it—only this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace
for the individual, of genuine peace for mankind at large.2¶ In past human crises, writers and
thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive the memory of
the unimaginable, to keep the human conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however,
intellectuals seem more devoted to abstract assaults on values than to thoughtful
probing of the moral dimensions of human experience.¶ "Heirs of the ancient possessions
of higher knowledge and literacy skills,"3 we seem to have lost our nerve, and not only because of Holocaust history and its
tragic aftermath. We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of hard science. We are intimidated by the "high modernist
rage against mimesis and content,"* monstrous progeny of the union between Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim
proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity, and no disinterested knowledge.5 ¶ Less certain about the
power of language, that "oldest flame of the humanist soul,"6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are
vulnerable even to the discredited Paul de Man's indecent hint that "wars and revolutions are not empirical events . . . but
'texts' masquerading as facts."7 Truth and reality seem more elusive than they ever were in the past; values are pronounced to
be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue. ¶ Words collide and crack under these new
skeptical strains, dissolving into banalities the colossal enormity of what must be expressed lest we forget. Remembering for
the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having to remember for the present, too, our having to register and confront
what is wrong here and now.¶ The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is
flawed by our subjectivities. It is selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It
stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face.8 ¶ Lodged in our brains, such axioms, certified by science and
statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on with our lives. Besides, memories
reconstructed in words, even when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed the world or fended off the
powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying. ¶ Especially denying, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an
obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our sense of the past. It is said that the Holocaust never
happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words must be set against it. Yet what?
How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of cryogenic
dubiety?¶ Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic
manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet.
The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [hasj Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of
land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvokc as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated by
Turks in 1389!9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, demands the bloody revenge of new
massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb
nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle—by widening the Kosovo charnel-house, by adding
wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo.... Kosovo is the Serbian-ized history of the Flood—
the Serbian New Testament."10 ¶ A cover of Siiddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee wom[y]n
from Bosnia in an eerily perverse afterbirth of violence revisited." ¶ We stand benumbed before multiplying horrors. As Vaclav
Havel warned more than a decade ago, regimes that generate them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The
depersonalization of power in "system, ideology and appa-rat," pathological
suspicions about human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual
responsibility, the swiftness by which disastrous events follow one upon another "have deprived us of
our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our
actual humanity."12 Nothing less than the transformation of human consciousness is likely to rescue us.
Anthro Alt Fails
 Reflexive Anthro Perm
Reflexive anthropocentrism solves best
Barry 99 (John politics lecturer Keele University, RETHINKING GREEN POLITICS, 1999,
p. 7-8)
Ecological stewardship, unlike ecocentrism, seeks to emphasize that a
self-reflexive, long-term
anthropocentrism, as opposed to an 'arrogant' or 'strong'
anthropocentrism can secure many of the policy objectives of
ecocentrism, in terms of environmental preservation and conservation. As argued in Chapter 3, a
reformed, reflexive anthropocentrism is premised on critically
evaluating human uses of the non-human world, and distinguishing
'permissible' from 'impermissible' uses. That is, an 'ethics of use', though anthropocentric and
rooted in human interests, seeks to regulate human interaction with the environment by distinguishing legitimate
'use' from unjustified 'abuse'. The
premise for this defence of anthropocentric
moral reasoning is that an immanent critique of 'arrogant
humanism' is a much more defensible and effective way to
express mere moral concerns than rejecting anthropocentrism
and developing a 'new ecocentric ethic'. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3,
ecocentric demands are premised on an over-hasty dismissal of
anthropocentrism which precludes recognition of the positive resources
within anthropocentrism for developing an appropriate and practicable moral idiom to cover social-
environmental interaction.
 Popularity DA
The alt can’t generate real change – pragmatic concern for
animal impacts through a human frame is best
Mendenhall 9 [(Beth, 2011 CEDA champ, graduated from Kansas state, studied philosophy and political
science). “The Environmental Crises: Why We Need Anthropocentrism.” Stance, Volume 2, April 2009]
The weakly anthropocentric view avoids the difficulties of justifying an environmental ethic from either end of
the spectrum. On one hand, it avoids controversy over the existence of intrinsic value in non-human
organisms, objects, and ecological systems. This is one important characteristic of a nonanthropocentric ethic like Deep
Ecology– finding intrinsic value in all living things.3 By intrinsic value, I mean value that exists independent of any
observer to give it value. For example, a nonanthropocentric ethicist would see value in an animal that no human could
ever benefit from or even know about, simply because of what it is. While possibly justifiable, an ethic that
treats all living things and possibly even ecological systems as intrinsically valuable may
seem very radical to a large portion of the public. It seems that even the philosophical
community remains divided on the issue. On the other hand, our ethic avoids making felt human desire
the loci of all value by showing how considered human values can explain the value in our environment. In other words,
what humans value, either directly or indirectly, generates value in the environment. In this way, we avoid unchecked felt
preferences that would not be able to explain why excessive human consumption is wrong. Avoiding these controversial
stances will contribute substantially to the first advantage of a weakly anthropocentric environmental ethic: public appeal.
The importance of public appeal to an environmental ethic cannot be overstated. We
are running out of time to slow or reverse the effects of past environmental
degradation, and we will need the support of society to combat them effectively. Hence, the
most important advantage of a weakly anthropocentric ethic over a nonanthropocentric one is public appeal because many
people feel that nonanthropocentrism is just too radical and contrary to common sense. For many, all value does come
from humans, since they believe we are the only species capable of rational thought. Opinions about the environment are
certainly changing, but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that most reasons given for increasing
environmental protection all reduce to anthropocentrism. For example, the 2004 book
The Meat You Eat, by Ken Midkiff, explains why factory farming should be rejected,
with a focus on its detrimental effects to human health. The vegan and vegetarian
movements have increasingly focused on this angle of the factory farming debate, perhaps because of the broader appeal
of human-focused motivations. As Midkiff says, “It is simply impossible to raise animals in concentrated operations and to
slaughter these animals by the thousands… without severe health consequences among humans. By treating these animals
as units of production, the industrial methods, ultimately and inevitably, produce meats that are unfit to eat.”4 Even if
this justification for ending factory farming is not one defended by deep ecologists, isn’t
actual change more important? Common justifications for species protection include parents wanting
their children to know what an elephant, or a leopard, or a panda look like, how the beauty of animals increases human
satisfaction in much the same way that an art gallery would, or the genetic information they can provide which might cure
human diseases. In fact, almost every justification printed or aired in major news media reflects a anthropocentric bias.
For example, an April 2008 article from the BBC, entitled “Species Loss Bad for Our Health”, surveys “a wide range of
threatened species whose biology could hold secrets to possible treatments for a growing variety of ailments.”5 President-
elect Barack Obama has consistently spoken about global warming in terms of its impact on future human generations. In
a 2007 speech at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he stressed the urgency of the issue by saying that “the polar ice caps are
now melting faster than science had ever predicted… this is not the future I want for my daughters.”6 As for the last
premise, most people agree that human consciousness is intrinsically valuable. That is the reason why this value needs
little explanation. Even if this justification isn’t perfect, I believe that the ecological ends justify the
philosophical means.
 ---1AR Light
Perm solves best—people think through an anthropocentric
frame now
Light 02 [Light, Andrew, Assistant Professor of Environmental Philosophy and Director, Environmental
Conservation Education Program, 2002 (Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters What Really Works David Schmidtz
and Elizabeth Willott, p. 556-57)]
In recent years a critique of this predominant trend in environmental ethics has emerged from within the pragmatist
tradition in American philosophy.' The force of this critique is driven by the intuition that environmental
philosophy cannot afford to be quiescent about the public reception of
ethical arguments over the value of nature. The original motivations of environmental
philosophers for turning their philosophical insights to the environment support such a position., Environmental
philosophy evolved out of a concern about the state of the grow ing
environmental crisis, and a conviction that a philosophical contribution could be made to the resolution of
this crisis. But if environmental philosophers spend all of their time debating
non-human centered forms of value theory they will ar guably never get very
far in making such a contribution. For example, to continue to ignore human motivations for the act
of valuing nature causes many in the field to overlook the fact that most people find it very difficult to
extend moral consideration to plants and animals on the grounds that these entities possess
some form of intrinsic, inherent, or otherwise conceived nonanthropocentric value. It is even more difficult for people to
recognize that nonhumans could have rights. Claims about the value of nature as such do not
appear to resonate with the ordinary moral intuitions of most people who,
after all, spend most of their lives thinking of value, moral obligations, and rights in
exclusively human terms. Indeed, while most environmental philosophers begin their work with the
assumption that most people think of value in human-centered terms (a problem that has been decried since the very early
days of the field), few have considered the problem of how a non-human-centered approach to valuing nature can ever
appeal to such human intuitions. The particular version of the pragmatist critique of environmental ethics that I have
endorsed recognizes that we need to rethink the utility of anthropocentric arguments
in environmental moral and political theory, not nec essarily because the
traditional nonanthropocentric arguments in the field are false, but because they
hamper attempts to contribute to the public discus sion of environmental
problems, in terms familiar to the public

Empirics prove
Light 2 – Professor of environmental philosophy Andrew Light, professor of environmental philosophy and director of
the Environmental Conservation Education Program, 2002, Applied Philosophy Group at New York University,
METAPHILOSOPHY, v33, n4, July, p. 561
It should be clear by now that endorsing a methodological environmental pragmatism requires an acceptance of some
form of anthropocentrism in environmental ethics, if only because we have sound empirical evidence
that humans think about the value of nature in human terms and pragmatists insist
that we must pay attention to how humans think about the value of nature. Indeed, as I said above, it is a common
presupposition among committed nonanthropocentrists that the proposition that humans are
anthropocentrist is true, though regrettable. There are many problems
involved in the wholesale rejection of anthropocentrism by most environmental
philosophers. While I cannot adequately explain my reservations to this rejection, for now I hope the reader will accept the
premise that not expressing reasons for environmental priorities in human
terms seriously hinders our ability to communicate a moral basis for better
environmental policies to the public. Both anthropocentric and
nonanthropocentric claims should be open to us.
 Inevitable
A total rejection of anthropocentrism fails and reinscribes
human-centric ideals – middle ground that preserves beneficial
human ethics while acknowledging our flaws is best
Hayward 97 [Tim Hayward (Professor of Politics at University of Edinburgh), “Anthropocentrism: A
Misunderstood Problem,” Environmental Values 6 (1997): 49-63] AZ
But if the project of overcoming speciesism can be pursued with some expectation of success, this is not the case with the
overcoming of anthropocentrism. What makes anthropocentrism unavoidable is a
limitation of a quite different sort, one which cannot be overcome even in principle
because it involves a non-contingent limitation on moral thinking as such. While
overcoming speciesism involves a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge of relevant similarities and differences
between humans and other species, the criteria of relevance will always have an
ineliminable element of anthropocentrism about them . Speciesism is the arbitrary refusal
to extend moral consideration to relevantly similar cases; the ineliminable element of
anthropocentrism is marked by the impossibility of giving meaningful
moral consideration to cases which bear no similarity to any aspect of human cases. The emphasis is on the
‘meaningful’ here: for in the abstract one could of course declare that some feature of the nonhuman world was morally
valuable, despite meeting no determinate criterion of value already recognised by any human, but because the new value is
completely unrelated to any existing value it will remain radically indeterminate as a guide to action. If the ultimate point
of an ethic is to yield a determinate guide to human action, then, the human reference is
ineliminable even when extending moral concern to nonhumans. So my argument
is that one cannot know if any judgement is speciesist if one has no
benchmark against which to test arbitrariness; and, more specifically, if we are
concerned to avoid speciesism of humans then one must have standards of
comparison between them and others. Thus features of humans remain the benchmark. As long as the valuer is a
human, the very selection of criteria of value will be limited by this fact. It
is this fact which precludes
the possibility of a radically nonanthropocentric value scheme, if by that is meant
the adoption of a set of values which are supposed to be completely unrelated to any existing human values. Any
attempt to construct a radically non-anthropocentric value scheme is liable not only to be arbitrary –
because founded on no certain knowledge – but also to be more insidiously anthropocentric in
projecting certain values, which as a matter of fact are selected by a human, onto nonhuman beings without certain
warrant for doing so. This, of course, is the error of anthropomorphism, and will inevitably, I believe, be committed in any
attempt to expunge anthropocentrism altogether. But is admitting this unavoidable element of anthropocentrism not
tanta- mount to admitting the unavoidability of human chauvinism? My claim is that it is not. What is unavoidable is that
human valuers make use of anthropocentric benchmarks; yet in doing so, they may find that in all consistency they must,
for instance, give priority to vital nonhuman interests over more trivial human interests. For the human chauvinist, by
contrast, interests of humans must always take precedence over the interests of nonhumans. Human chauvinism does not
take human values as a benchmark of comparison, since it admits no comparison between humans and nonhumans.
Human chauvinism ultimately values humans because they are humans. While the human chauvinist may officially claim
there are criteria which provide reasons for preferring humans – such as that they have language, rationality, sociality etc.
– no amount of evidence that other beings fulfil these criteria would satisfy them that they should be afforded a similar
moral concern. The bottom line for the human chauvinist is that being human is a necessary and sufficient condition of
moral concern. What I am pointing out as the ineliminable element of anthropocentrism is
an asymmetry between humans and other species which is not the product of chauvinist
prejudice. To sum up, then, what is unavoidable about anthropocentrism is precisely
what makes ethics possible at all. It is a basic feature of the logic of obligation: if an
ethic is a guide to action; and if a particular ethic requires an agent to make others’ ends her ends, then they become just
that – the agent’s ends. This is a non- contingent but substantive limitation on any attempt to
construct a completely nonanthropocentric ethic. Values are always the values of the
valuer:3 so as long as the class of valuers includes human beings, human values are ineliminable. Having argued that this
is unavoidable, I also want to argue that it is no bad thing.
 ---1AR
Anthro is inevitable – pragmatic action to avoid extinction for
humans and animals alike is best
Parker 96, Kelly A., Associate Professor and Chair of philosophy at Grand valley state Pragmatism and
Environmental Thought, Environmental Pragmatism edited by Andrew Light and Eric Katz,
I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments as centrally important. Pragmatism
is
"anthropocentric" (or better, "anthropometric")24 in one respect: the human organism
is inevitably the one that discusses value. This is so because human experience,
the human perspective on value, is the only thing we know as humans. Many other
entities indeed have experience and do value things. Again, this is not to say that human
whim is the measure of all things, only that humans are in fact the measurers. This must be a factor in
all our deliberations about environmental issues. We can and should speak on the others' behalf when appropriate, but
we cannot speak from their experience . We can in some sense hear their voices, but we
cannot speak in their voices. I see no way out of our own distinctively human bodies. In this sense , the
human yardstick of experience becomes, by default, the measure of all
things. Although the debate over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this is not inappropriate
- after all, the debate centers almost exclusively on human threats to the world. Wolves, spotted owls, and oldgrowth
forests are unable to enter the ethics debate except through their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps regrettable.
Far better that they should speak for themselves! Lacking this, they do at least have spokespersons - and these
spokespersons, their advocates, need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do this in anthropic value
categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the only way to go.
 ---History Proves
Anthropocentrism is inevitable – history proves
Sowers ’02 [George F. Sowers Jr., Lockheed Martin Astronautics, April 2002, The Transhumanist Case for Space, pgs. 6-
7)
Man is a prodigious consumer of resources. From energy to minerals, from
food to living space, the great bounty of our home planet is being depleted at
ever increasing rates. Yet, this trend represents more than mere
wastefulness. The history of humanity is one of ever increasing physical
power. That we seek ever increasing power is one of the fundamental
features of our species, and one of the keys to our success. Unfortunately,
increasing power as it is utilized, generally leads to increasing demands for
resources. After all, in a Newtonian sense, power is simply the rate of energy expenditure. The trends
toward ever increasing resource utilization are easy to recognize, especially
in the modern world where such statistics are actually recorded. For example, per
capita energy consumption in America has increased many-fold in the last 100 years even though enhancements in energy
efficiency have slowed that increase in over the last 20 years or so. The standard of living enjoyed by a country can
generally be related to per capita energy consumption and by this measure America has the highest standard of living in
the world. Now I take it as given that higher standards of living are more desirable, and indeed, higher standards of living
are consistent with transhumanist objectives. As I have argued above, we desire not just longer life, but better life.
 Humans Different
Humans are different from other animals – inevitably causes
human-centeredness
Lee, Philosophy Professor at Bloomsburg, ‘9 (Wendy, Spring, “Restoring Human-Centerednes to
Environmental Conscience: The Ecocentrist's Dilemma, the Role of Heterosexualized
Anthropomorphizing, and the Significance of Language to Ecological Feminism” Ethics and the
Environment, Vol 14 No 1, Project Muse)
However plastic and evolving the somatic, perceptual, cognitive, psychological, epistemic
and affective capacities native to Homo sapiens, they are still specific to human—and not
Chimpanzee or dolphin—being. Human consciousness is, in other words, informed
by the unique articulation and interaction of capacities that characterize
human embodiment, capacities whose exercise creates the conditions for
human experience. To be clear, I am not suggesting that what defines human-centeredness is that human beings have capacities that other
species of creatures do not—this may or may not be true given any particular comparison. What I am suggesting is that the unique

configuration of capacities that describes Homo sapiens informs an

experience unique to this species and thereby define this consciousness in
terms of this configuration. A human-centered consciousness cannot then
be displaced, disavowed, or disowned—the notion that we could get
"outside" of human centeredness makes as little sense as the notion that
there's an "outside" for human consciousness (other than permanent coma or death). Hence, I can
care profoundly about the welfare of chimpanzees—I can try to imagine what it might be like to be a
chimpanzee, and I might make excellent guesses given all of the perceptual, somatic, and psychological similarities we do appear to share in light of the behavioral,
But I cannot experience the world like a chimpanzee because
anatomical, and other evidence.

there is no "outside" to my experience as a member of Homo sapiens. 2 Philosophy of

language and empirically oriented philosophies of mind/brain may offer the most persuasive support for this position. Douglas Hofstadter argues, for example,
part of what distinguishes human beings from other species of animal is
that

our specifically linguistic capacity for the crafting of analogies: "We human
beings begin life as rather austere analogy-makers —our set of categories is terribly sparse, and each
category itself is hardly well-honed. Categories grow sharper and sharper and ever more flexible and subtle as we age, and of course fantastically [End Page 31]
more numerous" (2000, 121). Similarly, Nicholas Wade argues that the aboriginal click languages still in use in
South Africa demonstrate a capacity for the development of language and its
acquisition unique even to ancient human communities (2004, 191–4). In their now famous work,
Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that human beings "are the only animals we

know of who can ask, and sometimes even explain, why things happen the
way they do. We are the only animals who ponder the meaning of their
existence and who worry constantly about love, sex, work, death, and
morality. And we appear to be the only animals who can reflect critically on
their lives in order to make changes in how they behave " (1999, 551). The most persuasive
argument, however, may come from philosopher of mind, Daniel Dennett who, in Consciousness Explained (1991) asks: Do our selves, our nonminimal selfy selves,
exhibit the same permeability and flexibility of boundaries as the simpler selves of other creatures? Do we expand our personal boundaries—the boundaries of our
selves—to enclose any of our "stuff"? In general, perhaps, no, but there are certainly times when this seems true, psychologically…. So sometimes we enlarge our
boundaries; at other times, in response to perceived challenges real or imaginary, we let our boundaries shrink…. I have reminded you of these familiar speeches to
Ants and hermit crabs don't talk.
draw out the similarities between ourselves and the selves of ants and hermit crabs…

The hermit crab is designed in such a way as to see to it that it acquires a

shell, and hence, in a very weak sense, tacitly represents the crab as having a
shell, but the crab does not in any stronger sense represent itself as having a
shell. It doesn't go in for self-representation at all .
 Think from Our Position
We have to recognize our position- you cannot think like an owl
because you are not one. Instead we should utilize our agency in
a manner productive for animal rights
Harvey 99 (David, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, Global Ethics & Environment,
Edited by Nicholas Low, “Considerations on the environment of justice,” , Page 123)
This conception is species-centred and thereby commits me resolutely to a particular form of anthropocentrism (or
speciesism in Singer’s terms). I simply cannot see that we can ever avoid asserting our
own identity, being expressive of who we are and what we can become, and asserting our species’ capacities and
powers in the world we inhabit. To construe the matter any other way is, in my view, to fool
ourselves (alienate ourselves) as to who and what we are. In this sense the Marxian concept of
‘species-being’ continues to resonate. But if our task is, as White (1990) puts it, ‘to be distinctively ourselves in a world of
others’, this does not mean that we cannot, if we wish, ‘create a world of others’, this does not mean that we cannot, if we
wish, ‘create a frame that includes both self and other, neither dominant, in an image of fundamental equality’. We
can strive to think like a mountain, like the Ebola virus or like the spotted owl, and construct our
actions in response to such imaginaries, but it is still we who do the thinking and we who
choose to use our capacities and powers that way. An that principle applies
cross-culturally too. I can strive to think like an Aborigine, like a Chipko peasant, like Rupert Murdoch (for he
inhabits a cultural world I find hard to comprehend). In these cases, however, my capacity to empathize
and put myself in the other’s shoes if further aided by the possibility to
translate across languages and to study activities through careful
observation. But it is still an ‘I’ who does the imagining and the translation,
and it is always in the end through my language that the thinking gets expressed.
The ethical thrust here lies, of course, in the choice to try to think like the other, the
choice of who or what I try to think like (why a mountain and not the Ebola virus?) and the
efforts to build frames of thought and action that relate across self and
others in particular ways.
 A2 Animal Rights Alt
Animal rights excludes some animals and destroys a focus on
whole ecosystems
Paterson 6 [(Barbara, developed environmental information systems for the Ministry of Environment and
Tourism and environmental NGOs, PhD project at UCT developing software tools for wildlife management) “Ethics for
Wildlife Conservation: Overcoming the Human-Nature Dualism” RedOrbit March 1] AT

One way of identifying the intrinsic value of nonhumans is to extend traditional moral theory, which concerns itself with
interaction between humans, to include members of other species, stressing their similarities to humans. The search for
features common to humans and other animals is an attempt at building a particular type of moral community. Most
people have no difficulty in recognizing the moral bond between parents and children, for example, or between friends or
partners. As we extend moral obligations beyond the boundaries of our immediate environment, we naturally look for
features that give an inferential foundation for this extension. Consequently, so-called extensionist
arguments ask what qualities give intrinsic value to humans, and then assert
that some other beings possess these qualities, too. In the Kantian tradition, this moral
criterion is rationality (Downie 1995), and one common justification for valuing animals intrinsically is that some have
been shown to possess some rudimentary form of reasoning. Chimpanzees and gorillas have been taught sign language;
some predators, such as wolves and lions, have the ability to coordinate hunts; dolphins, whales, and other cetaceans send
complex signals that we are only beginning to understand. But basing intrinsic value on these
abstract capacities seems to rule out most animals, including most invertebrate species.
Another moral criterion is sentience (Singer 2001). The argument is that because animals share the ability to experience
their environment and to suffer, human actions that inflict suffering on animals are morally wrong. Using sentience as the
moral criterion does include a wider class of animals within an extended ethical domain, but still restricts it to sentient
animals. Plants, fungi, and single-celled organisms are effectively ruled out. What is common to all extensionist
theories is that they take the ego as the point of departure : I am intrinsically
valuable because I possess the moral criterion, and I must grant others who
possess the criterion the same rights. The problem with this line of
argument is obvious: The scope of moral consideration will either extend
only to some but not all species or lead to a very demanding code of conduct,
since it is then morally wrong for humans to kill individuals of any species, unless
justified through an appeal to our own survival. What is more, extensionist
arguments focus on individual organisms rather than on whole species.
Such individualist approaches allow no moral consideration of animal or
plant populations, or of endemic, rare, or endangered species, let alone biotic communities or ecosystems,
because entities and aggregations such as these have no apparent
psychological experience. Conservationists, however, are concerned with
the conservation of species and ecosystems rather than individual animals.
Hence it is questionable whether these individualistic approaches can serve
as an ethical underpinning for wildlife conservation (Cafaro and Primack
2001).
 A2 Deep Eco
Perm unlocks deep ecology with a focus on human action – this
is better
Deep ecology destroys environmental progress and turns case –
only social ecology can solve the case
Bookchin 87 [Murray Bookchin (author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and
urban affairs as well as ecology). “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology
Movement.” Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5. June 25, 1987] AJ
All of which brings us as social ecologists to an issue that seems to be totally
alien to the crude concerns of deep ecology: natural evolution has conferred on
human beings the capacity to form a second (or cultural) nature out of first (or
primeval) nature. Natural evolution has not only provided humans with ability but also with
the necessity to be purposive interveners into first nature, to consciously change first nature by means
of a highly institutionalized form of community. It is not alien to natural evolution that over billions of years the human species has
emerged, capable of thinking in a sophisticated way. Nor is it alien for that species to develop a highly sophisticated form of symbolic
communication or that a new kind of community---institutionalized, guided by thought rather than by instinct alone, and ever changing---
has emerged called society. Taken together, all of these
human traits---intellectual, communicative, and social---have
not only emerged from natural evolution and are inherently human; they can also be
placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic
diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new an
ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents or the harsh effects of mere
change. Whether this species, gifted by the creativity of natural evolution, can play the role of a nature rendered self-conscious or cut
against the grain of natural evolution by simplifying the biosphere, polluting it, and undermining the cumulative results of organic evolution
is above all a social problem. The primary question ecology faces today is whether an
ecologically oriented society can be created out of the present anti-ecological
one. Deep ecology provides is with no approach for responding to, much less acting
upon, this key question. It not only rips invaluable ideas like decentralization, a nonhierarchical
society, local autonomy, mutual aid, and communalism from the liberatory anarchic tradition of the past where they have
acquired a richly nuanced, anti-elitist , and egalitarian content---reinforced by passionate struggles by millions of men and women for
freedom. It
reduces them to bumper-sticker slogans that can be recycled for use
by a macho mountain man like Foreman at one extreme or flaky spiritualists at the
other. These bumper-sticker slogans are then relocated in a particularly repulsive context whose contours are defined by Malthusian
elitism, antihumanist misanthropy, and a seemingly benign "biocentrism" that dissolves humanity with all its unique natural traits for
conceptual thought and self-consciousness into a "biocentric democracy" that is more properly the product of human consciousness than a
natural reality. Carried to its logical absurdity, this "biocentric democracy'"---one might
also speak of a tree's morality or a leopard's social contract with its prey-- -can
no more deny the right of
pathogenic viruses to be placed in an Endangered Species list (and who places them there in the first place?) than it
can deny the same status to whales. The social roots of the ecological crisis are layered
over with a hybridized, often self-contradictory spirituality in which the human self,
writ large, is projected into the environment or into the sky as a reified deity or deities---a piece of anthropocentrism if
ever there was one, like the shamans dressed in reindeer skins and horns---and abjectly revered as "nature." Or as Arne
Naess, the grand pontiff of this mess, puts it: "The basic principles within the deep ecology movement are grounded in religion or
philosophy" (225)---as though the two words can be flippantly used interchangeably. Selfhood
is dissolved, in turn,
into a cosmic "Self" precisely at a time when deindividuation and passivity
are being cultivated by the mass media, corporations, and the State to an
appalling extent. Finally, deep ecology, with its concern for the
manipulation of nature, exhibits very little concern for the manipulation of
human beings by one another, except perhaps when it comes to the drastic measures that may be "needed" for
"population control." Unless there is a resolute attempt to fully anchor ecological
dislocation in social dislocations, to challenge the vested corporate and political interests known as capitalist
society---not some vague "industrial/technological" society that even Dwight D. Eisenhower attacked with a more acerbic term---to analyze,
explore and attack hierarchy as a reality, not only as a sensibility, to recognize the material needs of the poor and of Third World people, to
function politically, not simply as a religious cult, to give the human species and mind their due in natural evolution, not simply to regard
them as cancers in the biosphere, to examine economies as well as souls and freedom as well as immerse ourselves in introspective or
scholastic arguments about the rights of pathogenic viruses---unless in short North American Greens and the ecology
movement shift
their focus toward a social ecology and let deep ecology sink into
the pit it has created, the ecology movement will become another ugly wart on the skin of
society. What we must do today is return to nature, conceived in all its fecundity, richness of potentialities, and subjectivity---not to
supernature with its shamans, priests, priestesses, and fanciful deities that are merely anthropomorphic extensions and distortions of the
human as all-embracing divinities. And what we must enchant is not only an abstract nature that often reflects our own systems of power,
hierarchy, and domination, but rather human beings, the human mind, and the human spirit that has taken such a beating these days from
every source, particularly deep ecology. Deep
ecology, with its Malthusian thrust, its various centricities,
its mystifying
Eco-la-la, and its disorienting eclecticism degrades this
enterprise into a crude biologism that deflects us from the social problems
that underpin the ecological ones and the project of social reconstruction that alone can spare the biosphere
from virtual destruction. We must finally take a stand on these issues---free of all Eco-la-la---or acknowledge that the academy has made
another conquest: namely that of the ecology movement itself.

Deep ecology justifies mass starvation and genocide.

Bookchin 87 [Murray Bookchin (author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and
urban affairs as well as ecology). “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology
Movement.” Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5. June 25, 1987] AJ
It was out of this kind of crude eco-brutalism that Hitler, in the name of
"population control," with a racial orientation, fashioned theories of blood and soil that led
to the transport of millions of people to murder camps like Auschwitz. The same eco-brutalism
now reappears a half-century later among self-professed deep ecologists who believe that
Third World peoples should be permitted to starve to death and that
desperate Indian immigrants from Latin America should be excluded by the border cops from
the United States lest they burden "our" ecological resources. This eco-brutalism
does not come out of Hitler's Mein Kampf. It appeared in Simply Living, an Australian periodical, as part of a
laudatory interview of David Foreman by Professor Bill Devall, who co-authored Deep Ecology with Professor George
Sessions, the authorized manifesto of the deep ecology movement. Foreman, who
exuberantly expressed his commitment to deep ecology, frankly
informed Devall that "When I tell people
who the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid---the
best thing would be to just let
nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve---they think this is
monstrous. . . . Likewise, letting the USA be an overflow valve for problems in Latin America is not solving a thing. It's just
putting more pressure on the resources we have in the USA." One can reasonably ask such compelling questions as
what does it mean for nature to "seek its own balance" in East Africa, where
agribusiness,
colonialism, and exploitation have ravaged a once culturally and
ecologically stable area. Or who is this all-American "our" that owns "the resources we have in the USA"?
Are they the ordinary people who are driven by sheer need to cut timber, mine ores, and operate nuclear power plants? Or
are they the giant corporations that are not only wrecking the good old USA but have produced the main problems these
days in Latin America that send largely Indian folk across the Rio Grande? As an ex-Washington lobbyist and political
huckster, David Foreman need not be expected to answer these subtle questions in a radical way. But what is truly
surprising is the reaction---more precisely, the lack of any reaction---that marked Professor Devall's behavior. Indeed, the
interview was notable for the laudatory, almost reverential, introduction and description of Foreman that Devall prepared.
A "Self" so cosmic that it has to be capitalized is no real self at all. It is an ideological category as vague, faceless, and
depersonalized as the very patriarchal image of "man" that dissolves our uniqueness and rationality into a deadening
abstraction.

Deep ecology advocates a surrender to the “natural whole”

which destroys personal advocacy and paves the way for fascism
Bookchin 87 [Murray Bookchin (author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and
urban affairs as well as ecology). “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology
Movement.” Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5. June 25, 1987] AJ
A "Self" so cosmic that it has to be capitalized is no real self at all. It is an ideological
category as vague, faceless, and depersonalized as the very patriarchal image of "man"
that dissolves our uniqueness and rationality into a deadening abstraction. On Selfhood and Viruses Such flippant
abstractions of human individuality are extremely dangerous. Historically, a "self"
that absorbs all real existential selves has been used from time immemorial to absorb individual uniqueness and freedom
into a supreme individual who heads the State, churches of various sorts, adoring congregations---be they Eastern or
Western---and spellbound constituencies, however much a "self" is dressed up in ecological, naturalistic, and biocentric
attributes. The Paleolithic shaman regaled in reindeer skins and horns is the predecessor of the Pharaoh, the
institutionalized Buddha, and in more recent times Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. That the egotistical,
greedy, and soloist bourgeois self has always been a repellent being goes
without saying, and deep ecology as personified by Devall and Sessions make the most of
it. This kind of "critical" stance is easy to adopt; it can even find a place in People magazine.
But is there not a free, independently minded, ecologically concerned,
indeed idealist self with a unique personality that can think of itself as different from
"whales, grizzly bears, whole rainforest ecosystems [no less!], mountains and rivers, the tiniest microbes in the soil,
and so on"? Is it not indispensable, in fact, for the individual self to disengage
itself from a pharaonic "Self," discover its own capacities and uniqueness, indeed acquire a
sense of personality, of self-control and self-direction---all traits
indispensable for the achievement of freedom? Here, I may add, Heidegger and, yes,
Nazism begin to grimace with satisfaction behind this veil of self-effacement
and a passive personality so yielding that it can easily be shaped, distorted,
and manipulated by a new "ecological" State machine with a supreme "SELF" embodied
in a Leader, Guru, or Living God---all in the name of a "biocentric equality" that is slowly
reworked as it has been so often in history into a social hierarchy. From Shaman
to Monarch, from Priest or Priestess to Dictator, our warped social development has been
marked by nature worshippers and their ritual Supreme Ones who
produced unfinished individuals at best and who deindividuated the "self-
in-Self" at worst, often in the name of the "Great Connected Whole" (to use
exactly the language of the Chinese ruling classes who kept their peasantry in abject servitude, as Leon E. Stover points
out in his The Cultural Ecology of Chinese Civilization). What makes this Eco-la-la especially
sinister today is that we are already living in a period of massive
deindividuation---not because deep ecology or Taoism is making any serious inroads into our own cultural
ecology but because the mass media, the commodity culture, and a market society are
"reconnecting" us into an increasingly depersonalized "whole" whose
essence is passivity and a chronic vulnerability to economic and political
manipulation. It is not from an excess of selfhood that we are suffering but of selfishness---the surrender
of personality to the security afforded by corporations, centralized government, and
the military. If selfhood is identified with a grasping, "anthropocentric," and devouring personality, these traits are
to be found not so much among ordinary people, who basically sense that they have no control over their destinies, as
among the giant corporations and State leaders who are plundering not only the planet but also women, people of color,
and the underprivileged. It is not deindividuation that the oppressed of the world
require, much less passive personalities that readily surrender themselves to the cosmic forces---the "Self" —that
buffet them around, but reindividuation that will render them active agents in
remaking society and arresting the growing totalitarianism that threatens to
homogenize us all as part of a Western version of the "Great Connected Whole."

Social ecology solves their impact

Bookchin 87 [Murray Bookchin (author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs
as well as ecology). “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement.” Green Perspectives:
Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5. June 25, 1987] AJ
Let us agree from the outset that ecology is no magic term that unlocks the secret of our
abuse of nature. It is a word that can be as easily abused, distorted, and tainted as democracy and freedom. Nor does
ecology put us all--whoever "we" may be---in the same boat against environmentalists, who are simply trying to
make a rotten society work by dressing it in green leaves and colorful
flowers while ignoring the deep-seated roots of our ecological problems. It is time to
honestly fact the fact that there are differences within today's so-called ecology movement that are as serious as those
between the environmentalism and ecologism of the early 1970s. There are barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho
Daniel Boones, and outright social reactionaries who use the word ecology to express their views, just as there are deeply
concerned naturalists, communitarians, social radicals, and feminists who use the word ecology to express theirs. The
differences between these two tendencies consist not only of quarrels with regard to theory, sensibility, and ethics. They
have far-reaching practical and political consequences. They concern not only of the way we view nature, or humanity; or
even ecology, but how we propose to change society and by what means. The
greatest differences that
are emerging within the so-called ecology movement are between a vague,
formless, often self-contradictory, and invertebrate thing called deep ecology
and a long-developing, coherent, and socially oriented body of ideas that can best be called
social ecology. Deep ecology has parachuted into our midst quite recently from the
Sunbelt's bizarre mix of Hollywood and Disneyland, spiced with homilies from Taoism,
Buddhism, spiritualism, reborn Christianity, and in some cases eco-fascism,
while social ecology draws its inspiration from such outstanding radical
decentralist thinkers as Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Paul Goodman, among many
others who have advanced a serious challenge to the present society with its
vast hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled, statist apparatus and militaristic
history. Let us face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric,
has virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their ultimate
roots in society and in social problems. It preaches a gospel of a kind of "original sin"
that accurses a vague species called humanity---as though people of color were
equatable with whites, women with men, the Third World with the First, the
poor with the rich, and the exploited with their exploiters. Deep ecologists see this vague
and undifferentiated humanity essentially as an ugly "anthropocentric" thing---presumably a
malignant product of natural evolution---that is "overpopulating" the planet, "devouring"
its resources, and destroying its wildlife and the biosphere--- as though some
vague domain of "nature" stands opposed to a constellation of nonnatural human beings, with
their technology, minds, society, etc. Deep ecology, formulated largely by privileged male white academics, has managed
to bring sincere naturalists like Paul Shepard into the same company as patently antihumanist and macho mountain men
like David Foreman of Earth First! who preach a gospel that humanity is some kind of cancer in the world of life.
 A2 One with Nature Alt
Alt fails – it’s impossible to disassociate ourselves from our
experience – human centered-ness is inevitable
Lee, Philosophy Professor at Bloomsburg, ‘9 (Wendy, Spring, “Restoring Human-Centerednes to
Environmental Conscience: The Ecocentrist's Dilemma, the Role of Heterosexualized
Anthropomorphizing, and the Significance of Language to Ecological Feminism” Ethics and the
Environment, Vol 14 No 1, Project Muse)
Bender undertakes this task in the course of promoting his specific version of ecocen trism that he calls "nondualism" but it is telling that,
instead of offering an argument that provides grounds for rejecting the "dualism" of experiencing subject and experienced object, he resorts to an

experience of "nonduality": I start out…in ordinary, dualistic, waking consciousness, feeling myself a subject amidst myriad objects
around me, each experienced as other. I discover I do not exist independently, but am like a node in a web, through which diverse kinds of energy flow. For
example, I [End Page 35] take in the Sun's warmth, the in-breath, food, water, human speech, and so on. Meanwhile, I expel many kinds of energy. Like the out-
breath, speech, bodily movements, and excreta. The energy I take in and expel circulates everywhere on Earth, passing through others as through myself. Thus I
discover my connectedness to all other beings, such that I, like they, am but one manifestation of this energy flow, of planet Earth…. Nonduality emerges as I
realize further that natural phenomena are Earth transiently manifest, empty of substantive selfhood (objectivity), since everything is dependently co-originated.
Thus, though I am precisely emptiness of substantive or independent selfhood; even so, as one particular manifold of relations, I am unique. (2003, 435) The
this isn't an argument, but rather an experiential narrative ,
difficulties here are three-fold: First,
hence it would be folly to think it could establish anything other than that someone can have such an experience. But since such could be motivated by, say,
it hardly establishes any metaphysical claim about the
exhaustion, illness, or the use of narcotics,

nature of identity or being—much less about any capacity to dissociate

oneself from "substantive selfhood." Second, however much he may feel himself
to be "empty of substantive selfhood" Bender's use of "I' suggests that he
confuses the capacity to conceive with the capacity to actually be so emptied.
It's one thing to conceive of myself as connected to all other beings —indeed I do so
conceive myself, I know this in the abstract to be true and I know of no evidence that contradicts it. It is, however, quite another thing

to experience myself as emptied of selfhood. Moreover, it is simply false that what

I can conceive, imagine, think, or even describe is necessarily something I
can experience per se. Third, although Bender's appeals to intuition, mystical insight, Spinoza's notion of particulars as manifestations of nature
(2003, 434–5), or Buddhist inspired meditation (2003, 436–7) might be compelling for someone already convinced that so-called nondualist identification with
nonhuman nature is possible, these hardly suffice as an argument convincing to the skeptic
who may not share the necessary presuppositions or traditions . Here too, then,
Bender's account is unconvincing—the ethical norm he derives from it (among
others), "Form one body with all beings !" is likely to be mystifying to anyone

unconvinced we can make this leap of faith from centeredness to "one body"
or (as the moral dictum requires) from the "I" of subject-object dualism to the disavowal of
my body. [End Page 36] Moreover, if I am right that there are good reasons to take the specifically embodied configuration of capacities and limitations
that describe human being seriously, no such dissociation from "I" is possible —in fact, it intimates

precisely the dualism Bender rejects. However deep my feelings (spiritual sensibilities,
affectionate sentiments, desires to connect) go with respect to my appreciation of natural objects

and phenomena, I nonetheless remain at the center of my embodied

consciousness—and cannot be/do otherwise. Hence, one more version of the
ecocentrist's dilemma: the dissociation of self demanded by the moral maxim "form one body with
all things" assumes that I can dissociate my consciousness from my body—what

else to call this but dualism? The notion that I could dissociate myself
without dissociating myself from my situated body to be "one with all
things" is comprehensible only if I am not (at least essentially) my body, but
rather a consciousness that, even if not fully independent, is capable of not
merely conceiving but experiencing "my" body as something other than
bound by my own skin, that is, as not my body. Hence I must be dual—a
"mind" that, in virtue of its capacity to empty itself of its "substantive
selfhood," is merely in a dissociable body. No doubt, Bender would find this objection to his view onerous. However,
when he advises us to try to expand our selves through, for example, meditation or to encompass an ever-wider set of relations with and to human and nonhuman
others (2003, 423–4), it is hard to see how his view does not fit the dualist shoe. He writes that "[s]uch a practice, over time, should transform your sense of who
you are as you discover you are not the separate skin-encapsulated individual you once thought you were, but that you belong to all other living beings, and that
other beings are not really other, and that you yourself are not really the center of concern." (2003, 424, my emphasis) Again,
Bender confuses what I can conceive with what I can experience— I can
conceive myself as "not the center of concern," but not an iota of this moral
recognition either requires or makes possible an experience of myself as
anything other than "skin encapsulated." Bender hasn't, moreover, the luxury of trading in his metaphysical
commitments for the option that he's speaking "merely" phenomenologically or metaphorically. For neither the environmental pragmatist, who would likely deny
the need to undertake such a practice in order to have a stake in the future of human [End Page 37] consciousness, nor those who engage in such practices without
a smidgeon of the environmental activism Bender hopes will follow, are likely to be moved by anything but an argument for nondualism—and this Bender does not
provide.

Given that inevitability, the attempt of the alternative causes us

to give up and abandon all ethical engagement with the
environment
Lee, Philosophy Professor at Bloomsburg, ‘9 (Wendy, Spring, “Restoring Human-Centerednes to
Environmental Conscience: The Ecocentrist's Dilemma, the Role of Heterosexualized
Anthropomorphizing, and the Significance of Language to Ecological Feminism” Ethics and the
Environment, Vol 14 No 1, Project Muse)
if Bender is correct that the centeredness of human
A second difficulty is that

consciousness predisposes (or just is) chauvinistic, then either we really are
doomed to continue the ecocidal trajectory of our history or, as Bender argues, we
must disavow our human-centeredness in favor of an ecocentric ("non-dualist")
perspective and practice (2003, 397–404, 445–9). Hence a first version of the ecocentrist's dilemma: If the ecocentrist is
wrong, and it turns out that human-centeredness (qua chauvinistic) is an ineradicable
feature of human consciousness (at least short of suicide), then we're doomed to precisely
the environmental destruction Bender chronicles in impressive (if however despairing) detail in The
Culture of Extinction. We are, in other words determined to "dominate the earth!" in which case

we may as well just "hang it up," head out to buy Hummers, and buy stock in
Shell. This, of course, is not a conclusion Bender (or any of us) would find
acceptable. But if, alternatively, the ecocentrist is right, he/she must show
how it is possible—at the level of conscious experience—to dissociate that
experience from the centered "I" of the subject who, in other words, has it in mind to accomplish the disavowal of the
presumably egoistic self and permanently redirect consciousness towards the eco-centric.3

Differences key - K justifies domination of nature under the

guise of identification – impact turns the K
Cantrill 96 [James Gerard Cantrill, Christine Lena Oravec “The Symbolic Earth.” 1996]
There are three main problems with this narrative. First, deep ecology's insistence on a totalizing vision that is achievable
through transcendent identification is the point that social ecologists and ecofeminists have consistently challenged. For
example, Bookchin points out that identifying with the whole erases differences that
matter (Chase, 1991). By using this category of the whole, even as it applies only to
humans, differences between the president of Exxon and a child in Harlem are
erased. Similarly, by assuming similarity with all of nature, uniquely human
attributes (especially reason) are ignored. Ecofeminist criticism focuses on a different problem. Kheel
(1990), drawing on object relations theory (Chodorow, 1978; Dinnerstein, 1967), points out that the Self of deep
ecology is a Self that, in expanding to identify with the whole of nature,
simultaneously objectifies, symbolizes, and destroys particular instances of nature.
Critiquing Leopold's work, she points out that when the Self becomes the whole, the whole
takes precedence over the particular. Specifically, in Leopold's description of
hunting, the merging of the hunter's Self with nature through the hunted animal
occurs as the essence of the hunt, while the particular animal's death is an
incidental by-product of the process of connecting with the whole.
 A2 Biocentrism Alt
Biocentrism/ecocentrism reinscribes speciesism – perm is best
since it preserves inevitable human principles that prevent
anthropocentric discrimination
Hayward 97 [Tim Hayward (Professor of Politics at University of Edinburgh), “Anthropocentrism: A
Misunderstood Problem,” Environmental Values 6 (1997): 49-63] AZ
A basic reason why criticisms of anthropocentrism are equivocal is that it is not self-evident what exactly it means to be
human-centred: where or what is the ‘centre’? The idea of anthropocentrism is typically understood as
analogous to egocentrism (Goodpaster, 1979): but just as the latter is anything but unproblematic, if it implies a simple,
unitary, centred ego, so too is anthropocentrism – for the human species is all too at odds with itself. If the project
of bringing humanity to peace with itself , of constituting itself as a body
which is sufficiently unified to be considered ‘centred’ is anthropocentric ,
though, it is anthropocentric in a sense I have suggested should be applauded rather than
condemned. To be sure, what attitude such a body has towards non-humans cannot be predicted before the event,
but there is good reason to think that such a unified and peaceful body is more likely to be
considerate – or at least guided by a far-sighted and ecologically enlightened
conception of its self- interest – than one which is riven by internal strife.
Posing the question of ‘where and what is the centre’ not only allows this constructive perspective on anthropocentrism, it
also reveals the indeterminacy of alleged alternatives to it. One alternative often referred to in the literature is
‘biocentrism’.6 However, if biocentrism means giving moral consideration to all living
beings, it is quite consistent with giving moral consideration to humans;
biocentrism in this sense is actually presupposed by my own rejection of human chauvinism and speciesism, and
thus appears to be a complement of rather than alternative to anthropocentrism .
Another perspective, however, which purports to offer an alternative to either anthropocentrism or biocentrism, is
ecocentrism.7 For ecocentrism, not only living beings, but whole ecosystems, including the abiotic parts of nature, are
deemed worthy of moral consideration too. The ecocentric claim is particularly significant in the present
context in that it purports to stake out a role for the continued use of
anthropocentrism as a term of criticism. From the perspective of ecocentrism, the critique
of speciesism would not be adequate to capture all aspects of environmental
concern, for while it serves to counter the arbitrary treatment of species and their members, ecocentrists
would nevertheless argue that other sorts of entity , including abiotic parts of nature, are
also worthy of concern. It is here, they claim, that a distinction between human-centredness and eco-
centredness reveals its force: for in disre- garding ecosystemic relations humans may not be disregarding the interests of
any particular species, but they are nevertheless doing ecological harm. In reply to this claim I would argue that no
harms can actually be identified without reference to species-interests of
one sort or another. This is to return to the question of the lack of any determinate ‘eco-centre’, that is to say,
to the problem of identifying the loci of ecological harms. One ecocentric response might be that whole ecosystemic
balances, which can be upset by human interventions, should be preserved. But this response gives rise
to
a host of further questions, concerning, for instance: which balances should be
preserved and why; whether unaided nature never ‘upsets’ ecological
balances, and some human activities do not sometimes ‘improve’ them ; whether
humans should, per impossibile, seek simply not to influence ecosystems at all. In short, it leaves open the question of
what criteria there are, for telling whether one balance is preferable to another, which do not refer back to anthropocentric
or biocentric considerations. In fact, to my knowledge, the best, if not only, reason for preserving ecosystemic relations is
precisely that they constitute the ‘life-support system’ for humans and other living species. Still, another ecocentric
response might be to claim there is independent reason to take as morally considerable abiotic parts of nature – such as
rocks, rivers, and mountains, for instance. But while one clear reason to value these is that they provide habitats for
various living species, it is not so clear what reason there is to insist on their continued undisturbed existence for its own
sake.8 In fact, arguments in favour of these parts of the natural world almost invariably appeal to spiritual or aesthetic
reasons, and while these may be good reasons, they cannot, it seems to me, be disentangled from specifically human-
centred concerns – namely, those of spirituality or beauty. In short, it seems to me that the attempt to pursue
a radically ecocentric line is more likely to reintroduce objectionably
anthropocentric considerations – such as unrecog- nised prejudices about what
is beautiful or spiritual – than a position that recognizes, on the one hand, that aspects of
anthropocentrism are unavoidable , but, on the other, that speciesism is not. My claim, then, is that
ecocentrism is radically indeterminate and therefore provides no basis from
which to launch an all-encompassing critique of anthropocentrism.
 A2 Panpsychism/Rationality
They link to themselves – if any human attempt to shape the
world is anthropocentric, asking you to vote negative links to the
K. If the K is true it can’t be a reason to vote neg – only a risk of
our offense
The kritik solidifies the human/nature divide by treating
humans as uniquely responsible for “observing” the cosmos
while other entities can act.
Harman, 2005 (Graham, critically acclaimed Heidegger scholar who spent 10 years reading
everything Heidegger wrote [even in German,] Associate Provost for Research Administration at the
American University of Cairo, “Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things,” p.
241-245)
The theme of representation is one of the recurrent problems of philosophy. Certain special entities known as sentient
organisms are granted a unique ability to perceive images of the world, rather than merely responding to it with blind
causal force as subsentient entities are supposed to do. The hermeneutic school ofHeidegger and his successors claims to
have left the problem of representation in the past. For hermeneutics there is supposedly no magical gap between humans
and the world, since humans are always already involved with objects, and hence there is no pure representation of the
world free of the prior interpretation and use of objects. In one sense this is a clear step forward, but in another it yields no
progress at all. For with the notion that human beings are rooted in a specific
factical life rather than standing at a distance from the world and observing bloodless
images of it, we do come one step closer to dethroning the privilege of human beings
in philosophy. Yet hermeneutics still ascribes to humans (and perhaps even to animals)
an apparently miraculous power: the ability to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures or
simulacra of such impact. Humans still transcend the world and contemplate it, even if
only partially, and this makes humans different in kind from mere paper, sand, or gold. It is still humans alone who can
perceive the world, and the philosophical gap between sentient and inanimate or object
and appearance is still taken as a given. This in itself would not be so bad, since most of us would willingly
concede important differences in the structure of conscious and unconscious objects. But the question is whether the gap
between conscious and unconscious entities is so unspeakably vast that it needs to be built into the very foundation of
ontology in a way that the chasms between mammal and reptile or plant and fungus never are. For hermeneutics, there
is still an absolute gulf between two types of entities, with humans and possibly
animals on one side and all remaining objects on the other . A crucial ontological structure-
the as-structure-is ascribed to certain entities and denied to others. But this means that Heidegger grounds his ontology in
an ontic rift between specific types of objects. And in fact, he has no hope of explaining how the as-structure magically
arises only for certain objects and not others. Nor does he ever attempt such an explanation. I have suggested that the real
stakes in ontology lie at a far more primitive level than any of the well-known special properties of human being. The as-
structure is found even in inanimate matter; the dual axes of the world are everywhere and not just in some anxious,
mournful human space that would exclude such supposed inferiors as almonds and glass. One possible
antidote to this bias would be to embrace panpsychism and claim that even rocks and
milkweed must already show crude traces of cognitive power. Such doctrines are now wildly out of
fashion, and are generally exiled to the wastelands and gullies of the philosophical world, the eternal homeland of
renegades, outliers, pariahs, hermits, vagabonds, and unemployable cranks. It would take a short memory to think that
such theories will remain unfashionable forever: most abandoned concepts return someday in modified form, as the crop
rotation of history brings every fallow field back to life sooner or later. Yet reviving panpsychism would
not solve our current problem, since this refreshingly freewheeling theory actually
preserves the central problem of human-centered philosophy: namely, it still
assumes that cognition is something so poignantly special that ontology
cannot live without it. After all, no one ever claims that inanimate matter must
possess other human features in germinal form, such as five-fingered hands, a
spinal cord, taste buds, laughter, or musical skill. I have yet to hear anyone
speculate that rocks and maple sap display a primitive form of language. In this respect, even
philosophical cranks have proven themselves to have limited imaginations. For some reason it is sentient
perception alone that is deemed so important that certain fringe schools allow
it to balloon into an ontological feature of objects as a whole. And this merely
displays the well-worn assumption that there is something magically unique
and inexplicable about the ability to create images of things rather than merely submitting to their
blows. When hunters and gatherers came to develop agriculture, few historians deny that this change is of staggering
importance for human history. This shift is much more than a difference of degree: it is a revolution that triggers the
unforeseen rise of cities, armies, monarchies, and bureaucratic specialists. Even so, no one tries to convert agricultural life
into some sort of magic ontological principle; no philosopher carves up reality into entities that farm and entities that do
not. When birds first developed wings at some point in their evolutionary history, this was a
crucial shift that opened a new reality and new lifestyle to these creatures, inviting them for the first
time to long-distance migration and the building of nests in trees. Despite this landmark step in the history of
animals, no philosopher sees the gap between winged and nonwinged creatures
as immeasurably vast. No school of "panpterists􀈐' steps forth to claim that even
dirt and sunlight must have wings in some imperceptible, germinal form. Heidegger makes an important
mistake by locating one of his pivotal ontological features (the as-structure) in certain kinds of objects at the expense of
others. For him, only one kind of entity transcends, nihilates, or rises above the world to see it "as" what it is, and that
entity is human Dasein. To use a term that Heidegger himself avoids, only one kind of entity is conscious, and for this
reason the very existence of human beings is supposed to introduce a vital cleft into being itself. This is not only a
typical case of human arrogance in philosophy, but also has an air of voodoo or fetish
about it-like some tribal myth in which the world was a lifeless soil until
sprinkled with talking magic beans. We will never overcome this voodoo ontology
by joining forces with the panpsychists and demanding that the special
powers of human consciousness also be divvied up among dust, cactus, water, and
melons. Instead, we overcome it only by denying that the special features of
human consciousness are built into the heart of ontology at all. The history of the
universe is packed with numerous fateful revolutions: the emergence of the heavier
elements from hydrogen; the birth of solar systems; the breakup of Pangaea into multiple continents; the
emergence of muticellular life, the beaks of birds, and the gills of fish; the first dreams in
early animals; the domestication of cows and dogs; the shift from papyrus to paper; navigation across open
sea rather than playing it safe along the coasts; electricity and telephones; phenomenology, quantum
theory, and psychoanalysis; the atomic bomb, smart weapons, credit cards, steam engines, atonal music,
internal combustion, and blood transfusions. My claim is that sentient consciousness , human theory, and
language all belong on the same list with these other examples, and not on
some sanctified ontological throne from which they might proclaim that conscious images of the
world are infinitely different from the inanimate causal impacts of that world. There is no absolute gap
between objects and images, but only ubiquitous gaps between one object
and the next. Images are merely sensual objects, and sensual objects lie always and only on the interior of real
ones.
 Radical Anthro Bad
Radical anthropocentrism is self-defeating – total detachment is
impossible and bad
Hayward 97 [Tim Hayward (Professor of Politics at University of Edinburgh), “Anthropocentrism: A
Misunderstood Problem,” Environmental Values 6 (1997): 49-63] AZ
Overcoming anthropocentrism has meant appreciating that ‘Man’ is not the
centre of the universe or the measure of all things; that it is less tenable to think of humans as made in the
image of God, as the purpose of creation, than as one of the products of natural evolution. Humans are just a part of the
natural order. This cognitive displacement of human beings from centre stage in the greater scheme of things has been
made possible, above all, by developments in modern science. This detached view of humans has
been made possible by just that kind of objectivating knowledge which more
recently has been held to lie at the root of an attitude toward the natural world to be
condemned as anthropocentric. For what the rise of objectivating science has done
is bring with it the idea that humans can in some ways stand apart from the
rest of nature: the achievement of objectivity carries with it an enhanced
view of the power and autonomy of subjectivity; and this is at the heart of a set of attitudes
which privilege human faculties, capacities and interests over those of nonhuman entities. There thus appears to be a
paradox: the overcoming of anthropocentrism so far has been brought about by
just those developments which are now seen by many as lying at the root of unacceptably
anthropocentric attitudes and values.1 If the overcoming of anthropocentrism is to be deemed a good thing,
therefore, this paradox should alert us to how it is also a rather complex thing.
Managerialism
 Managerialism Good TL
The earth is becoming uninhabitable—only management can
avoid extinction of all life
Ward, 9 (Peter, Professor of biology and Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and an
astrobiologist with NASA, The Medea Hypothesis, 52-54)
Calcium is an important ingredient in this process, and it is found in two main sources on a planet's surface: igneous rocks
and, most importantly, the sedimentary rocks called limestone. Calcium reacts with carbon dioxide
to form limestone. Calcium thus draws CO2 out of the atmosphere . When CO2
begins to increase in the atmosphere, more limestone formation will occur. This can only happen,
however, if there is a steady source of new calcium available . The calcium con-
tent is steadily made available by plate tectonics, for the formation of new mountains brings new
sources of calcium back into the system in its magmas and by exhuming ancient limestone, eroding it, and thus releasing
its calcium to react with more CO2. At convergent plate margins, where the huge slabs of the Earth's surface dive back
down into the planet, some of the sediments resting on the descending part are carried down into the Earth. High
temperature and pressure convert some of these rocks into metamorphic rocks. One of the reactions is the carbonate
metamorphic reaction, where limestone combining with silica converts to a calcium silicate—and carbon dioxide. The
CO2 can then be liberated back into the atmosphere in volcanic eruptions.
The planetary thermostat requires a balance between the amount of CO2 being
pumped into the atmosphere through volcanic action and the amount being
taken out through the formation of limestone. The entire system is driven by heat emanating
from the Earth's interior, which causes plate tectonics. But as we have seen there is more to this cycle than simply heating
from the interior. Weathering on the surface of the Earth is crucial as well, and the rate
of weathering is highly sensitive to temperature, for reaction rates involved in
weathering tend to increase as temperature increases. This will cause silicate rocks to break down faster and thus
create more calcium, the building block of limestone. With more calcium available, more
limestone can form. But the rate of limestone formation affects the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and when
more lime- stone forms there is less and less CO2 in the atmosphere, causing the climate to cool. Here is a key aspect of
the overall Earth system that helps refute either Gaia or Medea. If the Medea hypothesis is correct,
we should be able to observe or measure a reduction of habitability
potential (as measured by the carrying capacity, or total amount of life that can live on our planet at any give time)
through time, or as measured by an observable shortening of the Earth's ability to be habitable for life in the future. For
our own Earth, habitability will ultimately end for two reasons. The first of these is
not Medean; it is a one-way effect. The ever-increasing energy output of our Sun, a
phenomenon of all stars on what is called the main sequence, will ultimately
cause the loss of the
Earth's oceans (sometime in the next 2 to 3 billion years, according to new calculations). When the
oceans are lost to space, planetary temperatures will rise to uninhabitable
levels. But long before that, life will have died out on the Earth's surface through a mechanism that is
Medean: because of life, the Earth will lose one resource with out which the
main trophic level of life itself—photosynthetic organisms, from microbes to
higher plants—can no longer survive. This dwindling resource, ironically, (in this time when human
society worries about too much of it), is atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Medean reduction of carbon
dioxide will then cause a further reduction of planetary habitability because the
CO2 drop will trigger a drop in atmospheric oxygen to a level too low to support
animal life. This is an example of a "Medean" property: it is because of life that the amount of CO2 in the Earth's
atmosphere has been steadily dropping over the last 200 million years. It is life that makes most
calcium carbonate deposits, such as coral skeletons, and thus life that ultimately
caused the drop in CO2, since it takes CO2 out of the atmosphere to build this kind of skeleton. Life will
continue to do this until a lethal lower limit is attained. This finding is important: in chapter 8 I will show a graph that
supports this statement. As pointed out by David Schwartzman, while limestone can be formed with or without life, life is
far more efficient at producing calcium carbonate structures—a process that draws CO2 out of the atmosphere—than
nonlife. There is only one way out of the lethal box imposed by Darwinian life:
the rise of intelligence capable of devising planetary-scale engineering.
Technical, or tool-producing, intelligence is the unique solution to the planetary
dilemma caused by Medean properties of life. New astrobiological work indicates that Venus, Mars, Europa, and
Titan are potentially habitable worlds at the present time, at least for microbes, just as the Earth was early in its history.
Did they undergo a reduction in habitability because of prior Medean forces? And certainly the cosmos is filled with Earth-
like planets, based on both new modeling of still-forming solar systems and observations by the Butler and Marcy planet-
finding missions. While the "planet finders" cannot yet directly observe any planet that is Earth-sized (a planet of this size
is still too small for us to see with our current technologies), the orbits exhibited by some of the Jupiter- and Saturn-sized
planets that can be observed suggest that smaller, Earth-like planets might exist there. Would Medean forces occur in
alien life, as well as Earth life? If such life were Darwinian, the answer would be "certainly."

Prioritize human existence --- we’re the only species that can
protect the entire biosphere from inevitable asteroid strikes ---
Matheny 9 (Jason Gaverick, research associate with the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University,
where his work focuses on technology forecasting and risk assessment - particularly of global catastrophic risks and
existential risks, Sommer Scholar and PhD candidate in Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University, March 14,
“Ought we worry about human extinction? [1]”, http://jgmatheny.org/extinctionethics.htm)
At the same time, we’re probably the only animal on Earth that routinely demonstrates
compassion for other species. Such compassion is nearly universal in developed countries but we usually know too little,
too late, for deeply ingrained habits, such as diets, to change. If
improvements in other public
morals were possible without any significant biological change in human
nature, then the same should be true for our treatment of nonhuman
animals, though it will take some time. Even without any change in public morals , it
seems unlikely we will continue to use animals for very long – at least, nowhere near
50 billion per year. Our most brutal use of animals results not from sadism but
from old appetites now satisfied with inefficient technologies that have not
fundamentally changed in 10,000 years. Ours is the first century where newer
technologies -- plant or in vitro meats, or meat from brainless animals -- could satisfy
human appetites for meat more efficiently and safely (Edelman et al, 2005). As these
technologies mature and become cheaper, they will likely replace conventional meat. If the use of sentient animals
survives much beyond this century, we should be very surprised. This thought is a cure for misanthropy. As long as
most humans in the future don't use sentient animals, the vast number of good lives we
can create would outweigh any sins humanity has committed or is likely to commit.

Even if it takes a century for animal farming to be replaced by

vegetarianism (or in vitro meats or brainless farm animals), the century of factory farming would
represent around 10^12 miserable life-years. That is one-billionth of the
10^21 animal life-years humanity could save by protecting Earth from
asteroids for a billion years. The century of industrialized animal use would
thus be the equivalent of a terrible pain that lasts one second in an
otherwise happy 100-year life. To accept human extinction now would be like
committing suicide to end an unpleasant itch . If human life is extinguished,
all known animal life will be extinguished when the Sun enters its Red Giant
phase, if not earlier. Despite its current mistreatment of other animals, humanity is the animal kingdom’s
best long-term hope for survival.
 Managerialism ext:
Prefer our evidence – most recent studies prove that
abandoning technology and civilization cause extinction, only
massive management campaign can solve
Ward 9 (Peter, Professor of biology and Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and an
astrobiologist with NASA, The Medea Hypothesis, XX – XXII)
To argue my case, I will use new discoveries from geology, biology, and most of the
fossil record. To me, these new understandings are like a memory exhumed from some deep sleep,
in reality from the deep past, that shows the absolute need to construct a new paradigm
about both past and future, one that will require a rather painful shift from the
kinds of conservation and environmentalism that are practiced now. The
philosophical underpinnings of modern environmentalism are that the planet must be returned to environmental condi-
tions that existed prior to the evolution of humankind's technological civilization, with the resulting planetwide changes to
almost every facet of the environment. Instead, we humans must resort to wholesale
planetary engineering if we are to overcome the tendencies of life around
us—and those of our own species— to make the Earth a less salubrious (and
eventually lethal) abode for life. The sum of this record, which is meant to be the theme of this work, is the
interpretation that the evolution of life triggered a series of disasters that are inimical to life and will continue to do so into
the future. If true, one implication is that the environmental challenges confronting our species and its civilizations are far
more than simple overpopulation and all that entails. The fact is that we live on a rapidly aging
planet, and we will soon have but two choices if our spe cies is to survive:
engineer on a planetary scale or get off. Instead of restoring our planet to how it
was before humans, we have to do exactly what the Gaia hypothesis suggests that life has done all
along: optimize conditions for further life . We have to confront the nature of
life itself and deal especially with groups of life that we animals have battled
throughout our history: armies of microbes that cause their own kind of
pollution, inimical to our kind of life. I will try to show in the pages to come that the cause of this in-
herent tendency of life on Earth is due to one of Earth life's most deeply inherent characteristics, so deeply rooted that it
would not be life without this aspect. It is that all Earth life is a slave to a process called evolution, Darwinian evolution in
fact, for Charles Darwin got the process spectacularly correct even without understanding how any characteristic could be
heritable. Along with replication and metabolism, evolution is one of the three tripods that defines life on Earth; take any
of these legs away and it falls into the nonlife category. Life can no more help evolving than we can stop breathing and stay
alive. You evolve or your species goes extinct, for the Earth keeps changing, and the formation of our own form of life was
made possible because of this characteristic. When life first appeared, some 3.7 billion years ago at the latest, our planet
was a far more energetic and dangerous place to live on or in, and only through the ability to change generation by
generation could the earliest forms of life survive. It was not only survival of the fittest, but also survival of the best and
fastest evolvers. Natural selection not only worked on better ways to get energy and
withstand environmental difficulties but evolved better ways to evolve . Before
all else, life worked on perfecting energy acquisition, replicating quickly and with fidelity, and evolving ever more quickly.
But the price to pay is that each and every species innately "tries" to become the
dominant species on the planet, with no regard to other species. Be it
bacteria or bees, all try to produce as many individuals as possible and in so doing can and do poison the
environment in various ways for all other species, including the species in question. How much longer will the Earth
sustain life in the face of this relentless overpopulation by a variety of species, which tends to use up resources—unless we
humans step in and save things, of course? Alone among all the creatures large and small,
our species can extend the length of the biosphere on Earth, which, like all of us, has a
finite lifespan. Yet that lifespan, currently dictated by life itself, can be lengthened. Vastly lengthened.
Dualism
 2AC Dualism
Perm do both
Perm do the aff and all non-mutually exclusive parts of the alt
 Arrogance Turn
They deny the fundamental independence of the world from
humanity
Cronon 95 [(William, Professor of History, Geography, and
Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison) “The
Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90] AT
In critiquing wilderness as I have done in this essay, I’m forced to confront my own deep ambivalence about its meaning
for modern environmentalism. On the one hand, one of my own most important environmental ethics is that people
should always be conscious that they are part of the natural world, inextricably tied to the ecological systems that sustain
their lives. Any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we are separate from nature—as wilderness tends to
do—is likely to reinforce environmentally irresponsible behavior. On the other hand, I also think it no
less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not
create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is.
The autonomy of nonhuman nature seems to me an indispensable corrective to
human arrogance. Any way of looking at nature that helps us remember—as
wilderness also tends to do—that the interests of people are not necessarily identical to
those of every other creature or of the earth itself is likely to foster responsible
behavior. To the extent that wilderness has served as an important vehicle for
articulating deep moral values regarding our obligations and responsibilities to the nonhuman
world, I would not want to jettison the contributions it has made to our
culture’s ways of thinking about nature.

This arrogance is the root cause of destruction and is a flawed

starting point that precludes ethical relations to nature
Margulis 98 [(Lynn, renowned biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst) “Life on Earth doesn't need us” the Independent 02 September] AT
.Gaia is a tough bitch and is not at all threatened by humans. Planetary life has
survived for billions of years before humanity was even the dream of a lively ape with a yearning for a hairless mate. Politicians
need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species -specific

arrogance . No evidence exists that we are "chosen", the unique species for
which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because
we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous. Our tenacious illusion of special dispensation belies our true status as
upright, mammalian weeds. In popular culture, the confused idea of Gaia strikes mythological chords. Gaia resonates with our longing for significance in our short
Earth-bound lives. We have, for centuries, personified nature. It is unfortunate that Gaia theory has been used for this vaguely spiritual agenda by mystics, and
some of the more scientifically-illiterate environmentalists. But the planet is not human, nor does it belong to humans. Now, a new scientific organisation, Gaia:
the Society for Research and Education in Earth System Science, is bringing the lessons of global biology to a wider audience. Few of us will ever be able to get the
unique perspective provided by seeing the Earth from space, but the Gaia society will help us share the planetary perspective of those who have. The urgency for
developing the larger, interconnected perspective facilitated by Gaia has never been more pressing. Despite our very recent appearance on the planet,
humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as
we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our
tendency to grow without limit? The planet will not permit our consumption of resources and

production of wastes to continue to increase. Runaway populations of bacteria, locusts, roaches, mice and even
wild flowers always collapse. They choke on their own wastes as crowding and severe shortage ensue. Diseases follow, taking their cue from destructive behaviours
and social disintegration. Even herbivores, if desperate, become vicious predators and cannibals. Cows will hunt rabbits or eat their calves, many mammals will vie
for the meat of their runted litter mates. Population overgrowth leads to stress, and stress depresses population overgrowth - an example of a Gaian-regulated
cannot put an end to nature; we can only pose a
cycle. We people eat just like our planet mates. We

threat to ourselves. Runaway climate change and further intensification of industrial agriculture would do just that. But the notion
that we can destroy all life, including the bacteria thriving in the water, tanks
of nuclear power plants and deep-sea volcanic vents, is ludicrous. Many species,
especially those in the four non-animal-kingdoms - plants, fungi, protoctists and bacteria - do not need humans to take care
 of them . The assertion made by some politicians and propagandists that, by
preserving biodiversity, we can somehow preserve the whole planet's life is
just a further example of our big-headed delusion. However close humanity
itself may be to causing its own extinction, or at best its irrevocable disintegration, most other
species will carry on regardless. It's just the delusion of our culture that we
will conquer death. I hear our non-human brethren sniggering. "Got along without you before I met you, gonna get along without you now,"
they sing. Most of them, the microbes, the whales, the insects, the seed plants and the birds are

still singing. The tropical forest trees are humming to themselves waiting for us to finish our

arrogant logging so they can get back to their business of growth as usual. And
they will continue their cacophonies and harmonies long after we are gone.
 2AC alt fails (vining)
The alternatives ethical stance fails to overcome inherent
cognitive dissonance between the self and nature—the ideology
is too ingrained and complex.
Vining et al 2008--Merrick Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences University of Illinois Urbana,
Department of Environment and Society Utah State University Logan [Joanne Vining,Melinda S, IL Emily A. Price, “The
Distinction between Humans and Nature: Human Perceptions of Connectedness to Nature and Elements of the Natural
and Unnatural”, Research in Human Ecology, accessed 7.18.14,, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2008 ]RMT

The idea that the human-nature

relationship may not be dichotomously defined in
people’s perceptions of self-nature concepts and mental processes is a potential
limitation of this study. In addition, the fluidity of perceptions of self-nature concepts may complicate the matter further.
A thorough understanding of people’s concept of their connectedness to nature and their definitions of what natural and
unnatural environments include is certainly more complicated than the questions we posed to our participants. However,
we intentionally designed our questions based on theory and history indicating
that there is a human-nature split in western and de veloped countries, and
that conflict (or cognitive dissonance) may result from that split. We believe
that our data give us a stance from which we can better understand the comple
x per ceptions of the self-na ture relationship. Work done by other researchers has allowed
participants more of a continuum with which to place their connection with nature (e.g ., Mayer and Frantz 2004; Schultz
2002; Clayton 2003). A competing explanation for how individuals might be able to
view themselves as part of a nature that they define as absent of humans and
human constr uctions stems from multiple definitions of nature (see, for example,
Lewis 1967; Soper 1995; and Macna ghten and Urry 1998). Our first question ask ed participants
simply if they felt they were a part of or separate from nature , while our second
and third questions asked par ticipants to define na tur al or unnatural
environments. Adding the term “environments” may have focused participants into a different definition of nature
than they were using for the first question. However, we kept the wording of questions
unchanged from the first year of data collection in order to allow
comparison across the three years. A futur e stud y consistently using the word “nature” in the
framing of the questions could be emplo y ed along with the use of specif ic situational contexts for participants to frame
their thinking w hen r esponding to the questions. T his w ould elimina te some of the potential f or the r esear c her s to
inf luence ho w participants chose to define “natural” and “unnatural” and also allo w f or compar isons on ho w these
words are def ined de pending on the fr aming of the question. The data from this study came from
three separate questionnair es administer ed to thr ee dif ferent Midwestern
popu- la tions. T w o of these questionnair es w er e administer ed with- in
the context of larger surveys (1997, 2003). We addressed the potential inf luence
of the elements within these lar g er questionnair es b y administer ing the
2005 questionnair e , which contained only the three questions addressed in
thisstudy. We compared responses from the three data sets but we found few
differences and no systematic differences . We believe that the sample differences that did exist
were beyond the scope of an already complicated study, and not particularly noteworthy as well. However, the three
populations from these studies are all Midwestern American populations, which threatens the external validity of the
study. Certainly future studies should seek a more diverse and representative sample. The finding that the
concept of self-nature relationships is in some way conflicted with
participants’ perceptions of natural and unnatural environments may have
implications related to environmental values, attitudes, and behavioral
research. This contradiction in the minds of people may reflect co gnitive
dissonance tha t can complicate decision-making and performing environmentally
responsible behavior. Cognitive dissonance occurs when people have two
contradictory thoughts, ideas, or feelings a bout a concept (Festinger et al. 1956). The
dissonance is unpleasant and will generally lead a person to relieve herself of the
contradictory perceptions by rationalizing or denying subsequent thoughts
and behavior. Even though our participants generally perceived themselves as
part of nature, most perceived natural places as independent from human
contact and interf erence, thereby creating dissonance. Resolving this conflict in perceptions might lead to
g reater le vels of environmentally responsible behavior. Ho wever , the opposite path, in which
people who consider themselves as part of nature rationalize
environmentally destructive behavior in or der to relieve dissonance , is
possible as w ell. Future research should address how people’s mental processes and perceptions of self-nature
relationships are associa ted with environmentally responsible or destructive patterns of behavior. Studies such as this
help us to gain a better understanding of the complica tions of mana ging our natural areas. We kno w fr om pr e vious w
or k tha t the le v el of connectedness an indi vidual feels towards an environment will affect level of concer n f or , and
mana gement decisions towards that environment (Sc hr oeder 2002; Sc hultz 2000). Anal yses of our da ta
indica te that the connection an individual feels towards nature ma y be
more complex than a dichotomous choice . Better under standing of the
human-na tur e r ela tionship is essen tial to form constructive and
appropriate environmental mana g ement and polic y
 2ac Dualisms Good
Covering up the distinction between humans and the non-
human legitimizes infinite violence and eco-facism via claims to
objectivity
MICHAEL MIKULAK , Really smart food philosopher person who talks about food and has a blog. PhD from
McMaster University, Eng & Cult. Studies Dept., Masters from the same dept., with a curricular emphasis on Critical
8
Theory, Cultural Studies, Globalization, and Canadian and Diasporic Literature, 200 [“THE RHIZOMATICS OF
DOMINATION: FROM DARWIN TO BIOTECHNOLOGY“, chapter of “An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s]
with Deleuze|Guattari”, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, Page 71-73, Cambridge Scholars Publishing]/sbhag 6.3.2014

However, if language
is inherently anthropocentric, and we are linguistic
creatures, how can we ever hope to understand a world outside of ourselves
and respect the goals of non-human nature? Is biocentrism even a tenable position? Should
we perhaps be seeking a stronger distinction between humans and the
world, rather than collapsing the two? Or is this perceived separation simply a linguistic artifact?
How can we speak of/within Nature if language predisposes us towards all sorts of humanistic biases? Does this even
matter? Gillian Beer asks: "If the material world is not anthropocentric but language is
so, the mind cannot be held to truly encompass and analyze the properties
of the world that lie about it" (Darwin's Plots 45). Darwin seems very aware of this, frequently bringing
attention to the linguistic limitation of his own theories. In The Origin of Species, he states that "I use the term Struggle
for Existence in a large and metaphoric sense, including dependence of one being on another" (62). Donna Haraway
argues that "biology is also not a culturefree universal discourse, for all that it
has considerable cultural, economic, and technical power to establish what
will count as nature throughout thplanet Earth" (Vampires 323). Darwin seems painfully
aware of this, and perhaps for this reason, avoids mentioning humanity in the Origin of Species. However, precisely
because Darwin is trying to explain something that exceeds the anthropocentric focus of language, the discourse of
evolution can easily be manipulated to serve various political ends. Moreover, because the act of description
and observation necessarily results in the transformation of the thing being
observed, any theory of nature that does not take into account its
production as a human discourse is dangerous and hugely problematic . Thus,
even if one is seeking a nonanthropocentric theory, to avoid the human is to
obfuscate the ideological, economic, and political conditions of emergence
that necessarily shape any theory of nature or culture . It is irresponsible and naive at best,
and incredibly dangerous and fascistic at worse. For example, Earth First!ers tend to look at
human beings ecologically, or as one more "natural population" that has
exceeded the carrying capacity of its range; hence, like rabbits, algae, deer, or locusts in similar
circumstances, there must be a catastrophic crash or mass die-off to re-equilibrate networks of ecological exchange.
The most famous and problematic incarnation of this position was an
article in the Earth First! journal that argued that AIDS was a good thing
because it would reduce the pressures of human population on the earth,
and consequently, governments should do nothing to help African
countries with the epidemic . Although this statement was later retracted, the Earth First!
tendency to take a virulently anti-humanist stance has problematic
ramifications for the ethico-political communities of kinship they imagine.
Although they embrace a profoundly ecological view that equates all life,
they tend to exclude humans from many of their accounts, and thus cannot
address issues of environmental justice and the role of hierarchical and
exploitative social and political ecologies that produce the conditions of
 environmental degradation . Chim Blea, a pseudonym for a member of Earth First!, argues that: "We as
Deep Ecologists recognize the transcendence of the community over any individual, we should deal with all individuals—
animal, plant, mineral, etc. – with whom we come into contact with compassion and bonhomie" (Ecocritique 23). The
(eco)fascistic tendencies emerge in the complete subsumption of the
individual to an imagined community, without a framework being
established for adjudicating how, what, and where one organism should
live, and another die. If everyone is truly equal, then what does it matter if
nature dies in order for humanity to survive? In a strange way, any biocentric
theory must take a detour through anthropocentrism. And in this sense, Darwin is a key
figure. He was instrumental in shattering the Arcadian view of nature based on a Romantic concept of pastoral harmony.
His focus on struggle and violence unsettled people's notion of a benevolent creator and creation in place for humankind.
Popular kinship imaginaries now had to contend with a natural world that
was decidedly inhumane and violent, denuded of a benevolent original mover that provided all life
with the means to survive, and the divine right for human domination. What emerged, according to Donald Worster, was a
"dismal science" of nature red in tooth and claw, even though Darwin himself placed a high
degree of emphasis on mutual aide and cooperation. This had the effect of
decentring humanity and thus providing the necessary first steps towards a
biocentric environmental ethic of rhizomatic interconnectivity . However, it
also tended to provide the ideological naturalization of violence,
competition, and hiearchalized human superiority. The same act of
decentring had profoundly antithetical consequences in terms of humbling
and aggrandizing humanity within the networks of worldly kinship, making
humans on the one hand, just one member of the great chain of being, and
on the other, the rightful conquerors and creators of an earthly garden of
Eden (cf Merchant). Thus, " to dwell on the violence and suffering in Nature
was, from the midnineteenth century on, to be 'realistic' " (Nature's Economy 128).
 A2 Wilderness link
Representations of wilderness are key to limit human
domination and foster respect for the nonhuman other – the
perm unlocks productive use of my discourse
Cronon 95 [(William, Professor of History, Geography, and
Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison) “The
Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90] AT
If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us
to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we
actually live. How can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness
and bring them closer to home? I think the answer to this question will come by broadening our sense
of the otherness that wilderness seeks to define and protect. In reminding us of the world we did
not make, wilderness can teach profound feelings of humility and respect as
we confront our fellow beings and the earth itself. Feelings like these argue for the
importance of self-awareness and self criticism as we exercise our own ability to transform the world
around us, helping us set responsible limits to human mastery—which without such limits too easily
becomes human hubris. Wilderness is the place where, symbolically at least, we try to withhold
our power to dominate. Wallace Stegner once wrote of the special human mark, the special record of human
passage, that distinguishes man from all other species. It is rare enough among men, impossible to any other form of life.
It is simply the deliberate and chosen refusal to make any marks at all…. We are the most dangerous species of life on the
planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only
species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy. (39) The myth of wilderness,
which Stegner knowingly reproduces in these remarks, is that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage. By
now it should be clear that this for the most part is an illusion. But Stegner’s deeper message then becomes all the more
compelling. If living in history means that we cannot help leaving marks on a fallen world ,
then the
dilemma we face is to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave. It is
just here that our cultural traditions of wilderness remain so important. In the
broadest sense, wilderness teaches us to ask whether the Other must always bend to our will, and, if not, under what
circumstances it should be allowed to flourish without our intervention. This is surely a question worth asking about
everything we do, and not just about the natural world. When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves
surrounded by plants and animals and physical landscapes whose otherness compels our attention. Inforcing us
to acknowledge that they are not of our making, that they have little or no need of our
continued existence, they recall for us a creation far greater than our own. In the
wilderness, we need no reminder that a tree has its own reasons for being ,
quite apart from us. The same is less true in the gardens we plant and tend ourselves: there it is far easier to
forget the otherness of the tree. (40) Indeed, one could almost measure wilderness by the extent to which our recognition
of its otherness requires a conscious, willed act on our part. The romantic legacy means that wilderness is more a state of
mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder. The striking power of the
wild is that wonder in the face of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us—as an expression of the
nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural history—as proof that ours is not the only
presence in the universe. Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine
that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or
that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be
more misleading. The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our
wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an ax or a saw—even though
the tree in the forest reflects a more intricate web of ecological relationships. The tree in the garden could easily have
sprung from the same seed as the tree in the forest, and we can claim only its location and perhaps its form as our own.
Both trees stand apart from us; both share our common world. The special power of the tree in the wilderness is to remind
us of this fact. It can teach us to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. By
seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too
in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this—if it can help us
perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural— then it will become part of the
solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem. This
will only happen, however, if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the
garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as
natural—completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now
depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can
claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things
according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the
nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual
map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace
the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the
city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place , which we
permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. We need to honor the Other within and the Other
next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away—a lesson that applies as much to people as it does to
(other) natural things. In particular, we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the
city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.” Home, after all, is the place where finally we
make our living. It is the place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can pass on what is best
in it (and in ourselves) to our children. (41)
Warming
 Pragmatism
Pragmatic warming policy is effective and key to prevent
extinction---the K results in disengagement and endless
theoretical uncertainty that debilitates action---only the perm
can bridge the gap
Simpson 10 (Francis, College of Engineering, Vanderbilt University, “Environmental Pragmatism and its
Application to Climate Change The Moral Obligations of Developed and Developing Nations to Avert Climate Change as
viewed through Technological Pragmatism”, Spring 2010 | Volume 6 | Number 1)
Environmental pragmatism is a relatively new field of environmental ethics that seeks
Pragmatism and Footprinting

to move beyond the strictly theoretical exercises normal in philosophy and

allows the environmental movement to formulate substantial new policies (Light, 1).
Environmental Pragmatism was initially posited by Bryan Norton and evolved to not take a stance over the dispute between non-anthropocentric and
anthropocentric ethics. Distancing himself from this dispute, he preferred to distinguish between strong and weak anthropocentricism (Light, 290-291, 298).
This
The main philosophers involved in advancing the debate in environmental pragmatism include Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and Bryan Norton.

particular discipline advocates moral pluralism , implying that the

environmental problems being faced have multiple correct solutions.
Light argues that the urgency of ecological crises requires that action is
necessary through negotiation and compromise. While theorists serve to further the field of
environmental ethics and to debate the metaethical basis of various
environmental philosophies, some answers to questions are best left to private

discussion rather than taking time to argue about them publically (introduction of
pragmatism). Pragmatism believes that if two theories are equally able to provide solutions to a given problem, then debate on which is more is argued that:
the commitment to solving environmental problems is the only
“

precondition for any workable and democratic political theory ” (Light, 11). While the
science behind a footprint is well understood, what can the synthesis of environmental pragmatism and footprinting tell us about the moral obligation to
avert climate change? How does grounding the practice of sustainability footprinting in environmental pragmatism generate moral prescriptions for averting
climate change? Environmental Pragmatism necessitates the need for tools in engineering to be developed and applied to avert the climate change problem,
pragmatism inherently calls for bridging the gap between theory and policy/
since

practices. With the theory of pragmatism in mind, further research and development of tools such as life-cycle analysis and footprinting are
potential policy tools that are necessary under a pragmatist viewpoint so that informed decisions can be made by policy makers. Since the role of life-cycle
analysis and footprinting attempt to improve the efficiency and decrease the overall environmental impact of a given process, good, or service, environmental
pragmatism would call for the further development and usage of these tools so that we can continue to develop sustainably and fulfill our moral obligation to
By utilizing footprinting and life-cycle analysis, it becomes
future generations.

possible to make environmentally conscious decisions not only based

upon a gut instinct but additionally based on sound science. Finally, in regards to averting climate
change, footprinting and life-cycle analysis offer another dimension to traditional cost-benefit analysis and can allow for our moral obligation to future
generations to weigh into final decisions which will eventually result in policies and/ or a production of a good or service. Since traditional cost benefit
analysis does not account for the environment explicitly, pragmatism would call for the application of these tools to ensure that the environment is adequately
Climate change modeling inherently contains many
protected for future generations.

unknowns in terms of future outcomes and applied simplifications, but these factors should not be
enough to hold us back from an environmental pragmatism stand point.
Rather than hiding behind a veil of uncertainty with the science, the
uncertainty of the possible catastrophic outcomes demands action on the part of
every human individual. Environmental pragmatism could also adopt a view point like the precautionary principle where a given action has great uncertainty,
Since we are attempting to protect human lives and
but also great consequence (Haller).

prevent unnecessary suffering, environmental pragmatism would dictate

that we should take action now and stop debating the theoretical aspects
of this problem. A moral obligation exists to protect human life, and it
becomes our obligation to avert climate change . Despite the relatively high economic costs of averting
climate change, it is worth noting that the creation of green jobs and new sectors will help to stimulate the economy rather than completely hindering it.
People inherently fear change, and it is my opinion that averting climate
change requires a drastic change in our consumption patterns, an important reason why people are resisting averting
climate change. From an environmental pragmatism viewpoint, it is humanities responsibility to avert
climate change before it is too late since we have a moral obligation to
protect the future of humanity and the biosphere.
Buddhism
 Framework
The world can be CHANGED by the force of truth, responsibility and
conscience, we are not POWERLESS. Intellectuals bear UNIQUE
RESPONSIBILITY for the thinking that shapes the general moral
consciousness. We must become WARRIORS of the PEN.
PREDICTING, WARNING, BEARING WITNESS on the side of truth.
Ketels 96, Assc Prof of English @Temple University
Violet-THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE ANNALS OF
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;
This article argues the virtue of Václav Havel's striking idea “that the world might
actually be changed by the force of truth, the power of a truthful word, the strength of
a free spirit, conscience, and responsibility.” We are not powerless when we
recognize the power of words to change history for good or ill. Intellectuals, whose
work is inherently linguistic , bear unique responsibility for the thinking that
shapes the general moral consciousness. Havel calls intellectuals to account for vacuous
verbal games that erode faith in human communication, for complicity in subversive
linguistic manipulation, and for ethical indifference. We must become Cassandras ,
he urges, “warriors of the pen,” predicting, warning, bearing witness on the side
of truth against lies, holding ourselves and others to account for the integrity of
words and for fidelity between words and action. Only such scruple can change moral
consciousness enough to make violence rare and human life sacred again.
 Permutation
Perm – embrace both spiritual and material sides
Dharmakosajarn 11 (Dr. Phra Dharmakosajarn, Venerable Professor at Mahachulalongkornrajvidyalya
University, Chairman at ICDV & IABU, Rector at MCU, Buddhist Virtues in Socio-Economic Development, p.71, May 2011, BG)
The chariot model of holistic development implies that the spirituality would guide the humanity to
establish socio-economic equality and development and strives to achieve a
balance. If, there is more emphasis on materialistic development, it would lead to social and economic problems as it is
widely evident in the today's world, due to more and more craving and greed. Similarly, if there is an emphasis
only on spirituality development alone then there would be no material
progress, and this condition would lead to poverty, health and deteriorate
standard of living. This shows that spiritual development alone or material development alone is not adequate to
lead a happy life, both are important. The Buddhist virtues, precepts principles and values
help in establishing harmony of spiritual and material side of life, leading to
socio-economic equality and development.
 Focus on Self Bad
Focusing on the inner self trades off with the fight against global
injustice
Zizek 1 Slavoj, On Belief (Thinking in Action), New York City: Routledge, 2001, 13-5
“Western Buddhism” thus perfectly fits the fetishist mode of ideology in our
allegedly “post-ideological” era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode, in which the ideological lie which
structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms quo “returns of the repressed,” cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. Fetish is
effectively a kind of inverse of the symptom. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the
point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which
enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person: in the case
of a symptom, I “repress” this death, I try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom; in the case of a
fetish, on the contrary, I “rationally” fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish,
to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death . In this sense, a fetish
can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality: fetishists are not dreamers lost in
their private worlds, they are thoroughly “realists,” able to accept the way
things effectively are – since they have their fetish to which they can cling in
order to cancel the full impact of reality. In Nevil Shute’s World War II melodramatic novel Requiem For a
WREN, the heroine survives her lover’s death without any visible distress, she goes on with her life and is even able to talk rationally about the
lover’s death – because she still has the dog who was the lover’s favored pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck,
she collapses and her entire world disintegrates. In this precise sense, money is for Marx a fetish – I pretend to be a rational, utilitarian subject,
well aware how things truly stand – but I embody my disavowed belief in the money-fetish . . . Sometimes, the line between the two is almost
indiscernable: an object can function as the symptom ( of a repressed desire) and almost simultaneously as a fetish (embodying the belief which
we officially renounce). For instance, a relic of the dead person, a piece of his/her clothing, can function as a fetish (in it, the dead person
magically continues to live) and as a symptom (the disturbing detail that brings to mind his/her death). Is this ambiguous tension not
homologous to that between the phobic and the fetishist object? The structural role is in both cases the same: if this exceptional element is
disturbed, the whole system collapses. Not only does the subject’s false universe collapses if he is forced to confront the meaning of his symptom;
the opposite also holds, i.e. the subject’s “rational” acceptance of the way things are dissolves when his fetish is taken away from him. So,
when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era
nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who
claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should always counter
such claims with the question: OK, but where is the fetish which enables you to (pretend to) accept reality “the way it is”? “Western
Buddhism” is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic
pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not
really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is – what
really matters to you is the peace of the inner self to which you know you can
always withdraw…(In a further specification, one should note that fetish can function in two opposite ways: either its role
remains unconscious – as in the case of Shute’s heroine who was unaware of the fetish-role of the dog – or you think that the fetish is that which
really matters, as in the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the “truth” of his existence is the social involvement which he tends to dismiss
as a mere game.”
 A2 Can’t Change World
Turn --- focusing on your own karma enocurages individuals to
ignore their social surroundings, increasing poverty, misery,
despair, and environmental destruction
GUATIER ‘3 (Francois Guatier, a French journalist and writer, who was for eight years the political correspondent in
India and South Asia for " Le Figaro " and now works for Ouest-France, the largest circulation daily (I million copies) in France
and LCI, France's 24 hour TV news channel. François Gautier has written several books, 2003,
http://www.francoisgautier.com/Written%20Material/buddhism-ie.rtf //shree)
The second unfortunate legacy which Buddhism gave to India is Maya.
"Everything is illusion, everything is misery, misery, misery, Buddhists said
- and still say today - and the sooner you get out of it by attaining Nirvana, the better .
Fine. But Hinduism had always taught that the Divine is concealed in all things, animate and inanimate and that every
aspect of life has to be conquered by the Spirit: even the Asura is a fallen Angel, doing unknowingly God's work. Hence
Hinduism had addressed itself to all aspects of life, from the Mundane, as brilliantly shown in Khajurao, to the subtle
spiritual planes which stand one after the other above Mind. In contrast, Buddhism came and said :
"Just leave Matter and take refuge in Buddha". And as result, because Buddhism has had
a subtle influence on Hinduism, India started disdaining Her physical envelope , Her
very body and material sheath, India's yogis started withdrawing more and
more in their caves, its people neglecting their surroundings, its leaders
forgetting about Beauty. And the result is there today for everybody to see:
an ugly India, full of trash and refuse, with very little sense of aesthetics left;
cities unplanned, polluted, crowded, hideous ; a people who says it worships
its Mighty Himalayas and Sacred Ganges, but which has allowed the former
to be nearly completely deforested and the latter to be so polluted, that
sometimes it is not even fit for bathing. And Indians cannot put all this on
account of poverty, because its rich people are probably the most guilty,
often not caring for anything and anybody beyond their own doorstep .
 A2 Meditation
Meditation is useless and even harmful – decades of studies
prove
HORGAN‘3
(John Horgan, Philosopher, WHY I CAN’T EMBRACE BUDDHISM, Feb. 12, http://www.american-buddha.com/ shree)
The major vehicle for achieving enlightenment is meditation , touted by both
The trouble is,
Buddhists and alternative-medicine gurus as a potent way to calm and comprehend our minds.
decades of research have shown meditation's effects to be highly
unreliable, as James Austin, a neurologist and Zen Buddhist, points out in Zen and Brain. Yes, it can reduce stress,
but, as it turns out, no more so than simply sitting still does. Meditation
can even exacerbate
depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people.

PERM --- COMBINE MEDITATION WITH POLICY ACTION ---

there’s no reason why we can’t breathe and embrace the
calming-effects of meditation with engaged action.
 Meditation – Perm
Meditation can co-exist with definitive action
TRUNGPA 4 (Chogyam Trungpa – Tibetan Buddhist master, Meditation in Action,
http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/978-1-59030-159-3.cfm //Shree)
This classic teaching by a Tibetan master continues to inspire both beginners and long-time practitioners of Buddhist
meditation. In Meditation in Action, Chögyam Trungpa teaches that meditation is based on trying to
see what is, rather than trying to achieve a higher mental or physical state.
Trungpa describes the life of the Buddha, emphasizing that, like the Buddha, we must find the
truth for ourselves, rather than following someone else's example.
Meditation in action might also be called "working meditation," for it is not
a retreat from the world. Rather, it builds the foundation for tremendous
compassion, awareness, and creativity in all aspects of a person's mind or
behavior. Trungpa shows that meditation extends beyond the formal practice of
sitting to build the foundation for compassion, awareness, and creativity in
all aspects of life. He explores the six activities associated with meditation in action—generosity, discipline,
patience, energy, clarity, and wisdom –revealing that through simple direct experience, one can attain real wisdom—the
ability to see clearly into situations and to deal with them skillfully, without the self-consciousness connected with ego.

Meditation allows the permutation

AUSTIN 98
(James H. Austin - Clinical Professor of Neurology, University of Missouri, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of
Meditation and Consciousness, p. 13-14//shree)
Meditative practice does not set itself against all conscious thoughts or emotions . Rather
it encourages those that are selfless and freed from unfruitful links with the passions .
Zen shuns hallucinations and dogmatism, except, perhaps, that which may be implied by some of its rigorous training
methods. Because such methods are regarded as the fruit of centuries of experiences, in the Orient, at least, the novice is
unlikely to brush them aside.

There are different types of meditation – meditating while acting

is acceptable
AUSTIN 98
(James H. Austin - Clinical Professor of Neurology, University of Missouri, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of
Meditation and Consciousness, p. 73)
In practice, Zen
meditators will find themselves trying out different styles at different
times, both while sitting on the mat and while attending to the events of the present
moment in everyday life.
 Genocide Turn
A. Buddhism is a form of narcissism
HORGAN 3
(John Horgan, Philosopher, WHY I CAN’T EMBRACE BUDDHISM, Feb. 12, http://www.american-buddha.com/ shree)
All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe
that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual
quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison
d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we
could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks
truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it
is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective.
The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.

As a result, their alternative is a form of complicity in the

suffering that occurs – we must confront complicity or genocide
is doomed to continually repeat
KETELS 96
(Violet B. Ketels, Associate Professor of English at Temple University, The Annals of The American Academy of Political
and Social Science, November, p. l/n//shree]
Even though, as Americans, we have not experienced "by fire, hunger and
the sword" the terrible disasters in war overtaking other human beings on
their home ground, we know the consequences of human hospitality to evil.
We know about human perfidy: the chasm that separates proclaiming virtue
from acting decently. Even those of us trained to linguistic skepticism and
the relativity of moral judgment can grasp the verity in the stark warning,
"If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere ." n20 That the
dreadful something warned against continues to exist anywhere should fill
us with an inextinguishable yearning to do something. Our impotence to
action against the brutality of mass slaughter shames us. We have the historical record to
ransack for precedent and corollaries--letters, documents, testaments, books--written words that would even "preserve their validity in the
eyes of a man threatened with instant death." n21 The truths gleanable from the record of totalitarian barbarism cited in them may be
common knowledge; they are by no means commonly acknowledged. n22 They appear in print upon many a page; they have not yet--still
Herein lies the supreme lesson for
not yet--sufficiently penetrated human consciousness.
intellectuals, those who have the projective power to grasp what is not yet
evident to the general human consciousness: it is possible to bring down
totalitarian regimes either by violence or by a gradual transformation of
human consciousness; it is not possible to bring them down "if we ignore
them, make excuses for them, yield to them or accept their way of playing
the game" n23 in order to avoid violence. The history of the gentle
revolutions of Poland, Hungary, and [*51] Czechoslovakia suggests that
those revolutions would not have happened at all, and certainly not
bloodlessly, without the moral engagement and political activism of
intellectuals in those besieged cultures. Hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and peasants joined
in the final efforts to defeat the totalitarian regimes that collapsed in 1989. Still, it was the intellectuals, during decades when they
repeatedly risked careers, freedom, and their very lives, often in dangerous solitary challenges to power, who formed the unifying
consensus, developed the liberating philosophy, wrote the rallying cries, framed the politics, mobilized the will and energies of disparate
groups, and literally took to the streets to lead nonviolent protests that became revolutions.The most profound insights into this process
that gradually penetrated social consciousness sufficiently to make revolution possible can be read in the role Vaclav Havel played before
and during Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. As George Steiner reflects, while "the mystery of creative and analytic genius . . . is given to
the very few," others can be "woken to its presence and exposed to its demands." n24 Havel possesses that rare creative and analytic
genius. We see it in the spaciousness of his moral vision for the future, distilled from the crucible of personal suffering and observation; in
his poet's ability to translate both experience and vision into language that comes as close as possible to truth and survives translation
across cultures; in the compelling force of his personal heroism. Characteristically, Havel raises local experience to universal relevance .
"If today's planetary civilization has any hope of survival," he begins, "that
hope lies chiefly in what we understand as the human spirit. " He continues: If we
don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious or political discord; if
we don't wish to find our world with twice its current population , half of it
dying of hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles
armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with bacteria specially
cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see some people go
desperately hungry while others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we
don't wish to suffocate in the global greenhouse we are heating up for
ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made
in the ozone; if we don't wish to exhaust the nonrenewable, mineral
resources of this planet, without which we cannot survive; if, in short, we
don't wish any of this to happen, then we must--as humanity, as people, as
conscious beings with spirit, mind and a sense of responsibility--somehow
come to our senses. Somehow we must come together in "a kind of general
mobilization of human consciousnes s, of the human mind and spirit, human
responsibility, human reason."
 Infallibility Turn
Buddhist spirituality leads you to believe you are morally
infallible, increasing violence and neglect of life responsibilities
HORGAN 3
(John Horgan, Philosopher, WHY I CAN’T EMBRACE BUDDHISM, Feb. 12, http://www.american-buddha.com/ shree)
What's worse, Buddhism holds that enlightenment makes you morally infallible—like the pope, but more so. Even the
otherwise sensible James Austin perpetuates this insidious notion. 'Wrong' actions won't arise," he
writes, "when a brain continues truly to " express the self-nature intrinsic to
its [transcendent] experiences." Buddhists infected with this belief can
easily excuse their teachers' abusive acts as hallmarks of a "crazy wisdom"
that the unenlightened cannot fathom. But what troubles me most about
Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest
route to salvation. Buddha's first step toward enlightenment was his
abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism) still exalts
male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. It seems legitimate to ask whether a path
that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual. From this perspective, the
very concept of enlightenment begins to look anti-spiritual: It suggests that life is a problem that
can be solved, a cul-de-sac that can be, and should be, escaped.
 A2 Buddhist Philosophy
The meditation of buddhism is like putting your faith in santa
claus
HORGAN 3
(John Horgan, Philosopher, WHY I CAN’T EMBRACE BUDDHISM, Feb. 12, http://www.american-buddha.com/ shree)
Four years ago, I joined a Buddhist meditation class and began talking to (and
reading books by) intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism. Eventually, and
regretfully, I concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than the
Catholicism I lapsed from in my youth; Buddhism's moral and metaphysical worldview cannot
easily be reconciled with science—or, more generally, with modern humanistic values. For many, a chief
selling point of Buddhism is its supposed de-emphasis of supernatural
notions such as immortal souls and God. Buddhism "rejects the theological impulse," the
philosopher Owen Flanagan declares approvingly in The Problem of the Soul. Actually, Buddhism is functionally theistic,
even if it avoids the "G" word. Like its parent religion Hinduism, Buddhism espouses
reincarnation, which holds that after death our souls are re-instantiated in
new bodies, and karma, the law of moral cause and effect. Together, these
tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus,
tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as
a cockroach or as a saintly lama.

Buddhist philosophy is bankrupt --- don’t rely on it

ACHARYAS 7
(A Critique of Buddhist Philosophy by the Vaishnava Acharyas, http://www.salagram.net/buddha-philos.html shree)
Along the Buddhist path there are nine principles: (1) The creation is eternal; therefore there is no need to accept a
creator. (2) This cosmic manifestation is false. (3) “I am” is the truth. (4) There is repetition of birth and death. (5) Lord
Buddha is the only source of understanding the truth. (6) The principle of nirväëa, or annihilation, is the ultimate goal. (7)
The philosophy of Buddha is the only philosophical path. (8) The Vedas are compiled by human beings. (9) Pious
activities, showing mercy to others and so on are advised. No one can attain the Absolute Truth by argument. One may be
very expert in logic, and another person may be even more expert in the art of argument. Because there is so much word
jugglery in logic, one can never come to the real conclusion about the Absolute Truth by argument. The followers of the
Vedic principles understand this. However, it is seen here that Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu defeated the Buddhist
philosophy by argument. Those who are preachers in ISKCON will certainly meet many people who believe in intellectual
arguments. Most of these people do not believe in the authority of the Vedas. Nevertheless, they accept intellectual
speculation and argument. Therefore the preachers of Kåñëa consciousness should be prepared to defeat others by
argument, just as Çré Caitanya Mahäprabhu did. In this verse it is clearly said, tarkei khaëòila prabhu. Lord Çré Caitanya
Mahäprabhu put forward such a strong argument that the Buddhists could not counter Him to establish their cult.
Their first principle is that the creation has always existed . But if this were
the case, there could be no theory of annihilation. The Buddhists maintain
that annihilation, or dissolution, is the highest truth. If the creation
eternally exists, there is no question of dissolution or annihilation. This
argument is not very strong because by practical experience we see that
material things have a beginning, a middle and an end . The ultimate aim of the Buddhist
philosophy is to dissolve the body. This is proposed because the body has a beginning. Similarly, the entire cosmic
manifestation is also a gigantic body, but if we accept the fact that it will always exist, there can be no question of
annihilation. Therefore the attempt to annihilate everything in order to attain zero is an absurdity. By our own practical
experience we have to accept the beginning of creation, and when we accept the beginning, we must accept a creator. Such
a creator must possess an all-pervasive body, as pointed out in the Bhagavad-gétä (13.14): sarvataù päëi-pädaà tat
sarvato-’kñi-çiro-mukham sarvataù çruti-mal loke sarvam ävåtya tiñöhati “Everywhere are His hands and legs, His eyes,
heads and faces, and He has ears everywhere. In this way the Supersoul exists, pervading everything.” The Supreme
Person must be present everywhere. His body existed before the creation; otherwise He could not be the creator. If the
Supreme Person is a created being, there can be no question of a creator. The conclusion is that the cosmic manifestation
is certainly created at a certain time, and the creator existed before the creation; therefore the creator is not a created
being. The creator is Parabrahman, or the Supreme Spirit. Matter is not only subordinate to spirit but is actually created
on the basis of spirit. When the spirit soul enters the womb of a mother, the body is created by material ingredients
supplied by the mother. Everything is created in the material world, and consequently there must be a creator who is the
Supreme Spirit and who is distinct from matter. It is confirmed in the Bhagavad-gétä that the material energy is inferior
 The
and that the spiritual energy is the living entity. Both inferior and superior energies belong to a supreme person.
Buddhists argue that the world is false, but this is not valid. The world is
temporary, but it is not false. As long as we have the body, we must suffer the pleasures and pains of the
body, even though we are not the body. We may not take these pleasures and pains very seriously, but they are factual
nonetheless. We cannot actually say that they are false. If the bodily pains and pleasures were false, the creation would be
false also, and consequently no one would take very much interest in it. The conclusion is that the material creation is not
false or imaginary, but it is temporary. The Buddhists maintain that the principle “I am” is
the ultimate truth, but this excludes the individuality of “I” and “you.” If
there is no “I” and “you,” or individuality, there is no possibility of
argument. The Buddhist philosophy depends on argument, but there can be
no argument if one simply depends on “I am.” There must be a “you ,” or
another person also. The philosophy of duality—the existence of the individual soul and the Supersoul—must
be there. This is confirmed in the Second Chapter of the Bhagavad-gétä (2.12), wherein the Lord says: na tv evähaà jätu
näsaà na tvaà neme janädhipäù na caiva na bhaviñyämaù sarve vayam ataù param “Never was there a time when I did
not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.” We existed in the past in different
bodies, and after the annihilation of this body we shall exist in another body. The principle of the soul is eternal, and it
exists in this body or in another body. Even in this lifetime we experience existence in a child’s body, a youth’s body, a
man’s body and an old body. After the annihilation of the body, we acquire another body. The Buddhist cult also accepts
the philosophy of transmigration, but the Buddhists do not properly explain the next birth. There are 8,400,000 species of
life, and our next birth may be in any one of them; therefore this human body is not guaranteed. According to
the Buddhists’ fifth principle, Lord Buddha is the only source for the
attainment of knowledge. We cannot accept this, for Lord Buddha rejected
the principles of Vedic knowledge. One must accept a principle of standard
knowledge because one cannot attain the Absolute Truth simply by
intellectual speculation. If everyone is an authority, or if everyone accepts his own intelligence as the
ultimate criterion—as is presently fashionable—the scriptures will be interpreted in many different ways, and everyone
will claim that his own philosophy is supreme. This has become a very great problem, and everyone is interpreting
scripture in his own way and setting up his own basis of authority. Yata mata tata patha. Now everybody and anybody is
trying to establish his own theory as the ultimate truth. The Buddhists theorize that annihilation, or nirväëa, is the
ultimate goal. Annihilation applies to the body, but the spirit soul transmigrates from one body to another. If this were not
the case, how can so many multifarious bodies come into existence? If the next birth is a fact, the next bodily form is also a
fact. As soon as we accept a material body, we must accept the fact that that body will be annihilated and that we will have
to accept another body. If all material bodies are doomed to annihilation, we must obtain a nonmaterial body, or a
spiritual body, if we wish the next birth to be anything but false. How the spiritual body is attained is explained by Lord
Kåñëa in the Bhagavad-gétä (4.9): janma karma ca me divyam evaà yo vetti tattvataù tyaktvä dehaà punar janma naiti
mäm eti so ’rjuna “One who knows the transcendental nature of My appearance and activities does not, upon leaving the
body, take his birth again in this material world, but attains My eternal abode, O Arjuna.” This is the highest perfection—
to give up one’s material body and not accept another but to return home, back to Godhead. It is not that perfection means
one’s existence becomes void or zero. Existence continues, but if we positively want to annihilate the material body, we
have to accept a spiritual body; otherwise there can be no eternality for the soul. We cannot accept the
theory that the Buddhist philosophy is the only way , for there are so many
defects in that philosophy.
 Alt Fails
Their alternative presumes the ability to believe the “self” is
unreal – this has disastrous consequences
HORGAN ‘3 (John Horgan, Philosopher, WHY I CAN’T EMBRACE BUDDHISM, Feb. 12, http://www.american-
buddha.com/ shree)
Much more dubious is Buddhism's claim that perceiving yourself as in some
sense unreal will make you happier and more compassionate. Ideally, as the British
psychologist and Zen practitioner Susan Blackmore writes in The Meme Machine, when you embrace your essential
selflessness, "guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt, and fear of failure ebb away and you become, contrary to
expectation, a better neighbor." But most people are distressed by sensations of unreality,
which are quite common and can be induced by drugs, fatigue, trauma, and mental illness as well as by meditation.
Even if you achieve a blissful acceptance of the illusory nature of your self,
this perspective may not transform you into a saintly bodhisattva, brimming
with love and compassion for all other creatures. Far from it—and this is where the
distance between certain humanistic values and Buddhism becomes most apparent. To someone who sees
himself and others as unreal, human suffering and death may appear
laughably trivial. This may explain why some Buddhist masters have
behaved more like nihilists than saints. Chogyam Trungpa, who helped introduce Tibetan
Buddhism to the United States in the 1970s, was a promiscuous drunk and bully, and he died of alcohol-related illness in
1987. Zen lore celebrates the sadistic or masochistic behavior of sages such as
Bodhidharma, who is said to have sat in meditation for so long that his legs became gangrenous.
 No link
Their links are wrong; A discussion of buddhist karma is
irrelevant to a discussion of how nation-states should behave
NORBU 4
(Jamyang Norbu is a playwright, activist and a political writer on Tibet, NON-VIOLENCE AND NON-ACTION, 12/29/04,
http://www.timesoftibet.com/articles/151/1/Non-Violence-and-Non-Action //Shree)
Tibetan ideas on non-violence are, by comparison, confused, naive, and in certain
cases seem to derive from magical beliefs inherent in tradition al Tibetan
thinking. For instance, the speaker of the Tibetan People's Assembly, Samdhong Rinpoche, who has come out with
his own version of Gandhi's Satyagraha doctrine (but which Rinpoche has translated somewhat awkwardly as "Truth
Insistence"), once made the somewhat fantastic pronouncement that if fifty percent of the Tibetan people were able to
comprehend Rinpoche's doctrine of "Truth Insistence", the Chinese would be compelled to leave Tibet in less than three
months. The Dalai Lama does not make as extravagant a claim for the efficacy
of his Middle Way doctrine. Both views, however, reflect their roots in
traditional metaphysical thinking and clearly reveal an imperfect
understanding of the politics of nation states and the Darwinian reality of
our modern world
2AC Baudrillard
Baudrillard
 2AC Baudrillard
Baudrillard is wrong about the totalizing control of the system
over politics
Robinson 13 (Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK, Jean Baudrillard and
Activism: A critique, Feb 7, http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-14/)
One limit to Baudrillard’s theory is his tendency to over-totalise . Baudrillard
is talking about tendential processes, but he often talks as if they are totally
effective. There are still, for instance, a lot of uncharted spaces, a lot of
unexplained events, a lot of things the system can’t handle. While Baudrillard is
describing dominant tendencies in the present, these tendencies coexist with older forms of capitalism, in a situation of
uneven development. The persistence of the system’s violence is a problem for Baudrillard’s perspective: the smooth
regime of neutralisation and inclusive regulation has not ended older modalities of brutality. At times, Baudrillard
exaggerates greatly the extent to which the old authoritarian version of
capitalism has been replaced by subtle regimes of control. He exaggerates
the extent to which contemporary capitalism is tolerant, permissive and
‘maternal’. This may be because his works were mostly written in France in the 1970s-80s,
when the dominant ethos was still largely social-democratic. What Baudrillard
recognises as the retrograde version of capitalism associated with the right-
wing was to return with a vengeance, especially after 9/11.
<continues>
Without an element of border thinking, Baudrillard
tends to exaggerate the system’s
completeness and effectiveness. Baudrillard assumes that any excess is everywhere absorbed into the
code. He ignores the persistence of borderlands. And when he talks about the
South, he admits that the old regime of production might still exist here:
people still work seeking betterment; colonial wars are fought to destroy persisting symbolic
exchange; Saddam was not playing the Gulf War by the rules of deterrence. The Arab masses are still able to become
inflamed by war or non-war; Iran and Iraq can still fight a real war, not a simulated non-war. So perhaps only a
minority, only the included layers within the North, are trapped within simulation and the
‘masses’. Perhaps reality has not died, but been displaced to the South. It seems,
therefore, premature to suggest that the system has encompassed all of
social life in the code. To be sure, its reach has expanded, but it has also
forcibly delinked large areas of the globe . The penetration of simulated
reality into everyday life varies in its effectiveness. At the limit, as in Somalia, simulated
states collapse under their own irrelevance. In other cases, an irrelevant state hovers over a largely autonomous society.
And the struggle Baudrillard advocated in his early works against subordination as labour-power is not simply theoretical.
In fact, there is a constant war, fought at various degrees of intensity, between the system and its others, especially in
highly marginal parts of the global South: Chiapas, Afghanistan, the Niger Delta, Somalia, West Papua, rural Colombia,
Northeast India, the Andes… The system continues to be drawn into these conflicts, despite its apparent self-deterrence
from total nuclear annihilation.

Baudrillard’s analysis is offensive and contradictory, lacks

validity, and plays into right-wing forces through nihilism
Steinberg 7 [(Stefan, author for World Socialist Website) “French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies in Paris”
World Socialist Website March 17] AT
All of Baudrillard’s later work basically revolves around his conception of consumer society and the role of the sign. In the
course of the 1980s and 1990s Baudrillard drew from modern communication theorists such as Marshall McLuhan to
extend his theory of the sign and signification (later termed “simulacrum”) into the “code,” which was synonymous with
the world of advertising. In his lecture “On Nihilism” (1980), Baudrillard draws a balance sheet of social
development and expounds
his case for nihilism as the only viable stance to be
adopted by the intellectual in modern society. In so doing, he expresses his kinship
with the mainstream of postmodernist thought. Baudrillard describes modernity as the era of Marx and Freud—an era
dominated by the “hermeneutics of suspicion”— i.e., Baudrillard’s phrase to describe any
attempt to develop a historical and scientifically based understanding of the
world. According to Baudrillard in 1980, we are now (“willing”) victims in a postmodern world dominated by
simulated experience and feelings, and have utterly lost the capacity to comprehend reality. Baudrillard’s “hyper-real”
world is dictated by the needs of consumption and dominated by the advertising campaigns and propaganda offensives of
businessmen and companies seeking to sell their wares and services. In Fatal Strategies he writes: “All of advertising and
information, all of the entire political class are there to tell us what we want, to tell the masses what they want—and we
basically assume this massive transfer of responsibility with joy, because it is simply neither obvious, nor of great interest
to know, to will, to have faculties or desires” (p. 97). Based on his interpretation of the omnipotence of bourgeois media
outlets, Baudrillard predicted that the first Gulf War (1991) would not take place. During the
course of the war, he maintained it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced that it had
not
taken place. The appalling suffering endured by hundreds of thousands, as a
consequence of the brutal US military offensive against Iraq, is dismissed by Baudrillard with a brush of
the hand. In another text, Baudrillard describes Disneyland as the real America. In his opinion, American society is
rushing to adapt and bring itself into line with the utopian vision of Disneyland. Gone are the divisions in a society
wracked by enormous social polarisation. For the self-complacent and insulated
Baudrillard, there are no poor or unemployed in America. Beneath the
verbal veneer of Baudrillard’s self proclaimed “ultra-radical” critique of
capitalism is the vision of an omnipotent society, largely free of class divisions, able to
endlessly increase production and pacify the broad masses of the population through a combination of consumer goods
and media and advertising propaganda. In fact, there is nothing original in such theories. A
similar assault on the foundations of Marxism was already undertaken in the twentieth century by leading members of the
German Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno, who wrote of the advent of a society of “total integration,” and Herbert
Marcuse, who wrote of a “one-dimensional society.” Baudrillard, however, is more explicit than the members of the
Frankfurt School in his rejection of the broad masses of the population. In his book Fatal Strategies (1985),
Baudrillard sneeringly derides the masses, who, he claims, in their brute,
animal fashion are complicit in the strategy of the ruling elite : “They (the masses) are
not at all an object of oppression and manipulation.... Atonal amorphous, abysmal, they exercise a passive and opaque
sovereignty; they say nothing, but subtly, perhaps like animals in their brute indifference” (p. 94) “... the masses know that
they are nothing and they have no desire to know. The masses know they are powerless, and they don’t want power” (p.
98). Freed by his own approach from the slightest obligation to any sort of
integrity to social analysis or historical introspection, Baudrillard wilfully
ignores the roles of political parties, tendencies and leaderships, preferring in these
passages to give rein to his “playful” idiosyncrasy. If the masses exercise “sovereignty,” they cannot at the same time be
“powerless,” but Baudrillard is oblivious of such contradictions in his own writing
under conditions where so few
of his contemporaries are prepared to point out that
“the emperor has no clothes.” What does remain in these passages is Baudrillard’s contempt, revulsion
and fear of the masses—sentiments shared by broad layers of former radicals who have been able to make highly
remunerative careers during the past decades. Baudrillard’s thoroughly cynical vision of the
world, based on his rejection of Marxism and the principles of enlightened thought, have been welcomed
and appropriated by right-wing forces. A number of Baudrillard’s books
have been published by the publishing house owned by the right-wing nouveau philosophe Bernard
Henri Levy, and in the late 1980s, Baudrillard contributed to the Krisis journal of the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right).
Nevertheless Baudrillard’s elevation to a “guru” of modern capitalism would have been impossible without the continuous
promotion of his work by such nominally “left” newspapers and journals as the British Stalinist magazine Marxism Today,
the French daily Liberation and the New Left Review. Postmodernism and Stalinism

If we all operate within hyperreality then it applies to

Baudrillard too – A) the system will co-opt his criticism, which
means it can’t solve, and B) his own criticism is a simulation
which the alt demands rejecting
We need pragmatic action and carefully researched
argumentation and information to create real change---
criticism, action, and change are impossible in their world
King 98 [Anthony, Professor at Essex University, Telos Journal, “Baudrillard’s Nihilism and the End of Theory”] AT
Compare this style of writing with J. G. Ballard’s Crash — a novel providing a very successful (and deliberately obscene)
description of postmodern culture. It recognizes that culture’s bodily indulgence, and knows that it does not liberate the
individual but reduces the body to a machine for pleasure, just as the car is a machine for speech. The car-crash and the
sexact are the moments when the wholly technical machineries of the car and the bodies are decomposed in an instant of
pain that is transformed (for ironic effect) into one of intense pleasure for the perverts who populate the book. In
communicating this new, debased ethic of bodily pleasure, where the delight in bodily mutilation parallels a correlating
spiritual disfigurement, Ballard describes a questionnaire about car crashes which Vaughan, the central figure in the book,
has prepared and which lists every conceivable injury: “Lastly came that group of injuries which had clearly most
preoccupied Vaughan — genital wounds caused during automobile accidents. . . . the breasts of teenage girls deformed by
instrument binnacles, the partial mammoplasties of elderly housewives carried out by chromium louvres of windshield
assemblies, nipples sectioned by manufacturers’ dashboard medallions; injuries to male and female genitalia caused by
steering wheel shrouds, windshields during ejection, crushed door pillars, seat springs and handbrake units, cassette
player instrument toggles.”28 The descriptions Ballard provides of both cars and bodies are wholly technical and
anatomical, emphasizing that, in this culture, both “bodyworks” are (obscenely) reduced to the same level. Against
Ballard’s rich, selfdeveloping text, Baudrillard’s writing is flat and strained. He simply
breaks down his academic text into aphoristic gobblets and draws on
alexicon of dead, static metaphors. In the end, Baudrillard falls between the two stools of demanding
that academic writing is inadequate to the analysis of hyperreality, but still writing according to its conventions and
thereby vitiating either the academic or the literary merit of his later work. However, even if Baudrillard wanted his later
writing to be read as literature and even if he had been successful in producing text which could be judged as literature,
the project of this later writing would still have been irretrievably self-deluded . Even if his terrorism were
a successful form of literature, it could never (as he claims) communicate
hyperreality to the reader directly, for all writing is necessarily mediated; all writing is an
interpretation.29 Unavoidably, his terroristic writing is an interpretation of hyperreal culture, which does not obviate the
necessity of interpretation, however directly it tries to communicate hyperreality. In insisting on
representing hyperreality directly, Baudrillard does not, as he claims, present a
clearer idea of hyperreality but, on the contrary (and ironically), a less illuminating and
less direct one. As a result of his demand to present hyperreality directly, he simply stops at the first point of the
interpretive process and presents his initial assumptions as the definitive statement on contemporary culture. Thus, he
does not provide a clearer insight into the true nature of televisual culture but rather obscures the role of television with an
assertive and arrogant hypostatization of an immediate concept. His terrorism halts the dialectical
process at its first and most inadequate initial point, before the critical
process has begun. Instead of developing his concepts through a thorough immersion in
“hyperreal” culture, refining his interpretation to make it more adequate to that object , Baudrillard reifies
his first impressions into absolute truths. In breaking off the dialectical
engagement with the actual social practices of postmodern culture, he hypostatizes
his crude standpoint into “the truth.” Ironically, in trying to present hyperreality immediately,
Baudrillard falls into exactly the same error for which he so effectively criticized Marx. Just as Marx failed to provide a
truly radical alternative to capitalism by employing the concepts of capitalist political economy, Baudrillard’s
fragmented aphorisms are unable to provide a critical alternative to
hyperreality, because they are so thoroughly embedded in and dependent on the very
cultural forms they are intended to oppose. The fragmentation of Baudrillard’s later writing does
not serve the critical purpose for which it was intended, but rather, if it has any effect, it sensitizes the reader
to the global media culture Baudrillard wanted to resist. His attempt to portray a
culture in which allegedly there is no longer any reality beyond its representations, is the
academic extension of that culture. Contrary to his own intentions, it is the very
intellectual path he has insisted on taking, which turns its back on careful research and close critical analysis,
which makes the desert of hyperreality grow. It robs the reader of any critical understanding of
contemporary culture. Moreover, it denies the importance of developing alternative
knowledge and understandings, which would undermine media representations of the world
because it asserts that these alternative visions would always already be
incorporated into hyperreality. It is not enough simply to say that television is a false reality; one
must try and reconstruct a reality in which political freedom and critique are
possible, even though any constructed reality must itself always be subjected to critique. Consequently, against
Baudrillard, an appropriate form of academic resistance would be to insist upon
even more rigorously researched and detailed work .30 In particular, the
dialectical method which demands the constant overhaul of concepts, whereby nothing is taken
for granted, would have prevented Baudrillard from falling into the
hyperbolic reification of mere assertions.

Their blanket criticism is shoddy scholarship that ought to be

rejected---prefer our appeal to specificity
Kellner 02 [Douglas, Prof at UCLA, “Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?”]
Yet doubts remain as to whether the media are having quite the impact that
Baudrillard ascribes to them and whether his theory provides adequate
concepts to analyze the complex interactions between media, culture, and
society today. In this section, I shall suggest that Baudrillard's media theory is vitiated by
three subordinations which undermine its theoretical and political
usefulness and which raise questions as well about the status of postmodern social theory. I shall suggest that the
limitations in Baudrillard's theory can be related to his uncritical assumption of
certain positions within McLuhan's media theory and that therefore earlier critiques of McLuhan can accurately
and usefully be applied to Baudrillard. This critique will suggest that indeed Baudrillard is a "new McLuhan" who has
repackaged McLuhan into new postmodern cultural capital. First, in what might be called a formalist subordination,
Baudrillard, like McLuhan, privileges the form of media technology over what might be
called the media apparatus, and thus subordinates content, meaning, and the use
of media to its purely formal structure and effects. Baudrillard -- much more so than
McLuhan who at least gives some media history and analysis of the media environment -- tends to abstract
media form and effects from the media environment and thus erases political
economy, media production, and media environment (i.e. society as large) from his theory.
Against abstracting media form and effects from context, I would argue that the use and effects of media
should be carefully examined and evaluated in terms of specific contexts .
Distinctions between context and use, form and content, media and reality,
all dissolve, however, in Baudrillard's one-dimensional theory where global
theses and glib pronouncements replace careful analysis and critique.

Baudrillard’s analysis is reductionist and wrong, and plays into

conservative attempts to preserve the status quo
Kellner 02 [Douglas, Prof at UCLA, “Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?”
http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/illumina%20folder/kell26.htm]
Another problem is that Baudrillard's formalism vitates the project of ideology critique, and against his claims that media
content are irrelevant and unimportant, I would propose grasping the dialectic of form and content in media
communication, seeing how media forms constitute content and how content is always formed or structured, while forms
themselves can be ideological, as when the situation comedy form of conflict/resolution projects an ideological vision
which shows all problems easily capable of being resolved within the existing society, or when action-adventure series
formats of violent conflict as the essence of reality project a conservative view of human life as a battleground where only
the fittest survive and prosper.[12] For a dialectical theory of the media, television would have multiple functions (and
potential decodings) where sometimes the ideological effects may be predominant while at other times time functions a
medium like television functions as mere noise or through the merely formal effects which Baudrillard puts at the center
of his analysis. Consequently, there is no real theory or practice of cultural
interpretation in Baudrillard's media (increasingly anti-)theory, which also emanates an
anti-hermeneutical bias that denies the importance of content and is against
interpretation.[13] This brings us to a second subordination in Baudrillard's theory in which a more
dialectical position is subordinated to media essentialism and technological
determinism. For -- according to Baudrillard -- it is the technology of, say, television that determines its effects
(one-way transmission, semiurgy, implosion, extermination of meaning and the social) rather than any particular content
or message (i.e. for both Baudrillard and McLuhan "the media is the message"), or its construction or use within specific
social systems. For Baudrillard, media technology and semiurgy are the demiurges of media practices and effects,
separated from their uses by specific economic and political interests, individuals and groups, and the social systems
within which they function. Baudrillard thus abstracts media from social systems and
essentializes media technology as dominant social forces . Yet against Baudrillard, one could
argue that capital continues to be a primary determinant of media form and content in neo-capitalist societies just as state
socialism helps determine the form, nature, and effects of technologies in certain state socialist societies. Baudrillard, like
McLuhan, often makes essentializing distinctions between media like television or film, ascribing a particular essence to
one, and an opposed essence to the other. Yet it seems highly problematical to reduce
apparatuses as complex, contradictory, and many-sided as television (or film or any
mass medium) to its formal properties and effects, or to a technological essence. It is
therefore preferable, for theories of media in the capitalist societies, to see the media as syntheses of technology and
capital, as technologies which serve specific interests and which have specific political and economic effects (rather than
merely technological ones). It is also preferable to see the dialectic between media and society in specific historical
conjunctures, to see how social content, trends, and imperatives help constitute the media which in turn influence social
developments and help constitute social reality. For Baudrillard, by contrast, the media today simply constitute a
simulated, hyperreal, and obscene (in his technical sense) world(view), and a dialectic of media and society is
shortcircuited in a new version of technological determinism. The political implications of this analysis
are that constituting alternative media, or alternative uses or forms of existing
media, is useless or worse because media in their very essence for him militate
against emancipatory politics or any project of social transformation. Such cynical views,
however, primarily benefit conservative interests who presently control the
media in their own interests -- a point to which I shall soon return.
Alt Fails
 TL Baudrillard sucks ass
Baudrillard’s analysis is offensive and contradictory, lacks
validity, and plays into right-wing forces through nihilism
Steinberg 7 [(Stefan, author for World Socialist Website) “French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies in Paris”
World Socialist Website March 17] AT
All of Baudrillard’s later work basically revolves around his conception of consumer society and the role of the sign. In the
course of the 1980s and 1990s Baudrillard drew from modern communication theorists such as Marshall McLuhan to
extend his theory of the sign and signification (later termed “simulacrum”) into the “code,” which was synonymous with
the world of advertising. In his lecture “On Nihilism” (1980), Baudrillard draws a balance sheet of social
development and expounds
his case for nihilism as the only viable stance to be
adopted by the intellectual in modern society. In so doing, he expresses his kinship
with the mainstream of postmodernist thought. Baudrillard describes modernity as the era of Marx and Freud—an era
dominated by the “hermeneutics of suspicion”— i.e., Baudrillard’s phrase to describe any
attempt to develop a historical and scientifically based understanding of the
world. According to Baudrillard in 1980, we are now (“willing”) victims in a postmodern world dominated by
simulated experience and feelings, and have utterly lost the capacity to comprehend reality. Baudrillard’s “hyper-real”
world is dictated by the needs of consumption and dominated by the advertising campaigns and propaganda offensives of
businessmen and companies seeking to sell their wares and services. In Fatal Strategies he writes: “All of advertising and
information, all of the entire political class are there to tell us what we want, to tell the masses what they want—and we
basically assume this massive transfer of responsibility with joy, because it is simply neither obvious, nor of great interest
to know, to will, to have faculties or desires” (p. 97). Based on his interpretation of the omnipotence of bourgeois media
outlets, Baudrillard predicted that the first Gulf War (1991) would not take place. During the
course of the war, he maintained it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced that it had
not
taken place. The appalling suffering endured by hundreds of thousands, as a
consequence of the brutal US military offensive against Iraq, is dismissed by Baudrillard with a brush of
the hand. In another text, Baudrillard describes Disneyland as the real America. In his opinion, American society is
rushing to adapt and bring itself into line with the utopian vision of Disneyland. Gone are the divisions in a society
wracked by enormous social polarisation. For the self-complacent and insulated
Baudrillard, there are no poor or unemployed in America. Beneath the
verbal veneer of Baudrillard’s self proclaimed “ultra-radical” critique of
capitalism is the vision of an omnipotent society, largely free of class divisions, able to
endlessly increase production and pacify the broad masses of the population through a combination of consumer goods
and media and advertising propaganda. In fact, there is nothing original in such theories. A
similar assault on the foundations of Marxism was already undertaken in the twentieth century by leading members of the
German Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno, who wrote of the advent of a society of “total integration,” and Herbert
Marcuse, who wrote of a “one-dimensional society.” Baudrillard, however, is more explicit than the members of the
Frankfurt School in his rejection of the broad masses of the population. In his book Fatal Strategies (1985),
Baudrillard sneeringly derides the masses, who, he claims, in their brute,
animal fashion are complicit in the strategy of the ruling elite : “They (the masses) are
not at all an object of oppression and manipulation.... Atonal amorphous, abysmal, they exercise a passive and opaque
sovereignty; they say nothing, but subtly, perhaps like animals in their brute indifference” (p. 94) “... the masses know that
they are nothing and they have no desire to know. The masses know they are powerless, and they don’t want power” (p.
98). Freed by his own approach from the slightest obligation to any sort of
integrity to social analysis or historical introspection, Baudrillard wilfully
ignores the roles of political parties, tendencies and leaderships, preferring in these
passages to give rein to his “playful” idiosyncrasy. If the masses exercise “sovereignty,” they cannot at the same time be
“powerless,” but Baudrillard is oblivious of such contradictions in his own writing
under conditions where so few
of his contemporaries are prepared to point out that
“the emperor has no clothes.” What does remain in these passages is Baudrillard’s contempt, revulsion
and fear of the masses—sentiments shared by broad layers of former radicals who have been able to make highly
remunerative careers during the past decades. Baudrillard’s thoroughly cynical vision of the
world, based on his rejection of Marxism and the principles of enlightened thought, have been welcomed
and appropriated by right-wing forces. A number of Baudrillard’s books
have been published by the publishing house owned by the right-wing nouveau philosophe Bernard
Henri Levy, and in the late 1980s, Baudrillard contributed to the Krisis journal of the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right).
Nevertheless Baudrillard’s elevation to a “guru” of modern capitalism would have been impossible without the continuous
promotion of his work by such nominally “left” newspapers and journals as the British Stalinist magazine Marxism Today,
the French daily Liberation and the New Left Review. Postmodernism and Stalinism
 Specificity Good
Their blanket criticism is shoddy scholarship that ought to be
rejected---prefer our appeal to specificity
Kellner 02 [Douglas, Prof at UCLA, “Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?”]
Yet doubts remain as to whether the media are having quite the impact that
Baudrillard ascribes to them and whether his theory provides adequate
concepts to analyze the complex interactions between media, culture, and
society today. In this section, I shall suggest that Baudrillard's media theory is vitiated by
three subordinations which undermine its theoretical and political
usefulness and which raise questions as well about the status of postmodern social theory. I shall suggest that the
limitations in Baudrillard's theory can be related to his uncritical assumption of
certain positions within McLuhan's media theory and that therefore earlier critiques of McLuhan can accurately
and usefully be applied to Baudrillard. This critique will suggest that indeed Baudrillard is a "new McLuhan" who has
repackaged McLuhan into new postmodern cultural capital. First, in what might be called a formalist subordination,
Baudrillard, like McLuhan, privileges the form of media technology over what might be
called the media apparatus, and thus subordinates content, meaning, and the use
of media to its purely formal structure and effects. Baudrillard -- much more so than
McLuhan who at least gives some media history and analysis of the media environment -- tends to abstract
media form and effects from the media environment and thus erases political
economy, media production, and media environment (i.e. society as large) from his theory.
Against abstracting media form and effects from context, I would argue that the use and effects of media
should be carefully examined and evaluated in terms of specific contexts .
Distinctions between context and use, form and content, media and reality,
all dissolve, however, in Baudrillard's one-dimensional theory where global
theses and glib pronouncements replace careful analysis and critique.
 Reductionist
Baudrillard’s analysis is reductionist and wrong, and plays into
conservative attempts to preserve the status quo
Kellner 02 [Douglas, Prof at UCLA, “Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?”
http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/illumina%20folder/kell26.htm]
Another problem is that Baudrillard's formalism vitates the project of ideology
critique, and against his claims that media content are irrelevant and
unimportant, I would propose grasping the dialectic of form and content in media
communication, seeing how media forms constitute content and how content is always formed or structured,
while forms themselves can be ideological, as when the situation comedy form of
conflict/resolution projects an ideological vision which shows all problems easily capable of being
resolved within the existing society, or when action-adventure series formats of violent
conflict as the essence of reality project a conservative view of human life as
a battleground where only the fittest survive and prosper .[12] For a dialectical theory of
the media, television would have multiple functions (and potential decodings) where
sometimes the ideological effects may be predominant while at other times time functions a
medium like television functions as mere noise or through the merely formal effects which Baudrillard puts at the center
of his analysis. Consequently, there is no real theory or practice of cultural
interpretation in Baudrillard's media (increasingly anti-)theory, which also emanates an
anti-hermeneutical bias that denies the importance of content and is against
interpretation.[13] This brings us to a second subordination in Baudrillard's theory in which a more
dialectical position is subordinated to media essentialism and technological
determinism. For -- according to Baudrillard -- it is the technology of, say, television that determines its effects
(one-way transmission, semiurgy, implosion, extermination of meaning and the social) rather than any particular content
or message (i.e. for both Baudrillard and McLuhan "the media is the message"), or its construction or use within specific
social systems. For Baudrillard, media technology and semiurgy are the demiurges of media practices and effects,
separated from their uses by specific economic and political interests, individuals and groups, and the social systems
within which they function. Baudrillard thus abstracts media from social systems and
essentializes media technology as dominant social forces . Yet against Baudrillard, one could
argue that capital continues to be a primary determinant of media form and content in neo-capitalist societies just as state
socialism helps determine the form, nature, and effects of technologies in certain state socialist societies. Baudrillard, like
McLuhan, often makes essentializing distinctions between media like television or film, ascribing a particular essence to
one, and an opposed essence to the other. Yet it seems highly problematical to reduce
apparatuses as complex, contradictory, and many-sided as television (or film or any
mass medium) to its formal properties and effects, or to a technological essence. It is
therefore preferable, for theories of media in the capitalist societies, to see the media as syntheses of technology and
capital, as technologies which serve specific interests and which have specific political and economic effects (rather than
merely technological ones). It is also preferable to see the dialectic between media and society in specific historical
conjunctures, to see how social content, trends, and imperatives help constitute the media which in turn influence social
developments and help constitute social reality. For Baudrillard, by contrast, the media today simply constitute a
simulated, hyperreal, and obscene (in his technical sense) world(view), and a dialectic of media and society is
shortcircuited in a new version of technological determinism. The political implications of this analysis
are that constituting alternative media, or alternative uses or forms of existing
media, is useless or worse because media in their very essence for him militate
against emancipatory politics or any project of social transformation. Such cynical views,
however, primarily benefit conservative interests who presently control the
media in their own interests -- a point to which I shall soon return.
 King
We need pragmatic action and carefully researched
argumentation and information to create real change---
criticism, action, and change are impossible in their world
King 98 [Anthony, Professor at Essex University, Telos Journal, “Baudrillard’s Nihilism and the End of Theory”] AT
Compare this style of writing with J. G. Ballard’s Crash — a novel providing a very successful (and deliberately obscene)
description of postmodern culture. It recognizes that culture’s bodily indulgence, and knows that it does not liberate the
individual but reduces the body to a machine for pleasure, just as the car is a machine for speech. The car-crash and the
sexact are the moments when the wholly technical machineries of the car and the bodies are decomposed in an instant of
pain that is transformed (for ironic effect) into one of intense pleasure for the perverts who populate the book. In
communicating this new, debased ethic of bodily pleasure, where the delight in bodily mutilation parallels a correlating
spiritual disfigurement, Ballard describes a questionnaire about car crashes which Vaughan, the central figure in the book,
has prepared and which lists every conceivable injury: “Lastly came that group of injuries which had clearly most
preoccupied Vaughan — genital wounds caused during automobile accidents. . . . the breasts of teenage girls deformed by
instrument binnacles, the partial mammoplasties of elderly housewives carried out by chromium louvres of windshield
assemblies, nipples sectioned by manufacturers’ dashboard medallions; injuries to male and female genitalia caused by
steering wheel shrouds, windshields during ejection, crushed door pillars, seat springs and handbrake units, cassette
player instrument toggles.”28 The descriptions Ballard provides of both cars and bodies are wholly technical and
anatomical, emphasizing that, in this culture, both “bodyworks” are (obscenely) reduced to the same level. Against
Ballard’s rich, selfdeveloping text, Baudrillard’s writing is flat and strained. He simply
breaks down his academic text into aphoristic gobblets and draws on
alexicon of dead, static metaphors. In the end, Baudrillard falls between the two stools of demanding
that academic writing is inadequate to the analysis of hyperreality, but still writing according to its conventions and
thereby vitiating either the academic or the literary merit of his later work. However, even if Baudrillard wanted his later
writing to be read as literature and even if he had been successful in producing text which could be judged as literature,
the project of this later writing would still have been irretrievably self-deluded . Even if his terrorism were
a successful form of literature, it could never (as he claims) communicate
hyperreality to the reader directly, for all writing is necessarily mediated; all writing is an
interpretation.29 Unavoidably, his terroristic writing is an interpretation of hyperreal culture, which does not obviate the
necessity of interpretation, however directly it tries to communicate hyperreality. In insisting on
representing hyperreality directly, Baudrillard does not, as he claims, present a
clearer idea of hyperreality but, on the contrary (and ironically), a less illuminating and
less direct one. As a result of his demand to present hyperreality directly, he simply stops at the first point of the
interpretive process and presents his initial assumptions as the definitive statement on contemporary culture. Thus, he
does not provide a clearer insight into the true nature of televisual culture but rather obscures the role of television with an
assertive and arrogant hypostatization of an immediate concept. His terrorism halts the dialectical
process at its first and most inadequate initial point, before the critical
process has begun. Instead of developing his concepts through a thorough immersion in
“hyperreal” culture, refining his interpretation to make it more adequate to that object , Baudrillard reifies
his first impressions into absolute truths. In breaking off the dialectical
engagement with the actual social practices of postmodern culture, he hypostatizes
his crude standpoint into “the truth.” Ironically, in trying to present hyperreality immediately,
Baudrillard falls into exactly the same error for which he so effectively criticized Marx. Just as Marx failed to provide a
truly radical alternative to capitalism by employing the concepts of capitalist political economy, Baudrillard’s
fragmented aphorisms are unable to provide a critical alternative to
hyperreality, because they are so thoroughly embedded in and dependent on the very
cultural forms they are intended to oppose. The fragmentation of Baudrillard’s later writing does
not serve the critical purpose for which it was intended, but rather, if it has any effect, it sensitizes the reader
to the global media culture Baudrillard wanted to resist. His attempt to portray a
culture in which allegedly there is no longer any reality beyond its representations, is the
academic extension of that culture. Contrary to his own intentions, it is the very
intellectual path he has insisted on taking, which turns its back on careful research and close critical analysis,
which makes the desert of hyperreality grow. It robs the reader of any critical understanding of
contemporary culture. Moreover, it denies the importance of developing alternative
knowledge and understandings, which would undermine media representations of the world
because it asserts that these alternative visions would always already be
incorporated into hyperreality. It is not enough simply to say that television is a false reality; one
must try and reconstruct a reality in which political freedom and critique are
possible, even though any constructed reality must itself always be subjected to critique. Consequently, against
Baudrillard, an appropriate form of academic resistance would be to insist upon
even more rigorously researched and detailed work .30 In particular, the
dialectical method which demands the constant overhaul of concepts, whereby nothing is taken
for granted, would have prevented Baudrillard from falling into the
hyperbolic reification of mere assertions.
 Real World Exists
Common sense tells us the real world exists and is knowable,
even if it’s socially constructed to some degree – their refusal to
recognize this causes extinction
Morris 97 [Brian, Prof. Anthropology – Goldsmiths College, Critique of Anthropology, “In Defence of Realism and
Truth: Critical Reflections on the Anthropological followers of Heidegger”, 17:3, p. 316-320]
It has long been known, of course, well before postmodernism came upon the anthropological scene, that we
do not
perceive or experience the world in pristine fashion . For our engagement with
the world is always mediated by our personal interests, by our state of mind, by language and cultural
conceptions, and, above all, by social praxis. As an early and important his¬torian of science put it in 1838:
'there is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature' (Megill, 1994: 66). The anthropologist Ruth Benedict in her classic
anthropological text Patterns of Culture long ago emphasized that a person's ideas, beliefs and attitudes are largely
culturally constituted. As she wrote: `No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definitive
set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking' (1934: 2). But as with Dilthey, her important mentor, this
affirmation did not in the least imply a denial of the reality of the material world .
This important insight which has been part of the common currency of the social sciences ever since the time of Marx,
has, in recent decades, been taken up by philosophers and postmodernist anthropologists. But they seem to have taken
this important insight to extremes, and in a `veritable epidemic' of `social constructivism' and `world making' have
propounded a latter-day version of Kantian idealism, going even further than Kant in denying the reality of the material
world, the `things-in-themselves'. Cultural idealism in its various guises, is thus now all the rage in the halls of academia,
and has been adapted by a wide range of scholars — Kuhn, Althusser, Goodman, Rorty, Hindess and Hirst, Douglas, as
well as postmodernist anthropologists (Devitt, 1984: 235). Such constructivism combines two basic Kantian ideas: that
the world as we know it is constituted by our concepts; and that an independent world is forever beyond our ken (Devitt,
1984: ix). But, as already mentioned, many anthropologists go even further in an anti-realist direction, and deny
the independent existence of a world beyond our cognition , a world that has
causal powers and efficacy. With the free use of the term `worlds' they invariably conflate the cognitive reality
which is culture — `discourses' is now the more popular term — and the material world that is
independent of humans. Thus anthropologists now tell us that there is `no nature, no culture', or that nature, sex,
emotions, the body, the senses, are purely social `constructs' or human `artefacts', or even that they do not `exist'
outside of Western discourses. The suggestion that `nature' is a human construct or artefact (rather than being simply
constituted or `edited'), or that it has 'disappeared' or does not `exist' are highly problematic notions. Derrida writes that
'nature, that which words . . . name, have always already escaped, have never existed' (1976: 159). Although making an
important point about the nature of language, this phrase simply indicates just how alienated from nature contemporary
philosophers seem to be. They seem unable to recognize that human beings are, as Nigel Pennick puts it 'rooted in the
earth' (1996: 7). In a gleeful phrase, John Passmore notes that it is the French intellectual's dream `of a world which
exists only in so far as it enters into a book' (1985: 32). Now either one means by `nature' the existential world in which
we find ourselves — the trees, the clouds, the sky, the animals and plants, the rocks, and all those natural processes which
are independent of human cognition, and on which human life depends. To suggest that this is a human creation or
artefact, or does not exist, is plainly absurd. Or, on the other hand, one means by nature the highly variable `concept' of
nature; to suggest that this is a social construct is rather banal, though the suggestion is dressed up as if it was some
profound anthropological insight. Reacting against the notion that there is an isomorphic — reflective — relationship
between consciousness (language) and the world — so-called logocentrism' — postmodernist anthropologists now seem
to embrace a form of cultural (or linguistic) idealism, and deny the reality of the material world (nature), or sex or the
senses. Although some anthropologists deny that `sex' exists (as there is nothing `pre-social', Moore, 1994: 816-19
affirms) baboons in Malawi have no difficulty at all in distinguishing between male and female humans (cf. Caplan, 1987,
for a more balanced perspective). Realism, as many philosophers have insisted, is a metaphysical doctrine. It is
about what exists in the world, and how the world is constituted. Contrary to what Kirsten Hastrup
writes (1995: 60), it is not a theory of knowledge , or of truth, but of being, and so does not aim at
providing a `faithful reflection to the world'. Realism, as a doctrine, is thus separate from semantic issues relating to
truth and reference, and from issues dealing with our knowledge of the world (epistemology) — both human and natural.
Roy Bhaskar has critiqued what he describes as the 'epistemic fallacy', the notion that
ontological issues can be reduced to, or analysed in terms of statements
about knowledge (epistemology) (1989: 13). Everyone, of course, is a `realist' or Toundationalise
in some sense, making ontological assumptions about what is 'real' and what
'exists'. Metaphysics is thus not something that one can dispense with, or put an 'end' to — as both positivists and
Heidegger and his acolytes suggest. For Plato, `ideas' or universals were 'real'; for Descartes, the transcendental ego was
`real'; for some eco-feminists the mother goddess is `real'; while for empiricists it is sense impressions. As used here,
realism entails the view that material things exist independently of human sense experience and cognition. It is thus
opposed to idealism which either holds that the material world does not exist, or is simply an emanation of spirit, or that
external realities do not exist apart from our knowledge or consciousness of them. Outside of philosophy departments,
and among some religious mystics and anthropologists, realism is universally held by everybody, and forms the basis of
both common sense and empirical science. Common sense, of course, sensus communis, can be interpreted in
Aristotelean fashion as a kind of sixth sense that draws together the localized senses of sight, touch, taste, smell and
hearing. It is this sixth sense, as Arendt writes, that gives us a sense of realness regarding the
world (1978: 49). Like Arendt, Karl Popper critically affirmed the importance of
common sense. He wrote: `I think very highly of common sense. In fact, I think that all philosophy must start
from common sense views and from their critical examination.' But what, for Popper, was important
about the common-sense view of the world was not the kind of epistemology associated
with the empiricists - who thought that knowledge was built up out of sense impressions - but its realism. This is
the view, he wrote, `that there is a real world, with real people, animals and
plants, cars and stars in it. I think that this view is true and immensely important, and I believe that no valid
criticism of it has ever been proposed' (Miller, 1983: 105). Science therefore was not the
repudiation of common-sense realism, but rather a creative attempt to go beyond the world of ordinary experience,
seeking to explain, as he put it, 'the everyday world by reference to hidden worlds'. In this it is similar to both religion and
art. What characterizes science is that the product of the human imagination
and intuition are controlled by rational criticism 'Criticism curbs the imagination but does
not put it in chains' (1992a: 54). Science is therefore, for Popper, `hypothetico-deductive'. What exists, and how the
world is constituted, depends, of course on what particular ontology or `world view' (to use Dilthey's term) is being
expressed, although in terms of social praxis the reality of the material world is always taken
for granted for human survival depends on acknowledging and engaging
with this world . As Marx expressed it, we are always engaged in a `dialogue with the real world' (1975: 328). It
is important then to defend a realist perspective, one Marx long ago described as historical materialism. It is a
metaphysics that entails the rejection both of contemplative materialism (the assumption that there is a direct
unmediated relationship between consciousness [language] and the world) and constructivism. The latter is just old-
fashioned idealism in modern guise, the emphasis being on culture, language and discourses, rather than on individual
perception (Berkeley) or a universal cognition (Kant). This approach may also be described as dialectical naturalism
(Bookchin, 1990), transcendental or critical realism (Bhaskar, 1978: 25; Collier, 1994), or constructive realism (Ben-Ze'ev,
1995: 50) - recognizing the significant social and cognitive activity of the human agent, but acknowledging the ontological
independence and causal powers of the natural world. As Mark Johnson simply puts it: 'How we carve up the world will
depend both on what is "out there" independent of us, and equally on the referential scheme we bring to bear, given our
purposes, interests, and goals' (1987: 202). Our engagement with the world is thus always mediated. Equally important is
the fact that we are always, as Marx put it, engaged in a 'dialogue' with the material world. It is thus necessary to reject
both idealism (constructivism) and reductive materialism (positivism, objectivism) as many classical sociologists and
human scientists have insisted (see my account of anthropological studies of religion, Morris, 1987). Again, Johnson
expresses this rather well: Contrary to idealism, we do not impose arbitrary concepts
and structure upon an undifferentiated, indefinitely malleable reality — we
do not simply construct reality according to our subjective desires and whims.
Contrary to objectivism, we are not merely mirrors of nature that determines our
concepts in one and only one way. (1987: 207) The 'end' of metaphysics is, of course, simply an intellectual posture of the
positivists and the Heideggerians, for we all affirm in our beliefs and writings certain ontological assumptions about the
world. What Flax means by the 'end' of 'metaphysics' is a rejection of a certain kind of idealist, or absolutist metaphysics,
one of course, that the social sciences rejected long, long ago.
 Baudrillard = Unintelligible [Dawkins]
You should reject their Baudrillard evidence—it’s hackery
cloaked in deliberately obscure language.
Dawkins 2007 – Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford,
fellow at the Royal Society of Literature, he has an asteroid officially named after him (4/1, Richard, Nature 394 pp. 141-3,
review of Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Bricmont, “Postmodernism Disrobed”,
http://richarddawkins.net/article,824,Postmodernism-Disrobed,Richard-Dawkins-Nature)
But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand
the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there
is also language designed to be
unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought . But how are we to
tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the
emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose
disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the
vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans? Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively New York
University and the University of Louvain. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke
concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal: on
Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout American and British
universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics: . . . although Lacan uses
quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the
slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish. They go on to quote the
following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan: Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic
method used here, namely: S (signifier) = s (the statement), s (signified) With S = (-1), produces: s = sqrt(-1) You don't
have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence
of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning which is entirely
typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ . . . is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification
produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake.
Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile
organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know
anything about. The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who is given whole chapter treatment by Sokal and
Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a 'rape manual') Irigaray
argues that E=mc2 is a 'sexed equation'. Why? Because 'it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally
necessary to us' (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an in-word). Just as typical of the school of thought
under examination is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. 'Masculine
physics' privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing
Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and,
yes, he has no clothes: The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with
turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that
protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. . . From this perspective it
is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow
cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave
unarticulated remainders. You don't have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the
tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why
turbulent flow is a hard problem (the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve). In similar manner, Sokal and
Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Lyotard's 'postmodern science', and the
widespread and predictable misuses of G�del's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean
Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for
bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The
following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology, is
meaningless from a scientific point of view": Perhaps history itself has to be
regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to
linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history
definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their
causes. I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text "continues in a
gradual crescendo of nonsense." They again call attention to "the high density of scientific and
pseudo-scientific terminology — inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning." Their
summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticised here, and lionised throughout America: In
summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used
with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where
they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as
metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an
appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific
terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said
and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the
verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.
Alt Stuff
 Analytics
If we all operate within hyperreality then it applies to
Baudrillard too – A) the system will co-opt his criticism, which
means it can’t solve, and B) his own criticism is a simulation
which the alt demands rejecting
 Must Engage System
Perm is possible – representation is meaningless so they can’t
get a reps links – Even though the system is one of pure
simulation, we still need to engage and act within it to avoid the
paralytic fascination it forces on our lives.
Baudrillard 81 [Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation” p. 152-154]
Attacking representation no longer has much meaning either. One senses quite clearly;
for the same reason, that all student conflicts (as is the case, more broadly; on the level of global society)
around the representation, the delegation of power are no longer anything but
phantom vicissitudes that yet still manage, out of despair, to occupy the forefront
of the stage. Through I don't know what Mobius effect, representation itself has also turned in on itself, and the
whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time, ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation,
where from the beginning no one is represented nor representative of anything any
more, where all that is accumulated is deaccumulated at the same time , where even
the axiological, directive, and salvageable phantasm of power has disappeared. A universe that is still
incomprehensible, unrecognizable, to us, a universe with a malefic curve that our mental coordinates,
which are orthogonal and prepared for the infinite linearity of criticism and
history, violently resist. Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning
anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are
concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without origin, without distance, and
it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight-without
hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination. Because one must not refuse the intense
fascination that emanates from this liquefaction of all power , of all axes of value, of all
axiology; politics included. This spectacle, which is at once that of the death throes and the apogee of capital, surpasses by
far that of the commodity described by the situationists. This spectacle is our essential force. We are no longer
in a relation toward capital of uncertain or victorious forces, but in a political
one, that is the phantasm of revolution. We are in a relation of defiance , of
seduction, and of death toward this universe that is no longer one , precisely because all axiality
that escapes it. The challenge capital directs at us in its delirium-liquidating without shame the law of profit, surplus value,
productive finalities, structures of power, and finding at the end of its process the profound immorality (but also the
seduction) of primitive rituals of destruction, this very challenge must be raised to an insanely higher level. Capital, like
value, is irresponsible, irreversible, ineluctable. Only to value is capital capable of offering a fantastic spectacle of its
decomposition only the phantom of value still floats over the desert of the classical structures of capital, just as the
phantom of religion floats over a world now long desacralized, just as the phantom of knowledge floats over the university.
It is up to us to again become the nomads of this desen, but disengaged from the mechanical illusion of value. We will live
in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of
living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us-because the
desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand-the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests-the vertigo of simulacra is
equal to that of nature-only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which
value buries value-leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind
lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand. What can one make of all this in the
political order? Very little. But we also have to fight against the profound fascination exerted
on us by the death throes of capital, against the staging by capital of its own death, when we are really the ones in our final
hours. To leave it the initiative of its own death, is to leave it all the privileges of
revolution. Surrounded by the simulacrum of value and by the phantom of capital and of
power, we are much more disarmed and impotent than when surrounded by
the law of value and of the commodity, since the system has revealed itself
capable of integrating its own death and since we are relieved of the
responsibility for this death, and thus of the stake of our own life. This supreme
ruse of the system, that of the simulacrum of its death, through which it maintains us in life
by having liquidated through absorption all possible negativity, only a superior ruse can stop.
Challenge or imaginary science, only a pataphysics of simulacra can remove us from the system’s
strategy of simulation and the impasse of death in which it imprisons us.
 Cede the Pol [generic]
Only the aff’s engagement in macropolitics solves
Best and Kellner 02 prof phil @ UT el paso and Kellner prof phil @ UCLA 2k2 (Steven, Doug, “Postmodern Politics and the
Battle for the Future” http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell28.htm)

A postmodern politics begins to take shape during the 1960s, when numerous new political groups and struggles emerged. The
development of a new postmodern politics is strongly informed by the vicissitudes of social movements in France, the United States, and
elsewhere, as well as by emerging postmodern theories. The utopian visions of modern politics proved, in this context, difficult to sustain
and were either rejected in favor of cynicism, nihilism, and, in some cases, a turn to the right, or were dramatically recast and scaled down
to more "modest" proportions. The modern emphasis on collective struggle, solidarity,
and alliance politics gave way to extreme fragmentation, as the "movement"
of the 1960s splintered into various competing struggles for rights and
liberties. The previous emphasis on transforming the public sphere and
institutions of domination gave way to new emphases on culture, personal identity,
and everyday life, as macropolitics were replaced by the micropolitics of local transformation
and subjectivity. In the aftermath of the 1960s, novel and conflicting conceptions of postmodern politics emerged. Postmodern
politics thus take a variety of forms and would include the anti-politics of
Baudrillard and his followers, who exhibit a cynical, despairing rejection of
the belief in emancipatory social transformation, as well as a variety of efforts to create a new or
reconstructed politics. On the extreme and apolitical position of a Baudrillard, we are
stranded at the end of history, paralyzed and frozen, as the masses collapse
into inertia and indifference, and simulacra and technology triumph over
agency. Thus, from Baudrillard's perspective, all we can do is "accommodate
ourselves to the time left to us."

The impact is extinction, the refusal to engage in traditional

politics is an abdication of social responsibility that makes all
social crises inevitable
Boggs, 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The
great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America”,
December, Volume 26, Number 6,
http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h
16r0/fulltext.pdf)
Many ideological currents scrutinized
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges.

here – localism, metaphysics post-modernism , spontaneism, , Deep Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have

all share one thing in

deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they

common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome

alienation. The false empowerment that comes with such impulses is
sense of mesmerizing

accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a

depleted capacity of individuals to work for social change. As this in large groups

ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the

fabric of American society will go unsolved only to fester more – perhaps even unrecognized –

ominously in the future. And such problems ( ecological crisis, poverty,

urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, cannot be technological displacement of workers)

understood outside the larger context of internationalized markets social and global , finance,
and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his
commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we

the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the meantime , The unyielding

even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even

truth is that,

fashionable in the U S it is the vagaries of political power that will

nited tates,

continue to decide the fate of human societies. The shrinkage This last point demands further elaboration.
of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality,
that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and
military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far from it: the
space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate
at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an
already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the
American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or
it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. 75
 Baudrillard Doesn’t Apply to Politics
Baudrillard is too nihilistic to apply to politics.
Butterfield 02 (Bradley, Assistant Professor of English at University of
Wisconsin at La Crosse, "The Baudrillardian Symbolic, 9/11, and the War of Good
and Evil" Postmodern Culture, volume 13, September, Project MUSE)
Jean Baudrillard has been the prophet of the postmodern
From Princess Diana to 9/11,
media spectacle, the hyperreal event. In the 1970s and 80s, our collective fascination with things like car
crashes, dead celebrities, terrorists and hostages was a major theme in Baudrillard's work on the symbolic and symbolic exchange, and in
his post-9/11 "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," he has taken it upon himself to decipher terrorism's symbolic message. He does so in the wake of
such scathing critiques as DouglasKellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1989), which
attacked Baudrillard's theory as "an imaginary construct which tries to
seduce the world to become as theory wants it to be , to follow the scenario
scripted in the theory" (178). Did Baudrillard seduce 9/11 into being--is he
terrorism's theoretical guru? --or did he merely anticipate and describe in advance the event's profound
seductiveness? To Kellner and other critics, Baudrillard's theory of postmodernity is a political
as well as an intellectual failure: Losing critical energy and growing apathetic
himself, he ascribes apathy and inertia to the universe. Imploding into
entropy, Baudrillard attributes implosion and entropy to the experience of
(post) modernity. (180) To be sure, Baudrillard's scripts and scenarios have always been concerned with the implosion of the
global capitalist system. But while Baudrillard's tone at the end of "L'Esprit du Terrorisme" can certainly be called apathetic--"there is no
solution to this extreme situation--certainly not war"--he does not suggest that there are no forces in the universe capable of mounting at
least a challenge to the system and its sponsors (18).
 Inevitable/A2 Destruction of Meaning
Radical destruction of meaning is already useless – the system is
already configured to where the resistance they advocate does
nothing.
Baudrillard 81 [Jean, “Simulacra and Simulation” p. 162-164]
Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated
systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same
order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system
is too strong: hegemonic. Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt
the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular
drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking
the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do. It is the trait of reversion that effaces the
remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the
power and pleasure of the master. The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of
its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure.
Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the
nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary. If being a
nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical
trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to
answer through its own death, then I am terrorist and nihilist in theory as
the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the
only resource left us. But such a sentiment is utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a
nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if
death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. But it is at this point that things
become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its
own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense
that it has the power to pour everything , including what denies it, into indifference. In
this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the
Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference , that is where terrorism is
the involuntary accomplice of the whole system , not politically, but in the
accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no
longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play
itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of
the other terrorism, that of the system. There is no longer a stage, not even the
minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality -no more
stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna,
or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television
screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without
consequences). There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a
good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to
liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal,
invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. This is
where seduction begins.
Kritik of War
 Scholarship Key
The aff’s reductionist view of military policy disconnects
simulacra from their real institutional determinants---only
countering simulations with better military scholarship can
prevent endless intervention
Mitchell Hobbs 6, The University of Newcastle, Australia, REFLECTIONS ON THE REALI TY OFTHE IRAQ
WARS: THE DEMISE OFBAUDRILLARD’S SEARCH FORTRUTH?,
https://www.academia.edu/2569231/Reflections_on_the_reality_of_the_Iraq_Wars_the_demise_of_Baudrillards_sea
rch_for_truth
Although Baudrillard’s work on “simulation” and “simulacra” is valuable in
highlightingthe relationship between the mass media and reality, and, in particular, the
ways in which
media content (images and narratives) come to be de-contextualised, his theses are
per se insufficient for the analysis of the contemporary mass media. For instance, asmedia theorist and
researcher Douglas Kellner (2003:31) notes, beyond the level of media spectacle, Baudrillard does not help
readers understand events such as the Gulf War, because he reduces the
actions of actors and complex political issues to categories of “simulation”
and “hyper-reality”, in
a sense “ erasing their concrete determinants ”. Kellner, who like
Baudrillard, has written extensively on media spectacles, including theGulf Wars, sees
Baudrillard’s theory
as being “ one-dimensional ”, “privilege[ing] the form of media technology over
its content, meaning and…use” (Kellner, 1989:73). In thisregard, Baudrillard does not
account for the political economic dimensions of the newsmedia , nor the
cultural practices involved with the production of news (Kellner, 1989:73-74). Thus, he suffers
from the same technologically deterministic essentialism thatundermined the media theories
of Marshall McLuhan, albeit in a different form (Kellner,1989:73-74). Although Kellner (2003:32) believes that
Baudrillard’s pre-1990s works on “the consumer society, on the political economy of the sign, simulation and
simulacra,and the implosion of [social] phenomenon” are useful and can be deployed within criticalsocial theory, he
prefers to read Baudrillard’s later, more controversial and obscure, workas “science fiction which anticipates the future by
In order to understand war and its relationship with
exaggerating present tendencies”
the media in the contemporary era it is, then, necessary to move beyond
Baudrillard’s spectacular theory of media spectacle. For although our culture is
resplendent with images, signs and narratives, circulating in aseemingly endless dance of
mimicry (or, rather, simulacra), there are observable social institutions
and practices producing this semiotic interplay. Although all that is solidmight melt into air

(Marx and Engles, 2002:223), appearances and illusions are not an end for sociological

analysis , but are rather a seductive invitation to further social inquiry. As the
research of Douglas Kellner (1992; 1995; 2005) has shown, when media spectacles are dissected
by critical cultural analysis , re-contextualisation is possible. Images and
narratives can be traced back to their sources: whether they lie in
Hollywood fantasies or government ‘spin’ . In short, by assessing the veracity
of competing texts, war (as understood by media audiences) can be re-connected to its
antecedents and consequences. Indeed, through wrestling with the ideological
spectres of myth and narrative, and by searching widely for critically
informed explanations of different events, the social sciences can acquire an
understanding of the ‘truthfulness’ of media representations; of the
‘authentic’ in a realm bewildered by smoke and mirrors. As long as there are
competing media voices on which to construct a juxtaposition of ‘truths’, sociologists can, to a certain extent,
force the media to grapple with their own disparate reflections. 3 CONCLUSIONS
3.1 REST IN PEACE BAUDRILLARD? In the final analysis, then, Baudrillard’s work on the Gulf War and the September
11terrorist attacks should (respectfully) be laid to rest. For although some, such as RichardKeeble (2004:43), have
followed Baudrillard in arguing that “there was no war in the gulf in 2003”, such statements are somewhat antithetical to
the truth aims of the social sciences. Baudrillard, being both an icon and iconoclast, pushed his language and arguments to
rhetorical extremes in order to force the collapse of representations andarguments he saw as having supplanted truth. His
fatal theory was in a sense intellectual ‘hype’, for a capricious world in which only ‘hype’ can be noticed. Yet in shouting his
arguments he served to obfuscate their nuance and subtext, the very intellectualessences of his work and, ultimately, his
contribution to the body of knowledge. However, although fatal theory is of little practical use for media researchers
seeking anempirically derived ‘truth’, Baudrillard’s oeuvre is still (somewhat) instructive, remindingus of the importance
of de-mystifying reality. For although the voice of the scholar is that of a pariah in the
entertainment driven public sphere, we must force our voices into thepublic
sphere if we are to re-contextualise events such as the Iraq war, by
providing audiences with better, more veracious accounts of events . Failing this,
we will continue to find our ‘defence’ forces engaged in military operations
under spurious casus belli arguments . Accordingly, despite the many faults of his work, Baudrillard
should not beforgotten. For although his contribution was more of a slap-of-the-face than a gentlepush in the right
direction, his ideas regarding simulacra and reality have helped to further our understanding of media spectacles (and
their potential repercussions). In apost-Baudrillard world, as social inquiry (it is to be hoped) returns to a more
empiricallyinformed understanding of the media, we should not forget the implications posed by thiscultural field. For if
sociology seeks to explain the social world, then it must work to prevent the dislocation of reality from the ‘real’ that
Baudrillard so feared.
 Abstraction Bad
Discussing the materiality of war is important—their abstraction
ignores the deeply important human, economic and strategic
issues at its core—that’s the danger of relentless abstraction.
Daniel Pipes 96, writer for Middle East Quarterly, runs Middle East Quarterly, “Review of The Gulf War Did Not
Take Place,” http://www.danielpipes.org/696/the-gulf-war-did-not-take-place
No one can lack commonsense as much as an intellectual, especially a leftist one, and
perhaps most of all a renowned French professor of sociology. To show his brilliance, Baudrillard takes a
perfectly obvious fact and devotes a book to proving it wrong . In saying
that the Kuwait war "did not take place," he means that the fighting was so
lopsided, it did not constitute a war. Brushing aside American fears of heavy casualties, he deems
that the war "was won in advance." It was, in his view, "a shameful and pointless hoax, a programmed and melodramatic
version of what was the drama of war." From the American point of view, he claims, "no accidents
occurred in this war, everything unfolded according to a programmatic
order ." In all, the events of early 1991 stood in relation to war as computer erotics do to actual sex.
Baudrillard's exceedingly slight essay (a compilation of three articles published in the newspaper Libération)
ceaselessly hammers away at these themes. He stands midway between the U nited S tates and
Iraq, faulting each of these main actors about equally. For him, it is all
aesthetics and ideology; the deeply important human, economic, and
strategic issues raised by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait disappear under the
weight of his relentless abstraction. Thus unconnected from reality, Baudrillard
mangles everything from the French president's name to the number of traffic fatalities in the United States. The
result is a book of profound error and transcendent stupidity, the most inane ever reviewed
in these pages.
 Not All War Fake
Baudrillard’s critique does not generalize to the thesis that all
information-production is pure spectacle
Patrick Wilcken 95 Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London “The Intellectuals,
the Media and the Gulf War” Critique of Anthropology 1995 15: 37
There are strong links between the theoretical meanderings described above and intellectuals’ response to an event like
the Gulf War. The ’no comment’ approach was perhaps the most widespread in keeping with an indifferent critical climate,
but for those who put their oar in, agnosticism was the order of the day. Baudrillard, for example, in his infamous
article ’The Reality Gulf’ (1991a) written on the eve of hostilities, claimed that the war would not in
fact take place. By this he meant that the media had created a ’hyper real
scenario’ of fallacious commentary, empty predictions and reports of
threats and counterthreats that were staged for the media in the first place .
In Baudrillard’s opinion, the only real ’strategic cite is the TV screen from which
we are daily bombarded’. There is no other reality ; images and their referents are
interchangeable. As a result we have on our hands, under the auspices of the UN as an ’extended contraceptive’,
a ’Safe War’ (like safe sex) - ’a form of war which means never having to face up to war’ (1991a: 25). Baudrillard’s
piece as a description of the way the media worked during the crisis holds
some validity,&dquo; but to go from there and suggest that taking any position
on such an event by attempting to demystify the media ’simulacrum’ is
simply mistaken - in effect just one more illusory exercise - is absurd to say the
least . Baudrillard’s second article published in Liberation (1991b) entitled ’La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu’ (’The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place’) goes even further in this direction. Baudrillard is willing to concede
that in the event mass destruction did take place, but he goes on to argue
that we must not be deceived into taking a moral stand on such an issue ,
but must instead engage in a sort of postmodern oneupmanship and reject
all evidence so as to be ’more virtual than the events themselves’ (trans. in Norris,
1992: 194). Baudrillard’s position is perhaps somewhat extreme, but its controversial avant-garde flavour assured it copy
space. But similar sentiments dressed up differently begin to look disturbingly representative of the intellectual response
in the media when one considers Michael Ignatieff’s article in the Observer (1991). ’The languages of moral concern hardly
connect,’ writes Ignatieff. Some people decry the carnage on the road to Basra, others, like Ignatieff himself, support the
war on the grounds that sanctions would have failed. But in the final analysis ’neither side has the slightest hope of
convincing the other’ . What kind of critical commentary is this? Ignatieff’s relativist stance renders informed debate
irrelevant and absolves him from having to defend his pro-war position. On the other side of the Atlantic, Barbara
Ehrenreich (one of Garafola’s new generation public intellectuals) in an article for Time magazine (1990), ’The Warrior
Culture’, attributes the eagerness of the US to confront the Iraqis militarily to America’s culture of aggression. She starts
off with a sort of Victorian anthropological chamber of horrors: dozens of ’pretechnological peoples’ including the Masai of
East Africa and the North American Plains Indians rule that men cannot marry until they have killed in battle; in the
Solomon Islands a chief’s status is reckoned by the number of skulls displayed around his door; Aztec kings use human
hearts in religious rituals. America possesses just such a ’warrior culture’ with its unquenchable thirst for violence on
television, its willingness to go to war on any pretext, and its warrior elite siphoning off nearly a third of the federal budget
even in peace time. While left-wingers may blame this war on imperialism, Ehrenreich concludes, and right-wingers
’internationalism’ the real villain is in the culture itself. Ehrenreich’s well-intentioned piece not only fails to convince
ethnographically but, reducing international politics to culture, eliminates the possibility of dissent. Ehrenreich is arguing
in effect, that Americans are unable to help themselves: their culture inculcates them with the urge to fight. Historical
precedent, economic considerations and global power relations become irrelevant. These three public
intellectuals, highly visible in their respective countries, are unable to assess
critically a major political event like the Gulf War. Baudrillard wants to live
in ’virtual reality’, Ignatieff concludes that any adjudication is impossible and Ehrenreich reduces the conflict to
specious cultural predispositions. Their lack of conviction, though, owes as much to the theoretical climate as to the
requirements of the media. Baudrillard’s piece satisfies the market for the bizarre - the intellectual eccentric going over the
top; Ignatieff encapsulates the views of the soft liberal readership of the Observer; while Ehrenreich’s article has obvious
exotic appeal. But even outside the requirements of the media, the Gulf War
highlighted the general paralysis of the intellectual community worldwide.
In the USA, Edward Said argues that intellectuals failed to join the debate
because of their lack of ’affiliation with the public sphere’ , provinciality and impotence
(1991: 15). Even the editorial board of Dissent was divided over the issue, producing a wide spectrum of opinion. Todd
Gitlin described the war as a ’catastrophe’ which was ’avoidable’, the late Irving Howe felt compelled to take a pro-war
position but felt that the stance was ’uncomfortable’ for the Left, while Dennis Wrong concluded that because of the UN’s
role this was a ’legal and just war’ (Morton et al., 1991:153-60). In France ex-radical ’soixante huitard’ Alaine Touraine
gave the war his unequivocal support, while Pierre Bourdieu denounced it as ’drunken war-mongering’ (Zamiti, 1992 : 53 ;
author’s trans.). In Britain, Christopher Norris comments that few intellectuals were able to resist the ’pressures of
ideological recruitment’ (1992: 25) and The Times, in an article written during the conflict, described the ’old constituency
of intellectual protest’ as ’in confusion’ (27 January 1991). But perhaps the most striking example of intellectual disarray
was in Germany, where the issue of the war was the first event to break up decisively one of the most politically cohesive
left-wing groups in Europe. Veterans of 1968 Enzensberger and Brumlik came out in support of the Allies as other
intellectuals appeared to flounder in self-contradiction: Jurgen Habermas commented that the war was ’justified’ (as
opposed to ’just’); Cohn-Bendit supported the war while at the same time condemned the hypocrisy of the intellectuals for
ignoring the suffering of the Iraqi people (Rabinbach, 1991 : 462).
 Masking DA
The affirmative over-states the role played by illusion in
politics---their emphasis on unmasking reality leaves us unable
to deal with practical political problems
Unger 9—founding member of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (Roberto, The Self Awakened, 15-8)
15¶ they have much more often been put forward by different thinkers and different schools of thought. However, even
when living separate lives, the two bodies of belief have regularly coexisted in a broad range of civilizations and historical
periods. Everything happens as if, despite their seeming distance and even contradiction to each other, they were in fact
allied. What is the meaning of this working partnership between partners with such widely differing motives, ambitions,
and tenets?¶ The world may be strife and illusion, but its troubles, sufferings,
and dangers do not dissipate simply because they have been denied solidity
and value . Once devalued, the world — especially the social world—must
still be managed . We must prevent the worst from happening. Those who
can apprehend the truth of the situation, divining ultimate being under the
shadows of mendacious difference, and permanence under the appearance
of change , are a happy few. Their withdrawal from social responsibility in
the name of an ethic of contemplative serenity, inaction, and absorption into
the reality of the One fails to solve the practical problems of social order . On the contrary,

such a retreat threatens to leave a disaster in its wake: the calamity of a

vacuum of initiative and belief. Into this vacuum steps the doctrine of
hierarchical specialization in soul and society . ¶ Seen through the sharp and selective lens of
the perennial philosophy, this
doctrine may be no more than a holding operation , as
There is
inexorable in its claims on those who must govern society as it is groundless in its metaphysical justification.
then no surprise in seeing it most often represented by traditions of thought
different from those that have adhered to the perennial philosophy .¶ Some in the
world history of thought, however, have claimed to discern a more intimate connection between the doctrine of order and
the perennial philosophy. If ultimate reality is spirit residing in all the apparent particulars, and most especially in living
beings, then identification with universal spirit creates as well a basis for universal solidarity or compassion. The same
compassion can then reappear in a commanding place among the highest faculties of the soul. It can therefore also be
most closely identified with rulers and priests. The bonds of reciprocity, of mutual allegiance and devotion, among supe ¶ ¶
16¶ riors and subalterns as well as among equals, can be founded on the expression and the worship of universal spirit,
manifest among us as compassion and solidarity. ¶ It is a belief we find articulated in philosophical and religious teachings
as different as those of Buddha and Confucius. It reappears in that uniquely relentless Western statement of the otherwise
un-Western instance of the perennial philosophy—the teaching of Schopenhauer. This belief turns the doctrine of social
and moral order into something more than an effort to contain calamity and savagery in this vale of tears and illusions:
into a concerted effort to soften the terror of social life, shortening the distance between ultimate being and everyday
experience. The perennial philosophy suffers from both a cognitive and an existential defect. The former is manifest in its
vision of the world, and the latter, in its quest for happiness through serenity, and for serenity through invulnerability and
distance.¶ Its cognitive flaw is its failure to recognize how completely and irreparably we are in fact embodied and situated.
Not only our sufferings and our joys but also our prospects of action and discovery are engaged in the reality and the
transformation of difference: the differences among phenomena and among people. To understand a state of affairs,
whether in nature or in science, is to grasp what it might become as it is subject to different directions and varieties of
pressure. Our imagination of these next steps—of these metamorphoses of reality—is the indispensable sign of advance in
insight. When we deny the reality— at least the ultimate reality—of differences, we sever the vital link between insight into
the real and imagined or experienced transformation. ¶ The existential failing of the perennial philosophy is the revenge of
this denied and unchained reality against the hope that we would become freer
and happier if
only we could see through the illusions of change and distinction .
The point of seeing through these illusions is supposed to be greater freedom on
the basis of truer understanding. ¶ However, the consequence of the
required denial of the reality of particulars may be the inverse of the
liberation it promises. Having declared independence in the mind and ceased
war against the realities¶ ¶ 17¶ around us, we find ourselves confined within a narrowing
space. In the name of freedom, we become more dependent and more
enslaved.¶ We may cast on ourselves a spell temporarily to quiet our restless
striving. However, in so doing we deny ourselves instruments with which
to explore the real world. We forego the means by which to see how
everything in it can become something else when placed under resistance. By the
same token, we lose the tools with which to strengthen our practical powers.

We become cranks, slaves, and fantasists under the pretext of becoming free
men and women . It is true that there will always be moments when we can
transport ourselves, through such self-incantation, into a realm in which the particulars
of the world and of the body, to which we have denied ultimate reality, cease to
burden us. However, we cannot live in such a world ; our moments of
supposed liberation cannot survive the routines and responsibilities of
practical life.¶ The alliance of the perennial philosophy with the practical doctrine of hierarchical specialization in
soul and society has been the predominant position in the world history of speculative thought. Its major opponent has
been a direction of thinking that, though exceptional in the context of world history, has long been the chief view in
Western philosophy. The expression of this view in philosophical texts, however, is secondary to its broader articulation in
religion, literature, and art. It is not merely the artifact of a tradition of speculative theorizing; it is the mainstay of a
civilization, though a mainstay that represents a radical and uncompromising deviation from what has elsewhere been the
dominant conception. Today this deviation has become the common possession of humanity thanks to the global
propagation of its ideas by both high and popular Western culture. Its assumptions nevertheless remain inexplicit and its
relation to the representation of nature in science unclear. To render this Western deviation from the perennial
philosophy both perspicuous and uncompromising is a major part of the work of a radicalized pragmatism. ¶ The
hallmark of the deviation is belief in the reality of time as well as in the reality of the
differences around which our experience is organized: in the first instance, the reality of the individual
person and of¶ ¶ 18¶ differences among persons; in the second, the discrete structure of the
world we perceive and inhabit. It is the view of individual personality that is
most central to this belief system; everything else follows as a consequence. ¶
The individual, his character, and his fate are for real. Each individual is different from every other individual who has
ever lived or who will ever live. A human life is a dramatic and irreversible movement from birth to death, surrounded by
mystery and overshadowed by chance.¶ What individuals can do with their lives depends on the
way society is organized and on their place within the social order, as well as on achievement and luck.
What happens in biographical time turns in large part on what happens in
historical time. For this reason alone, history is a scene of decisive action, and
everything that takes place in it is, like individuality itself, for real, not an
illusory or distracting epiphenomenon obscuring a timeless reality. History is not cyclical but rather
resembles individual life in being unilinear and irreversible. The
institutions and the beliefs we
develop in historical time may expand or diminish the life chances of the
individual, including his relative power to challenge and change them in the course of
his activities.¶ The reality of difference and of transformation, rooted in the
basic facts of individual experience, then becomes the model on which we see
and confront the whole world. Nothing is more crucial to the definition of such an approach to the world than
its way of representing the relation between its view of humanity and its view of nature. This representation is subject to
three related misstatements that narrow the reach and weaken the force of the alternative it offers to the perennial
philosophy. In the process of criticizing and rejecting these alternatives, we
come to see more clearly just what is at stake in the advancement of this
alternative conception. Many of the most influential positions in the history of Western philosophy—
including the “rejected options” discussed in the previous section—represent variations on qualified and inadequate
versions of the alternative.
 Theoretical Analysis Bad
Their theoretical analysis and overidentification leaves the
system in place—it fails to unearth systems of domination.
TlMOTHY W. Luke 91 [*], Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Power and politics in hyperreality:
The critical project of Jean Baudrillard. By: Luke, Timothy W., Social Science Journal, 03623319, 1991, Vol. 28, Issue 3,
EBSCO
Baudrillard's critical project clearly outlines a fascinating and innovative
appraisal of the often confusing and contradictory tendencies in
contemporary society that are usually labelled as "postmodernity ." Nonetheless,
there are considerable weaknesses as well as great strengths in Baudrillard's system of
analysis. The tenacity of "reality" or "modernity" in several spheres of
everyday life, for example, often still overshadows "hyperreality." Thus, it seems that
Baudrillard's major flaw is mistaking a handful of incipient developments
or budding trends for a full-blown or completely fixed new social order .
The total break with all past forms of social relations cannot be verified
either from within or from outside of Baudrillard's frameworks . While he denies
finding much systematicity in hyperreal capitalism and sees the end of "production" and "power" in the rise of seduction, Baudrillard still
clings to the image of a powerful exploitative system in his call to the masses to recognize "that a system is abolished only by pushing it into
hyperlogic."( n21) This twist in his thinking raises important questions. Why
does a social order that no
longer really exists need his theoretical intervention to be transformed by
mass resistance if it is not real, powerful or productive? Likewise, if the history of power and
production has ended, then why does Baudrillard envision today's best
radical opposition to capital and the state assuming the form of hyperconformity by
pushing "the system" into a hyperlogical practice of itself to induce the crisis
that might abolish it?¶ On the other hand, Baudrillard's strategy of "hyperconformity,"
as a means of radical resistance, does not seriously challenge the consumerist modes of domination
intrinsic to transnational corporate capitalism. Moreover, its ties to consumer subjectivity do not even begin to address other possible
strategies of resistance following lines drawn by gender, race, ethnicity, language or ecology. Unlike Lyotard, he
does not
advance any new conceptions of postmodern justice or articulate alternative
principles to represent meaningful narratives about values in hyperreality .
Thus, Baudrillard also can be tarred with the brush of neoconservatism, like many
other postmodernist critics of society.( n22) Baudrillard tends to misplace the concreteness of
the relations that he is investigating, lumping everything into the category of
"seduction" which, in turn, totally subsumes such complex factors as power,
production, sex, and economy into one universal force . He claims somewhat contradictorily
that "seduction . . . does not partake of the real order." Yet, at the same time, "seduction envelops the whole real process of power, as well as
the whole real order of production, with this never-ending reversibility and disaccumulation--without which neither power nor production
would even exist."( n23) While
Baudrillard makes these claims, he never really
demonstrates definitely how this all works with carefully considered evidence.
 Sanitization DA
The impact is sanitization—allows policymakers to coopt
poststructural concepts to justify interventions gone wrong
while doing nothing to change the squo.
Nik Hynek 13, Prof of International Relations and Theory of Politics at the Metropolitan University Prague and
Charles University, with David Chandler, No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies, Critical Studies on
Security, 2013 Vol. 1, No. 1, 46–63, http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/spais/migrated/documents/cssrg1.pdf
[Note: CSS = “Critical Security Studies”]
Conclusion¶ This article has argued that the appendage ‘critical’ should be removed to allow Security Studies to free itself
of the baggage of its founding. It is clear that what little emancipatory content critical
security theorising had initially has been more than exhausted and, in fact,
thoroughly critiqued. The boom in CSS in the 1990s and early 2000s was essentially parasitical on
the shift in Western policy discourses, which emphasised the radical and emancipatory
possibilities of power, rather than on the basis of giving theoretical clarity to counter-hegemonic forces. ¶ We
would argue that the removal of the prefix ‘critical’ would also be useful to distinguish security study based on critique of
the world as it exists from normative theorising based on the world as we would like it to be. As long as we keep
the ‘critical’ nomenclature, we are affirming that government and international
policy-making can be understood and critiqued against the goal of
emancipating the non-Western Other. Judging policy-making and policy
outcomes, on the basis of this imputed goal, may provide ‘critical’ theorists
with endless possibilities to demonstrate their normative standpoints but
it does little to develop academic and political understandings of the world
we live in. ¶ In fact, no greater straw[person] man could have been imagined,
than the ability to become ‘critical’ on the basis of debates around the claim
that the West was now capable of undertaking emancipatory policy
missions. Today, as we witness a narrowing of transformative aspirations on behalf of Western policy elites, in a
reaction against the ‘hubris’ of the claims of the 1990s (Mayall and Soares de Oliveira 2012) and a slimmed down
approach to sustainable, ‘hybrid’ peacebuilding, CSS has again renewed its relationship with the policy sphere. Some
academics and policy-makers now have a united front that rather than placing
emancipation at the heart of policy-making it should be ‘local knowledge’ and ‘local demands’.¶ The
double irony of the birth and death of CSS is not only that CSS has come full circle – from its liberal teleological
universalist and emancipatory claims, in the 1990s, to its discourses of limits and flatter ontologies, highlighting
differences and pluralities in the 2010s – but that this ‘critical’ approach to security has also
mirrored and mimicked the policy discourses of leading Western powers.
As policy-makers now look for excuses to explain the failures of the promise
of liberal interventionism, critical security theorists are on hand to salve
Western consciences with analyses of non-linearity , complexity and
human and non-human assemblages . It appears that the world cannot be
transformed after all . We cannot end conflict or insecurity, merely
attempt to manage them . Once critique becomes anti-critique (Noys 2011) and
emancipatory alternatives are seen to be merely expressions of liberal
hubris , the appendage of ‘critical’ for arguments that discount the
possibility of transforming the world and stake no claims which are
unamenable to power or distinct from dominant philosophical
understandings is highly problematic . Let us study security, its discourses and its
practices, by all means but please let us not pretend that study is somehow the same
as critique .
 Violence DA
The emphasis on simulation results in a conspiratorial approach
to politics that recreates conservative violence and stifles
politics
Latour 4—Professor and vice-president for research at Sciences Po Paris (Bruno, Why Has Critique Run out of
Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Inquiry, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-
CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf)
¶ Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars, science wars, and wars against terrorism. Wars
against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple:
Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add
fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Isit really the task of the humanities to add
deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of the critical
spirit? Has it run out of steam? ¶ Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right
target. To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time, military experts constantly revise
their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles,
their smart bombs, their missiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those
sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in
academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets.
Are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture
when everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if
we were still training young kids—yes, young recruits, young cadets—for wars that are no
longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them
ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated , for which we are so
thoroughly unprepared? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late— especially
French generals, especially these days. Would it be so surprising, after all, if intellectuals were
also one war late, one critique late—especially French intellectuals, especially now? It has been a long
time, after all, since intellectuals were in the vanguard. Indeed, it has been a long time since the very notion of the avant-
garde—the proletariat, the artistic—passed away, pushed aside by other forces, moved to the rear guard, or maybe lumped
with the baggage train.1 We are still able to go through the motions of a critical avant-garde, but is not the spirit gone? ¶ In
these most depressing of times, these are some of the issues I want to press, not to depress the reader but to press ahead,
to redirect our meager capacities as fast as possible. To prove my point, I have, not exactly facts, but rather tiny cues,
nagging doubts, disturbing telltale signs. What has become of critique, I wonder, when an
editorial in the New York Times contains the following quote? ¶ Most scientists
believe that [global] warming is caused largely by manmade pollutants that require
strict regulation. Mr. Luntz [a Republican strategist] seems to acknowledge as much
when he says that “the scientific debate is closing against us.” His advice,
however, is to emphasize that the evidence is not complete .¶ “Should the public come
to believe that the scientific issues are settled,” he writes, “their views about global warming will change accordingly.
Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a
primary issue.”2¶ Fancy that? An artificially maintained scientific controversy
to favor a “brownlash,” as Paul and Anne Ehrlich would say.3 ¶ Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some
time in the past trying to show “‘the lack of scientific certainty’” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a
“‘primary issue.’” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I?
After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the
public fromprematurely naturalized objectified facts.Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast? ¶ In which
case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in
ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to
combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters
of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real
prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and
incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still
running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made
up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are
always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular
standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same
argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our
lives . Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did
not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not?
Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good? ¶ Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can
use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it suits them and social construction when it suits them? Should we
apologize for having been wrong all along? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit
of soul-searching here: what were we really after whenwewere so intent on showing the social construction of scientific
facts? Nothing guarantees, after all, that\ we should be right all the time. There is no sure ground even for criticism.4 Isn’t
this what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anywhere? But what does it mean when this
lack of sure ground is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as an
argument against the things we cherish? ¶ Artificially maintained controversies are not the only worrying sign. What has critique
become when a French general, no, a marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak,
undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of nothingness? 5 What has become of
critique when a book that claims that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon can be a bestseller? I am ashamed to say that the author was French, too.6 Remember the good old days when
revisionism arrived very late, after the facts had been thoroughly established, decades after bodies of evidence had accumulated? Nowwe have the benefit of what can be called instant revisionism.
The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account, adding even more ruins to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the
smoke. What has become of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naı¨ve because I believe that the United States had
been attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naı¨vely believed in church, motherhood,
and apple pie? Things have changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naı¨vely believes in some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be
gullible: “Where have you been? Don’t you know that the Mossad and the CIA did it?” What has become of critique when someone as eminent as Stanley Fish, the “enemy of promises” as
LindsayWaters calls him, believes he defends science studies,my field, by comparing the laws of physics to the rules of baseball?7 What has become of critique when there is a whole industry
denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon? What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t
I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge

Let me be mean for a second. What’s the real difference between conspiracists and
(fig. 1)? ¶

a popularized, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick

reading of, let’s say, a sociologist as eminent as Pierre Bourdieu (to be polite I will stick with the French field
commanders)? In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of
everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the
thralls of a complete illusio of their real motives. Then, after disbelief has
struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both
cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark
acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the
academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-
slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to
portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something
troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement
of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of
the deep dark below . What if explanations resorting automatically to
power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness and deteriorated to
the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique? 8 Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too
seriously, but it worries me to detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief,
punctilious demands for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from
the social never land many of the weapons of social critique. Of course
conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but,
like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are
our weapons nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to
recognize, still burnt in the steel, our trademark: Made in Critical land. ¶ Do
you see why I am worried? Threats might have changed so much that we might still be directing all our arsenal east or
west while the enemy has now moved to a very different place. After all, masses of atomic missiles are
transformed into a huge pile of junk
once the question becomes how to defend against
militants armed with box cutters or dirty bombs. Why would it not be the same with
our critical arsenal, with the neutron bombs of deconstruction, with the
missiles of discourse analysis? Or maybe it is that critique has been miniaturized like computers have. I have always fancied that what took great
effort, occupied huge rooms, cost a lot of sweat and money, for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin, can be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s, which used to fill large halls
and expend a vast amount of electricity and heat, but now are accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail. As the recent advertisement of a Hollywood film proclaimed, “Everything is
suspect . . . Everyone is for sale . . . And nothing is what it seems.” ¶ What’s happening to me, you maywonder? Is this a case of midlife crisis? No, alas, I passed middle age quite a long time ago. Is
this a patrician spite for the popularization of critique? As if critique should be reserved for the elite and remain difficult and strenuous, like mountain climbing or yachting, and is no longer worth
the trouble if everyone can do it for a nickel? What would be so bad with critique for the people? We have been complaining so much about the gullible masses, swallowing naturalized facts, it
would be really unfair to now discredit the same masses for their, what should I call it, gullible criticism? Or could this be a case of radicalism gone mad, as when a revolution swallows its progeny?
Or, rather, have we behaved like mad scientists who have let the virus of critique out of the confines of their laboratories and cannot do anything now to limit its deleterious effects; it mutates now,
gnawing everything up, even the vessels in which it is contained? Or is it an another case of the famed power of capitalism for recycling everything aimed at its destruction? As Luc Boltanski and
Eve Chiapello say, the new spirit of capitalism has put to good use the artistic critique that was supposed to destroy it.9 If the dense and moralist cigarsmoking reactionary bourgeois can transform
him- or herself into a freefloating agnostic bohemian, moving opinions, capital, and networks from one end of the planet to the other without attachment, why would he or she not be able to absorb
the most sophisticated tools of deconstruction, social construction, discourse analysis, postmodernism, postology? ¶ In spite of my tone, I am not trying to reverse course, to become reactionary, to
regret what I have done, to swear that I will never be a constructivist any more. I simply want to do what every good military officer, at regular periods, would do: retest the linkages between the
new threats he or she has to face and the equipment and training he or she should have in order to meet them—and, if necessary, to revise from scratch the whole paraphernalia. This does not
mean for us any more than it does for the officer that we were wrong, but simply that history changes quickly and that there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an

¶ My argument is that a
older period the challenges of the present one. Whatever the case, our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget.

certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging
us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the
wrong sort of allies because of a little mistake in the definition of its main
target. The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not
fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism .
 A2 Kritik of War [Balsas]
Instead of dealing with real problems on the ground, they
retreat to the masturbatory sanctuary of word games---the
correct course of action is not word play, it is education and
action to abate the consequences of atrocity---their position is
ultimately one which authorizes colonialism and genocide
Balsas 06 [BALSAS is an interdisciplinary journal on media culture. Interview with Art Group BBM, “on first
cyborgs, aliens and other sides of new technologies,” translated from lithiuanian http://www.balsas.cc/modules.php?
name=News&file=print&sid=151]
Valentinas: We all know that Jean Baudrillard did not believe that the Gulf War did take place, as it was over-mediated
and over-simulated. In fact, the Gulf War II is still not over, and Iraq became much more than just a Frankenstein
laboratory for the new media, technology and “democracy” games. What can we learn from wars that do not take place,
even though they cannot be finished? Are they becoming a symptom of our times as a confrontation between multiple
time-lines, ideologies and technologies in a single place? Lars: Actually, it has always been the same: new wars have been
better test-beds for the state of art technologies and the latest computer-controlled firearms. The World War I already was
a fully mechanized war where pre-robots were fighting each other and gassing the troops. And afterwards, the winners
shape the new world order. Olaf: Who on hell is Baudrillard? The one who earns money by
publishing his prognoses after the things happen? What a fuck , French
philosophy deals too much with luxury problems and elegantly ignores the
problem itself. It’s no wonder, this is the colonizer’s mentality, you can hear
it roaring in their words: they use phrases made to camouflage genocide. I went to see
that Virilio’s exhibition "Ce qui arrive" at Foundation Cartier in 2003. I was smashed by that banal presentation of the evil
of all kinds: again, natural catastrophes and evil done by man were exposed on the same wall,
glued together with a piece of "theory". There you find it all, filed up in one row: the pure luxury
of the Cartier-funded Jean Nouvel building, an artwork without any blood in its veins , and that
late Christian philosophy about the techno-cataclysm being the revenge of God. Pure shit, turned into gold
in the holy cellars of the modern alchemists’ museums. The artist-made video
"documents" of the Manhattan towers opposed to Iraqian war pictures: that’s not Armageddon, that’s man-invented war
technology to be used to subdue others. And there is always somebody who pushes the
buttons, even when the button is a computer mouse some ten thousand
kilometers away from the place where people die, or even if it is a civil
airplanes redirected by Islamists. Everybody knows that. War technology has always
been made to make killing easier. And to produce martyrs as well. Janneke: Compare
Baudrillard with Henry Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red
Cross. Dunant was no philosopher, he was just an intelligent rich man in the late 19th century. But
his ideas went far more in the direction where you should hope to find
philosophers as well. He experienced war as a "randonneur": he passed by, he saw the suffering and the
inhumanity of war. And he felt obliged to act. Apart from the maybe 10 days he spent on the
battlefield, on the beautiful meadows in the Europeans Alps, helping wounded people to survive, as a complete
medical layman he decided to do something more sustainable against these
odds. He knew that his efforts couldn’t prevent war in general, but he felt that he
could alter the cruelty of reality. And he succeeded in doing it. No wonder that in our
days we find the most engaged people to support the TROIA projects intention in Geneva, where they
are still based. And they are not only doing their necessary surgeon’s work in the field: they are as well fighting
with the same energy on the diplomatic battle
Other Args
 A2 Vampiricism
Argument engagement is not commodification—saying that they
have come to an incorrect conclusion is not consuming their
knowledge
Rosi Braidotti 6, contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 76
I beg to differ from Spivak's assessment. The
charge of vampiristic or consumerist consumption
of others is an ill-informed way of approaching the issue, in that it ignores
the rigorous anti-humanistic, cartographic and materialistic roots of
poststructuralism. It specifically rests on a misreading of what is involved in the
poststructuralist critique of representation and on what is at stake in the
task of redefining alternative subject positions. Spivak attempts to rescue Derrida, whom she
credits with far more self-reflexivity and political integrity than she is prepared to grant to Foucault and Deleuze. The
grounds for this preferential treatment are highly debatable. Nomadic thinking challenges the
semiotic approach that is crucial to the 'linguistic turn' and also to
deconstruction. Both Deleuze and Foucault engage in a critical dialogue with it and work towards
an alternative model of political and ethical practice. It seems paradoxical
that thinkers who are committed to an analytics of contemporary subject-
positions get accused of actually having caused the events which they
account for; as if they were single-handedly responsible for, or even profiting from, the
accounts they offer as cartographies. Naming the networks of power-
relations in late postmodernity, however, is not as simple as metaphorizing and
therefore consuming them . In my view there is no vampiristic approach
towards 'otherness' on the part of the poststructuralists. Moreover, I find that
approach compatible with the emerging subjectivities of the former 'others' of Western reason. Late postmodernity has
seen the proliferation of many and potentially contradictory discourses and practices of difference, which have dislocated
the classical axis of distinction between Self or Same/Other or Different. The point of coalition between
different critical voices and the poststructuralists is the process of
elaborating the spaces in-between self and other, which means the practice
of the Relation . They stress the need to elaborate forms of social and
political implementation of non-pejorative and nondualistic notions of
'others'.
 A2 Labor = Death Deferred
It’s better than a violent death
Grant 76 [(Iian, senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol)
“LABOUR AND DEATH” Insomnia.ac] AT
Labour is slow death. This is generally understood in the sense of physical exhaustion. But it must be understood in
another sense. Labour is not opposed, like a sort of death, to the "fulfilment of life", which
is the idealist view; labour is opposed as a slow death to a violent death. That is
the symbolic reality. Labour is opposed as deferred death to the immediate death of

sacrifice . Against every pious and "revolutionary" view of the "labour (or culture) is the opposite of life" type, we
must maintain that the only alternative to labour is not free time, or non-labour, it is sacrifice.

Their alt can’t solve

Grant 76 [(Iian, senior lecturer at the University of the West of England in Bristol)
“LABOUR AND DEATH” Insomnia.ac] AT
This changes every revolutionary perspective on the abolition of power. If
power is death deferred, it
will not be removed insofar as the suspension of this death will not be
removed. And if power, of which this is always and everywhere the definition, resides in the act of
giving without being given, it is clear that the power the master has to unilaterally grant life
will only be abolished if this life can be given to him -- in a non-deferred
death. There is no other alternative ; you will never abolish this power by
staying alive, since there will have been no reversal of what has been given.
Only the surrender of this life, retaliating against a deferred death with an
immediate death, constitutes a radical response , and the only possibility of abolishing power.
No revolutionary strategy can begin without the slave putting his own death back at stake, since this is what the master
puts off in the différance from which he profits by securing his power. Refuse to be put to death, refuse to
live in the mortal reprieve of power, refuse the duty of this life and never be quits with living, ineffect be
under obligation to settle this long-term credit through the slow death of
labour, since this slow death does not alter the future of this abject dimension, in the fatality of power. Violent death
changes everything, slow death changes nothing, for there is a rhythm, a scansion necessary to symbolic exchange:
something has to be given in the same movement and following the same rhythm, otherwise there is no reciprocity and it
is quite simply not given. The strategy of the system of power is to displace the time of the exchange, substituting
continuity and mortal linearity for the immediate retaliation of death. It is thus futile for the slave (the worker) to give
little by little, in infinitesimal doses, to the rope of labour on which he is hung to death, to give his life to the master or to
capital, for this "sacrifice" in small doses is no longer a sacrifice -- it doesn't touch the most important thing, the différance
of death, and merely distils a process whose structure remains the same. We could in fact advance the hypothesis that in
labour the exploited renders his life to the exploiter and thereby regains, by means of this very exploitation, a power of
symbolic response. There was counter-power in the labour process as the exploited put their own (slow) death at stake.
Here we agree with Lyotard's hypothesis on the level of the libidinal economics: the intensity of the exploited's enjoyment
[jouissance] in their very abjection. And Lyotard is right. Libidinal intensity, the charge of desire and the surrendering of
death are always there in the exploited, but no longer on the properly symbolic rhythm of the immediate retaliation, and
therefore total resolution. The enjoyment of powerlessness (on sole condition that this is not a
phantasy aimed at reinstating the triumph of desire at the level of the proletariat) will
never abolish power.
The very modality of the response to the slow death of labour leaves the
master the possibility of, once again, repeatedly, giving the slave life through labour. The
accounts are never settled, it always profits power, the dialectic of power which plays on the splitting of the
poles of death, the poles of exchange. The slave remains the prisoner of the master's
dialectic, while his death, or his distilled life, serves the indefinite repetition of
domination.
A2 Simulations
 Top Level
Turn - Baudrillard’s politics are conformist - Playing with hyper-
reality shuts down real alternatives.
Donahue 1 (Department of English, Gonzaga University), (Brian, “Marxism, Postmodernism, Žižek,”
Postmodern Culture,12.2, Project Muse).
According to Žižek, theorists of postmodern society who make much of the
usurpation of the Real by the simulacrum either long nostalgically for the lost
distinction between them or announce the final overcoming of the "metaphysical obsession with authentic Being," or both (he
mentions Paul Virilio and Gianni Vattimo, and we might add Baudrillard to the list). In either case

they "miss the distinction between simulacrum and appearance ": What gets lost in today's
plague of simulations is not the firm, true, nonsimulated Real, but appearance itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: the simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while
appearance is symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate, imaginary and real become more and more
indistinguishable.... And, in sociopolitical terms, this domain of appearance (that is, symbolic fiction) is none other than that of politics.... The old conservative
motto of keeping up appearances thus today obtains a new twist:... [it] stands for the effort to save the properly political space. ("Leftist" 995-96) Making the same
the standard reading of "outbursts of
argument about a slightly different version of this problem, Žižek writes that

'irrational' violence" in the postmodern "society of the spectacle" is that "our

perception of reality is mediated by aestheticized media manipulations to
such an extent that it is no longer possible for us to distinguish reality from
its media image" (Metastases 75). Violent outbursts in this context are thus seen as "desperate attempts to draw a distinction between fiction
and reality... [and] to dispel the cobweb of the aestheticized pseudo-reality" (75). Again with reference to the Lacanian triad of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real, Žižek
What is missing from it is the crucial distinction
argues that this analysis is "right for the wrong reasons":

between imaginary order and symbolic fiction. The problem of contemporary media resides not in their
enticing us to confound fiction with reality but, rather, in their "hyperrealist" character by means of which they saturate the void that keeps open the space for
symbolic fiction.A society of proliferating, promiscuous images is thus not overly
fictionalized but is, on the contrary, not "fictionalized" enough in the sense
that the basis for making valid statements, the structure guaranteeing intersubjective communication, the order permitting shared narratives and, to use
Jameson's term, "cognitive mapping"11--in short, the realm of the Symbolic--is short-circuited by an

incessant flow of images, which solicit not analysis and the powers of
thought but rather nothing more than blank, unreflective enjoyment. The
kind of subjectivity that corresponds to this hyperreal, spectacularized
society without a stable Symbolic order is what Žižek calls in Looking Awry the
"pathological narcissist" (102). That is, following the predominance of the "'autonomous' individual of the Protestant ethic" and the
"heteronomous 'organization man'" who finds satisfaction through "the feeling of loyalty to the group"--the two models of subjectivity corresponding to previous
stages of capitalist society--today's media-spectacle-consumer society is marked by the rise of the "pathological narcissist," a subjective structure that breaks with
the "underlying frame of the ego-ideal common to the first two forms" (102). The first two forms involved inverted versions of each other: one either strove to
remain true to oneself (that is, to a "paternal ego-ideal") or looked at oneself "through the eyes of the group," which functioned as an "externalized" ego-ideal, and
sought "to merit its love and esteem" (102). With the stage of the "pathological narcissist," however, the ego-ideal itself is dissolved: Instead of the integration of a
The narcissistic subject
symbolic law, we have a multitude of rules to follow--rules of accommodation telling us "how to succeed."

knows only the "rules of the (social) game" enabling him to manipulate
others; social relations constitute for him a playing field in which he
assumes "roles," not proper symbolic mandates; he stays clear of any kind
of binding commitment that would imply a proper symbolic identification.
He is a radical conformist who paradoxically experiences himself as an
outlaw . (102)

Baudrillard is wrong – We’re aware of differences between real

life and media images. Just imagine how horrified you would be
if you were watching a horror movie and found out that the
actors were really being killed.
Zizek 2000 (University of Ljubljana), 2000 (Slavoj, March/April “The
Cyberspace Real,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/Žižek/Žižek-the-cyberspace-
real.html).
Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio)
justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic
immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by
any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real ? If not, how are we to detect in
cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the
symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging
domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship": the author (say, of the interactive immersive
environment in which we actively participate by role-playing) no longer writes detailed story-line, s/he merely provides
the basic set of rules (the coordinates of the fictional universe in which we immerse ourselves, the limited set of actions we
are allowed to accomplish within this virtual space, etc.), which serves as the basis for the interactor's active engagement
(intervention, improvisation). This notion of "procedural authorship" demonstrates the need for a kind of equivalent to
the Lacanian "big Other": in order for the interactor to become engaged in cyberspace, s/he has to operate within a
minimal set of externally imposed accepted symbolic rules/coordinates. Without these rules, the subject/interactor would
effectively become immersed in a psychotic experience of an universe in which "we do whatever we want" and are,
paradoxically, for that very reason deprived of our freedom, caught in a demoniac compulsion. It is thus crucial to
establish the rules that engage us, that led us in our immersion into the cyberspace, while allowing us to maintain the
distance towards the enacted universe. The point is not simply to maintain "the right measure" between the two extremes
(total psychotic immersion versus non-engaged external distance towards the artificial universe of the cyber-fiction):
distance is rather a positive condition of immersion. If we are to surrender to the enticements of
the virtual environment, we have to "mark the border," to rely on a set of
marks which clearly designate that we are dealing with a fiction, in the same way
in which, in order to let ourselves go and enjoy a violent war movie , we somehow
have to know that what we are seeing is a staged fiction, not real-life killing (imagine our
horrible surprise if, while watching a war scene, we would suddenly see that we are watching a snuff, that the actor
engaged in face-to-face combat is effectively cutting the throat of his "enemy"…). Against the theorists
who
fear that cyberspace involves the regression to a kind of psychotic incestuous
immersion, one should thus discern in today's often clumsy and ambiguous improvisations about
"cyberspace rules" precisely the effort to establish clearly the contours of a new
space of symbolic fictions in which we fully participate in the mode
disavowal, i.e. being aware that "this is not real life ."

Baudrillard’s critique is non-falsifiable

Marsh 95 – Philosophy Professor, Fordham (James, Critique, Action, and Liberation, p 292-3)
In such a postmodernist account is a
reduction of everything to image or symbol that misses
the relationship of these to realities such as corporations seeking profit,
impoverished workers in these corporations, or peasants in Third-World countries trying to conduct elections.
Postmodernism does not adequately distinguish here between a reduction of reality to image and a mediation of reality by
image. A media idealism exists rooted in the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism and doing
insufficient justice to concrete human experience, judgment, and free interaction in the
world.4 It is also paradoxical or contradictory to say it really is true that nothing is really true,’
that everything is illusory or imaginary. Postmodemism makes judgments that implicitly deny the
reduction of reality to image. For example, Poster and Baudrillard do want to say that we really are in a new age that is
informational and postindustrial. Again, to say that everything is imploded into media
images is akin logically to the Cartesian claim that everything is or might be a dream.
What happens is that dream or image is absolutized or generalized to the point that its original meaning lying in its
contrast to natural, human, and social reality is lost. We can discuss Disneyland as
reprehensible because we know the difference between Disneyland and the
larger, enveloping reality of Southern California and the United States.5
 Death
The aff’s relationship to death is one of up-front recognition and
humility. By banishing the specter of death, they just make the
sarcophagus invisible, turning confrontation into obsession
Dollimore, Sociology – U Sussex, ’98
(Jonathan, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, pg. 221)

Jean Baudrillard
presents the argument for the existence of a denial of death in its
most extreme form. For him, this denial is not only deeply symptomatic of contemporary reality, but represents an
insidious and pervasive form of ideological control. His account depends heavily upon a familiar critique of the
Enlightenment's intellectual, cultural and political legacy. This critique has become influential in recent cultural theory, though
Baudrillard's version of it is characteristically uncompromising and sweeping, and
more reductive than most. The main claim is that Enlightenment rationality is an instrument not of freedom and
democratic empowerment but, on the contrary, of repression and violence. Likewise with the Enlightenment's secular
emphasis upon a common humanity; for Baudrillard this resulted in what he calls 'the cancer of the Human' - far from being an
inclusive category of emancipation, the idea of a universal humanity made possible the demonizing of difference and the
repressive privileging of the normal: the 'Human' is from the outset the institution of its structural double, the 'Inhuman*. This
is all it is: the progress of Humanity and Culture are simply the chain of discriminations with which to brand 'Others' with
inhumanity, and therefore with nullity, {p. 125) Baudrillard acknowledges here the influence of Michel Foucault, but goes on to
identify something more fundamental and determining than anything identified by Foucault: at the very core of the
'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen,
children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death,
(p. 12.6) So total is this exclusion that, 'today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable
anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy' (p. 126). He
insists that
the attempt to abolish death (especially through capitalist accumulation), to separate it from life, leads only
to a culture permeated by death - 'quite simply, ours is a culture of death' (p. 127). Moreover, it is the
repression of death which facilitates 'the repressive socialization of life'; all existing agencies of repression
and control take root in the disastrous separation of death from life (p. 130). And, as if
that were not enough, our very concept of reality has its origin in the same separation or
disjunction (pp. 130-33). Modern culture is contrasted with that of the primitive and the
savage, in which, allegedly, life and death were not separated; also with that of the
Middle Ages, where, allegedly, there was still a collectivist, 'folkloric and joyous'
conception of death. This and many other aspects of the argument are questionable,
but perhaps the main objection to Baudrillard's case is his view of culture as a macro-
conspiracy conducted by an insidious ideological prime-mover whose agency is
always invisibly at work (rather like God). Thus (from just one page), the political economy supposedly
^intends* to eliminate death through accumulation; and 'our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death'
{p. 147; my emphases). What those like Baudrillard find interesting about death is not the old conception of it as a pre-cultural
constant which diminishes the significance of all cultural achievement, but, on the contrary, its function as a culturally relative
- which is to say culturally formative - construct. And, if cultural relativism is on the one hand about relinquishing the comfort
of the absolute, for those like Baudrillard it is also about the new strategies of intellectual mastery made possible by the very
disappearance of the absolute. Such modern
accounts of how death is allegedly denied, of how
death is the supreme ideological fix, entail a new intensity and complexity of interpretation and
decipherment, a kind of hermeneutics of death. To reinterpret death as a deep effect of
ideology, even to the extent of regarding it as the most fundamental ideological
adhesive of modern political repression and social control, is simultaneously to
denounce it as in some sense a deception or an illusion, and to bring it within the domain of
knowledge and analysis as never before. Death, for so long regarded as the ultimate reality - that which
disempowers the human and obliterates all human achievement, including the achievements of knowledge - now becomes the
object of a hugely empowering knowledge. Like omniscient
seers, intellectuals like Baudrillard and
Bauman relentlessly anatomize and diagnose the modern (or post-modern) human condition
in relation to an ideology of death which becomes the key with which to unlock the
secret workings of Western culture in all its insidiousness. Baudrillard in particular
applies his theory relentlessly, steamrollering across the cultural significance of the
quotidian and the contingent. His is an imperialist, omniscient analytic, a perpetual
act of reductive generalization, a self-empowering intellectual performance which
proceeds without qualification and without any sense that something might be
mysterious or inexplicable. As such it constitutes a kind of interpretative, theoretical
violence, an extreme but still representative instance of how the relentless
anatomizing and diagnosis of death in the modern world has become a struggle for
empowerment through masterful -i.e. reductive - critique. Occasionally one wonders if the
advocates of the denial-of-death argument are not themselves in denial. They speak
about death endlessly yet indirectly, analysing not death so much as our culture's attitude towards it. To that extent
it is not the truth of death but the truth of our culture that they seek. But, even as they make death signify in
this indirect way, it is still death that is compelling them to speak. And those like
Baudrillard and Bauman speak urgently, performing intellectually a desperate mimicry of
the omniscience which death denies. One senses that the entire modern enterprise of
relativizing death, of understanding it culturally and socially, may be an attempt to disavow it in the
very act of analysing and demystifying it. Ironically then, for all its rejection of the
Enlightenment's arrogant belief in the power of rationality, this analysis of death
remains indebted to a fundamental Enlightenment aspiration to mastery through
knowledge. Nothing could be more 'Enlightenment', in the pejorative sense that
Baudrillard describes, than his own almost megalomaniac wish to penetrate the truth
of death, and the masterful controlling intellectual subject which that attempt
presupposes. And this may be true to an extent for all of us more or less involved in the anthropological or quasi-
anthropological accounts of death which assume that, by looking at how a culture handles death, we disclose things about a
culture which it does not know about itself. So what has been said of sex in the nineteenth century may also be true of death
in the twentieth: it hasnot been repressed so much as resignified in new, complex and
productive ways which then legitimate a never-ending analysis of it . It is questionable
whether the denial of death has ever really figured in our culture in the way that
Baudrillard and Bauman suggest. Of course, the ways of dealing with and speaking about death have changed hugely,
and have in some respects involved something like denial. But in philosophical and literary terms
there has never been a denial of death.2 Moreover, however understood, the pre-modern period
can hardly be said to have been characterized by the 'healthy* attitude that advocates
of the denial argument often claim, imply or assume . In fact it could be said that we can begin to
understand the vital role of death in Western culture only when we accept death as profoundly, compellingly and irreducibly
traumatic.
 Suffering Matters
Turn - Relegating human suffering to the realm of simulation is
just nihilism, crushing politics.
Kellner, 89 Phil. Chair @ UCLA, 1989, Jean Baudrillard, p. 107-8, Douglas
Yet does the sort of symbolic exchange which Baudrillard advocates really provide a solution to the question of death?
Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange between life and death and his ultimate embrace of nihilism (see 4.4) is probably his most un-
Nietzschean moment, the instant in which his thought radically devalues life and focuses with a fascinated gaze on that
which is most terrible — death. In a popular French reading of Nietzsche, his ‘transvaluation of values’ demanded negation of all repressive
and life- negating values in favor of affirmation of life, joy and happiness. This ‘philosophy of value’ valorized life over death and derived its
In Baudrillard, by contrast, life does not
values from phenomena which enhanced, refined and nurtured human life.
exist as an autonomous source of value, and the body exists only as ‘the
caarnality of signs,’ as a mode of display of signification. His sign fetishism
erases all materialjty from the body and social life, and makes possible a
fascinated aestheticized fetishism of signs as the primary ontological reality .
This way of seeing erases suffering, disease, pain and the horror of death
from the body and social life and replaces it with the play of signs —
Baudrillard’s alternative. Politics too is reduced to a play of signs, and the
ways in which different politics alleviate or intensify human suffering
disappears from the Baudrillardian universe. Consequently Baudrillard’s theory
spirals into a fascination with signs which leads him to embrace certain
privileged forms of sign culture and to reject others (that is, the theoretical signs of modernity
such as meaning, truth, the social, power and so on) and to pay less and less attention to materiality
(that is, to needs, desire, suffering and so on) a trajectory will ultimately lead him to embrace
nihilism (see 4.4)
 A2 Disaster Porn
Obvious manipulation of the images demystifies news and
catastrophe reporting, fostering detachment that is crucial to
life in the modern age.
Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 60-61]
Here, then, is the international consciousness foiled by its own ideal, hoist with its own
petard. The Gulf War merely accentuated the disastrous impression of our having been
drawn so far into simulation that the question of truth and reality cannot even be posed,
of our having been drawn so far into the 'liberation' of the medium and the image that
the question of freedom cannot even be posed. But can news and the media really be put
on trial now? Absolutely not, for the simple reason that the media themselves hold
the key to the judicial enquiry. There can be no contesting their innocence
since 'disinformation' is always imputed to an accident of news-gathering
[information]; the guiding principle itself is never questioned.
And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian affair, and
the artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the same. One might ask
whether the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this staged event and the
simulacrum of their revolution, have not served as demystifiers of news and its guiding
principle. For, if the media image has put an end to the credibility of the event, the
event will, in its turn, have put an end to the credibility of the image. Never again shall
we be able to look at a television picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective
demystification we have ever known. The finest revenge over this new arrogant power,
this power to blackmail by events. Who can say what responsibility attaches to the
televisual production of a false massacre (Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating
of a true massacre? This is another kind of crime against humanity, a hijacking of
fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of millions of people by means of
television- a crime of blackmail and simulation. What penalty is laid down for such a
hijacking?
There is no way to rectify this situation and we must have no illusions: there is no
perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the 'Timisoara syndrome'. It is simply
the (immoral) truth of news, the secret purpose [destination] of which is to
deceive us about the real, but also to undeceive us about the real. There is no
worse mistake than taking the real for the real and, in that sense, the very excess of
media illusion plays a vital disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to
undo its own spell by its effects and the violence of information to be
avenged by the repudiation and indifference it engenders. Just as we should be
unreservedly thankful for the existence of politicians, who take on themselves the
responsibility for that wearisome function, so we should be grateful to the media for
existing and taking on themselves the triumphant illusionism of the world of
communications, the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the confusion of ideologies, the
stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality - soaking up all these things in their operation.
While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of intelligence, for where better
than on television can one learn to question every picture, every word, every
commentary? Television inculcates indifference, distance, scepticism and unconditional
apathy. Through the world's becoming-image, it anaesthetizes the
imagination, provokes a sickened abstraction, together with a surge of
adrenalin which induces total disillusionment. Television and the media would
render reality [Ie reel] dissuasive, were it not already so. And this represents an
absolute advance in the consciousness - or the cynical unconscious - of our age.
Cards to Integrate
2AC University K
Chow
 Chow – Understanding Good
Just because we can’t know what it feels like to be the other doesn’t
mean we can’t understand the experiences of the other
Simpson ‘01 (Lorenzo Charles- Professor of philosophy at the State University of New Work;
2001; “The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism”; 105;
https://books.google.com/books?
id=a9G7VOKNTlQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=young&f=false)
Young, therefore, illegitimately conflates the quite reasonable claim that "I cannot know
what it feels like to be you" with the claim that "I cannot understand you." She seems to
interpret understanding to refer to the idea of empathic understanding or empathic identification, ideas that Hans-Georg Gadamer so
trenchantly criticized Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Schlcicrmacher for promoting. As I have maintained, to
under-stand
another is not necessarily to "feel with" that other, but rather to understand the
descriptions under which she places actions, events, and situations. My
understanding of the other is linguistically enabled. The difference of different life
histories is what we attempt to bridge by the back and forth of hermeneutic
dialogue, which is always open to revision and on the lookout for premature
closure. In addition to conflating empathic identification with understanding, much of Young's argument here is predicated upon the
view that advo-cates of symmetry and reciprocity think that imagining oneself in the position of others is sufficient.17 But this is, of course,
precisely what motivated Habermas, for example, to dialogize Kantian ethics. If the other is not talking back, what else can I do but project
 2AC – Chow – AT: Instrumentalism
Zero risk of their Chow impact---instrumental knowledge
production doesn’t cause violence and discursive criticism could
never solve it anyway
Ken Hirschkop 7, Professor of English and Rhetoric at the University of Waterloo, July 25, 2007, “On Being
Difficult,” Electronic Book Review, online: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/transitive
This defect - not being art - is one that theory should prolong and celebrate, not remedy. For the most
egregious error Chow makes is to imagine that obstructing
instrumentalism is somehow a desirable and effective route for left-wing
politics . The case against instrumentalism is made in depth in the opening chapter, which
argues with reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that "[t]he dropping of the atomic bombs
effected what Michel Foucault would call a major shift in epistemes, a fundamental change in the organization, production
and circulation of knowledge" (33). It initiates the "age of the world target" in which war
becomes virtualized and knowledge militarized, particularly under the aegis of so-called "area
studies". It's hard not to see this as a Pacific version of the notorious argument that the Gulag and/or the Holocaust reveal
the exhaustion of modernity. And the first thing one has to say is that this interpretation of war as no
longer "the physical, mechanical struggles between combative oppositional
groups" (33), as now transformed into a matter technology and vision , puts
Chow in some uncomfortable intellectual company : like that of Donald
Rumsfeld, whose recent humiliation is a timely reminder that wars continue
to depend on the deployment of young men and women in fairly traditional
forms of battle. Pace Chow, war can indeed be fought, and fought successfully, "without the skills of playing video
games" (35) and this is proved, with grim results, every day. But it's the title of this new epoch - the title of the book as well
- that truly gives the game away. Heidegger's "Age of the World Picture" claimed that the
distinguishing phenomena of what we like to call modernity - science, machine technology,
secularization, the autonomy of art and culture - depended, in the last instance, on a particular
metaphysics, that of the "world conceived of and grasped as a picture", as something prepared, if you
like, for the manipulations of the subject . Against this vision of "sweeping global instrumentalism"
Heidegger set not Mallarmé, but Hölderlin, and not just Hölderlin, but also "reflection", i.e., Heidegger's own philosophy.
It's a philosophical reprise of what Francis Mulhern has dubbed "metaculture", the discourse in which culture is invoked
as a principle of social organization superior to the degraded machinations of "politics", degraded machinations which, at
the time he was composing this essay, had led Heidegger to lower his expectations of what National Socialism might
In the fog of metaphysics , every actually existing nation - America, the
achieve.
Soviet Union, Germany - looks just as grey, as does every conceivable form
of politics. For the antithesis of the "world picture" is not a more just
democratic politics, but no politics at all , and it is hard to see how this
stance can serve as the starting point for a political critique . If Chow decides to
pursue this unpromising path anyhow, it is probably because turning exploitation, military
conquest and prejudice into so many epiphenomena of a metaphysical
"instrumentalism" grants philosophy and poetry a force and a role in
revolutionising the world that would otherwise seem extravagant. Or it would do, if
"instrumentalism" was, as Chow claims a "demotion of language", if language was somehow more at home exulting in its
own plenitude than merely referring to things. Poor old language. Apparently ignored for centuries, it only receives its due
when poststructuralists force us to acknowledge it. In their hands, "language flexes its muscles and breaks the chains of its
hitherto subordination to thought" and, as a consequence, "those who pursue poststructuralist theory in the critical
writings find themselves permanently at war with those who expect, and insist on, the transparency - that is, the
invisibility - of language as a tool of communication" (48). We have been down this road before and will no doubt go down
it again. In fact, it's fair to say this particular journey has become more or less the daily commute of critical theory, though
few have thought it ought to be described in such openly military terms. There is good reason, however, to think
Chow's chosen route will lead not to the promised land of resistance and
emancipation, but to more Sisyphean frustration . In fact, there are several good reasons.
University K
 AT: Humanism K – Some Fixity Good
Their method precludes any degree of fixity necessary to
respond to specific problems---this locks in the worst forms of
violence
Katherine Fierlbeck 94, Professor of Political Science – Dalhousie University, "Post-Modernism and The Social
Sciences: Insights, Inroads, And Intrusions", History & Theory, 33(1)
In many respects, even the dismally skeptical post-modernists are too optimistic in their allegiance to post-modern ideas.
As many others have already pointed out, post-modernism offers little constructive advice
about how to reorganize and reinvigorate modern social relations. "The
views of the post-modern individual," explains Rosenau, "are likely neither to lead to a post-modern
society of innovative production nor to engender sustained or contained economic growth." This is simply because "these
are not post-modern priorities"(55). Post-modernism offers no salient solutions ; and, where it
does, such ideas have usually been reconstituted from ideas presented in other times and places.[9] What we
need are specific solutions to specific problems : to trade disputes, to the redistribution of
health care resources, to unemployment, to spousal abuse. If
one cannot prioritize public policy
alternatives, or assign political responsibility to address such issues, or even say without
hesitation that wealthy nations that steadfastly ignore pockets of virulent
poverty are immoral, then the worst nightmares of the most cynical post-
modernists will likely come to life. Such an overarching refusal to address
these issues is at least as dangerous as any overarching affirmation of
beliefs regarding ways to go about solving them.¶ Post-modernism suffers
from -- and is defined by -- too much indeterminacy . In order to achieve
anything, constructive or otherwise, human beings must attempt to understand the
nature of things, and to evaluate them. This can be done even if we accept
that we may never understand things completely , or evaluate them correctly. But if
paralysis is the most obvious political consequence of post-modernism, a graver danger lies in the
rejection of the "Enlightenment ideals" of universality and impartiality. If the
resounding end to the Cold War has taught us anything, it should be that the opposite of

"universalism" is not invariably a coexistence of "little narratives ": it can

be, and frequently is, some combination of intolerance, local prejudice,
suspicion, bigotry, fear, brutality, and persecution . The uncritical affiliation
with the community of one's birth, as Martha Nussbaum notes, "while not without causal and formative power, is ethically
arbitrary, and sometimes ethically dangerous -- in that it encourages us to listen to our
unexamined preferences as if they were ethical laws."[10]
 A2 Vampiricism K
WE don’t consume Black suffering by saying violence exists—
calling out power is not a commodification of otherness—its key
to acknowledge the difference between the self and others
Rosi Braidotti 6, contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 76
I beg to differ from Spivak's assessment. The
charge of vampiristic or consumerist consumption of
others is an ill-informed way of approaching the issue, in that it ignores the
rigorous anti-humanistic, cartographic and materialistic roots of
poststructuralism. It specifically rests on a misreading of what is involved in the
poststructuralist critique of representation and on what is at stake in the
task of redefining alternative subject positions. Spivak attempts to rescue Derrida, whom she credits
with far more self-reflexivity and political integrity than she is prepared to grant to Foucault and Deleuze. The grounds for this preferential
treatment are highly debatable. Nomadic thinking challenges the semiotic approach that is
crucial to the 'linguistic turn' and also to deconstruction. Both Deleuze and Foucault
engage in a critical dialogue with it and work towards an alternative model of political and
ethical practice. It seems paradoxical that thinkers who are committed to an
analytics of contemporary subject-positions get accused of actually having
caused the events which they account for; as if they were single-handedly
responsible for, or even profiting from, the accounts they offer as cartographies.
Naming the networks of power-relations in late postmodernity, however, is not as simple
as metaphorizing and therefore consuming them . In my view there is no
vampiristic approach towards 'otherness' on the part of the
poststructuralists. Moreover, I find that approach compatible with the emerging subjectivities of the former 'others' of
Western reason. Late postmodernity has seen the proliferation of many and potentially contradictory discourses and practices of difference,
The point of coalition
which have dislocated the classical axis of distinction between Self or Same/Other or Different.
between different critical voices and the poststructuralists is the process of
elaborating the spaces in-between self and other, which means the practice
of the Relation . They stress the need to elaborate forms of social and
political implementation of non-pejorative and nondualistic notions of
'others'.
 A2 Undercommons Alt
Their framing the university a locks them into a strong
ontological state that undermines the ability for challenges to
the problems they criticize
Katja Čičigoj 14, Stefan Apostolou-Hölscher and Martina Ruhsam, The Inflexions of the Undercommons,
Lingering Ghosts: (Un)Answered Questions, (Un)Present Speakers, (Un)Read Books and Readers?,
http://www.inflexions.org/radicalpedagogy/n8_tangent_cicigojapostolou-holscherruhsam.html
What are the Undercommons then? In their groundbreaking essay The University and the Undercommons Harney and
Moten describe a tendency that is not only valid for the contemporary academia in the US but has also been unfolding on a
rather international level, the latest since the Bologna reforms were decided by 29 European ministers of education in
1999. Harney and Moten paradoxically identify the idea of universitas as such
with its professionalization and thereby – being inspired by the operaist assumption that living
labor would always be creative whilst capital could only react to its inventions – juxtapose the mass
intellectuality of what they call the Undercommons with a privatization of
(knowledge) practices through their imprisonment inside the walls of the
academia: “The Universitas is always a state/ State strategy,“ they claim. In comparison the
Undercommons as maroons rather act against their administration by state
apparatuses. PERSISTENT QUESTIONS– 1. ONTO-METHODOLOGY: creation of
concepts (D&G): theory/philosophy as poetic practice versus a scientific attitude of understanding the world - raised as a
problem of metaphoric poetic language, this may be more than a mere question of
rhetorics: PHILOSOPHICAL-POLITICAL POIESIS can amount also to the
CREATION OF POLITICAL IMAGINATION against “capitalist realism” - i.e.
recognizing the immense political productivity and creativity of
innumerable practical readings of concepts such as the Multitude, the
Commons, and the Empire from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt or performativity from
Judith Butler – regardless of what our theoretical assessment of them might be in terms of how much they
“scientifically” can correspond to concrete social realities. - so what is the poetic practice of the
Undercommons as a concept? Can we envisage its political poesis (and how
to think of it in this temporal order, if the Undercommons is always
already here – see next point)? 2. EPISTEMOLOGY/POLITCS: Where and
how can we find/see the Undercommons at work ? If they are always
already here, they risk becoming ubiquitous and we risk not to spot them ...
And on the other hand – why should we spot them at all, if they are always
already here? - There seems to be an onto-political tension between “THE
ALWAYS ALREADY” and “the contrary to what is”: between assigning value
to the potential of what is already (the undercommons of study as always already going
on) AND DEMANDING A RADICAL CHANGE OR BRAKE , infrastructural

change etc. (for if what we are looking for is already here – it seems we
necessitate no political work anymore) Does the recognition of the “always
already” of the undercommons call for being complemented by political
work on what is not (yet)? Can we think of these two attitudes together, but
not merely in terms of a complementary “peaceful coexistence” ? Can they
inform each other – and how? About the Undercommons as Being... Always Already There “They saw
our bad debt coming a mile off. [...] Anywhere bad debt elaborates itself. Anywhere you can stay, conserve yourself, plan. A
few minutes, a few days when you cannot hear them say there is something wrong with you.” The Undercommons –
Against Politics? The intentional work of subjects towards a clear goal: “Our task is the self-defence of the surround in the
face of repeated, targeted dispossessions through the settler’s armed incursion. And while acquisitive violence occasions
this self-defence, it is recourse to self-possession in the face of dispossession (recourse, in other words, to politics) that
represents the real danger. Politics is an ongoing attack on the common – the general and generative antagonism – from
within the surround” […] We surround democracy’s false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a
decision, we’re undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, we’re unwilling” (Harney & Moten 17-19). An
abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life.
We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise,
every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home
sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfil by abolishing, to renew by
unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics
surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.” 3. THE INFORMAL/The need of
FORMATION/DIS-/RE-FORMATION: – “the informal” is proposed by Harney
and Moten as a way of thinking about the Undercommons ; but when
reflecting back on the specific conference set-up and how it worked out in
the end in terms of in-forming the way our discussions proceeded, it struck
me how perhaps what we think of as “the informal” is always already in-
formed by pre-formed relations and positions (also in the specific case of this conference, but

not only): how therefore a mere “via negative” of formal openness might not be
enough for everyone to feel addressed and included (does everyone need to be addressed
and included at all, however, or are we bound to always form specific regimes of
address and inclusion/exclusion?) - The question might therefore not be
how to form the informal (paradox?), but how can a pre-formed and informed
“informal” set-up be dis-formed and re-formed otherwise in order to
enable i.e. an emergence of a situation of study? - Is study really “the
informal” or does it need some kind of form-ation to take place, to enable a
study to occur ? Is study itself a kind of dis- and re-formation, neither the formation ex nihilo, nor the creation
of a supposed informal? 4.
(IM)PATIENCE AND (LACK OF) RESULTS: - Bojana Kunst asked –
why do we seem to be very patient when discussing the minute theoretical
discrepancies, but impatient when faced with concrete practices and
propositions? - To bring it further, does this indicate our inability to cross
contextual boundaries or is there something inherent in contemporary
modes of power operations that makes us prone to abstract assessment
but reluctant to concrete propositions ( unable to go “beyond the
symptom”)? - Randy Martin asked whether our inclination towards self-
assessment makes us perhaps too impatient to see and produce results. How to
enable the afterlife of the conference to linger? Cartography of Symptomatic Developments and Problems 1.
STRUCTURAL IMPOSSIBILITY Referring to the paradoxical situation in
which we usually find ourselves if we – while claiming or aiming to be part of the undercommons –
are deeply entangled with the problem of the commons as soon as we work to make a
living. (This shaking standpoint can also be observed if artists criticize the institution in their work while their pieces or
projects are passed on from institution to institution.) As soon as we have to earn money our
hands become dirty because we become part of the social/political system
we try to oppose, hence it is difficult to draw a demarcation line between
the commons and the undercommons or the critical academic and the
subversive intellectual . Honestly speaking, all of us who are writing this, are
entangled in both . Is there a critical culture that comprises both of them? (Ana Vujanović) Constantly being in
modes of producing while the WORK IS OUTSOURCED TO PRIVATE SPACES in front of the computer (Bojana Cveijć)
THE SHIFT FROM COLLABORATION AS A RESISTANT STRATEGY TO COLLABORATION AS A REQUIREMENT
Whereas collaboration was conceived as a resistant mode of artistic production – related to a set of artistic and socio-
political utopias in the 1960s, it has become an essential component and requirement for new modes of production in the
context of neoliberalism and by now dismayingly resembles the dominant narrative of creative capitalism with its praise of
plasticity, fluidity, networking, flexibility etc. (Boyan Manchev). One can observe a transformation
of the aim to connect people and the whole discourse that evolved around relations and
relational aesthetics (in the wake of Nicolas Bourriaud´s well-known book Relational Aesthetics) from
being a critical tool to becoming a normative discourse or practise. What are the
consequences of the institutionalisation of the discourse that evolved
around intersubjective relations in the performing arts and how does this development
react upon artistic practices and conversely? HAS THE SHIFT AWAY FROM THE PRODUCT
AND TOWARDS THE PROCESS LOST ITS RESISTANT MOMENTUM? Boyan
Manchev outlines that his move has once connoted a resistance against constant
production and sprang from the belief that the process could not be
commodified; that focussing on the process would hence be a gesture of
resistance against the commodfication of art-objects. But in our stage of
“ performance capitalism ” (Manchev) that pretends that there is no loss, no
waste and no finitude, every resistant strategy can perfectly be
appropriated by performance capitalism – the working process inclusively.
A certain fetishisation of the process that followed the fetishisation of the
object or product as an attempt to counter the latter resulted in the
commodification of the artistic process or labour that are goods by themselves now (Sergej
Pristaš). Are art institutions today places that are first and foremost dedicated to the promotion of artistic labour and the
reproduction of consumer relations as Pristaš claims? THE COMMONS OF EDUCATION Education based on a rigid
exchange of information, experiences and consensus whereas critique is in function of maintaining equilibrium. To resist
the tendency that a fast accumulation of information becomes the ultimate goal (or exchange-product) in a university as
privatized industry that trains flexible students to become quick absorbers in order to be fit for marketable pursuits. To
Continue Proposing – Again and Again: Lines of Flight THE UNDERCOMMONS, THE INFORMAL & THEIR CRITIQUE
OF SOVEREIGNTY The Undercommons are connected with the persistence of the informal that is in no account a mere
natural occurrence but has to be on the contrary permanently created, organized and fostered. (Stefano Harney) This
informal – as unfinished and vaguely wrong – can be a place of resistance against sovereign politics and is according to
Harney´s explanation connected with the temporal condition of making and creating time and with a certain deregulation
of the rigid organisation of universities in terms of spatial and temporal settings that would counter the rhythm of what he
calls “synaptic labour” - understood as a constant reanimation or reassembling of the assembly line. This would lead to:
COUNTERSPECULATION Study as a form of counterspeculation – dedicated to the
question: how can we think outside or beyond the rhythms and the
efficiency of synaptic labour? BUT “Would it not mean that to be critical of
the university would make one the professional par excellence , more
negligent than any other? To distance oneself professionally through
critique , is this not the most active consent to privatize the social
individual?” (Stefano Harney & Fred Moten) YET ANOTHER PARADOX How can I be an
“emigrant from conscription” (Harney and Moten)? This could be the question of a
professional who read the text of Harney and Moten and tries to thereafter
engage into the diligent business of the emigrant that Harney and Moten call for. But
this diligence would be one that follows a prescripted refuge and hence
one that would be conscripted too. SO? COUNTERSPECULATION! DISORGANISATION The
potential that a collective disorganised study might bear. A learning of/in/as disorganisation would have to invent and test
possibilities to intervene. But isn´t it impossible to organize disorganisation? THE RIGHT OF A CERTAIN OBSCURITY
OF PRODUCTION Today an artwork is not valorised after it is produced and shown, it is likely that the valorisation is
imposed on the work beforehand in relation to a production of desire (Sergej Pristaš). RESISTANCE How can we
resist the call of conscription as artists and avoid performing the perfectly
flexible, mobile, precarious, creative individual (that could perfectly be recruited for any kind of
challenging business or creative industry and nearby upgrades delapidated neighbourhoods)? How to
counterpose the hegemonic demand to squeeze or exploit every potential
relentlessly? THE INVENTION OF NEW SPACES AND CO-WORKING STRATEGIES The development
of infrastructural facilities and the creation of situations that enable exchange without
focussing exclusively on resulting products (for instance the ID_Frankfurt:
http://www.frankdances.org/idfrankfurt/) TO RISK THE ENDEAVOUR OF SPECULATIVE THINKING Semiotic politics
often operate in terms of limiting imaginative capacities and solidifying the boundaries of the thinkable as defined by the
context we are situated in. Hence, a radical break or rupture with the status quo would
also demand an exodus from these prevailing semiotics in order to not
operate “with the same weapons” that the enemy is using (to quote Mårten Spångberg
referring to Levi Bryant) or in order to keep the semiotic system open for poietic in(ter)vention. Might adopting another
perspective (the dog, the alien, the thing?) or conceiving another horizon of thought (a flat ontology) in the hope that this
difference in perspective will enable us to change a certain structure, help? Do we have to re-think agency – assumed to be
the priviledge of human individuals and groups – and shift our awareness to our alliances and interdependencies with
non-human, inanimate, technological and alien entities? TO RECOGNISE ABUNDANCE IN THE PLACES OF ALLEGED
SCARCITY SUBVERSIVE AFFIRMATION The boycott-group (assembled students of the Institute of Applied Theatre
Studies at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen) presented their act of subversive affirmation in response to a call of the
Maxim Gorki theatre in Berlin that invited young makers to present pieces under the motto “Rehearse rebellion”
(“Aufstand proben”) in 2013. By occupying the stage of the theatre the boycott-group decided to refuse to perform if there
are no fees for the performers but to perform this refusal on the stage of the theatre instead of dismissing the invitation.
The group answered the call with an intrusion of the real and demonstrated real resistance against the exploitative
working conditions imposed by the theatre instead of displaying a represented or rehearsed one . Is subversive
affirmation one of the only options left? Do we have to use the institutions to
articulate our refusals or counter-propositions in regard to the offered
working conditions? Do we have to betray the dispositif of representation by still opting for being in it? How
can we keep asking questions, stay curious and continue to make our voices
heared while at the same time avoiding to perform a professional criticality –
in the way Harney and Moten critizice it? How can we avoid a criticality that is performed in
order to keep up a certain ritual of self-display as professional routine? How can we instead practice an affirmative
criticality that is not resulting from a withdrawal into a distant position outside but that would spring from the wish to
affirm and spur ways of thinking, doing and perceiving that don´t comply with the neoliberal rationale and its incessant
search for marketable outputs? In this sense we would then ask – and persist to ask – not to keep the
academic ritual going but as a matter of curiosity and real interest – how can we be critical in the
closest proximity – by being commited to a passion of thinking that is
dedicated to the poietic potential of theory and that scrutinizes categories and
practices that pretend timeless stability or self-evident relevance? But a

thinking that is not self-satisfied with the performance of its criticality. A

thinking that ultimately seeks an affirmative performative practice. And
one that claims time as the fundamental condition for any
thought/practice/change to occur.
2AC Cosmo, Complexity
Cosmo
 Case O/W
National governments exist now – only the plan concretely
affects their action in the short term – alt can’t solve as fast or
effectively as the aff
Plan is negative state action – reducing the size of the military
reduces national power and is consistent with their alt
Authoritarianism turns it – the plan prevents the Ugandan
government from becoming violently nationalistic and
autocratic – anything else causes Uganda to attack other
countries and increase its control over its citizens, which is
inconsistent with their alt – and autocracies would resist any
attempt to overcome nationalism, so the plan is necessary for alt
solvency
EAC turns it – increases regional cooperation and breaks down
nationalism
 Permutation
Perm- do the plan and all non-mutually exclusive parts of the alt
We avoid and solve the problematic practices they critique
Deudney and Ikenberry 12 [Daniel, Associate Professor of Political Science @ Johns Hopkins
University, and G. John, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs @ Princeton University,
November, “Democratic Internationalism An American Grand Strategy for a Post-Exceptionalist Era,” p. 7-9] AG
For this new world, the United States needs a new grand strategy: democratic
internationalism. The overall aim of this strategy is order building, both
domestic and international, to create a world in which peace, prosperity,
and freedom are widely shared. A liberal world order is marked by
openness, sovereign equality, respect for human rights, democratic accountability, widely shared economic
opportunity, and the muting of great power rivalry , as well as collective efforts to
keep the peace, promote the rule of law, and sustain an array of
international institutions tailored to solving and managing the problems of
interdependence and common global problems. 19 This vision has deep roots, but the
conditions for its realization are more favorable today than at any point in history. In Woodrow Wilson’s era, democracies
were few, interdependence was relatively low, and much of the world was locked into European imperial bondage. In
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman’s era, much of the world was still in empires, the few democracies that existed
were precarious and under assault, and liberal order building largely proceeded within the beleaguered free world
camp.20 More recently, over the past three decades, U.S. foreign policy has been
consumed with the collapse of communism, the global war on terrorism,
and the disorders of the Middle East. These problems remain, but such a narrowly
focused American grand strategy has overlooked the opportunities and problems
presented by the enlarged democratic world. In the past, the obstacles to the universal realization of
the liberal vision were almost insurmountable and located outside the democratic world. Today, the realization of the
worldwide triumph of the liberal vision is within reach and the obstacles are located primarily within the democratic
world. Pivoting toward the democratic world entails a greater focus on
stabilizing and deepening. Policymakers should direct more attention to
consolidate fragile democracies and refurbish institutions in older
democracies. At the same time, democratic internationalism involves less
democratic expansion—and, in particular, less coercive democracy promotion.
Specifically, an American grand strategy of democratic internationalism should
pursue five goals: increasing equality of opportunity, assuming responsibility,
smartly managing interdependence, leading coalitions and recasting global
bargains, and building the democratic community. This is a grand strategy for the present and future that builds on
deep historical foundations and more recent U.S. foreign policy initiatives. Developing and implementing programs to
realize each of these five goals should be at the center of U.S. foreign policy. First, increasing equality of
opportunity means restoring and extending liberal and social democracy
throughout the democratic world.21 Tackling the maldistribution of wealth,
income, and opportunity that has increasingly marked contemporary democracies requires
reversing many of the policies of Reagan-Thatcher fundamentalist capitalism. The
first priority of democratic internationalism is to grapple with runaway globalization
and the neoliberal turn to unregulated capitalism that has skewed liberal
order building and spawned divisions among the liberal democracies. More specifically, the equity
agenda requires the restoration of progressive income taxation and heavy taxation of large estates, and greater roles for
workers and their unions in corporate governance.22 It requires effective regulation of financial
institutions and offshore tax havens. The equity agenda also necessitates a
redressing of the intergenerational contributions and benefits in spending on social
security and health. Second, assuming responsibility means that the first step in
solving global problems is solving national ones. And the first step in solving national
problems is for people to take responsibility as individuals and communities. American institutions—public and private—
should undertake efforts to cultivate good citizenship. The aim should be citizenship in which the claims for rights and
opportunities are balanced between a sense of individual responsibility and a willingness to contribute to public problem
solving.23 For instance, the first step in addressing global climate change is for
individuals, corporations, and local governments to reduce their
contribution to the problem. Another initiative would encourage
individuals, families, and communities to take responsibility for
maintaining their health in order to reduce the necessity of expensive health
care. Third, smartly managing interdependence involves building
international institutions in new and experimental ways. Rather th.an automatically
building larger transnational or supranational bodies and organizations, the democratic community
should explore networks, private-public partnerships, and informal groupings as
frameworks for managing interdependence. The next generation of global governance will
employ approaches that combine agendas of formal international institution building with complementary efforts and
strategies from nongovernmental organizations, networks of research institutions, local governments, and corporations.
The goal must be to leverage the energy of civil society actors and configure institutions that
complement rather than supplant their activities. Fourth, bolstering
coalitional leadership and recasting global bargains means reconfiguring
the rights and responsibilities in existing institutions to reflect the diffusion
of power in an increasingly multipolar world. One example could include consolidating the
British and French permanent veto-bearing seats on the UN Security Council into a single European Union (EU) seat and
extending permanent seats to rising democracies.24 Adjusting to multipolarity does not mean
abandoning U.S. leadership. Coalitional leadership means that the United States will lead by
collaboration and reciprocal agreement rather than rely on preponderance,
threats, and coercion. Of course, the United States, like all other states, will need to be willing—in extreme
cases—to employ armed force to protect core interests. Playing the role of coalitional leader will
also require the United States to more readily support the proposals of others and abandon its Cold
War and hegemonic tendency to assume that it has to be the prime source of initiatives and ideas.
Finally, building community requires developing more convergent self-understandings and mutual understandings among
the democracies. To start with, democratic community cannot be assumed . The widespread use
of the term exaggerates the extent of solidarity among the democracies.25 Rather, democratic
community should be seen as an aspiration that requires efforts and
programs to achieve. Bridging the old established democracies with the new postcolonial democracies will
require both sides to abandon perceptions and mindsets inherited from earlier eras. The United States will need
to downplay the exceptionalist view of itself that blocks opportunities for
copying successful innovations from other democracies and rankles the
sensibilities of old allies and potential new friends. Closing the “democratic community
gap” will require building links between the United States and numerous non-Western democracies, as well as with
longstanding democracies strongly committed to robust government promotion of social and economic equity associated
with social democracy. Bridging current divides will require overcoming anti-Europeanism
in America and anti-Americanism in Europe, as well as anti-third worldism in America and anti-
Americanism in the third world.
 National Interest Good
Turn - Rejection of national interest eradicates the very notion
of value making total violence inevitable.
Gelven ’94 (Michael, Prof. Phil. – Northern Illinois U., “War and Existence: A Philosophical Inquiry”, p. 268-
269)
1. The concept that the only acceptable behavior among nations is a total and continuous peace, that such an
unbroken peace is the supreme desideratum, is fatal. For a commitment to a complete and total peace
means that at no time can any nation assert its own interests or values to maintain itself as an autonomous
nation. The counterargument, that a nation might sacrifice its uniqueness or autonomy for the sake of a world peace, is to
misunderstand what peace means. True peace is possible only if the we-they principle is respected .
Furthermore, the idea that no nation can struggle for its own authenticity or independence, because such uses of military
power manifest a step away from peace, is simply bad thinking. It does not seem to me that a small nation going to war in
order to achieve some semblance of respect for its own values necessarily entails an all-out nuclear holocaust. Perhaps
such small struggles throughout the world are actually beneficial, for they keep the world political body alive
with change and with openings for hope. Indeed, even the idea of the superpowers involved with certain
wars for their own interests is not necessarily an antipeace event, since peace depends on the
authenticity of one's own. It is far more likely that an actual nuclear confrontation with the two superpowers will
happen if no wars are fought on the level of "conventional" weaponry. Mankind does not function well
in the greenhouse of abstraction . 2. The disjunction assumed by some who perceive this question
simplistically is that one must always assume that there are only two choices: nuclear confrontation or submission. This
notion must be resisted at all costs. Surely no simplistic idea is more deadly than this, because in the last analysis it tends
to make any notion of sympathy for what is one's own an impediment to peace. But peace can be achieved only when
the sense of what is one's own continues to matter, and to matter greatly. Indeed, the concept that one must
see this problem in terms of the dreadful decision between submission and nuclear madness should be replaced with an
understanding of what it means to be a state at all. We must recognize two things: retention of our own values is an
absolute commitment, but avoidance of a nuclear holocaust is also an absolute value. By these principles the
two values are conjoined rather than disjoined. 3. Contained wars, whether nonnuclear or even using nuclear weapons
on a limited basis, should not be seen as an absolute evil. Those of us who care very much about avoiding a nuclear
confrontation are simply different from those who merely lament the possibility with a wringing of hands. To forgo those
values is to submit to the nihilistic point of view that the nuclear weapons confront us with only two alternatives. We
must remain human beings, and we must retain patriotism in order for there to be peac e. But peace
entails the willingness to defend oneself against tyranny; otherwise peace comes to be identified with
capitulation. A Carthaginian peace is not the only kind of peace possible; it is indeed only an embryonic notion of peace.
4. The slogan "Peace at any price," therefore, represents the greatest promise of a nuclear war : first,
because it promotes an opportunity for blackmail and would-be aggressors, but second , and more
important, because it sponsors an atmosphere and a way of thinking that undermines the very meaning
of peace itself, respect between nations. To urge capitulation rather than warfare when basic institutions are
threatened is to deny the very meaning of peace, since peace can occur only when there are autonomous nations.
Such pacifistic thinking also creates a totally false view of what it means to be a human being, for it sets up
as the supreme value the continued existence of individual lives only, denying the truth that we are not isolated
beings without institutional meaning. 5. Therefore, the great question of our day is not the question of peace or war,
but rather the avoidance of a nuclear holocaust as well as a nihilistic capitulation. By recognizing the true meanings of war
and peace, the proper misunderstanding of this profound truth can be realized. To forget these fundamental
meanings invites both nihilism and nuclear war.
 Nationalism Inevitable
You CANNOT choose a new identity—historical context and
inherent patriotism make institutional, national bias impossible
Himmelfarb ‘2 (Gertrude, Prof. Emeritus – Graduate School of CUNY, Fellow – British Academy and
American Academy for Arts and Sciences, in “For Love of Country?” Ed. Joshua Cohen, p. 76-77)
There are other omissions here—no mention, for example, of Islamic fundamentalism, which might evoke
disagreeable images of female subjugation and abuse; religious intolerance and persecution, despotic
governments and caste systems, child labor and illiteracy, and other unsavory practices that are hardly consonant with the
vision of a universal "moral community." Cosmopolitanism obscures all such unwelcome facts—obscures,
indeed, the reality of the world in which a good many human beings actually reside. It is utopian, not only
in its unrealistic assumption of a commonality of "aims, aspirations, and values," but also in its unwarranted
optimism. One might object that the Western-style, capitalist nation-state has its own deficiencies and
evils. And so it does. But they are deficiencies and evils that are at least partly remediable within the framework of a
democratic polity and a secure legal system. And at their worst, they pall in contrast to the deficiencies and evils
of non-Western, noncapitalist countries. ABOVE ALL, WHAT COSMOPOLITANISM OBSCURES, EVEN
denies, are the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history, culture,
tradition, community—and nationality. These are not "accidental" attributes of the individual. They
are essential attributes. We do not come into the world as freefloating,
autonomous individuals. We come into it complete with all the particular, defining characteristics that go
into a fully formed human being, a being with an identity. Identity is neither an accident nor a matter or choice .
It is given, not willed. We may, in the course of our lives, reject or alter one or another of these givens, perhaps for
good reason. But we do so at some cost to the self. The "protean self," which aspires to create an identity de novo, is
an individual without identity, just as the person who repudiates his nationality is a person without a nation. To pledge
one's "fundamental allegiance" to cosmopolitanism is to try to transcend not only nationality but all the
actualities, particularities, and realities of life that constitute one's natural identity. Cosmopolitanism
has a nice, high-minded ring to it, but it is an illusion, and, like all illusions, perilous.

It’s only possible to feel national identity. Ethically identifying

with humanity leads to violent individualism.
McConnell ‘2 (Michael, William B. Graham Prof. Law – U. Chicago, in “For Love of Country?” Ed. Joshua
Cohen, p. 81-82)
Teach children instead to be "citizens of the world," and in all likelihood they will become neither patriots
nor cosmopolitans, but lovers of abstraction and ideology, intolerant of the flaw-ridden individuals and
cultures that actually exist throughout the world. Humanity at large—what we share with other humans as rational
beings—is too abstract to be a strong focus for the affections. Since "the world" has never been the locus of
citizenship, a child who is taught to be a "citizen of the world" is taught to be a citizen of an abstraction. Abstract
cosmopolitanism may well succeed in introducing skepticism and cynicism regarding the loyalties that now exist,
but it is unlikely to create a substitute moral community . Nussbaum appears to
recognize this difficulty when she comments that the writings of Marcus Aurelius create a feeling of "boundless
loneliness, as if the removal of the props of habit and local boundaries had left life bereft of any warmth and security"
Cosmopolitanism, she admits, "offers no such refuge; it offers only reason and the love of humanity, which may seem at
times less colorful than other sources of belonging." But she does not recognize that this is inherent in the project of
directing the affections toward objects so distant that they have no reality in the life of a child. Love cannot be
directed toward "humanity"; it can be directed only toward real people, with whom one can have a real
relationship. Moral education in a cosmopolitan vein is thus likely to turn out not only too weak to be useful in its
own right, but destructive of the moral communities that have managed to persist in the face of Western
materialism and cynicism. In his Tract Relative to the Popery Laws, Burke wrote: To commiserate the distresses of all
men suffering innocently, perhaps meritoriously, is generous, and very agreeable to the better part of our nature,—a
disposition that ought by all means to be cherished. But to transfer humanity from its natural basis, our legitimate and
homebred connections,—to lose all feeling for those who have grown up by our sides, in our eyes, the benefit of whose
cares and labors we have partaken from our birth, and meretriciously to hunt abroad after foreign affections, is such a
disarrangement of the whole system of our duties, that I do not know whether benevolence so displaced is not almost the
same thing as destroyed, or what effect bigotry could have produced that is more fatal to society. If cosmopolitanism is
seen as opposing localized attachments, it will most likely prove destructive of these ends. To call these
doser ties of nation, community, or religion "morally irrelevant" (Nussbaum's words) is to undermine
the very basis of our natural sociality. Such a teaching is more likely to be received as a justification for
selfish individualism than as an inspiration to generous cosmopolitanism. We will not love,those distant from
us more by loving those close to us less. An abstract cosmopolitanism, moreover, is not just "less colorful" (hence less
likely to form the basis for an effective moral education). It also has the danger of breeding contempt for our
actual fellow citizens, who likely will remain mired in their parochialism, as well as for good people elsewhere,
similarly mired. No actual culture is cosmopolitan, in the sense that Nussbaum uses the term. Each is parochial in its
own way. The moralistic cosmopolitan, therefore, is not one who everywhere feels comfortable but who
everywhere feels superior.

Exceptionalism is necessary. If we don’t care about who we are

we cannot respect the other enough to create peace.
Gelven ’94 (Michael, Prof. Phil. – Northern Illinois U., “War and Existence: A Philosophical Inquiry”, p. 254-256)
But why should we-ye become we-us? Peace is the positive existential modality of sharing the world without surrendering
autonomy. To confuse "peace" with "reductionism" is the guarantee of war. But what must be presupposed in order for
there to be such a thing as we-ye? The ultimate presupposition is that for us, the we matters, and for the other, the ye
matters. In other words, the we-ye is possible only because both "we" and "ye" care about their autonomy. If
either of these autonomous ways of being are in any way threatened, the we-ye becomes we-they. The threat can be either
from outside or from an insufficiently existential understanding of who one is from within. Thus, to continue to care
about who we are is actually a support for the integrity of the we-ye and hence also implies a respect for
the autonomy of the other. Hence, the genuine threat to peace, to the we-ye, is the failure to let who we are
and who ye are matter. Peace is always between nations, just as war is between nations. Thus, if one nation
ceases to be an autonomous nation, there can be no peace. Just as, in moral terms, it is impossible for
anyone to have respect for others unless one first has respect for one's own self, so in international terms it is
impossible for there to be a true peace without the sense of a nation's own worth. But this means that the state of
coexisting in nonbelligerence is not the supreme value; it is dependent on the more fundamental principle that one's own
matters. The true sense of peace consists, therefore, in letting others be, but only if both the security and
self-confidence of one's own nation is first assured. The third step in the story of peace is a major advance over
step one and step two because it allows others to enjoy the worth of who one is and, in doing this, is a deepening and
enrichment of oneself. And surely this corresponds to one's normal, everyday sense of peace. We enjoy peace, not merely
because we do not have to fight but because the wealth of other cultures can be enjoyed. In peace, we can visit other
nations, share other cultures, learn other traditions. But to recognize and even respect others does not imply relativism; on
the contrary, a genuine peace is possible only if the robust sense of one's own is retained. Does this mean
that only armed, militarily prepared nations, supremely committed to autonomy, can enjoy peace?
Surely this is true. This is true, first, in the practical sense. Deny, by conquest, another nation of its sense
of worth, and you surely sow the seeds of resentment and another war. Witness the peace treaty against the
German nation after World War I. On the other hand, compare the attitude of the victors in World War II. One of the most
brilliant moves of MacArthur was surely letting the Japanese keep their emperor. For frail and disarmed as he was after
the peace treaty, he was still the same man who was emperor of the Japanese: they were still a people. So, on the level of
simple practicality, respect for the autonomy of oneself and others is essential. But theoretically the point is even
more obvious. How can I respect others unless I first respect myself? How can there be peace unless
there are nations at all? But as obvious as these observations may be, they have not as yet focused on an existential
understanding of peace. We have seen that peace is we-ye and war is we-they. This distinction is thought of in different
ways for the nation at war and the nation at peace. We have seen that, in peacetime, we ourselves respect the
fundamental right of meaning that another nation has. But of course, we do this in war as well. The difference is
that in peace we see this affirmation as a part of our own meaning, nonthreatened by the other. This is to rejoice that we
are we and ye are ye. War and peace are equally fundamental: war focuses on the triumph of the we over the they; peace,
the triumph of the we with the ye. Hence, the autonomy of the we-meaning is paramount. Since this paramount meaning
of the we is presupposed in war and peace, it is fundamental, presupposed in both we-ye and we-they. But this does not
mean that peace is reduced to war, for with peace a new and further concept is developed, that of the autonomous ye. We
now celebrate the fact that others can have the same affirmation of what is their own. With this definition, peace is seen as
entirely consistent with the meaning of war. It has its own special meaning, established by the journey through the first
three stages of our genealogy: it gives security, self-confidence, and affirms universality of belonging. The meaningful
peace exists only because of the willingness and readiness of each nation to assert its own independence
and autonomy, so that meaningful and lasting peace can be accomplished only by the continuing respect
of the warrior as an essential part of one's nation. To think in this way is to be a man of peace, for it
establishes an existential worth in being at peace that is lacking in being at war. The man of peace, however,
must always remain a reluctant warrior, ready to defend his home and nation should the we-ye develop into the threat of
the we-they.

Cosmopolitanism is impossible. National distinctions are an

inevitability and precondition for politics.
Crick ’00 (Bernarnd, Prof. Politics and Fellw – Birkbeck College, “Essays on Citizenship”, p. 137-138
There is a deeper intellectual reason, however, why some of the global-first organizations and teachers must always
remain a little disappointed. This has never been put more clearly than by Hannah Arendt: Nobody can be a
citizen of the world as he is the citizen of his country. [Karl] Jaspers, in his Origin and Goal of History (1953),
discusses extensively the implications of a world state and a world empire. No matter what form a world
government… might assume, the very notion of one sovereign force ruling the whole earth, holding the
monopoly of all means of violence, unchecked and uncontrolled by other sovereign powers, is not only a forbidding
nightmare of tyranny, it would be the end of all political life as we know it . Political
concepts are based on plurality, diversity and mutual limitations. A citizen is by definition a citizen
among citizens of a country among countries. His rights and duties must be defined and limited, not only
by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory. Philosophy may conceive of the
earth as the homeland of mankind and one unwritten law, eternal and valid for all. Political deals with men,
nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which
hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept but a living political reality.
(Arendt, 1970, p. 84)
Complexity
 Complexity Theory Wrong
Complexity theory has zero validity as a means of interpreting
real world events. Lack of empirical observations means
complexity cannot interpret our social reality or improve policy
making.
Rosenhead, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics, ‘98
[Jonathan, “Complexity theory and management practice”, Science as Culture
http://human-nature.com/science-as-culture/rosenhead.html, RSR]
It hardly needs saying that there is no formally validated evidence demonstrating that
the complexity theory-based prescriptions for management style, structure and process do
produce the results claimed for them. These results are generally to do with long-term survival, a
phenomenon not susceptible to study using short-term experimental methods. Such evidence as is
adduced is almost exclusively anecdotal in character. The stories range from improving
tales of successful corporate improvisation, to longer accounts of organisational death wishes or of innovation which
bypasses the obstruction of the formal hierarchy; there are also approving quotations from business leaders. The problem
with anecdotal evidence is that it is most persuasive to those who experienced the events in question, and to those who are
already persuaded. For others it can be hard to judge the representativeness of the sample of exhibits. This is especially so
if, even unintentionally, different standards of proof or disproof are used for different sides of an argument. Such
distortions do occur in Stacey (1992). Thus the advantage of opportunistic policies is supported by presenting examples of
success, while the perils of formal planning methods are driven home by examples of failure. Yet obviously opportunism
has its failures, and analytic techniques even have their modest achievements – which are not cited. In the absence of a
conclusive case based on evidence of organisational success, it is not surprising that great weight is placed on the authority
of science. Wheatley (1992) has it in her title – "Leadership and the New Science". Merry (1995) relegates it to his sub-
title, but in the plural: "Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization and Complexity". Indeed ‘New
Sciences’, always capitalised, runs through his book like the message in Blackpool rock. However all management
complexity authors lean heavily on ‘science’ in their texts. These are liberally peppered with phrases like "Scientific
discoveries have shown that…" or "The science of complexity shows that…". The illustrative examples provided are
commonly of natural rather than social or managerial phenomena – the behaviour of molecules when the temperature of
liquid rises, a laser beam, the weather… This invocation of (natural) science comes out clearly in a passage on page 11 of
Stacey (1996). A list of Nobel and other eminent scientists who have developed "the science of complexity" is presented. So
far this science has "focused primarily on the evolution of life and the behavior of chemical and physical systems".
However "it is not only to natural systems that this science applies; as I will show in Chapter One, we too constitute such
systems". These systems which "we" also constitute are complex adaptive systems – precisely those to which the findings
of the "new science" apply. Or do they? If we are to accept the argument from scientific authority there are a number of
links in the argument. First we have to accept that the "findings" do actually apply to
the natural systems which natural scientists have investigated. Then we
have to accept that these findings can be generalised to all such systems.
Then we have to accept that organisations (let us leave individual humans
out of it) do constitute systems of the same kin d. And then we have to accept that findings can
be transferred across from one domain to a quite different one. This could be a long haul ! We should start
with the least problematic element – the solidity of those natural science
results in their own domains. There are indeed a considerable number of findings which have passed
stringent tests of scientific validity. (We should ignore any ultra-Popperian objections that all scientific results can only be
provisional, a spur to refutation – or we will have no solid ground to stand on.) Stewart (1989) provides a good source of
such examples – the weather (of course), ecological cycles, fluid dynamics, chemical clocks… Experiments are
only possible in some cases, but in all observations of real world events fit
patterns consistent with aspects of complexity theory . What follows from this is that
complexity theory is a field within which some surprising and diverse results have been found, leading on to some further
intriguing conjectures. What does not follow is that any such result necessarily
applies to all situations which share some of its structural features (for example,
mathematical structure). Many of the ‘results’ cited in the complexity literature are
not, however, firmly grounded in this way on empirical observations. They are
the outputs of computer simulations. Typically some simple laws of behaviour and interaction are postulated, and the
computer is used to see how the operations of these laws would translate into long-term development or macro-behaviour.
For example Kauffman (1993, 1995) models how an organism might evolve through an ‘adaptive walk’ of mutations across
available alternatives, depending on the degree of cross-coupling of the organism’s component parts. Krugman (1996)
shows how aggregate patterns of land use (eg the formation of multiple business districts, racial segregation) could result
from individual responses to purely local conditions. Stacey (1996) reports a wide variety of simulations, mostly produced
under the auspices of the Santa Fe Institute, in which simple rules of individual behaviour generate replications of the
flocking of birds, the trail-laying of ants, the dynamics of organism-parasite systems…In each case the computer tracks the
way in which such simple laws, if they were to hold, could produce patterned order. Evidently such demonstrations,
absorbing though they may be, cannot constitute proofs that these laws are indeed the cause of the observed behaviour.
Indeed Kauffman (1993) in the introduction to his 700 page volume, stresses that "this is not a finished book …Premises
and conclusions stand open to criticism." Krugman (1996) adopts an informal approach, and allows himself to include "a
few wild speculations". That is well and good – but it would be as well if the ‘not proven’ dimension of complexity theory
was prominently acknowledged in this way by all those involved in extrapolating its results into new territory. Mittleton-
Kelly (1997) recognises a further need for circumspection which arises in essaying to transfer complexity theory
formulations from the natural to the social domain. Behaviour in the former may be assumed to be governed by laws; in
the latter, awareness of a claimed law may itself generate changed behaviour . In
this crucial respect, social
systems (including organisations and their managements) are
fundamentally different from all other complex systems. It can be seen from
this that scientific authority is an unsafe ground for asserting that specific
results from complexity theory necessarily apply to organizations , or that
complexity-based lessons constitute imperatives for management practice. Krugman (1996), on the concluding page of his
exploration of the relevance of complexity theory for economics, states "at this point I have no recommendations to
offer." By contrast in the management complexity literature there is a
tendency to make just such unwarranted statements – both generalisations
and prescriptions. Both tendencies can be amply illustrated from a single
work – Stacey (1992).

We should make predictions---complexity results in either

political paralysis or pure reaction.
Ulfelder, Research Director for the Political Instability Task Force at Science Applications International Cooperation,
‘11
[Jay, “Why Political Instability Forecasts Are Less Precise Than We’d Like (and Why It’s Still Worth Doing)" May 5
dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/why-political-instability-forecasts-are-less-precise-than-wed-like-and-why-
its-still-worth-doing/]
If this is the best we can do, then what’s the point? Well, consider the alternatives. For starters, we might decide
to skip statistical forecasting altogether and just target our interventions at
cases identified by expert judgment as likely onsets . Unfortunately, those expert
judgments are probably going to be an even less reliable guide than our
statistical forecasts, so this “solution” only exacerbates our problem .
Alternatively, we could take no preventive action and just respond to events
as they occur. If the net costs of responding to crises as they happen are roughly equivalent to the net costs of
prevention, then this is a reasonable choice. Maybe responding to crises isn’t really all that costly; maybe preventive action
isn’t effective; or maybe preventive action is potentially effective but also extremely expensive. Under these circumstances,
early warning is not going to be as useful as we forecasters would like. If, however, any of those last statements are false–if
responding to crises already underway is very costly, or if preventive action is (relatively) cheap and sometimes effective–
then we have an incentive to use forecasts to help guide that action, in spite of
the lingering uncertainty about exactly where and when those crises will
occur. Even in situations where preventive action isn’t feasible or desirable ,
reasonably accurate forecasts can still be useful if they spur interested
observers to plan for contingencies they otherwise might not have
considered. For example, policy-makers in one country might be rooting for
a dictatorship in another country to fall but still fail to plan for that event
because they don’t expect it to happen any time soon. A forecasting model
which identifies that dictatorship as being at high or increasing risk of collapse
might encourage those policy-makers to reconsider their expectations and ,
in so doing, lead them to prepare better for that event. Where does that leave us? For me,
the bottom line is this: even though forecasts of political instability are never going
to be as precise as we’d like, they can still be accurate enough to be helpful,
as long as the events they predict are ones for which prevention or
preparation stand a decent chance of making a (positive) difference.
Applying complexity theory leads to policy paralysis and
numerous other failures.
Hendrick, Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, ‘9
[Diane, “Complexity Theory and Conflict Transformation: An Exploration of Potential and Implications,” June,
http://143.53.238.22/acad/confres/papers/pdfs/CCR17.pdf]
It is still relatively early days in the application of complexity theory to
social sciences and there are doubts and criticisms, either about the
applicability of the ideas or about the expectations generated for them. It is true
that the translation of terms from natural science to social science is sometimes contested due to the significant
differences in these domains, and that there are concerns that the meanings of terms may be
distorted, thus making their use arbitrary or even misleading. Developing new,
relevant definitions for the new domain applications, where the terms indicate a new idea or a new synthesis that takes
our understanding forward, are required. In some cases, particular aspects of complexity theory
are seen as of only limited applicability, for example, self-organisation (see Rosenau‘s argument above
that it is only relevant in systems in which authority does not play a role). There are those who argue that much that
is being touted as new is actually already known, whether from systems
theory or from experience, and so complexity theory cannot be seen as adding
value in that way. There are also concerns that the theory has not been worked out in
sufficient detail, or with sufficient rigour, to make itself useful yet. Even that it
encourages woolly thinking and imprecision . In terms of application in the
field, it could be argued that it may lead to paralysis, in fear of all the unexpected
things that could happen, and all the unintended consequences that could
result, from a particular intervention. The proposed adaptability and sensitivity to emerging new
situations may lead to difficulties in planning or, better expressed, must lead to a different conception of what constitutes
planning, which is, in itself, challenging (or even threatening) for many fields. The criteria for funding
projects or research may not fit comfortably with a complexity approach,
and evaluation, already difficult especially in the field of conflict
transformation, would require a re-conceptualisation. Pressure for results could act as a disincentive to change
project design in the light of emergent processes. There may be the desire to maintain the illusion of control in order to
retain the confidence of funders. On the other hand, there are fears that complexity may be used
as an excuse for poor planning, and implementation , which is a valid concern for funders.
In addition, there may be scepticism that the co-operation and co-ordination between
different researchers or interveners, (let alone transdisciplinary undertakings) appropriate
to working on complex problem domains, will not work due to differing
mental models, competing interests and aims, competition for funding,
prestige, etc. Such attempts appear, therefore, unrealistic or unfeasible.
 Inevitable
Prediction and scenario planning are inevitable
Danzig 11
Richard Danzig, Center for a New American Security Board Chairman, Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton,
October 2011, Driving in the Dark Ten Propositions About Prediction and National Security,
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_Prediction_Danzig.pdf

3. The Propensity
for Prediction Is Especially Deeply Embedded in the U.S.
Department of Defense \ Five factors powerfully contribute to this propensity. Bureaucratic Managers, and
Especially Government Officials, Seek Predict ability as a Means of Maintaining Order Students of both business and
government bureaucracies have observed that managers seek to simplify problems in order to
render them more predictable. In the words of Herbert Simon: Administrative man recognizes that
the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming
confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification
because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real
world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and
that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and
simple.36 Henry Kissinger arrived at a similar observation after decades of interacting with U.S. national security
bureaucracies. “The essence of bureaucracy ,” he writes, “is its quest for safety; its
success is calculability… The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability
which tends to become a prisoner of events.”37 Andrew Krepinevich, a long-time observer of the Pentagon, comments that
bureaucrats would prefer “no thinking about the future (which implies things might
change and they might have to change along with it). To
the extent they ‘tolerate’ such thinking,
they attempt to insure that such thinking results in a world that looks very
much like the one for which they have planned.”38 Insofar as the future is
forecast to differ from the present, it is highly desirable from a bureaucratic
perspective for the forecast to at least be presented with certitude. James C. Scott
discerns the reasons for this, arguing that for a government bureaucrat, [t]he … present is the platform for launching plans
for a better future… The strategic choice of the future is freighted with consequences. To the degree that the future is
known and achievable … the less future benefits are discounted for uncertainty.39 Conceding uncertainty
would weaken budgetary claims, power and status. Moreover, bureaucratic actors who
question alleged certainties soon learn that they are regarded skeptically. Whose team are they on? What bureaucratic
interest is served by emphasizing uncertainty? Militaries, in Particular, Seek Predictive Power
The military environment compounds managers’ predisposition to
prediction, and indeed, most security strategies are designed to reduce risk. Napoleon’s maxim reflects present
military attitudes: “To be defeated is pardonable; to be surprised – never!”40 The American military,
committed to harnessing technological superiority and overwhelming force, is particularly predisposed
to a mind-set in which power and predictive accuracy are exaggerated . William
Astor captures the point: [W]hat disturbs me most is that the [U.S.] military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion
of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on
events… a new vision of the battlefield emerged in which the U.S. military
aimed, without the slightest sense of irony, for “total situational awareness”
and “full spectrum dominance,” goals that, if attained, promised commanders the almost god-like
ability to master the “storm of steel,” to calm the waves, to command the air. In the process, any sense of war
as thoroughly unpredictable and enormously wasteful was lost .41 The Modern
American Military Traces its Roots to Predictive Failure The present American military establishment was created in the
wake of two wars – World War II and the Korean War – for which it was widely recognized that America was
unprepared.42 These led to a mantra of attempting to foresee and plan for risks so as never again to be comparably
unprepared. The McN amara Revolution Enshr ined Pentagon Processes Dependent on Predict ion A half century ago,
Robert McNamara and his “whiz kids” intensified the predictive tendency, but for different reasons than their
predecessors. For McNamara and his colleagues, the challenge was to take an internally competitive, substantially
disorganized and significantly dysfunctional DOD and make it more manageable and rational. A key step to this end was
to adopt the then-modern concepts of strategic planning with which McNamara had been closely associated at Ford Motor
Company.43 A related initiative was to establish for DOD a single scenario – a Soviet invasion of Western Europe –
against which most investments could be measured.44 This mechanism of resource allocation became a mechanism of
program planning in accord with the proposition that “what you measure is what you motivate.” This result was
rationalized with the observation that the Soviet scenario was so stressful that all other contingencies would be lesser
included cases; they could be readily handled with the equipment, training and doctrine designed for the most demanding
Soviet scenario. Of course, this scenario was never as dominant in practice as it was in theory. Collateral investments were
made, for example, in attack submarines. Subordinate combat commands worried about scenarios specific to their
regions, such as fighting in Asia or the Persian Gulf. Occasional consideration was also given by the Office of the Secretary
of Defense to some alternative opponents.45 It was not that the system prohibited collateral thought about
unpredicted outcomes. Rather, it forced
overwhelming attention to the predicted
scenario and offered few incentives to consider unexpected contingencies .
Owen Brown and Paul Eremenko observe that the McNamara revolution introduced a bias toward design systems with
long lives for allegedly predictable environments. Analyzing our space programs, they write: Decisionmakers respond to
increased marginal cost by … increasing lifetime to minimize amortized annual costs. In a perfect world of no uncertainty
(or certainty of the uncertainty) this is an appropriate decision. The scars of real world experience illustrate the true
problems of this approach. These space systems, which (because of their complexity) take years to design and build, are
designed to meet requirements based on today’s threat forecasts. With constantly changing threat environments,
requirements change during the design and build phase. The result is redesign, which costs time and money for a large,
tightly coupled system. Once launched, there is little hope the capability of a space system can be adapted to a new
threat.46 The Monolith ic Soviet Opp onent Was Unusually Predict able The Cold War led to co-evolution: The mutually
engaged American and Soviet military systems responded to each other’s doctrines, processes and military products.47
Because the massive Soviet system became largely ponderous and
predictable,48 the American system had unusual opportunities for
forecasting.49 Furthermore, the U.S. system was unusually disposed to produce large numbers of standardized
systems. The Defense Science Board astutely commented on the result: Focus was on long, predictable, evolutionary
change against a Cold War peer opponent who suffered as much, if not more, than the United States from a rigid and
bureaucratic system. There were certainly instances of adaptability during the Cold War period, but the surviving
features of that period are now predominated by long compliance-based
structures.50 These five strands combine to embed a propensity for
prediction deeply within the DNA of the U.S. Department of Defense.
 A2 Black Swans
It’s possible to predict risks – things like black swans and
perfect storms don’t matter.
Pate-Cornell, Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor of Engineering at Stanford, ‘12
[Elisabeth, specialty is engineering risk analysis with application to complex systems (space, medical etc.). Her research
has focused on explicit inclusion of human and organizational factors in the analysis of systems’ failure risks. Her recent
work is on the use of game theory in risk analysis with applications that have included counter-terrorism and nuclear
counter-proliferation problems, “On “Black Swans” and “Perfect Storms”: Risk Analysis and Management When Statistics
Are Not Enough”, Journal of Risk Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 11, 2012, RSR]
Whether a rare event is a “black swan” or a “perfect storm” is often in the
eyes of the beholder and may not matter that much in practice. Problems
arise when these terms are used as an excuse for failure to act proactively . As
stated by Augustine (“Law” XLV(81) ): “One should expect that the expected can be
prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected .” Clearly, one cannot
assess the risks of events that have really never been seen before and are
truly unimaginable. In reality, there are often precursors to such events.
The best approach in that case is thus a mix of alertness, quick detection,
and early response . By contrast, rare combinations of known events that can
place heavy loads on human or technical systems can be anticipated and
their probabilities assessed based on a systematic risk analysis anchored in
history and fundamental knowledge. Risk management procedures can then
be designed to face these events, within limits of risk tolerance and resource constraints. In any case,
“it was a ‘black swan’ or “a ‘perfect storm’ ” is not an excuse to wait until a
disaster happens to take safety measures and issue regulations against a
predictable situation.
 CTP
If scholars don’t make predictions, elites base policy on
biases and pathologies which is worse
Fitzsimmons, 07 (Michael, Washington DC defense analyst, “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic
Planning”, Survival, Winter 06-07, online)
But handling even this weaker form of uncertainty is still quite challeng— ing. If
not sufficiently bounded,
a high degree of variability in planning factors can exact a significant price
on planning. The complexity presented by great variability strains the
cognitive abilities of even the most sophisticated decision— makers .15 And even a
robust decision-making process sensitive to cognitive limitations necessarily sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth as
variability and complexity grows. It should follow, then, that in planning under conditions of risk,
variability in strategic calculation should be carefully tailored to available
analytic and decision processes. Why is this important? What harm can an imbalance between
complexity and cognitive or analytic capacity in strategic planning bring? Stated simply, where analysis is
silent or inadequate, the personal beliefs of decision-makers fill the void . As
political scientist Richard Betts found in a study of strategic sur— prise, in ‘an environment that lacks
clarity, abounds with conflicting data, and allows no time for rigorous
assessment of sources and validity, ambiguity allows intuition or wishfulness to
drive interpretation ... The greater the ambiguity, the greater the impact of
preconceptions.’16 The decision-making environment that Betts describes here is one of political-military crisis,
not long-term strategic planning. But a strategist who sees uncertainty as the central fact of his
environment brings upon himself some of the pathologies of crisis decision-making .
He invites ambiguity, takes conflicting data for granted and substitutes a
priori scepticism about the validity of prediction for time pressure as a rationale for
discounting the importance of analytic rigour. It is important not to exaggerate the extent to
which data and ‘rigorous assessment’ can illuminate strategic choices. Ambiguity is a fact of life, and scepticism of
analysis is necessary. Accordingly, the intuition and judgement of decision-makers will always be vital to strategy, and
attempting to subordinate those factors to some formulaic, deterministic decision-making model would be both
undesirable and unrealistic. All the same, there is danger in the opposite extreme as well. Without careful
analysis of what is relatively likely and what is relatively unlikely, what will be the
possible bases for strategic choices? A decision-maker with no faith in
prediction is left with little more than a set of worst-case scenarios and his existing beliefs
about the world to confront the choices before him. Those beliefs may be more or less
well founded, but if they are not made explicit and subject to analysis and
debate regarding their application to particular strategic contexts, they
remain only beliefs and premises, rather than rational judgements. Even at
their best, such decisions are likely to be poorly understood by the
organisations charged with their implementation. At their worst, such decisions may be
poorly understood by the decision-makers themselves.
 More cards
Probabilistic evaluation of hypothetical impacts is the only way
to grapple with strategic uncertainty
Krepinevich 9 (Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. is a defense policy analyst, currently executive director of the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His influential book, The Army and Vietnam, contends that the United States could
have won the Vietnam War had the Army adopted a small-unit pacification strategy in South Vietnam's villages, rather
than conducting search and destroy operations in remote jungles. Today, he criticizes the counterinsurgency approaches
being employed in the Iraq War. He is a West Point graduate. 1/27/2009, “7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist
Explores War in the 21st Century”, http://www.amazon.com/reader/0553805398?_encoding=UTF8&query=so%20are
%20we%20building#reader_0553805398)

While the Pentagon would dearly like to know the answers to these questions, it is simply not possible. Too many factors
have a hand in shaping the future. Of course. Pentagon planners may blithely assume away
all uncertainty and essentially bet that the future they fore-cast is the one
that will emerge. In this case the U.S. military will be very well prepared—for the
predicted future. But history shows that militaries are often wrong when they put too
many eggs in one basket. In the summer of 1914, as World War I was breaking out, Europeans felt
that the war would be brief and that the troops might be home "before the leaves fall." In reality
the Allied and Central Powers engaged in over four years of horrific
bloodletting. In World War II the French Army entered the conflict believing it would experience an advanced
version of the trench warfare it had encountered in 1914-1918. Instead, France was defeated by the Germans in a lightning
campaign lasting less than two months. Finally, in 2003 the Pentagon predicted that the Second Gulf War would play out
with a traditional blitzkrieg. Instead, it turned into an irregular war, a "long, hard slog."20 Militaries seem
prone to assuming that the next war will be an "updated" version of the last
war rather than something quite different. Consequently, they are often accused
of preparing for the last war instead of the next. This is where rigorous,
scenario-based planning comes into play. It is designed to take uncertainty
explicitly into account by incorporating factors that may change the
character of future conflict in significant and perhaps profound ways. By
presenting a plausible set of paths into the future, scenarios can help senior
Pentagon leaders avoid the "default" picture in which tomorrow looks very
much like today. If the future were entirely uncertain, scenario-based
planning would be a waste of time. But certain things are predictable or at
least highly likely. Scenario planners call these things “predetermined
elements.” While not quite “done deals,” they are sufficiently well known that
their probability of occurring is quite high. For example, we have a very good idea
of how many men of military age (eighteen to thirty-one) there will be in the United
States in 2020, since all of those males have already been born, and, barring a catastrophic event, the actuarial
data on them is quite refined. We know that China has already tested several types of weapons that can disable or destroy
satellites. We know that dramatic advances in solid-state lasers have been made in recent years and that more advances
are well within the realm of possibility. These "certainties" should be reflected in all
scenarios, while key uncertainties should be reflected in how they play out
across the different scenarios.21 If scenario-based planning is done well, and
if its insights are acted upon promptly, the changes it stimulates in the
military may help deter prospective threats, or dissuade enemies from
creating threatening new capabilities in the first place.

Uncertainty doesn’t take out our specific scenarios

Krepinevich 9 (Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. is a defense policy analyst, currently executive director of the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His influential book, The Army and Vietnam, contends that the United States could
have won the Vietnam War had the Army adopted a small-unit pacification strategy in South Vietnam's villages, rather
than conducting search and destroy operations in remote jungles. Today, he criticizes the counterinsurgency approaches
being employed in the Iraq War. He is a West Point graduate. 1/27/2009, “7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist
Explores War in the 21st Century”, http://www.amazon.com/reader/0553805398?_encoding=UTF8&query=so%20are
%20we%20building#reader_0553805398)
  
Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we are moved to ask: A re these the shadows
of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that may be only ?...
[I]f the courses be departed from, the ends will change . Say it is thus with what you show
me!1 Fortunately, a country as powerful as the United Stares can often take action to deflect emerging challenges or to
mitigate significantly their potential consequences. Remember, the crafting of scenarios is not an
attempt to predict the future. Far too many interacting factors are at work to
shape the future. It is impossible to know in advance how things will turn
out. Eliminating uncertainty and surprise is simply not possible. No ne of the
scenarios presented above will come to pass exactly as described . Scenarios have a
more modest goal: to describe how the future might turn out . That being the
case, why do these scenarios matter? Their usefulness lies in their ability to
help military planners reduce the risks inherent in their work. The planners'
job is to minimize the overall threat to the national security. Then ability to
do this is limited, among other things, by risk and uncertainty . Risk is
randomness with knowable probabilities; that is, we have some sense of what the probabilities
might be (e.g., low, medium, high}. Uncertainty is randomness with unknowable probabilities. These "wild card" or "Black
Swan" events are essentially unanticipated.2 Hence it is not possible to put a value on
"uncertainty." However, by identifying and assessing the factors that will
likely exert the greatest influence on the future security environment, and
by examining the trends associated with these factors, military planners can
identify significant emerging threats to the national security for which they
must prepare. These risks must he plausible or credible to be taken seriously
by senior decision-makers. Toward this end the narrative path between the world of today and the world
of tomorrow's security challenges must be believable. A credible scenario can help broaden
senior leaders’ attention beyond the immediate problems confronting them
and enable them to overcome the natural mindset that sees tomorrow as
simply a linear extrapolation of the world as it exists today.

The goal of complexity theorists is still risk avoidance via

resiliency – the disads are examples of how the plan could go
wrong
Ogilvy 11
Facing The Fold: Essays on scenario planning
Jay is a cofounder of GBN and dean and chief academic officer at the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco.
His own research and work have focused primarily on the role that human values and changing motivations play in
business decision-making and strategy, with a particular focus on health care, education, and sustainability. He has
pursued these interests in collaboration with Peter Schwartz since 1979, when he joined SRI International, and from
1988-2008 with GBN, where he led dozens of scenario projects for public and private sector clients in health care and
life sciences and led GBN’s scenario training courses. While at SRI, Jay split his time between developing future
scenarios for strategic planning and serving as director of research for the Values and Lifestyles (VALS) Program, a
consumer segmentation system used in market research. He also authored monographs on social, political, and
demographic trends affecting the values of American consumers. Jay's work builds on his background as a
philosopher. He taught at the University of Texas, Williams College, and for seven years at Yale, where he received his
PhD in 1968. He is the author of Facing The Fold: Essays on Scenario Planning (2011), Creating Better Futures:
Scenario Planning as a Tool for a Better Tomorrow (2002), Living Without a Goal (1995), Many Dimensional Man
(1977); co-author of China' Futures (2001) and Seven Tomorrows (1980); and editor of Self and World (1971, 1980),
and Revisioning Philosophy (1991). He is currently at work on a book on emergent systems, e.g. consciousness,
leadership, and wealth.

But what if we measure scenario planning against the standards of a different kind of
science? What kind? Consider complexity theory and the ideas of Stuart
Kauffman. In his Investigations. Kauffman reflects on the fact that in an evolving
universe where new forms of order emerge from complex concatenations of already
complex molecules, it is not only impossible to predict the future; we cannot even
anticipate the parameters of the configuration space. Not only can we not calculate
the measure of the future: we cannot even anticipate the correct measuring rods to
use. Kauffman is not shy about drawing appropriately radical conclusions about the
nature of science itself. Once again: "Our inability to prestate the configuration space
of a biosphere foretells a deepening of science, a search for story and historical
contingency, yet a place for natural laws."8 I think Kauffman is right to deduce the
need for story from our inability to prestate the configuration space of the biosphere,
but there are some premises missing from his deduction. What is it about story that
makes it essential to his new kind of science? What is it about narrative that makes it
so important to complexity theory? In order to answer this question, we need to look
elsewhere. But before we do so. it's worth recalling that scenarios are stories—
narrativ es of alternative futures. If stories are essential to Kauffman's new kind of
science, and scenarios are stories, then scenario planning might be far more
compatible with this new kind of science than with the science of LaPlace and the
positiv ists. We seem to be getting closer to an understanding of scenario planning as
not just art. but also part of science. But before we get there, we still need to know
just what it is about story or narrative that makes it essential to this new kind of
science. Despite the rash of recent interest in narrative and the growing fascination
with story-telling in organizations,91 find it necessary to go all the way back to Hegel
to find an account of narrative sufficiently profound to serve Kauffman's needs. Since
Hegel's prose is obscure to the point of being unintelligible to those not steeped in the
language of German philosophy, it will be helpful to borrow from one of his modern
interpreters. Hayden White, a formulation of his insights more lucid than Hegel's
own. White interprets Hegel as saving, "The reality that lends itself to narrative
representation is the conflict between desire and the law ."10 I think Hayden White
and Hegel are on to something very important here, something that completes Stuart
Kauffman's argument in ways that not even he may have anticipated. Put Hegel and
Kauffman together (with Hayden White's help), and you get a science that not only
covers the force of necessity; you get a science that also accommodates the power of
desire—not only what must be. but also what we want to be; not only a degree of
determinism, but also some room for freedom. We get the kind of science we need for
shaping the future as well as we can without falling into the paradox of a scientifically
predictable fate defeating the efficacy of good intentions. In short, there is reason for
hope.

Demands for DETERMINIST accuracy misunderstand the point

of NORMATIVE SCENARIO PLANNING in debate – SOCIAL
SCIENCE can be good without being POSITIVISM
Ogilvy 11
Facing The Fold: Essays on scenario planning
Jay is a cofounder of GBN and dean and chief academic officer at the Presidio
School of Management in San Francisco. His own research and work have
focused primarily on the role that human values and changing motivations
play in business decision-making and strategy, with a particular focus on
health care, education, and sustainability. He has pursued these interests in
collaboration with Peter Schwartz since 1979, when he joined SRI
International, and from 1988-2008 with GBN, where he led dozens of scenario
projects for public and private sector clients in health care and life sciences
and led GBN’s scenario training courses. While at SRI, Jay split his time
between developing future scenarios for strategic planning and serving as
director of research for the Values and Lifestyles (VALS) Program, a consumer
segmentation system used in market research. He also authored monographs
on social, political, and demographic trends affecting the values of American
consumers. Jay's work builds on his background as a philosopher. He taught at
the University of Texas, Williams College, and for seven years at Yale, where
he received his PhD in 1968. He is the author of Facing The Fold: Essays on
Scenario Planning (2011), Creating Better Futures: Scenario Planning as a
Tool for a Better Tomorrow (2002), Living Without a Goal (1995), Many
Dimensional Man (1977); co-author of China' Futures (2001) and Seven
Tomorrows (1980); and editor of Self and World (1971, 1980), and
Revisioning Philosophy (1991). He is currently at work on a book on emergent
systems, e.g. consciousness, leadership, and wealth.
Monological science is not simply wrong; it is a necessary condition for the emergence of
subjectivity from the conflict between desire and that law. Rather than staking out a romantic
opposition to the force of law; rather than restating New Age complaints
about the failure of "Western science" (whatever that might mean); rather than giving in to
Feycrabcnd's methodological anarchism, it seems wiser to define as precisely as possible what I've called
monological science, grant it its due under laboratory' conditions, but then
declare its limitations in applications outside the laboratory, especially where
intentional agents hav e their say. The point is to appreciate the tension between the force of law and the force of desire.
Wishing something doesn't make it so. But there is reason for hope, even in the face of harsh necessity. Once we grant the
force of law, together with its limitations somewhere short of the pre-determined, billiards table universe of the positivists,
then there's room for entertaining the role of hope , desire and care without
falling into overly wishful thinking or belief in some benign teleology . This
is precisely where normative scenarios come into play . As I've argued elsewhere,11
investing our scenarios with our values is not a mistake. It is not an error to recognize one
scenario as aspirational. another as an evil to be avoided at all costs. The effort to
create scenarios that are simply different without being recognized as good
or bad derives from the mistaken belief that pure objectivity is possible . It is
not. Of course it is worth even' effort to explore and identify our biases. But it is a mistake to maintain that we can root out
all of our biases, all of our predispositions, all of our assumptions and pre-judgments,12 to achieve some sort of context-
free objectivity.
2AC Death
Death Reps
 Extinction Reps Good
The 1AC is necessary discourse – combating complacency is
crucial to halting certain and inevitable extinction
Epstein and Zhao 9 Richard J. Epstein and Y. Zhao ‘9 – Laboratory of Computational Oncology,
Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, The Threat That Dare Not Speak Its Name; Human Extinction,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Volume 52, Number 1, Winter 2009, Muse
We shall not speculate here as to the “how and when” of human extinction; rather, we
ask why there remains so little discussion of this important topic. We hypothesise that a lethal
mix of ignorance and denial is blinding humans from the realization that our own species
could soon (a relative concept, admittedly) be as endangered as many other large mammals (Cardillo
et al. 2004). For notwithstanding the “overgrown Petri dish” model of human decline now confronting us, the most
sinister menace that we face may not be extrinsic selection pressures but complacency.
Entrenched in our culture is a knee-jerk “boy who cried wolf ” skepticism aimed at any
person who voices concerns about the future—a skepticism fed by a traditionally bullish, growth-
addicted economy that eschews caution (Table 1). But the facts of extinction are less exciting and newsworthy than
the roller-coaster booms and busts of stock markets.

Portraying ‘extinction-level’ events is a crucial

communication act that forestalls complete extinction – it
solves their offense because it sparks a new social ethic
Epstein and Zhao 9 Richard J. Epstein and Y. Zhao ‘9 – Laboratory of Computational Oncology,
Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, The Threat That Dare Not Speak Its Name; Human Extinction,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Volume 52, Number 1, Winter 2009, Muse
Final ends for all species are the same, but the journeys will be different. If we cannot
influence the end of our species, can we influence the journey? To do so —even in a small
way—would be a crowning achievement for human evolution and give new meaning to the term
civilization. Only by elevating the topic [End Page 121] of human extinction to the level of serious
professional discourse can we begin to prepare ourselves for the challenges that lie
ahead. Table 3.   Human Thinking Modes Relevant to Extinction: from Ego-Think to Eco-Think  The difficulty of the required
transition should not be underestimated. This is depicted in Table 3 as a painful multistep progression
from the 20th-century philosophical norm of Ego-Think—defined therein as a short-term state of mind valuing individual
material self-interest above all other considerations—to Eco-Think, in which humans come to adopt a
broader Gaia-like outlook on themselves as but one part of an infinitely larger reality.
Making this change must involve communicating the non-sensationalist message to all global citizens
that “things are serious” and “we are in this together”—or, in blunter language, that the road to extinction and its
related agonies does indeed lie ahead. Consistent with this prospect, the risks of human extinction—and the cost-
benefit of attempting to reduce these risks—have been quantified in a recent sobering analysis (Matheny 2007).  Once
complacency has been shaken off and a sense of collective purpose created, the battle against self-seeking
anthropocentric human instincts will have only just begun. It is often said that human beings suffer from the ability to
appreciate their own mortality—an existential agony that has given rise to the great religions— but in the present age of religious
decline, we must begin to bear the added burden of anticipating the demise of our species. Indeed, as argued here, there are
compelling reasons for encouraging this collective mind-shift. For in the best of all possible worlds, the
realization that our species has long-term survival criteria distinct from our short-term
tribal priorities could spark a new social ethic to upgrade what we now all too often dismiss as
“human nature” (Tudge 1989). [End Page 122] 
Human extinction is the greatest act of suffering imaginable
– using scientific methods to forestall extinction is crucial
Epstein and Zhao 9 Richard J. Epstein and Y. Zhao ‘9 – Laboratory of Computational Oncology,
Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, The Threat That Dare Not Speak Its Name; Human Extinction,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Volume 52, Number 1, Winter 2009, Muse
Human extinction is 100% certain—the only uncertainties are when and how. Like the men
and women of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, our species is but one of many players making entrances and exits on the
evolutionary stage. That we generally deny that such exits for our own species are possible is to be expected, given the brutish
selection pressures on our biology. Death, which is merely a biological description of evolutionary selection, is fundamental to
life as we know it. Similarly, death occurring at the level of a species—extinction—is as basic to biology as is the death of
individual organisms or cells. Hence, to regard extinction as catastrophic—which implies that it may
somehow never occur, provided that we are all well behaved—is not only specious, but self-
defeating.  Man is both blessed and cursed by the highest level of self-awareness of any life-form on Earth. This
suggests that the process of human extinction is likely to be accompanied by more
suffering than that associated with any previous species extinction event. Such suffering
may only be eased by the getting of wisdom: the same kind of wisdom that could, if applied sufficiently
early, postpone extinction. But the tragedy of our species is that evolution does not select for such foresight. Man’s
dreams of being an immortal species in an eternal paradise are unachievable not because of original sin—the doomsday scenario
for which we choose to blame our “free will,” thereby perpetuating our creationist illusion of being at the center of the universe—
but rather, in reductionist terms, because paradise is incompatible with evolution. More scientific effort in
propounding this central truth of our species’ mortality, rather than seeking spiritual
comfort in escapist fantasies, could pay dividends in minimizing the eventual cumulative
burden of human suffering. 
 A2 Fiat Illusory
1. This misses the point – even if the plan doesn’t actually
happen, the point of debate is to debate whether the
plan SHOULD happen. Voting aff isn’t meant to do
anything – it simply indicates I’ve won by proving the
plan is a good idea.
2. Voting neg doesn’t do anything to reorient your
relationship towards death either – who you vote for
doesn’t any effect besides signaling the winner of the
debate
 2AC Actions good
Acting generates meaning
Todd May 5, philosophy prof at Clemson, “To change the world, to celebrate life”, Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol
31, nos 5–6, 517–531
What are we to make of these references? We can, to be sure, see the hand of Heidegger in them. But we may also, and for
present purposes more relevantly, see an intersection with Foucault’s work on freedom. There is an ontology
of freedom at work here, one that situates freedom not in the private reserve of an individual but in the unfinished
character of any historical situation. There is more to our historical juncture , as there is to a
painting, than appears to us on the surface of its visibility . The trick is to
recognize this, and to take advantage of it, not only with our thoughts but
with our lives. And that is why, in the end, there can be no such thing as a sad
revolutionary. To seek to change the world is to offer a new form of life-
celebration . It is to articulate a fresh way of being , which is at once a way of seeing,
thinking, acting, and being acted upon. It is to fold Being once again upon itself, this time at a new point, to see what that
might yield. There is, as Foucault often reminds us, no guarantee that this fold will not itself turn
out to contain the intolerable. In a complex world with which we are inescapably entwined, a world we
cannot view from above or outside, there is no certainty about the results of our
experiments. Our politics are constructed from the same vulnerability that is the stuff
of our art and our daily practices. But to refuse to experiment is to resign oneself to the

intolerable; it is to abandon both the struggle to change the world and the
opportunity to celebrate living within it . And to seek one aspect without the
other – life-celebration without world-changing, world-changing without life-celebration – is to refuse to
acknowledge the chiasm of body and world that is the wellspring of both. If we are to
celebrate our lives, if we are to change our world, then perhaps the best place to
begin to think is our bodies, which are the openings to celebration and to change, and perhaps the point at
which the war within us that I spoke of earlier can be both waged and resolved. That is the fragile beauty that, in their
different ways, both MerleauPonty and Foucault have placed before us. The question before us is
whether, in our lives and in our politics, we can be worthy of it .
Bataille/Baudrillard
 TL Bataille Perm
Perm do both – confronting death while preserving life
allows subjects to access value to life through
communication and solves their offense and mine
Lawtoo 05 [Nidesh, Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Fall, “Bataille and
the Suspension of Being,” Lingua Romana, Vol. 4 No. 1, linguaromana.byu.edu/Lawtoo4.html]
confronting death
Bataille's notion of communication involves a dialectic with two positives (hence a non-dialectic) where two sovereigns confront death not in view of an end but as an end in itself: " ," in

puts the subjects at stake

fact, " Bataille affirms -"l'être en eux-mêmes [est] mis en jeu" (Sur Nietzsche 61).Further, that "[p]ersonne n'est-un instant-

a self-forgetfulness which implies a

souverain qui ne se perde" (OC VIII 429). It is the Nietzschean self-forgetfulness that is here evoked;

transgression of the limits of both communicating subjects . Again, for Bataille "[l]a 'communication' n'a lieu qu'entre

However, if according to Nietzsche, self-

deux êtres mis en jeu-déchirés, suspendus, l'un et l'autre penchés au-dessus de leur néant" (Sur Nietzsche 62).

forgetfulness takes place in solitude, for Bataille it necessitates the

presence of an "other ."( the 5) Communication in fact, asks for "deux êtres mis en jeu" who participate in what he defines as "une fête immotivée" (Sur Nietzsche 31). There

sovereign loses himself with the other, through the other, in the other, in(se perde)

a process of "mutual laceration " (Essential 105) which is simultaneously tragic and ludic. The emphasis on the other is Hegelian, but unlike dialectics, communication does not
confront the subject with an object (Gegen-stand, something that stands against the subject). As Bataille puts it (apparently echoing Baudelaire), communication takes place with "un semblable," "mon frère" (OC VIII 289). And he adds: "Cela

Bataille's notion of communication is not based upon a

suppose la communication de sujet à sujet" (OC VIII 288).

"violent hierarchy but rather upon egalitarianism transgressing the

" (Derrida's term) . Moreover,

limits of the subject implies that the two subjects already possess the (in potential)

characteristics of sovereignty the status of sovereign is not achieved as a . Hence,

result of a fight to the death, but requires the subject to be open to an other who is outside the limits of

the self. Derrida speaks of the "trembling" to which Bataille submits Hegelian concepts (253). This trembling, I would argue, has its source in Nietzsche (6): "The figs fall from the trees" says Zarathustra, "they are good and sweet, and when they
fall, their red skins are rent. A north wind am I unto ripe figs" (qtd. in Philosophy 135). If we apply this passage to Bataille's philosophy, we could say that inherent in this "fall" is an explosion of Hegelian concepts, and in particular, as we have
seen, the notion of Herrshaft. Further, communication, for Bataille, involves a similar "fall" which rents (déchire) the skin of the subjects (their limits) exposing the red flesh which lies beneath the skin. According to the French philosopher,
Nietzsche's critique of the subject is more radical than Hegel's, since, as he puts it in "Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice," Hegel's philosophy, and I would add Kojève's interpretation of it, is "une théologie, où l'homme aurait pris la place de Dieu" (OC
XII 329). Hegel's "theology" preserves the identity of the subject. Now, Bataille makes his position to this "theology" clear as he writes: "I don't believe in God-from the inability to believe in self" (Essential 10). By establishing a direct link between
the death of the subject and the death of God, Bataille extends his critique of "beings" into the larger, ontological, critique of "Being." Implicit in this theoretical move is the articulation of the ontology of sovereignty. Bataille's philosophy is
Nietzschean insofar as it is grounded in experience and in the immanence of the body. Communication, for Bataille is first and foremost a bodily affair. Hence the interrogation of the limits of the subject starts from an interrogation of what we
could call the "gates," or openings of the body: the mouth, the vagina, the anus and the eyes are for Bataille central places for philosophical investigation because at these gates, the integrity of the subject is questioned; its limits can be
transgressed. They are spaces of transition where a "glissement hors de soi" (OC VIII 246) can take place. These bodily openings, which Bataille also defines as "blessures," (Sur Nietzsche 64) found his conception of the sovereign subject. In fact,
each "blessure" can be linked to a specific dimension of communication which obsesses Bataille. His central themes match different bodily openings: the mouth connects to laughter; the vagina to eroticism; the eyes to tears; the anus to the
excrements which he links to death. Through these openings the subject is traversed by different fluxes and its integrity, totality and stability is challenged. They allow for the possibility of a glissement of the subject's being. The same could be
said of Bataille's corpus: it is a unitary entity, which, like a body, escapes the totalizing temptation of closure. Despite the fact that Bataille defines sovereignty in terms of the Kojèvian/Hegelian "nothingness" (Bataille's Rien), his conception of
communication is built upon the Nietzschean ontological distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In fact, the ontological movement that takes place in communication "exige que l'on glisse" (OC VI 158) from an "insufficient" and
"discontinuous" being to a reality of "continuity" that transcends binary oppositions (Erotism 13-14). To put it more simply, communication introduces a movement from the "many" to the "One"; from a "discontinuity of being" to a "continuity of
being;" from separate "beings" to a common ontological ground ("Being"). The source of Bataille's ontology is clear: it stems from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy which in turn, is construed upon Schopenhauer's distinction between will and
representation. "As a sailor sits in a small boat in a boundless raging sea," writes Schopenhauer," surrounded on all sides by heaving mountainous waves, trusting to his frail vessel; so does the individual man sit calmly in the middle of a world of

Communication involves
torment, trusting to the principium individuationis" (Birth 21) .(7) , for Bataille, as the Dionysian for Nietzsche, the shattering of the principium individuationis, a

tearing down the veil which constitutes of the "illusion of

of Maya , what Bataille calls, with a blink of the eye to Schopenhauer,

a being which is isolated Communication, thus, involves an " (Essential 10; my emphasis).

opening of the subject to the larger ground of Being. The sovereign's boat is
constantly leaking. Yet, in order for communication to take place, the boat
needs to keep floating for transgression to take place the subject
. That is to say that , the limits of

need to be preserved The being of the sovereign subject is (Erotism 63; Foucault 34).

suspended the subject neither dwells safely

upon the abîme-what Bataille also calls "une realité plus vaste" (OC II 246)-which means that

within the limits of the "small, insufficient boat" of individuation, nor

within the depth of the undifferentiated "raging sea," but in the space of
contact in-between the two spheres This precision is key in order to .

delineate Bataille's ontology of sovereignty. Bataille's conception of the

the originality of

communicating subject (i.e., of sovereignty) walks a thin line between its

self-dissolution and its self-preservation The sovereign's . Hence the idea that he is above all a thinker of limits or borders.

being is "suspended
, in fact, " on the "bord de l'abîme" (Coupable V 355) but never actually falls, except, of course, in death. Hence, for Bataille, "[i]l s'agit d'approcher la mort" [it is

approaching death as close as one can endure

] that is to say, the abîme, or the continuity of being, "d'aussi près qu'on peut l'endurer" [ ] (337-338).

The sovereign subject confronts death while preserving life being is his . His

placed at the border between life and death if Bataille defines philosophy . Hence,

as "existence striving to reach its limits it should be specified that the " (Essential 146),

being of the subject is not found beyond of "existence since its limits, as his use " seems to suggest (Ek-sistenz)
that would imply a total dissolution of the subject transgression . Bataille's philosophy of

implies the preservation of the limits of the subject so that the sovereign
can experience and endure death in life. The tension between self-
expenditure and self-preservation is analogous to the
(Nietzsche's Verschwendung) (linked to Hegel's Anerkennung)

movement of a moth that is first attracted by the fire of a candle and

subsequently distances itself from the fire in order to preserve its life. This (8)

repeated back and forth movement recapitulates the movement of

communication and is responsible for the underlying tension which
traverses Bataille's philosophy. It is an inner (bodily) drive that attracts the
moth to death and not, as it is the case for Hegel's master, a reasoned project in view of an end (recognition). The moth's self-sacrifice, in fact, is perfectly useless (it serves no purpose) and hence is truly sovereign.

This
Bataille would call it "une négativité sans emploi." Or, as he says with respect to eroticism in his first and last interview before he died, "it is purely squandering, an expenditure of energy for itself" (in Essential 220).

movement forwards, towards the flame of self-dissolution (which takes place in death, eroticism, laughter…)

and its retreat backwards, towards life and the limits it involves, epitomizes
Bataille's notion of communication. A practice which for Bataille seems to have the characteristic of a fort-da game in which the subject is not in control of the
movement. This movement, Bataille writes in the Preface to Madame Edwarda, happens "malgré nous" (III 11). Thus conceived the sovereign accepts the place of a toy in the hands of a child playing-a definition similar to Heraclitus' vision of life,
which he defines as "a child at play, moving pieces in a game (Fragment 52, in GM 149). This view of communication is both tragic and joyful; violent and useless. A joyful tragedy, which challenges the limits of the subject; that puts the subject's

being en jeu. If Bataille is deeply fascinated by death, decay and the dissolution of the subject in a continuity of being, he escapes the temptation to
embrace death at the expense of life . His definition of eroticism sums up this fundamental tension: "Eroticism," he writes, "is assenting to life up to the point of

death" (Erotism11). This applies not only to eroticism but also to allcommunicating activities such as laughter, play, tears, and ultimately to the ethos that sustains the totality of Bataille's philosophy. If Kojève defines dialectics as a "negating-

negativity" (5), Bataille's communication can be read as an affirmative negativity. In fact, death is confronted and even invoked , but what is found in
death is the ultimate affirmation of life . Negation of the integrity (the limits) of the subject leads to a radical affirmation of life. And if in the Preface to

Madame Edwarda, Bataille can affirme "l'identité de l'être et de la mort" (OC III 10), let us also note that the identity of being and death is realized
in life Bataille does not become a negator of the will; a negator of
. Faithful to Nietzsche,

life; a pessimist or worse, a nihilist , a Buddhist (some of the derogatory terms used by Nietzsche to retrospectively define his first and last

Bataille remains truthful to life

master). . While the ontological premises grounding sovereignty are taken from Schopenhauer (via Nietzsche), Bataille's conclusions are

Bataille's philosophy can be seen as an affirmation of the

diametrically opposed to Nietzsche's first master. In fact,

will through Dionysian practices

(he operates an inversion of values) that put the (included sexuality which Schopenhauer condemned)

subject in touch with the ultimate ground of being, without dissolving in him/her

it.
 TL A2 Baudrillard
Value is subjective – you don’t know how other people
experience the world, you only the know what values you
have chosen for yourself– if people see value in their lives,
then they should be allowed to live
Death is bad—to die removes pleasure
Preston 7 – Rio Hondo College AND Minnesota State Community and
Technical College (Ted; Scott Dixon, “Who wants to live forever? Immortality,
authenticity, and living forever in the present”, Int J Philos Relig (2007) 61:99–
117, dml)
If death deprives of pleasure—the pleasure he would
Death might be very bad for the one who is dead. him a lot of

have enjoyed if [s]he had not died death might be —the death might be a huge misfortune for someone. More explicitly,

extrinsically bad even though nothing intrinsically bad happens

for the one who is dead to him as a

death would be extrinsically bad

result. In my view, if life would have contained more for him his

intrinsic value if he had not died then (Ibid, p. 140). This is a tricky issue. On the one hand, someone might claim that even a negative evil has to happen to someone, and the dead person who no longer exists is no

it is a powerful intuition that death

longer a “somebody” to experience the evil, so there shouldn’t be any subjective harm. On the other hand,

deprives the dead of something, somehow. Nagel tries to resolve this problem by claiming that the person who used to exist can be benefited or
harmed by death, and tries to show that our intuitions are in harmony with this idea. For instance, he claims we could and would say of someone trapped in a burning building who died instantly from being hit on the head rather than burning to
death, that the person was lucky, or better off, for having died quickly. Of course, after dying from the head trauma, there was no one in existence who was spared the pain of burning to death, but Nagel claims that the “him” we refer to in such an
example refers to the person who was alive and who would have suffered (Nagel, 1987). Nagel believes the person subjectively benefited, although no subject was there to receive the benefit. It would be easier to understand this objectively in
terms of the qualitative assessment of Feldman; however, that is not Nagel’s position. Similarly, if someone dies before seeing the birth of a grandchild, and there is no life after death, there is no person in existence who is presently being

the person who was alive and who would have seen
deprived of anything at all, including, of course, births of grandchildren. But

it, if not for death, has counterfactually and subjectively missed out on
something. The same could be said about death as a negative evil. When
kind of thing

you die, all good come to a stop:

the If those
things in your life no more meals, movies, travel, conversation, love, work, books, music, or anything else.

things would be good, their absence is bad. the Of course, you won’t miss them: death is not like being locked up in solitary confinement. But

ending of everything good seems clearly to be a negative evil in life, because of the stopping of life itself,

for the person who was alive and is now dead. When someone we know dies,
we feel sorry not only for ourselves but for him, because he cannot see the
sun shine today, or smell the bread in the toaster (Ibid, p. 93). This is admittedly a confusing concept: the
idea that one can be negatively harmed or benefited even when one does not exist, but it is a concept Nagel claims is intuitively powerful for us, and which Feldman supports. It is confusing because of its counterfactual base; that a subject
experiences harm or good even though there is no subject. It is intuitive because we do talk and think in terms of what it would have been for someone to experience. What these two articulations may show is that counterfactuals are being used in
different ways, with the intuitive version masking a lot of the work of the counterfactual harm version. In response to the problem of locating when death is a problem for someone, Feldman claims that a state of affairs can be bad for someone
regardless of when it occurs: “The only requirement is that the value of the life he leads if it occurs is lower than the value of the life he leads if it does not occur” (Feldman, 1992, p. 152). The comparison is between the respective values of two
possible lives. The state of affairs pertaining to someone dying at some particular time, is bad for that person, if “the value-for-her of the life she leads where [that state of affairs] occurs is lower than the value-for-her of the life she would have led
if [that state of affairs] had not taken place” (Ibid, p. 155). When is it the case that the value-for-her of her life would be comparatively lower? Eternally. Eternally, as opposed to at any particular moment, because “when we say that her death is a
bad for her, we are really expressing a complex fact about the relative values of two possible lives” (Ibid, p. 154). Lives taken as a whole, that is. It seems that Feldman is offering an objective qualitative analysis here, which may be addressing a
different component than Nagel’s subjective argument does. If we take the two arguments together, they may offer a rather compelling account of why deprivation is a bad thing in an abstracted sense. We should not forget, however, that a
possible life is not a life that is lived or being lived. In that way, they both lose a bit of their intuitive force. In another attempt to undermine the Epicurean argument that death is not a bad thing but one that focuses upon one’s actual desires and

death
interests, we may turn to Nussbaum’s work. Adding to an argument already developed by David Furley, Nussbaum argues that is bad for the one who dies because it renders “empty and

vain the plans, hopes , and desires that this person had during life” (Nussbaum, 1994). As an example, consider someone dying of a terminal disease.
Subjectively, the terminally ill person is unaware of this fact, though some friends and family do know. This person plans for a future that, unbeknownst to him, will be denied him, and, to the friends and relatives who objectively know, “his hopes
and projects for the future seem, right now, particularly vain, futile, and pathetic, since they are doomed to incompleteness” (Ibid). Moreover, the futility is not removed by removing the knowing spectators. “Any death that frustrates hopes and
plans is bad for the life it terminates, because it reflects retrospectively on that life, showing its hopes and projects to have been, at the very time the agent was forming them, empty and meaningless” (Ibid). Nussbaum is making an interesting
move here. She is collapsing the subjective and objective views, such that if the agent were aware, his projects would change and mirror reality. He would realize that his interests cannot be realized, and would change his interests, and live out his
days with an accurate assessment of his interests and mortality. Nussbaum appreciates this argument because it shows how death reflects back on an actual life, and our intuitions do not depend on “the irrational fiction of a surviving subject”

(Ibid, p. 208). This argument is in harmony with Nagel’s claim that death can be bad for someone— even if that someone no longer
exists . And, because it is rooted in the feared futility of our current projects, it is not vulnerable to the “asymmetry problem” (i.e., the alleged irrationality of lamenting the loss of possible experience in the future due to “premature”
death, but not lamenting the loss of possible experience in the past due to not having been born sooner) since the unborn do not yet have any projects subject to futility. Nussbaum adds, to this argument, however, by appealing to the temporally
extended structure of the relationships and activities we tend to cherish. A parent’s love for a child, a child’s for a parent, a teacher’s for a student, a citizen’s for a city: these involve interaction over time, and much planning and hoping. Even the
love or friendship of two mature adults has a structure that evolves and deepens over time; and it will centrally involve sharing futuredirected projects. This orientation to the future seems to be inseparable from the value we attach to these
relationships; we cannot imagine them taking place in an instant without imagining them stripped of much of the human value they actually have. . . . Much the same, too, can be said of individual forms of virtuous activity. To act justly or

death
courageously, one must undertake complex projects that develop over time; so too for intellectual and creative work; so too for athletic achievement. . . . So , when it comes, does not only frustrate projects and desires that just

intrudes upon the value

happen to be there. It of activities the fear of and beauty temporally evolving and relations. And

death is not only the fear that present projects are right now empty, it is the
fear that present value and wonder is right now diminished (Ibid, p. 208–209). This argument also helps to

death is tragic when it comes prematurely.

explain our intuition that especially While we might grieve the death of someone at any age, it seems
especially bad when it is a child, or a young adult, that died. We sometimes explicitly state this in terms of the deceased having “so much left to do,” or having their “whole lives ahead of them.” It is not that death is unimportant when it is the
elderly who die, but that, in many cases, the elderly have already had a chance to accomplish goals they have set for themselves. Indeed, many times those who face impending death with tranquility are those who can say, of themselves, that they
have already lived a long, full life—while the elderly who most lament death are those who regret what they have failed to do in the time they had. “It is those who are most afraid of having missed something who are also most afraid of missing out
on something when they die” (Kaufmann, 1976, p. 231).
We don’t know what happens beyond death – we can only
trust our own experience which tells us life is good, so we
should preserve it
Schwartz - “A Defense of Naïve Empiricism: It is Neither Self-Refuting Nor Dogmatic.” Stephen P. Schwartz.
Ithaca College. pp.1-14. No date Cited”
The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our
common
empirical experience and experimental psychology offer evidence that
humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical
sources. The fact is that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or
evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our sensory
experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a
posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on empirical
evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like
other animals on our senses to tell us how things are. If humans are more
successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-
experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at cooperating ,
collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori
knowledge. There is no known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible.

Any uncertainty here means vote aff

Bostrom 12 [Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential
Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012)]
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at
Our
existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶
present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know
— at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be
able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about
our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and
ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future
accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers
and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the
probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any
existential catastrophe.

Fear is good and validating it through representing death

better overcomes binary divisions
Macy 2K – Joanna Macy, adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, 2000, Environmental
Discourse and Practice: A Reader, p. 243
We are
The move to a wider ecological sense of self is in large part a function of the dangers that are threatening to overwhelm us.
confronted by social breakdown, wars, nuclear proliferation, and the progressive
destruction of our biosphere. Polls show that people today are aware that the
world, as they know it, may come to an end. This loss of certainty that there will be a
future is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. ¶ Over the past twelve
years my colleagues and I have worked with tens of thousands of people in North America,
Europe, Asia, and Australia, helping them confront and explore what they know and feel
about what is happening to their world. The purpose of this work, which was first known as “Despair and
Empowerment Work,” is to overcome the numbing and powerlessness that result from
suppression of painful responses to massively painful realities . As their grief and
fear for the world is allowed to be expressed without apology or argument and validated
as a wholesome, life-preserving response, people break through their avoidance
mechanisms, break through their sense of futility and isolation. Generally what they break through
into is a larger sense of identity. It is as if the pressure of their acknowledged
awareness of the suffering of our world stretches or collapses the culturally defined
boundaries of the self. It becomes clear, for example, that the grief and fear
experienced for our world and our common future are categorically
different from similar sentiments relating to one’s personal welfare . This pain
cannot be equated with dread of one’s own individual demise. Its source lies less in
concerns for personal survival than in apprehensions of collective suffering – of what looms for human
life and other species and unborn generations to come. Its nature is akin to the original meaning of
compassion – “suffering with.” It is the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part. And, when it is so
defined, it serves as a trigger or getaway to a more encompassing sense of
identity, inseparable from the web of life in which we are as intricately connected
as cells in a larger body. ¶ This shift in consciousness is an appropriate, adaptive response. For the crisis that
threatens our planet, be it seen in its military, ecological, or social aspects, derives from a
dysfunctional and pathogenic notion of the self. It is a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the
delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its
boundaries, that it is so small and needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly
consume , that it is so aloof that we can – as individuals, corporations, nation-
states, or as a species – be immune to what we do to other beings .

The process of extinction causes mass suffering – billions

slowly dying from nuclear catastrophe is painful
 A2 Death Not Binary Robinson
This doesn’t say purely physical understandings of death
are wrong, but that in Baudrillard’s writing, “death” refers
to other death-like processes – deploying reps of physical
death isn’t a link
Robinson 12 (Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre
for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, “Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism &
the Exclusion of Death”, March 30, http:((ceasefiremagazine.co.uk(in-theory-baudrillard-2)
According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is
the ability to engage in exchanges with death. Death should not be seen
here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not
mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of
the subject and of value – which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard
certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on. But he also sees death
figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations , the “death” of
the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance,
eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and
communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation
replaces another. Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque. Death
refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social
change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death.
 Robinson Perm
Permutation – do the plan within a system of gift exchange
– this solves capitalism which is the root cause of binary
views of death
Robinson 12 (Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre
for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, “Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism &
the Exclusion of Death”, March 30, http:((ceasefiremagazine.co.uk(in-theory-baudrillard-2)
Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus introduces the
irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard,
capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries
to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off ambivalence
(associated with death) through value (associated with life). But this is bound to fail.
General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death,
the more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The attempt to
abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of progress, and
linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the
accumulation of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard,
such accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects
now have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced
from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come
from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always based on
negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation.
And capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible
aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other.
It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument. Capitalism produces the
Freudian “death drive”, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx
and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious. It is
the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard
also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan. He believes desire comes into
existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic. Liberated energies always leave a new
remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups
do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the
symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire.
He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the
processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies.
This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere. It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of
desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed
categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of
energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism,
because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility.
Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does
not destroy the remainder. Quite the opposite. The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This
turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the forgotten dead.
Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening.
It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined. This is different from theories of
lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is the carrier of the force of
symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical
difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the
repressed remainder. Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West
continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first –
destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic
dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic
confusion and instability. Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system . This is not
because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it
counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant
system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody
has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift.
They exist to keep the symbolic at bay. The affective charge of death remains
present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’
of immediate retaliation.

Disads to the perm don’t apply – gift-exchange is totally

subversive since the system can’t integrate exchange;
including the aff doesn’t tank perm solvency. Also, gift-
exchange matters independent of the aff’s death reps – even
if they win a death link, the aff can exist within a system of
symbolic exchange.
 A2 Natives Believe Non-Binary Death
Their invocation of “the natives” believing in more mystical
and pre-modern ideas of death is racist and essentialist
Minssieux 13 [(Nelly Minssieux, Milene Minssieux and Kristoffer Sidenius)
“The Impact of Essentialist Representations on the Native American in a
Postcolonial Context” Project Report – Cultural Encounters, Fall 2013 –
Supervisor: Prem Poddar, Senior Fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient cultural
and historical research institute] AT
The postcolonial subject has
is one which been represented in
frequently Western relation to

imperialist discourse , benefitting and reinforcing prevailing dominant power

structures. (Moreira- Slepoy: 11) Postcolonial dynamics are characterised by underlying power distributions between the coloniser and colonised, where the former exerts his power and authority over the colonized.
Interferences with what were generally indigenous cultures have been conducted in the name of development, out of good will to help the colonized achieve similar “civilized” ways as the colonizer himself. This civilizing process was achieved in
part through the use of representation as a means of control by spreading Western Imperialist discourse through essentialist views. In philosophy, the essential properties of an object, in contrast to accidental properties, are qualities which are
necessary to an object’s being, and without which it could not possibly ‘be’. They are thus essential to its existence. Accidental properties, however, refer to certain qualities which an object might possess, but might also not have possessed

an essentialist view on culture leads one to understanding

(Robertson). In relation to this, one might have . This

cultural ways as natural not recognizing social construct, which (common knowledge),

presents a danger when one tries to impose these ‘truths’ on a culture

presenting differing ways of life. We will investigate the impact of stereotypes on a population, and its use as an effective medium of coercion. During imperialist times,
European colonial power was not solely maintained through military means. In fact, representations of the colonial subject were used as a tool in promoting their discourse. (MOREIRA-SLEPOY: 2) The images circulating depicting the colonized

we live in a world of representations

were controlled and manipulated which was a powerful tool of coercion. According to Said, “... not only of commodities but also ,

their production
and representations- and interpretation are the very element of , circulation, history,

culture These representations represented the colonized as a

-” (MOREIRA-SLEPOY: 1) have

deviant Other the sign of cultural /racial difference

, bringing him to a fixed and static position. For Homi Bhabha, fixity is: “... /historical

in the discourse of colonialism connotes rigidity and an , which is a paradoxical mode of representation: it

unchanging order fixity is a strategy used by

as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition” (IBID). Thus, this

essentialist dominating powers to enforce their ways over the colonies

through representation whilst ensuring a continuation of their discourse. The ensuring of one’s power through representation will be developed later in the chapter. In terms of the colonized
responses to the representations, Dubois has proposed what she refers to as double consciousness, which is: “...a peculiar sensation, [...] this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness” (Du Bois: 3-4). What Dubois is claiming here is that when being oppressed, the colonised starts to look at themselves through the eyes of the colonisers, internalising
the stereotyped constructions of their identity which leads to a mimicking of the colonizer’s ways. However, while the colonised feel an urge to comply with the dominant discourse, they also intuitively feel the need to find alternative ways of
resisting. The postcolonial subject will unconsciously try to gain acceptance by internalizing the dominant essential discourses, thereby mimicking the representations viewed. In Homi Bhabha’s words, this mimicry may be understood as “one of
the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge”. He adds that this strategy aims at creating «a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” This implies that the

colonized should internalise and embody Western discourse, while however still remaining an Other. These ideological representations were, naturally, derogative,

portray the colonized as a

ing degenerate or primitive being (Bhabha: 85-86). In terms of aesthetics, Western works were considered as surpassing any

other forms of art. These were left unquestioned, considered as universal truths. In fact, Schwarz states that: “...a conception of art which views itself as transcending ideology even as it raises a single object, English literature, to the status of self-

Binary thought is characteristic of imperialist

contained totality” to point to the essentialist views of the prior (Schwarz: 21).

discourse Othering can also be done through the

, and can be seen when a representation is made through divisions of Self/Other. This

representing of Others as exotic a mythical or creature. Edward Said has contributed greatly to this process which he terms Orientalisation: “The Orient was almost a European
invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said: 87). Thus, the Occident/Orient dichotomy is a socially constructed one which has a history and

representation established through

tradition. These mechanisms of exoticism are employed degradation or

to symbolically force subjects into dominant discourses internalizing , entering the collective consciousness of the people,

reinforcing governing power relations. This is

thus an essentialist stance obviously

where one does not question essentially natural ways of life, enforcing and habitual

them on others who ‘do not know better’ , a hierarchical view . Through this binary way of perceiving

where the self is perceived as superior to the Other is established. The self is also the ‘normal’ one, and in this sense, the Other is a
sort of alien. In this section, we will make a brief historical overview of the west ́s hegemonic power over the Native Americans. The image we have of the Native Americans today is a simplified western construction which is not adequate with the
complexity of Native American culture, history and their self-representations. (Harlan et al: 202) This demonstrates the way power can be used to enforce dominant ideologies. In Robert Berkhoffer's The White Man’s Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present he writes that: “Since Whites primarily understood the Indian as an antithesis to themselves, then civilization and Indianness as they defined them would forever be opposites.” (Robert Berkhofer,
Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, New York: First Vintage Books Edition, A Division of Random House, 1979, p. 29) Indians exist not as having their holistic culture and history but as a
dichotomy to us, and therefore dependent on us. If the Indian exists only in relation to being what 'white is not', then the Indian is truly Indian if he remains excluded from civilization and maintains his traditional culture. He is therefore an
ahistorical and decontextualized being. When American anthropology developed in the 1890's, artifact collecting became popular amongst intellectuals. Later, in the twentieth century, tourism expanded and the general public started collecting
artifacts. According to Brody and Garmhausen, it is between 1900 and 1917 that white intervention amongst Native art began in the Southwest (Harlan et al: 217). Anthropologists or Indian traders went to various Indian tribes and provided the
Natives with material for painting. They were asked to make paintings regarding tribal ceremonies. These paintings were bought and exhibited at museums or used for research. These paintings are therefore not 'authentic' in relation to the
western definition of authentic which is not influenced by Western culture. They are paintings seeking to please the white market. By the 1920's, there were over a dozen of Indians who produced these 'Native paintings' for white customers in
areas such as in Santa Fe, Taos and New Mexico. Two of these became a market which remains the largest 'Indian art' venues today (Gallup Inter Tribal Indian Ceremonial and Santa Fe Indian Market) (IBID). A larger event was held in 1931 in
New York. This National Indian Art show emphasized that Indians were a dying race and that their culture needed preserving. As the demand for Native art increased, more Indians participated in the making of this art (IBID). From the 1930's
onwards, art was seen as a process for economic growth. For this reason, art, which assured the continuation of 'Native art' was incorporated into boarding schools as part of the curriculum (Harlan et al: 216). The Santa Fe boarding school is an
example of this. The teachers were non Native American and taught Native American students to use techniques and subjects which conformed to the idea of the Vanishing Indian. This school aimed to preserve Indian art through techniques
which were said to be ‘authentic’. Dorothy Dunn, the director of the Santa Fe art school decided that the art produced was to be sold exclusively for the Indian Market. This way of making art was known as the Studio style. The students were told
to look in their backgrounds for tribal themes to depict and were refused any other topic. The subjects were traditional ceremonial and tribal scenes, and plants and animals, using a flat, decorative, linear style. (Ojibwa) It is important to note that
although Dorothy Dunn scholarized the studio style to fit the demands of the white market, several techniques were already present in Native American culture before the arrival of settlers. For example, she introduced the use of earth color
paintings in 1933 to reproduce the colors traditionally used in painting pottery and ceremonial objects. (Ojibwa) example of a studio-style painting, by Joe Herrera, Cochiti “Men’s arrow Dance” 1938 In 1959, The Rockefeller conference took
place at the university of Arizona. The aim of this conference was to discuss ways to preserve and expand Southwest Indian art. Dorothy Dunn supported the idea that Indian studio style art was ahistorical:.”Indian painting is, first of all, art, but
in the greater implications of human relationships and history it is something more—something perhaps of a genetic aspect in the riddle of mankind. Unless the legends, songs, ceremonies, and other native customs are recorded by the people
themselves, painting must continue to be the principal contributor of Indian thought to the world art and history.” (Harlan et al: 219) Dorothy Dunn is placing the Indians beyond history and context thus bringing them to a more universal and
mystical level of mankind. Lloyd New went against the ideas held by the conference concerning the idea of the vanishing Indian: ”Let’s admit, sadly if you must, that the hey-dey of Indian life is past, or passing. Let’s also admit that art with all
peoples has been a manifestation of the lives of those people, reflecting the truth of the times. And if Indian culture is in a state of flux then we must expect a corresponding art” (IBID). In the late fifties and early sixties, there was a shift in Indian
Art. Until then, it had only been outsiders who spoke on behalf of Native American culture. This started changing slowly. In October 1959, workshops were organized by organizers of the University of Arizona for young Indian artists. It was in
order to help the younger generation during a time of conflict between traditional and contemporary viewpoints. The workshops did not only focus on Indian painting as seen in the Studio Art movement. They learned from both Indian
anthropological resources and historic and contemporary Western art sources and were taught by both Indian and Anglo instructors (IBID). In 1962, the Santa Fe boarding school was replaced by the Institute of American Indian Arts (also
known as IAIA). Three Native American instructors were hired as instructors of the school. They broadened the fields of Native Arts so it did not only encompass painting. This period was known as the post-studio style and golden period.
American Indian studies later became available at universities which caused competition for the IAIA. Modern artists began detaching themselves from the techniques of the industry and developed their own techniques. The art produced was for
a larger audience, in opposition to the Studio Style. New artists became renowned for being artists and not only Native Artists. Furthermore, by the mid- 2000s a new generation of artists started to create socially critical works (Harlan et al: 221).
Museums have broadened the boundaries of Indian Arts so that they are in accordance with modernity (and not only the 'authentic' Indian image from the Indian Market.) This is the case of the exhibition New maternities in a post Indian world
at the National Museum of the American Indian (IBID). This museum collaborates with Native communities and gives place to the voices of contemporary Indigenous as exhibitions are from the Native perspective. Theory of Representation of
Stereotypes Stereotyping is defined as a ”one-sided characterization of others, and as a general process, stereotyping is a unilinear mode of representing them.” (Pickering: 47). The two stereotypes which are relevant in relation to the case of
Native American representation are the concepts of the 'Other' and the 'primitive', which is derived from the former. As shall be investigated further in the project, Native Americans have been subjected to various stereotypes.

Stereotypes are strong representation as they allow symbolic control over tools of

the stereotyped.
one who is They “reduce
As we have seen in the previous chapter, stereotypes are maintained by those in power. have the ability to

everything about the person to traits, exaggerate and simplify them those , and fix them without

As a symbolic process it is effective, as people can take it as

change or development to eternity” (Hall, 1997: 258).

being true. Firstly, we shall attempt to explain that due to its naturalized appearance the stereotype can be efficient and thus create a symbolic control over the other. Secondly, we shall establish the various ways in which

These manifest themselves through symbolic expulsion of the

it maintains symbolic control. partly

‘Other’. The control over space and time is an important aspect here. This is primarily the case in the stereotyping of the primitive. We shall see that control over time and space leads to a denial of history. Stereotyping involves a
process of objectification of the ‘Other’, which leaves the other in a position where his cultural identity will be damaged with no possibility for change. Stereotypes are able to have an effect on both those stereotyping and those being stereotyped.
It is for this reason that we can speak of a symbolic control. It is not the stereotype in itself which is powerful, but the legitimacy that people grant it. When people start taking it as being true and act in accordance to it, the power of the stereotype
takes place. As we have formerly observed, power relations play a role on representations. This is in relation to the hegemonic relations and structures within a society(ies). Bourdieu states that: “The cultural arbitrary is used by dominant groups

representations can
or classes because it expresses completely although always in a mediated way the objective and material interests of the dominant group” (Rajan: 139). This means that

appear to usas natural, as they reflect underlying power relations. Indeed, due to the power relations at play,
what is culturally arbitrary takes on a quasi- cognitive dimension, as if they could be demonstrated objectively or separately from culture (Pickering :70). If stereotypes take on a naturalized form, then they can hardly change. The association with
essentialism is clear here. Cultural values take on naturalized dimensions and appear to have an innate and universal existence rather than taken as being cultural constructs (Merriam-Webster). Therefore, the stereotype appears to us as 'true'

the ‘Other’ can be

and ‘transparent'. The stereotype then reaches a neutral level and is disguised. It needs to be masked in order to exercise its power (Pickering: 70). The construction of

explained in relation to power relations. those who possess power In relation to hegemony, the have

ensure the exclusion of those who do not

the ability to regulate the norms of society in their interest. In order to maintain their position, they

possess power. (Hugh). Those who do not fit into society’s norms are deviants. They do not go unnoticed. For “what is taken as normal is usually taken for granted and left unquestioned” (Pickering: 70). The
opposite also applies that what is not normal or deviant is noticed. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir illustrates this in relation to gender: “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the ‘Other’” (Pickering: 64). This could be applied to other social
categories such as race, ethnicity etc. Those who possess the power possess the means to construct the discourses. They define themselves in contrast to the ‘Others’. The ‘Others’ do not have the means of defining themselves, but instead identify
themselves through the dominant groups’ self-definition. This is a denial of identity as it “...divests them of their social and cultural identities by diminishing them to their stereotyped definitions.” (Pickering: 73). Furthermore, this recognition of
oneself as ‘Other’ violates individual autonomy and independence as the subject is objectified as complementary to another subject in order to be. Stereotyping can thereafter cast the 'Other' on the social periphery. By distancing the 'Other', it
unifies the sense of social identity of the ones placed at the symbolic center. The need for this symbolic centrality suggests two causes: ”...either a fear of what cannot be admitted into an ordered identity, or a critical lack, an absence in the
presence of identity which demands that the other be turned into an object of happy assimilation” (Pickering: 49) It can be said that the 'Other' is accomplishing the needs of solving fantasies of those engaged in the process of stereotyping. In this
way, stereotypes reveal more about the ones stereotyping than the one being stereotyped: “The Other is always constructed as an object for the benefit of the subject who stands in a need of an objectified other in order to achieve a masterly self-
definition” (Pickering: 71) Defining the Other is first and foremost to define the self. In order to understand the construction of the stereotype of the primitive, it is necessary to look back into history to when the term was first used, as the view on

The notion of the 'primitive'

the primitive today is still based on this imperial history (Pickering: 52). The term primitive is the binary opposite of the term modernity. became widely

fulfilled the task of mirroring

used in the nineteenth century (though it had existed since the Columbian times (Pickering: 51). As the concept of the 'Other', the primitive

the West , more particularly in their own development. The primitive is seen as antithesis to development.
Darwin's evolutionism was an important contribution to the transition from the traditional to the modern society (Pickering: 52). This led to an interest in studying 'primitive' societies, which lacked any sense of development concerning

The primitive was

empirical and rational knowledge. therefore the opposite of the civilized modern
individual. Founded on evolutionism was the eugenics movement, initiated by Francis Galton who justified superiority of races by stating that physically inherent characteristics had bred Europeans into modern civilized

the
beings (Pickering: 53). The dominion of Europeans over other less scientifically developed cultures was confirmed and the existence of races confirmed. The construction of races carries many consequences. Along with it is

idea that the 'primitive' cultures lack abilities to develop the innate , which Europeans have. This

legitimizes Europeans' right to control these cultures It puts the , in order to develop them. also

West at the symbolic center and every other culture on the margin due to
being modern and superior. therefore We can note that due to the fact that the primitives serve as a mirror for Western development, Darwin's theory of Evolution brought a
hierarchical model within social development where development was the dynamic of evolution (with the West at one end and the primitive cultures at the other). According to this thought, every culture goes through the same stages in relation
to this scale of progress, following the path of Europe. This brings every culture as dependent to the West on an inferior level, as they will all follow the same stages of development the West has undergone. The Other serves to indicate how far

These cultures
Western civilization has developed. The West is therefore the reference point to other cultures as it is the most developed. serve the purpose of a ”living fossil” for the West, as a mirror of the stage

represent a backward, unchanging,

that Europe had gone through long ago. They are in fact so underdeveloped that they form of human existence which is”...

simple form of human existence which the West left behind had long ” (Pickering: 54). As the primitive is placed
into the past of the West, it creates a division in time around the globe where different cultures are living in different times. Living in the past does not leave space for them to change their position on a symbolic level. We can notice a

The primitive is so
temporalization of geographical spaces. As mentioned above, temporality is divided in stages regarding the Western model of modernity.

underdeveloped that he is denied history

he does not have a place on the scale. Consequently, he is denied time. If he is denied time, then follows that

which further excludes them. The ‘Others’

(Pickering: 56). It places them in a different time than the present of the producers of the discourse,

are symbolically muted by being in the past Primitives were of the production of discourse.

exhibited as spectacles The in Europe, such as African tribes as the 'Kaffir' in London in 1853 or bushmen displayed as little above monkeys (Pickering: 58).

exhibitions were degrading for these cultures. They permitted the West to
keep a control over the 'unknown' savage. The savagery under spectacle is
under control this way. The primitive makes its way into popular culture , as it is

accessible and familiarized by the general population and made real in popular minds. This is a case of the happy assimilation
of the unknown to fit the society's needs and adapt it as an object of fascination. Furthermore, it brings forth the development of the West.
 A2 Death is Original Hierarchy
They have no evidence for this claim – it’s non-falsifiable as
anything can be claimed as the “root cause” of all
hierarchies so you shouldn’t treat it as true
 A2 Human As Machine
The aff is compatible with recognizing that we’re always
dying - it just says at some point we can no longer enjoy life,
at which point the person is “dead” – this breaks out of the
machinic view of the human
Death/Suffering Bad
 TL Death is Bad
Value is subjective – you don’t know how other people
experience the world, you only the know what values you
have chosen for yourself– if people see value in their lives,
then they should be allowed to live
Deprivation makes death bad, experience is irrelevant. The fact
that death is inevitable does not make it less bad.
Banach 1—St. Anslem College [David, “Outline of Thomas Nagel, Feb 1, 2001
"Death"”,http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/deathol.htm]RMT
Statement of the problem. If we assume that death is the permanent end of our
existence, is death a bad thing? II. Two possible positions. A. Death deprives of us
life, which is all we have. Therefore, it is the greatest of all losses. B. Death is
the end of the subject. It is a mere blank, not a great loss. There is no subject left to
experience the loss. III. If death is an evil, it is not because of its positive features,
but because of what it deprives us of. Namely, life. A. Life has value apart from its
contents. When we take away all the good and bad experiences in life what is left over,
the bare experience of life, is valuable in itself. 1. The value of life does not attach
to mere organic survival. Surviving in a coma does not appeal to us. 2. The good of life
can be multiplied by time. More is better than less. B. The state of being dead, or nonexistent, is
not evil in itself. It cannot be what makes death bad. 1. Death is not an evil that one accumulates more of the longer one is dead. 2. We
would not regard a temporary suspension of life as a great misfortune in itself. 3. We don't regard the long period of time before we were
born, in which we did not exist, as a great misfortune. IV. Three objections. A. It can be doubted that anything can be an evil unless it causes
displeasure. How can a deprivation of life be an evil unless someone minds the deprivation? B. In the case of death there is no subject left.
How can it be a misfortune if there is no subject of the misfortune? Who suffers the misfortune? C. How can the period of nonexistence after
our death be bad, if the period before our birth is not bad. V. Replies to the objections. A. The good or ill fortune of a person depends on a
persons history and possibilities rather than just their momentary state. Therefore a terrible misfortune can befall a person even though
they are not around to experience the misfortune. 1. We consider ourselves to have been injured when someone acts against our wishes or
interests, even when we are not aware of his or her actions. 2. The discovery of wrongs done us in our absence make us unhappy because
they are misfortunes. They are not misfortunes only because they made us unhappy when we discovered them. 3. We consider a person who
has become a vegetable to have suffered a grave misfortune, even though they may be quite happy in their new condition. We recognize this
only when we consider the person he could be now. B.
Even though the person as subject does not
survive his or her death, it can still be the subject of the misfortune. If he or
she had not died, it would have gone on enjoying whatever good there is in living. C.
The period of time after death is time that death deprives us of. This is not
true of the period of non-existence before birth. This explains the differences in
our attitudes towards these two periods of non-existence.

We don’t know what happens beyond death – we can only

trust our own experience which tells us life is good, so we
should preserve it
Schwartz - “A Defense of Naïve Empiricism: It is Neither Self-Refuting Nor Dogmatic.” Stephen P. Schwartz.
Ithaca College. pp.1-14. No date Cited”
The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our
common
empirical experience and experimental psychology offer evidence that
humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical
sources. The fact is that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or
evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our sensory
experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a
posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on empirical
evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like
other animals on our senses to tell us how things are. If humans are more
successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-
experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at cooperating ,
collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori
knowledge. There is no known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible.

Any uncertainty here means vote aff

Bostrom 12 [Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential
Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012)]
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at
Our
existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶
present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know
— at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be
able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about
our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and
ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future
accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers
and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the
probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any
existential catastrophe.

The process of extinction causes mass suffering – billions

slowly dying from nuclear catastrophe is painful
Humanity would be aware that all its achievements are
ending which causes suffering
Epstein and Zhao 9 Richard J. Epstein and Y. Zhao ‘9 – Laboratory of Computational Oncology,
Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, The Threat That Dare Not Speak Its Name; Human Extinction,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Volume 52, Number 1, Winter 2009, Muse
[Humanity]Man is both blessed and cursed by the highest level of self-awareness of any life-form on Earth.
This suggests that the process of human extinction is likely to be accompanied by more
suffering than that associated with any previous species extinction event. Such suffering may
only be eased by the getting of wisdom: the same kind of wisdom that could, if applied sufficiently early, postpone extinction. But
the tragedy of our species is that evolution does not select for such foresight. Man’s dreams of being an immortal species in an
eternal paradise are unachievable not because of original sin—the doomsday scenario for which we choose to blame our “free
will,” thereby perpetuating our creationist illusion of being at the center of the universe—but rather, in reductionist terms, because
paradise is incompatible with evolution. More scientific effort in propounding this central truth of
our species’ mortality, rather than seeking spiritual comfort in escapist fantasies, could
pay dividends in minimizing the eventual cumulative burden of human suffering . 
 --1AR Deprivation Theory
Death is bad by depriving us of the good in life. The burden falls on
them to prove people don’t want to live.
Their death inevitable arguments don’t apply because it’s not
inevitable in OUR LIFE TIME, and SUBJECTIVELY we can extend
experience which death shuts off—that’s Banach

Life is a pre-requisite to death’s symbolic value---fearing death

doesn’t preclude recognizing life’s finitude and its inevitability—
even if death isn’t inherently bad it’s still a subjective travesty.
Cara Kalnow 9 A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of MPhil at the University of St. Andrews “WHY DEATH CAN
BE BAD AND IMMORTALITY IS WORSE” https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/10023/724/3/Cara
%20Kalnow%20MPhil%20thesis.PDF
our lives could
(PA) also provided us with good reason to reject the Epicurean claim that the finitude of life cannot be bad for us. With (PA), we saw that

accumulate value through the satisfaction of our desires beyond the boundaries of the
natural termination of life. But Chapter Four determined that the finitude of life is a necessary condition for
the value of life as such and that many of our human values rely on the finite temporal
structure of life. I therefore argued that an indefinite life cannot present a desirable alternative to our finite life, because life as such would not be recognized
as valuable. In this chapter, I have argued that the finitude of life is instrumentally good as it provides the

recognition that life itself is valuable . Although I ultimately agree with the Epicureans that the finitude of
life cannot be an evil, this conclusion was not reached from the Epicurean arguments
against the badness of death, and I maintain that (HA) and (EA) are insufficient to justify changing our attitudes towards our future deaths and the
finitude of life. Nonetheless, the instrumental good of the finitude of life that we arrived at through the consideration of immortality should make us realize that the finitude
of life cannot be an evil; it is a necessary condition for the recognition that life as such is valuable.¶ Although my arguments pertaining to the nature of death and its moral
implications have yielded several of the Epicurean conclusions, my position still negotiates a middle ground between the
Epicureans and Williams, as (PA) accounts for the intuition that it is rational to fear death and regard
it as an evil to be avoided . I have therefore reached three of the Epicurean conclusions pertaining to the moral worth of the nature of death: (1)
that the state of being dead is nothing to us, (2) death simpliciter is nothing to us, and (3) the finitude of life is a matter for contentment. But against the Epicureans, I have
we can rationally fear our future deaths, as categorical desires provide a disutility
argued that

by which the prospect of death is rationally held as an evil to be avoided. Finally, I also claimed against
the Epicureans, that the prospect of death can rationally be regarded as morally good for one if one no longer desires to continue living.¶ 5.3 Conclusion¶ I began this thesis
with the suggestion that in part, theEpicureans were right: death—when it occurs—is nothing to us . I went on to
defend the Epicurean position against the objections raised by the deprivation theorists and Williams. I argued that the state of being dead, and death simpliciter, cannot be an
evil of deprivation or prevention for the person who dies because (once dead), the person—and the grounds for any misfortune—cease to exist. I accounted for the anti-
it is rational to fear death and to regard death as an evil to be avoided, not because death simpliciter is
Epicurean intuition 115 that

bad, but rather because the prospect of our deaths may be presented to us as bad for us
if our deaths would prevent the satisfaction of our categorical desires. Though we have
good reasons to rationally regard the prospect of our own death as an evil for us, the fact
that life is finite cannot be an evil and is in fact instrumentally good, because it takes the
threat of losing life to recognize that life as such is valuable . In this chapter, I concluded that even
though death cannot be of any moral worth for us once it occurs, we can attach two
distinct values to death while we are alive : we can attach a value of disutility (or
utility) to the prospect of our own individual deaths, and we must attach an instrumentally good
value to the fact of death as such. How to decide on the balance of those values is a
matter for psychological judgment.
 --1AR Ext: Fear Good
Fear is good—Macy says expressions of fear create larger senses of
identity. Only fear can allow a definition of the self that accepts its
place in relation to death. The alternative is SEPARATION that results
in atrocities.
 --1AR Actions Good
Acting is key to meaning—changing the world is a celebration of life
that changes meaning—that’s may
IT IS INEVITABLE AND SOLVES EXTINCTION—Pyszczynski says
evolution results in beings that avoid death, which fear generates.
Only fear stops extinction, we feel anxiety towards non-present events
like DISEASE AND NUKES. Proves the ALT FAILS AND CAUSES
EXTINCTION.
 Extinction Bad
The process of extinction causes mass suffering – billions
slowly dying from nuclear catastrophe is painful
Humanity would be aware that all its achievements are
ending which causes suffering
Epstein and Zhao 9 Richard J. Epstein and Y. Zhao ‘9 – Laboratory of Computational Oncology,
Department of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, The Threat That Dare Not Speak Its Name; Human Extinction,
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Volume 52, Number 1, Winter 2009, Muse
[Humanity]Man is both blessed and cursed by the highest level of self-awareness of any life-form on Earth.
This suggests that the process of human extinction is likely to be accompanied by more
suffering than that associated with any previous species extinction event. Such suffering may
only be eased by the getting of wisdom: the same kind of wisdom that could, if applied sufficiently early, postpone extinction. But
the tragedy of our species is that evolution does not select for such foresight. Man’s dreams of being an immortal species in an
eternal paradise are unachievable not because of original sin—the doomsday scenario for which we choose to blame our “free
will,” thereby perpetuating our creationist illusion of being at the center of the universe—but rather, in reductionist terms, because
paradise is incompatible with evolution. More scientific effort in propounding this central truth of
our species’ mortality, rather than seeking spiritual comfort in escapist fantasies, could
pay dividends in minimizing the eventual cumulative burden of human suffering . 
 Death bad [long]
Deprivation makes death bad, experience is irrelevant. The
fact that death is inevitable does not make it less bad.
Banach 1—St. Anslem College [David, “Outline of Thomas Nagel, Feb 1, 2001
"Death"”,http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/deathol.htm]RMT
Statement of the problem. If we assume that death is the permanent end of our
existence, is death a bad thing? II. Two possible positions. A. Death deprives of us
life, which is all we have. Therefore, it is the greatest of all losses. B. Death is
the end of the subject. It is a mere blank, not a great loss. There is no subject left to
experience the loss. III. If death is an evil, it is not because of its positive features,
but because of what it deprives us of. Namely, life. A. Life has value apart from its
contents. When we take away all the good and bad experiences in life what is left over,
the bare experience of life, is valuable in itself. 1. The value of life does not attach
to mere organic survival. Surviving in a coma does not appeal to us. 2. The good of life
can be multiplied by time. More is better than less. B. The state of being dead, or nonexistent, is
not evil in itself. It cannot be what makes death bad. 1. Death is not an evil that one accumulates more of the longer one is dead. 2. We
would not regard a temporary suspension of life as a great misfortune in itself. 3. We don't regard the long period of time before we were
born, in which we did not exist, as a great misfortune. IV. Three objections. A. It can be doubted that anything can be an evil unless it causes
displeasure. How can a deprivation of life be an evil unless someone minds the deprivation? B. In the case of death there is no subject left.
How can it be a misfortune if there is no subject of the misfortune? Who suffers the misfortune? C. How can the period of nonexistence after
our death be bad, if the period before our birth is not bad. V. Replies to the objections. A. The good or ill fortune of a person depends on a
persons history and possibilities rather than just their momentary state. Therefore a terrible misfortune can befall a person even though
they are not around to experience the misfortune. 1. We consider ourselves to have been injured when someone acts against our wishes or
interests, even when we are not aware of his or her actions. 2. The discovery of wrongs done us in our absence make us unhappy because
they are misfortunes. They are not misfortunes only because they made us unhappy when we discovered them. 3. We consider a person who
has become a vegetable to have suffered a grave misfortune, even though they may be quite happy in their new condition. We recognize this
only when we consider the person he could be now. B. Even though the person as subject does not
survive his or her death, it can still be the subject of the misfortune. If he or
she had not died, it would have gone on enjoying whatever good there is in living. C.
The period of time after death is time that death deprives us of. This is not
true of the period of non-existence before birth. This explains the differences in
our attitudes towards these two periods of non-existence. VI. The question still remains
whether the non-realization of the possibility for further life is always a misfortune, or
whether this depends on what can naturally be hoped for. A. Perhaps we can only
regard as a misfortune those deprivations which add gratuitously to the
inevitable evils we must endure. In this case, only premature death would be a great
evil. B. Whether we see death as a deprivation depends upon the point of view we take up. 1. Observed from the outside,
objectively, a human being cannot live much more than 100 years. From this point of view, we
can only feel deprived of those years which are allotted to beings of our type ,
but which we do not live long enough to enjoy. 2. When looked at in terms of our own experience ,
subjectively, our life experience seems open ended. We can see no reason why
our normal experiences cannot continue indefinitely. On this view death, no matter

how inevitable, is the cancellation of an indefinitely extendible good. The

fact that death is inevitable does not affect how it feels in our experience to
look forward to the end of our experience.
 Death is Bad
Their evidence is in the context of individual choices to live
or die, not murdering people who haven’t chosen to die – it
doesn’t apply to forcing death on others
Value is subjective – you don’t know how other people
experience the world, you only the know what values you
have chosen for yourself– if people see value in their lives,
then they should be allowed to live
Death is bad—to die removes pleasure
Preston 7 – Rio Hondo College AND Minnesota State Community and
Technical College (Ted; Scott Dixon, “Who wants to live forever? Immortality,
authenticity, and living forever in the present”, Int J Philos Relig (2007) 61:99–
117, dml)
If death deprives of pleasure—the pleasure he would
Death might be very bad for the one who is dead. him a lot of

have enjoyed if [s]he had not died death might be —the death might be a huge misfortune for someone. More explicitly,

extrinsically bad even though nothing intrinsically bad happens

for the one who is dead to him as a

death would be extrinsically bad

result. In my view, if life would have contained more for him his

intrinsic value if he had not died then (Ibid, p. 140). This is a tricky issue. On the one hand, someone might claim that even a negative evil has to happen to someone, and the dead person who no longer exists is no

it is a powerful intuition that death

longer a “somebody” to experience the evil, so there shouldn’t be any subjective harm. On the other hand,

deprives the dead of something, somehow. Nagel tries to resolve this problem by claiming that the person who used to exist can be benefited or
harmed by death, and tries to show that our intuitions are in harmony with this idea. For instance, he claims we could and would say of someone trapped in a burning building who died instantly from being hit on the head rather than burning to
death, that the person was lucky, or better off, for having died quickly. Of course, after dying from the head trauma, there was no one in existence who was spared the pain of burning to death, but Nagel claims that the “him” we refer to in such an
example refers to the person who was alive and who would have suffered (Nagel, 1987). Nagel believes the person subjectively benefited, although no subject was there to receive the benefit. It would be easier to understand this objectively in
terms of the qualitative assessment of Feldman; however, that is not Nagel’s position. Similarly, if someone dies before seeing the birth of a grandchild, and there is no life after death, there is no person in existence who is presently being

the person who was alive and who would have seen
deprived of anything at all, including, of course, births of grandchildren. But

it, if not for death, has counterfactually and subjectively missed out on
something. The same could be said about death as a negative evil. When
kind of thing

you die, all good come to a stop:

the If those
things in your life no more meals, movies, travel, conversation, love, work, books, music, or anything else.

things would be good, their absence is bad. the Of course, you won’t miss them: death is not like being locked up in solitary confinement. But

ending of everything good seems clearly to be a negative evil in life, because of the stopping of life itself,

for the person who was alive and is now dead. When someone we know dies,
we feel sorry not only for ourselves but for him, because he cannot see the
sun shine today, or smell the bread in the toaster (Ibid, p. 93). This is admittedly a confusing concept: the
idea that one can be negatively harmed or benefited even when one does not exist, but it is a concept Nagel claims is intuitively powerful for us, and which Feldman supports. It is confusing because of its counterfactual base; that a subject
experiences harm or good even though there is no subject. It is intuitive because we do talk and think in terms of what it would have been for someone to experience. What these two articulations may show is that counterfactuals are being used in
different ways, with the intuitive version masking a lot of the work of the counterfactual harm version. In response to the problem of locating when death is a problem for someone, Feldman claims that a state of affairs can be bad for someone
regardless of when it occurs: “The only requirement is that the value of the life he leads if it occurs is lower than the value of the life he leads if it does not occur” (Feldman, 1992, p. 152). The comparison is between the respective values of two
possible lives. The state of affairs pertaining to someone dying at some particular time, is bad for that person, if “the value-for-her of the life she leads where [that state of affairs] occurs is lower than the value-for-her of the life she would have led
if [that state of affairs] had not taken place” (Ibid, p. 155). When is it the case that the value-for-her of her life would be comparatively lower? Eternally. Eternally, as opposed to at any particular moment, because “when we say that her death is a
bad for her, we are really expressing a complex fact about the relative values of two possible lives” (Ibid, p. 154). Lives taken as a whole, that is. It seems that Feldman is offering an objective qualitative analysis here, which may be addressing a
different component than Nagel’s subjective argument does. If we take the two arguments together, they may offer a rather compelling account of why deprivation is a bad thing in an abstracted sense. We should not forget, however, that a
possible life is not a life that is lived or being lived. In that way, they both lose a bit of their intuitive force. In another attempt to undermine the Epicurean argument that death is not a bad thing but one that focuses upon one’s actual desires and

death
interests, we may turn to Nussbaum’s work. Adding to an argument already developed by David Furley, Nussbaum argues that is bad for the one who dies because it renders “empty and

vain the plans, hopes , and desires that this person had during life” (Nussbaum, 1994). As an example, consider someone dying of a terminal disease.
Subjectively, the terminally ill person is unaware of this fact, though some friends and family do know. This person plans for a future that, unbeknownst to him, will be denied him, and, to the friends and relatives who objectively know, “his hopes
and projects for the future seem, right now, particularly vain, futile, and pathetic, since they are doomed to incompleteness” (Ibid). Moreover, the futility is not removed by removing the knowing spectators. “Any death that frustrates hopes and
plans is bad for the life it terminates, because it reflects retrospectively on that life, showing its hopes and projects to have been, at the very time the agent was forming them, empty and meaningless” (Ibid). Nussbaum is making an interesting
move here. She is collapsing the subjective and objective views, such that if the agent were aware, his projects would change and mirror reality. He would realize that his interests cannot be realized, and would change his interests, and live out his
days with an accurate assessment of his interests and mortality. Nussbaum appreciates this argument because it shows how death reflects back on an actual life, and our intuitions do not depend on “the irrational fiction of a surviving subject”

(Ibid, p. 208). This argument is in harmony with Nagel’s claim that death can be bad for someone— even if that someone no longer
exists . And, because it is rooted in the feared futility of our current projects, it is not vulnerable to the “asymmetry problem” (i.e., the alleged irrationality of lamenting the loss of possible experience in the future due to “premature”
death, but not lamenting the loss of possible experience in the past due to not having been born sooner) since the unborn do not yet have any projects subject to futility. Nussbaum adds, to this argument, however, by appealing to the temporally
extended structure of the relationships and activities we tend to cherish. A parent’s love for a child, a child’s for a parent, a teacher’s for a student, a citizen’s for a city: these involve interaction over time, and much planning and hoping. Even the
love or friendship of two mature adults has a structure that evolves and deepens over time; and it will centrally involve sharing futuredirected projects. This orientation to the future seems to be inseparable from the value we attach to these
relationships; we cannot imagine them taking place in an instant without imagining them stripped of much of the human value they actually have. . . . Much the same, too, can be said of individual forms of virtuous activity. To act justly or

death
courageously, one must undertake complex projects that develop over time; so too for intellectual and creative work; so too for athletic achievement. . . . So , when it comes, does not only frustrate projects and desires that just

intrudes upon the value

happen to be there. It of activities the fear of and beauty temporally evolving and relations. And

death is not only the fear that present projects are right now empty, it is the
fear that present value and wonder is right now diminished (Ibid, p. 208–209). This argument also helps to
explain our intuition that death is especially tragic when it comes prematurely. While we might grieve the death of someone at any age, it seems
especially bad when it is a child, or a young adult, that died. We sometimes explicitly state this in terms of the deceased having “so much left to do,” or having their “whole lives ahead of them.” It is not that death is unimportant when it is the
elderly who die, but that, in many cases, the elderly have already had a chance to accomplish goals they have set for themselves. Indeed, many times those who face impending death with tranquility are those who can say, of themselves, that they
have already lived a long, full life—while the elderly who most lament death are those who regret what they have failed to do in the time they had. “It is those who are most afraid of having missed something who are also most afraid of missing out
on something when they die” (Kaufmann, 1976, p. 231).

Murder is unethical—we should not need a card for this and

you should not let them flip the burden—this is an instance
where it’s justified to let your predispositions enter the
round because it’s a strongly held intuition, just like your
intuition that they need warrants for their claims—if you
think ending the lives of others is prima facie bad then you
should vote aff immediately because they even suggested it
 A2 Suffering Good
We control uniqueness – meaning isn’t doomed, it’s just
transient – we should stop suffering when we can
Mitchell Smolkin, doctor who specializes in depression, Understanding Pain, 19 89 p75-79
For Camus, the absurdity of the human condition consists in the incongruity between what humans naturally desire, and
the reality of the world. Humans naturally desire not to be injured and killed. They
desire to understand life and to find meaning in living. They desire to feel at home in the
universe. Despite these natural needs, [humanity] man is confronted with a silent universe that does
not answer human questions about meaning. He is surrounded by irrational destructiveness, and
by the spectre of suffering and pain hurtling out of the void capriciously at
human recipients with no regard for their relative merits. Man is estranged from a
universe which seems so antagonistic to his natural needs. He feels homeless, in exile, a stranger in his own land. He
[Humanity] hears his “nights and days filled always, everywhere with the eternal cry
of human pain.”56 Man has been “sentenced, for an unknown crime to an indeterminate period of punishment. And
while a good many people adapted themselves to confinement and carried out their humdrum lives as before, there were
others who rebelled, and whose one idea was to break loose from the prison house.” Like Ivan Karamozov (Bk V, Chap 4),
Camus refuses to accept the idea that future goods such as Divine salvation or eternal happiness “can compensate for a
single moment of human suffering,”57 or a child’s tears. Both Ivan Karamozov and Camus believe that “if evil is essential
to Divine creation, then creation is unacceptable.” They wish to replace “the reign of grace by the reign of justice.”58 They
both assert that no good man would accept salvation on these terms. “There is no possible salvation for the man who feels
real compassion,” because he would side with the damned and for their sake reject eternity.59 What is to be gained by
rebellion, what are its dangers, and how does one avoid merely “beating the sea with rods” in
a nihilistic orgy? With great perceptiveness, Camus discusses these issues in The Rebel. He begins by outlining
the entire history of nihilistic rebellion. He admits that once God is declared dead and life meaningless, there is the
tendency to rebel in anger by engaging in irrational acts of violence and destruction. Andre Breton has written that the
simplest surrealistic act consists “in going out in the Street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd.”6°
Camus cites “the struggle between the will to be and the desire for annihilation, between the yes and the no, which we have
discovered again and again at every stage of rebellion.”61 Citing numerous historical examples, he continually warns
against this degeneration of rebellion into crime and murder. Another danger of rebellion which Camus discusses is the
sub- stitution of human gods and concepts of salvation for the dead God. This error is more subtle than shooting at
random into the crowd, but leads to much more killing and human suffering than the nihilist sniper. Camus
criticizes “Nietzsche, at least in his theory of super-humanity, and Marx before him, with
his classless society, [who] both replace The Beyond by the Later On.”62 In this respect, these
thinkers have not abandoned the notion that history marches toward redemption in which some messianic goal will be
realized. Camus urges moderation in the quest for distant goals. He writes, “the absolute is not attained nor, above all,
created through history. Politics is not religion, or if it is, then it is nothing but the inquisition.”63 He contrasts
rebellion, which he applauds with revolution which leads to murder in the name
of vague future goals. “Revolution consists in loving[those] a man who does not yet
exist,” and in murdering [those] men who do exist.64 “He who dedicates himself to this history,
dedicates himself to nothing, and in his turn is nothing.”65 In The Plague, the character Tarrou renounces his
revolutionary past. He states, For many years I’ve been ashamed, mortally ashamed of having been, even with the best
intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn. . . All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and
there are victims, and its up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestil- ences.66 Though obviously attuned
to the dangers of rebellion, he insists that “these consequences are in no way due to rebellion itself, or at least they occur to
the extent that the rebel forgets his original purpose.”67 What is the original purpose that has been forgotten? Rebellion
begins because the rebel denounces the lack of justice in the world. He denounces the idea that the end, whether it be the
coming of the messianic age, or the revo- lution, or eternal bliss, justifies means which involve so much suffering. Once
injustice and suffering are denounced, [people] man needs to exert all his effort
against injustice and in solidarity with the sufferers in the world. Killing existing men for a questionable
future good, would not be a rational method of exhibiting solidarity with the
sufferers. Nor would solidarity be shown by stoical acceptance of the status
quo. Camus urges his rebels to renounce murder completely and work for justice and for a
decrease in suffering. Like Dr. Rieux in The Plague, one should take the victim’s side
and “share with his fellow citizens the only certitude they have in common—
love, exile, suffering.”68 What can be accomplished through rebellion?
Camus’ goals are modest. He realizes that the rebel is doomed to “a never ending
defeat,”69 in that death, finitude and suffering will always conquer him. He realizes
that after [humanity] man has mastered everything in creation that can be mastered
and rectified everything that can be rectified, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect
society. Even by his greatest effort man can only purpose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But
the injustice and the suffering will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage.7°
However, there are ephemeral victories and rewards for the rebel. He [One]
who dedicates [oneself] himself for the duration of his life to the house he builds, to the dignity of
[hu]mankind, dedicates himself the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its
seed and sustains the world again and again. Those whose desires are limited to man
and his humble yet formidable love, should enter, if only now and then, into their reward. They know that if there is one
thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love. Society must be arranged to
limit injustice and suffering as much as possible so that each individual has
the leisure and freedom to pursue his own search for meaning. Future utopias must be
renounced, and “history can no longer be presented as an object of
worship.”74 “It is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies,” and to
aim for what is possible—more justice, solidarity, and love among [people]
men. The rebel must “reject divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all
men.”75 Redemption is impossible. Human dignity and love can intermittently be achieved with
struggle and constant vigilance against the plague bacillus that “never dies or
disappears for good. .. [but can] rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”76

Suffering destroys meaning

Edelglass 6 William Edelglass is Assistant Professor of Philosophy
at Marlboro College, “LEVINAS ON SUFFERING AND
COMPASSION” Sophia, Vol. 45, No. 2, October 2006
Because suffering is a pure passivity, lived as the breach of the totality we
constitute through intending acts, Levinas argues, even suffering that is chosen
cannot be meaningfully systematized within a coherent whole. Suffering is a
rupture and disturbance of meaning because it suffocates the subject and destroys
the capacity for systematically assimilating the world. 9 Pain isolates itself in consciousness,
overwhelming consciousness with its insistence. Suffering , then, is an absurdity,
'an absurdity breaking out on the ground of signification. '1~ This absurdity is the eidetic
character of suffering Levinas seeks to draw out in his phenomenology. Suffering often appears justified, from the
biological need for sensibility to pain, to the various ways in which suffering is employed in character formation, the
concerns of practical life, a community's desire for justice, and the needs of the state. Implicit in Levinas's texts is the
insistence that the analysis of these sufferings calls for a distinction between the use
of pain as a tool, a practice performed on the Other's body for a particular
end, and the acknowledgement of the Other's lived pain. A consequence of Levinas's
phenomenology is the idea that instrumental justifications of extreme suffering necessarily are insensible to the
unbearable pain theyseek to legitimize. Strictly speaking, then, suffering is meaningless and cannot be comprehended or
justified by rational argument. Meaningless, and therefore unjustifiable, Levinas insists, suffering is evil.
Suffering, according to Levinas's phenomenology, is an exception to the subject's mastery of being; in suffering the subject
endures the overwhelming of freedom by alterity. The will that revels in the autonomous grasping of the world, in
suffering finds itself grasped by the world. The in-itself of the will loses its capacity to exert itself and submits to the will of
what is beyond its grasp. Contrary to Heidegger, it is not the anxiety before my own death
which threatens the will and the self. For, Levinas argues, death, announced in suffering, is in a future
always beyond the present. Instead of death, it is the pure passivity of suffering that
menaces the freedom of the will. The will endures pain 'as a tyranny,' the work of a 'You,' a malicious
other who perpetrates violence (TI239). This tyranny, Levinas argues, 'is more radical than sin, for it threatens the will in
its very structure as a will, in its dignity as origin and identity' (TI237). Because suffering is unjustifiable, it
is a tyranny breaking open my world of totality and meaning 'for nothing.' The gratuitous and extreme suffering
that destroys the capacity for flourishing human activity is generally addressed by thinkers
in European traditions in the context of metaphysical questions of evil (is evil a positive substance or deviation from the
Good?), or problems of philosophical anthropology (is evil chosen or is it a result of ignorance?). For these traditions it is
evil, not suffering, that is the great scandal, for they consider suffering to be evil only when it is both severe and
unjustified. II But for Levinas suffering is essentially without meaning and thus cannot be legitimized; all suffering is evil.
As he subsumes the question of death into the problem of pain, 12 so also Levinas understands evil in the context of the
unassumability and meaninglessness of suffering. 13 The suffering of singular beings is not incidental to an evil
characterized primarily by the subordination of the categorical imperative to self-interest, or by neglect of the commands
of a Divine Being. Indeed, for Levinas, evil is understood through suffering: 'All evil relates back to suffering' (US92). No
explanation can redeem the suffering of the other and thereby remove its evil while leaving the tyranny of a pain that
overwhelms subjectivity.
 A2 Nietzsche
Nietzsche concedes we’re bodily beings, so any value
requires absence of suffering – he assumes a comfortable
bourgeois existence that abstracts away from the reality of
poverty and warfare
Nussbaum 94 Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven on May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a
particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics. Nussbaum is currently Ernst
Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments
in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics
and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human
Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor.Nietzsche,
Genealogy, Morality, By Richard
We now turn to the heart of the matter, the role of "external goods" in the
good human life. And here we encounter a rather large surprise. There is no philosopher in the
modern Western tradition who is more emphatic than Nietzsche is about the central
importance of the body, and about the fact that we are bodily creatures. Again
and again he charges Christian and Platonist moralities with making a false
separation between our spiritual and our physical nature; against them, he
insists that we are physical through and through. The surprise is that, having said so much
and with such urgency, he really is very loathe to draw the conclusion that is naturally suggested
by his position: that human beings need worldly goods in order to function. In all of
Nietzsche's rather abstract and romantic praise of solitude and asceticism, we find no grasp of the simple truth that a
hungry person cannot think well; that a person who lacks shelter, basic health care, and
the basic necessities of life, is not likely to become a great philosopher or artist, no matter
what her innate equipment. The solitude Nietzsche describes is comfortable bourgeois

solitude , whatever its pains and loneli- ness. Who are his ascetic philosophers? "Heraclitus, Plato. Descartes, Spi-
noza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer"—none a poor person, none a person who had to perform menial labor in order to
survive. And because Nietzsche does not grasp the simple fact that if our abilities are physical
abilities they have physical necessary conditions, he does not understand what the
democratic and socialist movements of his day were all about. The pro-pity tradition, from Homer on,
understood that one functions badly if one is hungry , that one thinks badly if one has to
labor all day in work that does not involve the fully human use of one's faculties. I have suggested that such thoughts were
made by Rousseau the basis for the modern development of democratic-socialist thinking. Since Nietzsche
does not get the basic idea, he does not see what socialism is trying to do.
Since he probably never saw or knew an acutely hungry person, or a person
performing hard physical labor, he never asked how human self-command
is affected by such forms of life. And thus he can proceed as if it does not matter how people live front
day to day, how they get their food. Who provides basic welfare support for Zarathustra? What are the "higher men" doing
all the day long? The reader docs not know and the author does not seem to care. Now Nietzsche himself obviously was
not a happy man. He was lonely, in bad health, scorned by many of his contemporaries. And yet, there still is a distinction
to be drawn between the sort of vulnerability that Nietzsche's life contained and the sort we find if we examine the lives of
truly impov- erished and hungry people. We might say. simplifying things a bit, that there are two sorts of vulnerability:
what we might call bourgeois vulnerabil- ity—for example, the pains of solitude, loneliness, bad reputation, some ill
health, pains that are painful enough but still compatible with thinking and doing philosophy—and what we might call
basic vulnerability, which is a deprivation of resources so central to human
functioning that thought and character are themselves impaired or not developed.
Nietzsche, focuv ing on the first son of vulnerability, holds that it is not so bad; it may even be good for the philosopher.*®
The second sort. I claim, he simply ne- glects—believing, apparently, that even a beggar can be a Stoic hero, if only
socialism does not inspire him with weakness.5"
 Oppression O/w
We also have a RACISM impact – doesn’t just cause death;
oppression is unethical in itself and causes mass suffering,
which outweighs the kritik
Racism is the foremost impact – it makes all ethical action
impossible
Albert Memmi, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire,
Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165 2000
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a
struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be
indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to

augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish

what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we
still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates,

in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human

condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that
sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always
debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism

. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative

is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy

order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other , and
his or her subjection to violence and domination . From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious
language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions

counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such
unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such
sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and
death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining
the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you

you ought to respect the stranger

with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that

because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a
contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and
practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a

just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then
only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the
stakes are irresistible.
 A2 benatar
NO LINK – we don’t claim an extinction impact
Benatar’s argument relies on any pain outweighing any
pleasure. He also assumes that only the absence of pain, is
good for future people who do not yet exist, whereas both
are good for people who currently exist. This asymmetry
between pain and pleasure and between existent and
nonexistent people is nonsensical.
Baumi 8 [BenaBetter to exist: a reply to Benatar Seth D. Baumi Journal
of Medical Ethics, vol. 34, no. 12, pages 875-876, 2008] AT
The benefits/harms asymmetry is commonly manifested (including in Benatar’s writing) in the claim that no
amount of benefit, however large, can make up for any amount of harm, however small. This claim comes from
an intuition that while we have a duty to reduce harm, we have no duty to increase benefit. The corresponding ethical
framework is often called ‘negative utilitarianism’.7 Negative utilitarianism resembles maximin in its resolute focus on the
worst off- as long as some of those worst off are in a state of harm, instead of just in a state of low benefit. Like maximin,
negative utilitarianism can recommend that no one be brought into existence- and that all existing people be ‘euthanized’ .
I find negative utilitarianism decidedly unreasonable: our willingness to accept some harm in order to
enjoy the benefits of another day seems praiseworthy, not mistaken. I thus urge the rejection of this
manifestation of the benefits/harms asymmetry.¶ ¶ The existent/non-existent asymmetry is commonly manifested
(including in Benatar’s writing) in the claim that, in decisions which might bring people into existence, the welfare
of those would-be people don’t count. This claim comes from an intuition that we cannot benefit or harm people by
bringing them into existence, because if they don’t come into existence, then there is no ‘them’ to benefit or harm. The
corresponding ethical framework is often called ‘person-affecting utilitarianism’.8 This metaphysical trickery is
unsatisfying. It seems quite reasonable that, all else equal, the entry into the world of some new, happy people
can make the world a better place (or vice versa for unhappy people). Furthermore, person-affecting utilitarianism
has troubling consequences such as permitting existing people to go on a frivolous binge even to the point of
destroying the world for all would-be people. I thus urge the rejection of this manifestation of the existent/non-
existent asymmetry.¶ ¶ Benatar supports both the benefits/harms asymmetry and the existent/non-existent asymmetry,
but he does not do so uniformly.iv He accepts the benefits/harms asymmetry for people who don’t already
exist but he rejects it for people who already exist. Alternatively (and equivalently), he accepts the
existent/non-existent asymmetry for benefits but he rejects it for harms. In other words, he does not value
benefits to people we could bring into existence, but he values harms to them as well as benefits and
harms to existing people. This set of views is how he reaches his bold claim that new people should not be brought
into existence but does not reach the claim that people who already exist should be ‘euthanized’. This ‘anti-birth
utilitarianism’ has received support from others as well, including Narveson9 and Vetter.10 ¶ ¶ If we reject both
asymmetries, as I urge, then Benatar’s bold claim disappears and we return to the more pedestrian
discussions of which and how many people to bring into existence, and of course how to treat everyone once
they come into existence. These discussions are important, but they need not be considered here. My one intention with
this paper is to show that Benatar’s bold claim can readily be rejected not just out of reflexive distaste for the claim
but also out of sound ethical reasoning.

This argument is miscut. Benatar argues we shouldn’t

recreate existence not end it

DeGrazia 10 [David,“Is it wrong to impose the harms of human

life? A reply to Benatar.” Theor Med Bioeth (2010) 31:317–331. DT.]

For one thing, he contends, the argument fails to distinguish between two senses¶ of ‘‘a
life worth living’’: (1) a life worth starting and (2) a life worth continuing¶ (pp. 22–23). A
person may judge that the benefits of her life compensate for the¶ harms and that her life is therefore (now) worth
continuing. That a life includes¶ benefits sufficient to compensate for the harms may constitute an appropriate¶ standard
for judging that a life is worth continuing. The problem with the optimistic¶ thesis that most cases of coming into
existence are not cases of wrongful life is the¶ assumption that an appropriate standard for a life worth continuing is also
an¶ appropriate standard for a life worth starting. Benatar denies this assumption. ‘‘For¶ instance,’’ he argues,
‘‘while most people think that living life without a limb does¶ not make life so bad
that it is worth ending, most (of the same) people also think that¶ it is better not to
bring into existence somebody who will lack a limb. We require ¶ stronger
justification for ending a life than for not starting one’’ (p. 22)

Squo is structurally improving---health, environment and

equality
Bjorn Lomborg 10/16, Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, "A Better World Is Here",
2013, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/on-the-declining-costs-of-global-problems-by-bj-rn-lomborg
COPENHAGEN – For centuries, optimists and pessimists have argued over the
state of the world. Pessimists see a world where more people means less food, where rising demand for
resources means depletion and war, and, in recent decades, where boosting production capacity means more pollution
and global warming. One of the current generation of pessimists’ sacred texts, The Limits to Growth, influences the
environmental movement to this day.¶ The optimists, by contrast, cheerfully claim that everything – human health, living
standards, environmental quality, and so on – is getting better. Their opponents think of them as “cornucopian”
economists, placing their faith in the market to fix any and all problems.¶ But, rather than picking facts
and stories to fit some grand narrative of decline or progress, we should try
to compare across all areas of human existence to see if the world really is
doing better or worse. Together with 21 of the world’s top economists, I have
tried to do just that, developing a scorecard spanning 150 years . Across ten
areas – including health, education, war, gender, air pollution, climate
change, and biodiversity – the economists all answered the same question:
What was the relative cost of this problem in every year since 1900, all the
way to 2013, with predictions to 2050.¶ Using classic economic valuations of everything from lost
lives, bad health, and illiteracy to wetlands destruction and increased hurricane damage from global warming, the
economists show how much each problem costs. To estimate the magnitude of the problem, it is compared to the total
resources available to fix it. This gives us the problem’s size as a share of GDP. And the trends since 1900 are sometimes
surprising.¶ Consider gender inequality. Essentially, we were excluding almost
half the world’s population from production. In 1900, only 15% of the global
workforce was female. What is the loss from lower female workforce participation? Even taking into account
that someone has to do unpaid housework and the increased costs of female education, the loss was at least 17% of global
GDP in 1900. Today, with higher female participation and lower wage
differentials, the loss is 7% – and projected to fall to 4% by 2050.¶ It will probably
come as a big surprise that climate change from 1900 to 2025 has mostly been a net benefit, increasing welfare by about
1.5% of GDP per year. This is because global warming has mixed effects; for moderate warming, the benefits prevail.¶ On
one hand, because CO2 works as a fertilizer, higher levels have been a boon for agriculture, which comprises the biggest
positive impact, at 0.8% of GDP. Likewise, moderate warming prevents more cold deaths than the number of extra heat
deaths that it causes. It also reduces demand for heating more than it increases the costs of cooling, implying a gain of
about 0.4% of GDP. On the other hand, warming increases water stress, costing about 0.2% of GDP, and negatively affects
ecosystems like wetlands, at a cost of about 0.1%.¶ As temperatures rise, however, the costs will rise and the benefits will
decline, leading to a dramatic reduction in net benefits. After the year 2070, global warming will become a net cost to the
world, justifying cost-effective climate action now and in the decades to come.¶ Yet, to put matters in perspective, the
scorecard also shows us that the world’s biggest environmental problem by far is indoor air pollution. Today, indoor
pollution from cooking and heating with bad fuels kills more than three million people annually, or the equivalent of a loss
of 3% of global GDP. But in 1900, the cost was 19% of GDP, and it is expected to drop to 1% of GDP by 2050.¶ Health
indicators worldwide have shown some of the largest improvements . Human
life expectancy barely changed before the late eighteenth century. Yet it is difficult to overstate the
magnitude of the gain since 1900: in that year, life expectancy worldwide
was 32 years, compared to 69 now (and a projection of 76 years in 2050).¶ The biggest
factor was the fall in infant mortality. For example, even as late as 1970, only around 5% of infants
were vaccinated against measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. By 2000, it was 85%, saving about three
million lives annually – more, each year, than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century.¶ This success has
many parents. The Gates Foundation and the GAVI Alliance have spent more than $2.5 billion and promised another $10
billion for vaccines. Efforts by the Rotary Club, the World Health Organization, and many others have reduced polio by
99% worldwide since 1979.¶ In economic terms, the cost of poor health at the outset of
the twentieth century was an astounding 32% of global GDP. Today, it is
down to about 11%, and by 2050 it will be half that .¶ While the optimists are not entirely
right (loss of biodiversity in the twentieth century probably cost about 1% of GDP per year, with some places losing much
more), the overall picture is clear . Most of the topics in the scorecard show
improvements of 5-20% of GDP . And the overall trend is even clearer . Global
problems have declined dramatically relative to the resources available to tackle them.¶ Of course,
this does not mean that there are no more problems. Although much smaller, problems in
health, education, malnutrition, air pollution, gender inequality, and trade remain large.¶ But realists should

now embrace the view that the world is doing much better. Moreover, the scorecard
shows us where the substantial challenges remain for a better 2050. We should guide our future
attention not on the basis of the scariest stories or loudest pressure groups,
but on objective assessments of where we can do the most good.
 A2 schopenhauer
1. Suffering is the exception, not the rule.
Knapp 09 - Alex KNAPP, Editor-in-Chief of Heretical Ideas—a webzine devoted to in-depth
examination of opinions, ideas, and culture, B.S. in Biochemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, J.D.
from the University of Kansas, 2009 [“Is Suffering the Universal Human Condition?,” Heretical Ideas: A
Journal of Unorthodox Opinion, February 5th, Available Online at
http://www.hereticalideas.com/2009/02/is-suffering-the-universal-human-condition/, Accessed 12-07-
2009]
the
From the basic Buddhist tenet that life is suffering to Medieval Christian idea that we suffer on Earth to receive rewards in heaven,
idea of suffering as the human condition is an accepted cliché in many areas of religion
and philosophy. Some even go so far as to say that suffering is a universal human condition; that it is both inevitable and we should accept
it. This, as I see it, is a problem. First, let’s explore the idea of suffering as being the universal human condition. What does this mean? Well,
the adjectives “universal” and “human” suggest that suffering is something that everyone experiences. The term “condition” implies that
suffering is something chronic and enduring. In other words, stating
that suffering is the universal
human condition means that everybody suffers, and implies that suffering is the essential aspect of being
human. This assertion seems to be spurious on face. While memories and experiences of suffering can

be intense and enduring, they are this way precisely because they are the exception , and
not the rule . If suffering were endemic to human existence, it would be almost
unnoticed, since it would be experienced all the time. To use a somewhat applicable analogy,
there are oftentimes when one thinks that a certain song is going to be played on the radio, and it is. An event such as this is often
remembered. However, in remembering the one incident, it is unlikely that one would remember the numerous occasions in which one
predicted that the radio would play a certain song, and it did not. In the same way, suffering
is memorable, not because
always present, but becauseit is the exception in one’s life. It is important to note, however, that this is a
generalization. There are undoubtedly human beings whose life consisted of , on balance,
more suffering than non-suffering. This does not disprove the point, though. The fact that many
people can examine the suffering of others with a great intensity of feeling underscores the point that for most people, suffering is a
relatively rare event. As the existential philosopher William Hasker notes, most of us would say that our lives have been, on the whole, good,
and that we are glad that we exist.

2. Turn—the alternative causes greater suffering—

a. It undermines moral agency
Knapp 09 - Alex KNAPP, Editor-in-Chief of Heretical Ideas—a webzine devoted to in-depth
examination of opinions, ideas, and culture, B.S. in Biochemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, J.D.
from the University of Kansas, 2009 [“Is Suffering the Universal Human Condition?,” Heretical Ideas: A
Journal of Unorthodox Opinion, February 5th, Available Online at
http://www.hereticalideas.com/2009/02/is-suffering-the-universal-human-condition/, Accessed 12-07-
2009]
Since we have established the contention that suffering is not the universal condition, the next point to examine is what
the proper moral response to suffering is. Well, if suffering is the exception, not the rule, of human
existence, then the proper moral response to suffering is its alleviation, in both others and oneself. In
other words, suffering should be perceived as a problem to be fixed, rather than a
condition that can’t be avoided. Given this notion, one can then observe that the focus on suffering as
the universal human condition actually thwarts its alleviation. This is because if we accept the notion that
suffering as the universal human condition, we also accept it as inevitable. An
example of this acceptance can be seen in Greek tragedy. One of the essential characteristics of tragedy is that the person
who suffers must be a good person whose suffering is undeserved and caused by a “tragic flaw.” This flaw must also be
something that the hero cannot do anything to change. For example, Oedipus suffered the fate that the Oracle of Delphi
predicted, despite the efforts on the part of both himself and his father. In other words, there was no way for Oedipus to
prevent himself from suffering. As Plato rightly pointed out, by accepting Fate as the cause of
suffering, the idea of moral agency completely disappears. After all, if suffering
is inevitable, then how can anyone be held responsible for it?
b. It equalizes disparate suffering.
Knapp 09 - Alex KNAPP, Editor-in-Chief of Heretical Ideas—a webzine devoted to in-depth
examination of opinions, ideas, and culture, B.S. in Biochemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, J.D.
from the University of Kansas, 2009 [“Is Suffering the Universal Human Condition?,” Heretical Ideas: A
Journal of Unorthodox Opinion, February 5th, Available Online at
http://www.hereticalideas.com/2009/02/is-suffering-the-universal-human-condition/, Accessed 12-07-
2009]
This idea of the inevitability of suffering also leads to the equalization of suffering. In other
words, if suffering is the universal human condition, then the suffering of any
individual is meaningless, because everyone suffers. Spelman points out one manifestation of this in
AIDS victims who compare the epidemic to the Holocaust . Although AIDS is
certainly a terrible disease, there is a great difference between suffering caused by an impersonal
virus, and deliberate torture and mass murder at the hands of one’s fellow human beings. However, since
accepting the inevitability of suffering involves eliminating questions of moral agency, it
becomes quite simple to equate the sufferers of a disease to the victims of
attempted genocide.

This prevents corrective actions to decrease specific

instances of suffering.
Knapp 09 - Alex KNAPP, Editor-in-Chief of Heretical Ideas—a webzine devoted to in-depth
examination of opinions, ideas, and culture, B.S. in Biochemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, J.D.
from the University of Kansas, 2009 [“Is Suffering the Universal Human Condition?,” Heretical Ideas: A
Journal of Unorthodox Opinion, February 5th, Available Online at
http://www.hereticalideas.com/2009/02/is-suffering-the-universal-human-condition/, Accessed 12-07-
2009]
The removal of moral agency and the equalization of suffering finally leads to
apathy towards the suffering of others. Since suffering is inevitable, the proper
moral response to suffering, if there need be a response at all, is through compassion or pity for those
who suffer. These feelings, however, provide no impetus for corrective action . Since
suffering is inevitable, then there is nothing one can do to alleviate it. After all, if one’s suffering is just as bad as another’s,
then what can one do? A shrug of the shoulders and a response of “Sorry bud, but I have my own problems”
is about the most one can hope for. Thus, the problem of claiming that suffering is somehow
“universal” brings about two problems. First, it ignores the fact that suffering is not, in fact endemic
to the human condition. But more importantly, the acceptance of the idea that suffering is
universal perpetuates human misery by eliminating the impetus to get rid of it.

3. Turn—the alternative kills happiness – it’s a self-fulfilling

prophecy – vote aff to reject them
a. Optimism makes us happier than pessimism—
schopenhauer is wrong.
Schalakx 8 - Rozemarijn SCHALKX, Scholar at the University for
Humanistics (Netherlands), AND Ad BERGSMA, Faculty of Social Sciences
at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands), 2008 [“Arthur’s Advice:
Comparing Arthur Schopenhauer’s Advice On Happiness With
Contemporary Research,” Journal of Happiness Studies, Volume 9, Issue 3,
September, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic
Search Elite, p. 390]
We mentioned above that optimism is correlated with higher well being , and it is worthwhile
to go deeper into this subject, because Schopenhauer believed that superficial optimism would render people vulnerable to
depression. He advised people not to be too optimistic, because the worst is yet to come. Research however
shows that optimism is also a positive trait in challenging circumstances . It helps
people to see the negative in perspective: by seeing the future as enjoyable, you are more likely to see negative events as
temporary. Optimism gives people the strength to deal with the negative , because it
helps people to focus on aspects of a given situation that are within their personal
control, so they can make the best of adversities. Optimism correlates positively with well being (Scheier et al., 2001).

b. Following schopenhauer’s advice leads to unhappiness.

Schalakx 8 - Rozemarijn SCHALKX, Scholar at the University for
Humanistics (Netherlands), AND Ad BERGSMA, Faculty of Social Sciences
at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands), 2008 [“Arthur’s Advice:
Comparing Arthur Schopenhauer’s Advice On Happiness With
Contemporary Research,” Journal of Happiness Studies, Volume 9, Issue 3,
September, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Academic
Search Elite, p. 390]
Schopenhauer wrote one of the first self-help books. It gives the reader advice on how to
make life bearable. Some of his remarks are very apt. For instance he advises the reader to restrain from striving for
wealth; and contemporary data shows that once a basic income is achieved, more money does little to increase happiness.
He also advises us to stay busy, which is a valid suggestion. Schopenhauer rightly observed that a person’s character is a
key determinant of happiness. Ironically, he did not realize the strong interaction between his own
personality and his view on happiness. His gloomy view on human interaction
dominates his advice about happiness. Contemporary data prove Schopenhauer
wrong in these remarks on social interaction. Social interaction is a key determinant for happiness. His advice to
shy away from people and to distrust others is probably the worst advice for
anyone to follow. The book is amusing and well written, but it would be a mistake to follow all of its
recommendations. Schopenhauer did not succeed in using his pessimistic world-view constructively
for creating happiness enhancing advice. Misanthropy and social isolation will make you
unhappy, even when you are someone with a neurotic personality like Schopenhauer.

4. Schopenhauer’s pessimism was a product of syphilis and

his hatred of women.
BMJ 38 [“Nova et Vetera,” The British Medical Journal, Volume 2,
Number 404, July 2nd, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via
JSTOR, p. 22]
While a medical student at the University of Gottingen Arthur Schopenhauer, who was born 150 years ago, contracted
syphilis, which was treated with huge doses of mercury, so popular at that time. The
accompanying wretchedness of salivation, depression, and internal pain
were responsible for his lifelong syphilophobia, and out of his hatred of
women—under-sized, short-legged, long-haired creatures whose sole purpose in the world was to spread syphilis— grew his
philosophy of pessimism. In commemoration of this anniversary Danzig, his native city, has recently issued a set of
three stamps bearing his likeness.

That means his philosophy should be discarded—it can’t be

universalized from his specific situation.
Roberts 03 - Laura ROBERTS, freelance writer, indie publisher, editor-
in-chief, and sex columnist, 2003 [“Misogyny in the Writings of Arthur
Schopenhauer,” Helium, Available Online at
http://www.helium.com/items/993109-misogyny-in-the-writings-of-
arthur-schopenhauer, Accessed 12-07-2009]
Ultimately, we must either find a way to forgive Schopenhauer's bitterness or we
must cast his philosophy aside
as hopelessly stuck in personal misery. He cannot be of any use or insight to us if
his specific situation is reasoned to universal proportions; most of us do not
possess his utter contempt for anything, much less females as a group. Truly, it is even unusual for his time
period (particularly when factoring in the beginnings of feminism in the United States' suffragist movement [29]) to find someone so
virulently opposed to the idea that women could possess intelligence or creativity. It is unfortunate that such a great mind wasted so much
energy on disgust and loathing for a large section of the population that would now like to read, understand, and accept his ideas.
Schopenhauer's arrogance apparently an intrinsic part of his genius was never looked upon favourably, but today it makes
him almost impossible to read without either laughing or screaming.
 A2 lanza
Their argument is irrational—inevitable uncertainty means
you should err negative - we don’t know enough about death
and Lanza is advancing a theory that hasn’t even been peer
reviewed yet—defer to the side of caution because our
impact is extinction—if they’re wrong, the world is gone
forever, but if we’re wrong, you always have an escape
hatch later
People aren’t particles – death is real
Morris Myers 9, biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, 12-10-2009, “The dead are dead”,
Pharyngula,http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/the_dead_are_dead.php

But then Lanza goes on to babble about quantum physics and many-worlds
theory. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling - the 'Who am I?'- is just a 20-watt
fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest
axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from
one world to the other? Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists
could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a
beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided
at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who
will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our
ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that
result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same battery or agent responsible
for the projection. I have heard that first argument so many times, and it is facile and dishonest. We are not just
"energy". We are a pattern of energy and matter, a very specific and precise
arrangement of molecules in movement. That can be destroyed. When you've built a
pretty sand castle and the tide comes in and washes it away, the grains of sand are
still all there, but what you've lost is the arrangement that you worked to generate, and
which you appreciated. Reducing a complex functional order to nothing but the
constituent parts is an insult to the work . If I were to walk into the Louvre and set fire
to the Mona Lisa, and afterwards take a drive down to Chartres and blow up the cathedral, would
anyone defend my actions by saying, "well, science says matter and energy cannot be
created or destroyed, therefore, Rabid Myers did no harm, and we'll all just enjoy viewing the
ashes and rubble from now on"? No. That's crazy talk. We also wouldn't be arguing that the painting and the
architecture have transcended this universe to enter another, nor would such a pointless claim ameliorate our loss in this
universe. The rest of his argument is quantum gobbledy-gook. The behavior of
subatomic particles
is not a good guide to what to expect of the behavior of large
bodies. A photon may have no rest mass, but I can't use this fact to justify my
grand new weight loss plan; quantum tunnelling does not imply that I can
ignore doors when I amble about my house. People are not particles! We are the
product of the aggregate behavior of the many particles that constitute our bodies, and
you cannot ignore the importance of these higher-order relationships when
talking about our fate.
Fear of Death Good
 2AC Fear Good
No link to their fear arguments—its in context of
IRRATIONAL FEAR from FLAWED CALCULATIONS—they
haven’t disproven the 1AC.
Fear is good and validating it allows through representing
death better overcomes binary divisions
Macy 2K – Joanna Macy, adjunct professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, 2000, Environmental
Discourse and Practice: A Reader, p. 243
We are
The move to a wider ecological sense of self is in large part a function of the dangers that are threatening to overwhelm us.
confronted by social breakdown, wars, nuclear proliferation, and the progressive
destruction of our biosphere. Polls show that people today are aware that the
world, as they know it, may come to an end. This loss of certainty that there will be a
future is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. ¶ Over the past twelve
years my colleagues and I have worked with tens of thousands of people in North America,
Europe, Asia, and Australia, helping them confront and explore what they know and feel
about what is happening to their world. The purpose of this work, which was first known as “Despair and
Empowerment Work,” is to overcome the numbing and powerlessness that result from
suppression of painful responses to massively painful realities . As their grief and
fear for the world is allowed to be expressed without apology or argument and validated
as a wholesome, life-preserving response, people break through their avoidance
mechanisms, break through their sense of futility and isolation. Generally what they break through
into is a larger sense of identity. It is as if the pressure of their acknowledged
awareness of the suffering of our world stretches or collapses the culturally defined
boundaries of the self. It becomes clear, for example, that the grief and fear
experienced for our world and our common future are categorically
different from similar sentiments relating to one’s personal welfare . This pain
cannot be equated with dread of one’s own individual demise. Its source lies less in
concerns for personal survival than in apprehensions of collective suffering – of what looms for human
life and other species and unborn generations to come. Its nature is akin to the original meaning of
compassion – “suffering with.” It is the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part. And, when it is so
defined, it serves as a trigger or getaway to a more encompassing sense of
identity, inseparable from the web of life in which we are as intricately connected
as cells in a larger body. ¶ This shift in consciousness is an appropriate, adaptive response. For the crisis that
threatens our planet, be it seen in its military, ecological, or social aspects, derives from a
dysfunctional and pathogenic notion of the self. It is a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the
delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its
boundaries, that it is so small and needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly
consume , that it is so aloof that we can – as individuals, corporations, nation-
states, or as a species – be immune to what we do to other beings .

Fear of death is inevitable and preserves existence

Pyszczynski et al ‘6 (Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Sheldon Solomon, Prof. Psych. – Skidmore
College, Jeff Greenberg, Prof. Psych. – U. Arizona, and Molly Maxfield, U. Colorado, Psychological Inquiry, “On the
Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations” 17:4, Ebsco)
Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first specific complaint with TMT is that it is
wedded to an outmoded assumption that human beings share with many other species a
survival instinct. They argue that natural selection can only build instincts that respond to specific adaptive challenges in specific situations, and
 Our
thus could not have designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is a broad and distal goal with no single clearly defined adaptive response.

use of the term survival instinct was meant to highlight the general
orientation toward continued life that is expressed in many of an organism’s
bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc) and the diverse approach and avoidance
tendencies that promote its survival and reproduction, ultimately leading to genes being passed on to
fu- ture generations. Our use of this term also reflects the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT of theorists like Becker (1971,
1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank (1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler (1999), and Darwin (1993). We concur that natural selection, at least initially, is
unlikely to design a unitary survival instinct, but rather, a series of specific adaptations that have tended over evolutionary time to promote the survival of an
adaptations as a series of discrete mechanisms or a
organism’s genes. However, whether one construes these

orients
general overarching tendency that encompasses many specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that natural selection usually

organisms to approach things that facilitate continued existence and to avoid things that
would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection doesn’t also select for characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other ways, or that all species
or even all humans, will always choose life over other valued goals in all circumstances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward continued life exists
because staying alive is essential for reproduction in most species, as well as for child rearing and support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an
animal as a loose collection of independent modules that produce responses to specific adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it
overlooks the point that adaptation involves a variety of inter-related mechanisms working together to insure that genes responsible for these mechanisms are
more numerously represented in future generations (see, e.g., Tattersall, 1998). For example, although the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to solve a
specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be useless unless well-integrated with other aspects of the circulatory system. We believe it useful to think in
terms of the overarching function of the heart and pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve specific adaptive problems
within that system. In addition to specific solutions to specific adaptive problems, over time, natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning(Dawkins,
1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved survival rates and reproductive success of lifeformspossessing integrated systemic characteristics that determine whether
those characteristics become widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize a glucose-approaching amoeba and a bear-
avoiding salmon as oriented toward self-preservation and reproduction, even if neither species possesses one single genetically encoded mechanism designed to
This is the same position that
generally foster life or insure reproduction, or cognitive representations of survival and reproduction.

Dawkins (1976) took in his classic book, The selfish gene: The obvious first priorities of a survival
machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are individual
survival and reproduction. … Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find
and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease
and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to
find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves. (pp. 62–63) All
humans fear death. Somewhat ironically, in the early days of the theory,we felt
that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that

compelled to explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because
many critics adamantly insisted, for reasons that were never clear to us, that
most people do not fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the
inevitability of death is frightening because people know they are alive and
because they want to continue living. Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really
believe that humans do not fear death? Although people sometimes claim
that they are not afraid of death, and on rare occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach their death, this
requires extensive psychological work, typically a great deal of anxiety, and
preparation and immersion in a belief system that makes this possible (see TMT for
an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interesting question, but not essential to the logic of the theory. Even if
Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary self-preservation instinct was not, in and of itself, selected for, it is indisputable
A desire to stay alive, and a fear
that many discrete and integrated mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for.

of anything that threatens to end one’s life, are likely emergent properties of
these many discrete mechanisms that result from the evolution of
sophisticated cognitive abilities for symbolic, future- oriented, and self-reflective thought. As Batson and Stocks (2004) have
noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our limbic reactions to threats of death and of our many systems oriented toward keeping us alive
that we have a general fear of death. Here are three quotes that illustrate this point. First, for psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of TMT:
“Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of
preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant”
(p. 467). For literature buffs, acclaimed novelist Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot
than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewil- derment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and
unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142) And perhaps most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane
An important consequence of
flight: Phyllis: I learned something up in that plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die.

the emergence of this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to
anxiety due to events or stimuli that are not immediately present and novel
threats to survival that did not exist for our ancestors, such as AIDS, guns,
or nuclear weapons. Regardless of how this fear originates, it is abundantly
clear that humans do fear death. Anyone who has ever faced a man with a
gun, a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires
further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into one’s lane can
attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on an x-ray, a gun, a crossbow, or
any number of weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical structures be if
they didn’t have the ability to instigate fear reactions in response to such threats?
 A2 Fear kills VTL
Fearing death recognizes life’s finitude and promotes VTL
Cara Kalnow 9, A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of MPhil at the University of St. Andrews “WHY DEATH CAN
BE BAD AND IMMORTALITY IS WORSE”, https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/10023/724/3/Cara
%20Kalnow%20MPhil%20thesis.PDF
(PA) also provided us with good reason to reject the Epicurean claim that the finitude of life cannot be bad for us. With
(PA), we saw that our lives could accumulate value through the satisfaction of our
desires beyond the boundaries of the natural termination of life. But Chapter
Four determined that the finitude of life is a necessary condition for the value of life as
such and that many of our human values rely on the finite temporal structure of
life. I therefore argued that an indefinite life cannot present a desirable alternative to our finite life, because life as such
would not be recognized as valuable. In this chapter, I have argued that the finitude of life is
instrumentally good as it provides the recognition that life itself is valuable .
Although I ultimately agree with the Epicureans that the finitude of life cannot be an evil,
this conclusion was not reached from the Epicurean arguments against the
badness of death, and I maintain that (HA) and (EA) are insufficient to justify changing our attitudes towards
our future deaths and the finitude of life. Nonetheless, the instrumental good of the finitude of life that we arrived at
through the consideration of immortality should make us realize that the finitude of life cannot be an evil; it is a necessary
condition for the recognition that life as such is valuable.¶ Although my arguments pertaining to the nature of death and
its moral implications have yielded several of the Epicurean conclusions, my position still negotiates a
middle ground between the Epicureans and Williams, as (PA) accounts for the intuition
that it is rational to fear death and regard it as an evil to be avoided. I have
therefore reached three of the Epicurean conclusions pertaining to the moral worth of the nature of death: (1) that the
state of being dead is nothing to us, (2) death simpliciter is nothing to us, and (3) the finitude of life is a matter for
contentment. But against the Epicureans, I have argued that we can rationally fear our future
deaths, as categorical desires provide a disutility by which the prospect of
death is rationally held as an evil to be avoided . Finally, I also claimed against the Epicureans,
that the prospect of death can rationally be regarded as morally good for one if one no longer desires to continue living.¶
5.3 Conclusion¶ I began this thesis with the suggestion that in part, the Epicureans were right: death—
when it occurs—is nothing to us. I went on to defend the Epicurean position against the objections
raised by the deprivation theorists and Williams. I argued that the state of being dead, and death simpliciter, cannot be an
evil of deprivation or prevention for the person who dies because (once dead), the person—and the grounds for any
misfortune—cease to exist. I accounted for the anti-Epicurean intuition 115 that it is rational to fear death
and to regard death as an evil to be avoided, not
because death simpliciter is bad, but rather
because the prospect of our deaths may be presented to us as bad for us if
our deaths would prevent the satisfaction of our categorical desires. Though
we have good reasons to rationally regard the prospect of our own death as
an evil for us, the fact that life is finite cannot be an evil and is in fact
instrumentally good, because it takes the threat of losing life to recognize
that life as such is valuable . In this chapter, I concluded that even though death cannot
be of any moral worth for us once it occurs, we can attach two distinct
values to death while we are alive : we can attach a value of disutility (or
utility) to the prospect of our own individual deaths, and we must attach an
instrumentally good value to the fact of death as such. How to decide on the
balance of those values is a matter for psychological judgment.
 Key to motivate action
Risk framing motivates new social movements and re-
democratizes politics
Witte and Allen ’00 - Department of Communication, Michigan State University. And Department of
Communication, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, respectively [Kim Witte and Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear
Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” Health Educ Behav 2000, 27: 591 p. 595]
At least three meta-analyses have been conducted on the fear appeal literature.
Boster and Mongeau8 and Mongeau9 examined the influence of a fear appeal on perceived fear (the
manipulation check; i.e., did the strong vs. weak fear appeals differ significantly in their influence on measures of reported
fear), attitudes, and behaviors. They found that on average, fear appeal manipulations produced
moderate associations between reported fear and strength of fear appeal (r = .36 in Boster and Mongeau and r = .34 in
Mongeau) and modest but reliable relationships between the strength of a fear appeal
and attitude change (r = .21 in Boster and Mongeau and r = .20 in Mongeau) and the strength of a
fear appeal and behavior change (r = .10 in Boster and Mongeau and r = .17 in Mongeau). Sutton7
used a different meta-analytic statistical method (z scores) and reported signifi- cant positive effects
for strength of fear appeal on intentions and behaviors. None of the meta-analyses found
support for a curvilinear association between fear appeal strength and message acceptance. Overall, the previous meta-
analyses suggested that fear appeal manipulations work in producing different levels of fear according to different
strengths of fear appeal messages. Furthermore, the meta-analyses suggest that the stronger
the fear appeal, the greater the attitude, intention, and behavior change. The
present meta-analysis will update and expand on these results by assessing the rel- ative fit of the data to each fear appeal
model and examining the influence of fear appeals on both intended (i.e., attitudes, intentions, behaviors) and unintended
(i.e., defensive avoidance, reactance) outcomes.
 No Paralysis
Empirics deny fear causing paralysis
Witte and Allen ’00 - Department of Communication, Michigan State University. And Department of
Communication, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, respectively [Kim Witte and Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear
Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” Health Educ Behav 2000, 27: 591 p. 603]
The remaining results have strong theoretical implications and will be discussed with reference to each theoretical
approach. First, there was no support for the drive model’s curvilinear hypothesis .
Specifically, the
results provide absolutely no evidence supportive of any kind of
quadratic effects (either U shaped or inverted U shaped). Similarly, there was no support for
any hypothesized negative effects from fear appeals. Thus, the drive model’s theoretical
predictions do not appear to be consistent with the data.
 Nuclear War Specific
Fear of nuclear war makes war obsolete
Futterman, 95 J. A. H. Futterman, Physicist; experience with
electromagnetic, high energy density plasma physics, hydrodynamics, and
systems analysis; Now a scientist at the US National Lab, 1995,
www.dogchurch.org/scriptorium/nuke.html
But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than Shirer's deterrence of
adventurer-conquerors. It changes the way we think individually and culturally, preparing us for a future we cannot now imagine.
Jungian psychiatrist Anthony J. Stevens states, [15] "History would indicate that people cannot rise
above their narrow sectarian concerns without some overwhelming paroxysm . It took the War
of Independence and the Civil War to forge the United States, World War I to create the League of Nations, World War II to
create the United Nations Organization and the European Economic Community. Only catastrophe, it seems, forces people to take
the wider view. Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we
contemplate the possibility of nuclear extinction mobilize in us sufficient libidinal energy
to resist the archetypes of war? Certainly, the moment we become blasé about the possibility
of holocaust we are lost. As long as horror of nuclear exchange remains uppermost we can recognize that nothing is
worth it. War becomes the impossible option. Perhaps horror, the experience of horror, the consciousness of horror, is
our only hope. Perhaps horror alone will enable us to overcome the otherwise invincible attraction of war." Thus I also
continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that world-historical warning shot I
mentioned above, namely, that as our beneficial technologies become more powerful, so will our weapons technologies, unless
genuine peace precludes it. We must build a future more peaceful than our past , if we are to have
a future at all, with or without nuclear weapons — a fact we had better learn before worse things than
nuclear weapons are invented. If you're a philosopher, this means that I regard the nature of humankind as mutable rather than
fixed, but that I think most people welcome change in their personalities and cultures with all the enthusiasm that they welcome
death — thus, the fear of nuclear annihilation of ourselves and all our values may be what we require in order to become peaceful
enough to survive our future technological breakthroughs.[16] In other words, when the peace movement tells the
world that we need to treat each other more kindly, I and my colleagues stand behind it
(like Malcolm X stood behind Martin Luther King, Jr.) saying, "Or else." We provide
the peace movement with a needed sense of urgency that it might otherwise lack.

Nuclear representations empirically inspire caution –

Reagan proves
Miller 5 Laura, Senior writer for Salon.com, April 27, "Generation Bomb"
www.salon.com/books/feature/2005/04/27/bomb/index.html
"The Day After," for all its dated special effects and insufficiently blasted
landscapes, is branded in the imaginations of millions of Americans. The
reader reviews posted on the film's Amazon and IMDb pages testify to its
harrowing effect on many young minds. (Ironically, those kids whose parents didn't allow them to
watch it may have found speculating about it even more terrifying.) But there was one viewer in
particular who was moved by the film in an especially momentous way. A
screening of "The Day After" is listed by DeGroot as one of three events that
led to a "strange transformation" in late 1983. "Reagan the warmonger
morphed into Reagan the peacemaker," he explains; the president began to tone
down his bellicose posture toward the Soviets . The other two factors in this change were the
downing of a Korean airliner mistaken for a hostile aircraft by a Soviet pilot and an incident when the Soviets almost
responded aggressively to a NATO exercise that at first appeared to be preparation for a nuclear strike. These real-world
accidents showed Reagan that the Soviets sincerely believed the U.S. to be capable of an unprovoked attack and how easily
a fatal error could be made. It took "The Day After" to impress on Reagan just how dire
the consequences of an exchange of nuclear weapons would be for average
Americans. "By all accounts," DeGroot writes, the film "left Reagan severely
depressed and determined to 'do all we can ... to see that there is never a
nuclear war.'" There's something grotesquely comic about the power
Hollywood movies had over Reagan, but it also goes a long way toward explaining why he had such
rapport with the American public. It was a susceptibility they shared with him. The
intelligentsia could wring their hands over "The Fate of the Earth," and
Middle America had "The Day After."
A2 Alt
 A2 Sacrifice
Alt fails – we only engage in sacrifice because we are not the
ones to die. Trying to understand death is counter-
productive – vote them down
Razinsky 09 explains the argument (Liran Razinsky, Lecturer, The Program for
Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies, Bar-llan University, Professor of Philosophy @ The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
“How to Look Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille” SubStance, Issue 119 (Volume 38, Number 2), 2009)//AJ
Why do we repeat the act if it is doomed to failure? Why do we not understand that death
simply cannot be grasped? It seems we are not satisfied with something. Possibly, we only try to do so
because we know we will find ourselves as spectators, thereby abating [End
Page 82] the anxiety. The attempt at representation will therefore be similar to the sacrificial act or the theatrical
experience: it brings us close to death and satisfies that need, yet assures us in advance that it is only “make believe,” that
we will not be personally touched by it. But it is also possible that the necessity to come close to death is what drives us to
attempt representation. The attempt to understand death, to imagine it to ourselves, to represent it, fails. We discover that
we are still there. As a result of the impossibility of representation, Freud
concludes that in our unconscious we are immortal, that “no one believes in
his own death.” There is a gap here, and the conclusion does not follow logically, as is already noted by Hoffman
(236). But there is more than flawed logic here. The nature of our attitude to death is at stake. The failure to
represent, to imagine, should not mean death is unavailable to us. It only
means it is unreachable through understanding. We cannot grasp it. But death is presented
to us in the terror it inflicts on us in certain events; it can be very present to us when it
breaks into our world, as seen above, through the mediation of an other. Trying to imagine death, to
grasp it as it were consciously, is to try and clothe it with sense. This, as Bataille explained, is doomed to
failure. The attempt to impose sense on it will necessarily distort death. Binding what in its nature defies
representation, the pure negative, into discursive thought must result in failure. That we remain spectators is only a
manifestation of the problem. Grasping it would give us something else. It does not mean anything about the availability
of death to us, only about its availability to conscious, discursive thought, or as an object of thought or imagination.
Therefore Freud’s jump is all the more unjustified. The problem is not that the attempt to
imagine fails. The problem is that we attempt. Thus the failure to grasp
death is significant.
 A2 Alt---Panic DA
Fear is inevitable and productive – when people are afraid,
they take steps to protect themselves. Denying fear causes
it to turn into denial or panic.
Sandman and Lanard 3, Peter M. PhD in Communications and Professor
at Rutgers specialzing in crisis communication; Jody, Psychiatrist, Sept 7, “Fear
of fear”
Let’s start with the obvious. Any normal person is going to be more anxious than usual while awaiting a biopsy result, a
turbulent airplane landing, or a layoff notice. Human emotions tend to match the situation.
The same is true of a more widespread threat. Of course the public at large
will be commensurately alarmed when told that a terrorism attack, an epidemic, or a hurricane
may be approaching. Moreover, fear isn’t just normal in frightening
situations; it is functional. Both the human body and the body politic ultimately benefit from the changes
(physiological and sociological ... and inevitably emotional) that accompany preparedness for crisis. Take terrorism as a
case in point. Nearly everyone agrees that we need people to be vigilant for indications of terrorist attacks; to prepare
themselves and their families to cope with possible attacks; to be supportive of preparedness expenses and tolerant of
preparedness inconveniences. And nearly everyone agrees that we need all this to ramp up in an actual attack, so that
people put other agendas on hold, follow instructions willingly, and help care for their neighbors. The question is
what emotional state, what state of mind, is conducive to this sort of public
readiness. We believe the right answer is fear. We won’t get there if terrorism is
merely one of many issues people are “concerned” about, along with West
Nile Virus and inflation and rap lyrics. Either terrorism is different from
most other concerns, or it isn’t. If it is, we need to get used to the idea that people are going
to be appropriately frightened, and we need to help them get used to it too.
Not all fear is functional. Fear that is paralyzing, fear that verges on panic, is obviously not
functional. Terror is the goal of terrorism, not the goal of preparedness. But fear is not necessarily
terror . This is a conceptual mistake officials routinely make , a mistake they seem
terribly attracted to — the embedded, preconscious, erroneous assumption that all fear is one short step removed from
panic. Some fear is. Most fear is not. When officials express their reluctance about “unduly frightening people,” they are
literally right. The key word here is “unduly.” Unduly frightening people is wrong. Duly frightening people is right, and
important. The problem is telling the two apart. The distinction is partly a matter of degree — “enough” fear versus
“excessive” fear. Perhaps in addition there are kinds of fear like the kinds of cholesterol — “good” fear versus “bad” fear.
But we suspect the key difference is neither the amount of fear nor the kind of fear, but rather people’s ability to bear the
fear. Much is known about how to enhance that ability. Among the things that help: Give people things to do — action
binds anxiety. Give people things to decide — decision-making provides more individual control, which makes fear more
tolerable. Encourage appropriate anger — the desire to get even often trumps the desire to cower. Encourage love (and
camaraderie) — soldiers, for example, fight for their friends and for their country. Provide candid leadership — we get
more frightened when our leaders seem to be misleading us. Show your own fear and show you can bear it — apparently
fearless leaders are little help to a fearful public. Most importantly, treat other people’s fear as legitimate. Fear is
likeliest to escalate into terror or panic (or to flip into denial) when it is treated as
shameful and wrong. “It’s natural to be afraid, I’m afraid too” is a much more
empathic response to public fear than “there’s nothing to be afraid of.” If we
want people to bear their fear, we must assure them that their fear is
appropriate. Even fear that is statistically inappropriate can and should be legitimized as normal, understandable,
and widespread. Leaders who are contemptuous of people’s fear have a much tougher time explaining the reasons why
they needn’t be afraid.
 A2 alt---Internalizing DA
We need to embrace our fear of nuclear weapons, not try to
get over it – failure to acknowledge fear leads to
internalizing it
Gusterson 89 - Hugh, Published in Livermore Independent, August 23. June
25, “Dialogue Needed on Nuclear Future.” Sermon given at Livermore's
Unitarian Universalist Church
Third, and most important of all, the
protestors remind us how important our feelings are as guides
-- especially feelings of fear. The protestors, unlike scientists, talk constantly about their
feelings and about their fear of nuclear war. In Livermore, however, I find very little fear of the bomb. People
in Livermore are comfortable with the bomb. They trust it. I make a point of asking my interviewees if they have ever had
nightmares about nuclear war. Most of the protestors say yes; most of the scientists look at me as if there must be something
wrong with me. But it is important that we fear the bomb; then we take it seriously and see the dangers of an arms race.
Psychologist Joanna Macy writes: We are a society caught between a sense of impending
apocalypse and an inability to acknowledge it. The refusal of feeling takes a heavy toll.
The toll is not only an impoverishment of emotional and sensory life -- the flowers dimmer and less fragrant, loves less ecstatic.
This psychic numbing also impedes the capacity to process and respond to information...
We erect an invisible screen, selectively filtering out anxiety-provoking data. In a world where organisms
require feedback in order to adapt and survive, this is suicidal . "It is time to see the
bomb as a real weapon again," says journalist Roger Rosenblatt. "It is time to look at its drab snout
and recall quite clearly what it once did and still can do." 100,000 dead at Hiroshima; 70,000 at
Nagasaki. We should not take such a weapon lightly.

The K is motivated by their fear – they’re projecting their

anxiety on to us and trying to address it.
Sandman and Lanard, 3 Peter M. PhD in Communications and Professor
at Rutgers specialzing in crisis communication; Jody, Psychiatrist, 28 April, “Fear
Is Spreading Faster than SARS — And So It Should!”
Projection is disavowing your own uncomfortable feelings by imagining that others are
feeling them instead. Angry people trying to stay courteous tend to imagine that others are angry. Panicky people
trying to stay calm, similarly, tend to imagine that others are panicky. Officials managing the
response to the SARS epidemic are on extraordinarily unfamiliar turf. In a variety of ways, SARS is unprecedented; it is the first
new respiratory disease since the invention of the airplane that is not geographically confined, that kills a high percentage of those
it infects (including many who were previously healthy), that can stretch even a modern medical facility past its breaking point,
and that passes readily from person to person. For the officials in charge, this is their Rudy Giuliani moment. It seems reasonable
that they are feeling a bit panicky — about the disease itself, about their ability to manage it wisely, about the
recriminations that will come their way if they under- or over-respond. Yet
their jobs and their self-esteem
require them to keep these feelings well hidden, often even from themselves. Little
wonder they misdiagnose an appropriately anxious public as dangerously panic-stricken.
 A2 Waiting for Death
Waiting for death fails because of unpredictability—the
alternative rejects finitude which allows us to actualize life.
Sartre 43 [Jean Paul, (philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist), “Being and Nothingness”, Translated by
Hazel Barnes, Washington Square Press; Reprint edition, p. 536] RMT
Thus I can not say that the minute which, is passing is bringing death ¶ closer to me. It
is true that death is
coming to me if I consider very ¶ broadly that my life is limited. But within these very
elastic limits (I can ¶ die at the age of a hundred or at thirty-seven, tomorrow) I
cannot ¶ know whether this end is coming closer to me or being removed
farther ¶ from me. This is because there is a considerable difference in quality ¶
between death at the limit of old age and sudden death which annihilates ¶ us at
the prime of life or in youth. To wait for the former is to accept ¶ the fact that life
is a limited enterprise; it is one way among others of ¶ choosing finitude and
electing our ends on the foundation of finitude. ¶ To wait for the second would
be to wait with the idea that my life is an ¶ enterprise which is lacking. If only
deaths from old age existed (or deaths ¶ by explicit condemnation), then I could wait for my
death. But the ¶ unique quality of death is the fact that it can always before the end surprise
those who wait for it at such and such a date. And while death ¶ from old age can be confused
with the finitude of our choice and con¶ sequently can be lived as the resolved chord of our life
(we are given a ¶ task and we are given time to accomplish it), sudden death, on
the ¶ contrary, is such that it can in no way be waited for. Sudden death is ¶
undetermined and by definition can not be waited for at any date; it ¶ always, in fact,
includes the possibility that we shall die in surprise before ¶ the awaited date and
consequently that our waiting may be, qua waiting, a deception or that we
shall survive beyond this date; in the latter case ¶ since we were only this waiting,
we shall outlive ourselves .
 A2 Experience of Death
We don’t need to experience death for it to be bad
Banach 1—St. Anslem College [David, “Outline of Thomas Nagel, Feb 1, 2001
"Death"”,http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/deathol.htm]RMT
Three objections. A. It can be doubted that anything can be an evil unless it
causes displeasure. How can a deprivation of life be an evil unless someone
minds the deprivation? B. In the case of death there is no subject left. How
can it be a misfortune if there is no subject of the misfortune? Who suffers the
misfortune? C. How can the period of nonexistence after our death be bad, if the
period before our birth is not bad. V. Replies- to the objections. A. The good
or ill fortune of a person depends on a persons history and possibilities rather
than just their momentary state. Therefore a terrible misfortune can befall a
person even though they are not around to experience the misfortune. 1. We
consider ourselves to have been injured when someone acts against our
wishes or interests, even when we are not aware of his or her actions. 2. The
discovery of wrongs done us in our absence make us unhappy because they
are misfortunes. They are not misfortunes only because they made us
unhappy when we discovered them. 3. We consider a person who has
become a vegetable to have suffered a grave misfortune, even though they
may be quite happy in their new condition. We recognize this only when we consider the person he
could be now. B. Even though the person as subject does not survive his or her
death, it can still be the subject of the misfortune. If he or she had not died, it
would have gone on enjoying whatever good there is in living. C. The period of time
after death is time that death deprives us of. This is not true of the period of non-
existence before birth. This explains the differences in our attitudes towards
these two periods of non-existence. VI.
 A2 We are Always Dying
We may be dying, but we are not dead. Death is the result of
dying, which is bad.
Kalnow 9 [Cara Kalnow, 2009, A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of MPhil at the University of St. Andrews,
“WHY DEATH CAN BE BAD AND IMMORTALITY IS WORSE”]RMT
This thesis explores the metaphysical nature of death , where death is
defined as the permanent end of a person’s existence, and what moral
implications, if any, that nature may have. I begin with a distinction between
dying, death, and being dead. 1 Dying is a process. Death is the result of that
process ; it marks the end of a person’s existence and the beginning of a
person’s non-existence. Being dead is the state of nonexistence a person enters into
once death has occurred. Oftentimes dying and death are taken as one and the same and
perhaps this can explain why so many people fear death. To equate the two is deeply mistaken as
dying involves a process wherein a person is alive and continues to exist, while
death marks the end of that process; it is a time in which a person no longer exists. Dying can
be a horrible process; it can include a great amount of suffering and pain for the
person. There is no great mystery as to why dying is regarded as a bad for a
person. But it is puzzling to consider why death, or the state of being dead, could be bad for a person as each involves
a time when a person no longer exists, and cannot experience anything unpleasant that may result from being dead
 A2 Accept Death
Embracing death leads to violence. Psychological studies
prove we cannot simply accept vulnerability.
Solomon et al ‘3 (Sheldon, Prof. Psych. – Skidmore College, Jeff Greenberg, Prof. Psych. – U. Arizona, and
Tom Pyszczynski, Prof. Psych. – Colorado U., Psychoanalytic Review, “Fear of Death and Huma Destructiveness”, 90:457-
474,
(2003). Psychoanalytic Review, 90:457-474, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing)
The role of in-group identity in assuaging concerns about mortality has also been demonstrated in the domain of domestic
race relations. Specifically, mortality salience leads white Americans to react
sympathetically to a white racist (Greenberg, Schimel, Martens, Solomon, and Pyszcznyski, 2001)
and to react negatively to an African American individual who violates the
negative stereotype of African Americans-specifically, a studious chess-playing male African
American college student (Schimel et al., 1999). These results support the notion that
religious, political, and ethnic identities and beliefs serve a death-denying
function, in that people respond to momentary reminders of death by
increasing their affection for similar others and their disdain for dissimilar
others. But earlier we argued that even in the absence of others who differ in these salient ways, people would
designate others as a scapegoat to serve a terror-assuaging function. Harmon-Jones, Greenberg, Solomon, and Simon
(1995) examined this notion empirically by assigning previously unacquainted people to different groups on the basis of
their preference for abstract art works by Paul Klee or Wasily Kandinsky (the minimal group paradigm; Tajfel, Billig,
Bundy, & Flament, 1971). Participants then rated themselves and fellow in-group members and members of the other
group after a mortality salience or control induction. Thinking about death resulted in exaggerated regard for one's own
group and disparagement of those who preferred a different kind of art, despite the fact that the group had just been
formed minutes ago, participants did not know anyone in their group directly, and membership in the group was based on
a relatively unimportant preference for abstract art. One possible shortcoming of these findings is that they are all based
on attitudinal measures. Thinking about death may engender more positive and negative attitudes toward similar and
dissimilar others, respectively, but without leading people to behave accordingly. Additional research has,
however, demonstrated the effects of mortality salience on actual behavior.
After completing a mortality salience or control induction, Ochsmann and Mathy (1994) told German university students
that the experiment was over and had them sit in a reception area, presumably to be paid for participating in the study.
There was a row of chairs in the reception area, and in the center of the row was another student who was actually a
confederate of the experimenters. The confederate appeared to be a German student for half of the participants; for the
other half, the confederate appeared to be a Turkish student (currently a despised minority in Germany). The investigators
were interested in how close to or far away from the confederate each participant would sit as a function of his appearance
(German or Turkish) after thinking about death or a benign control topic. Although physical distance did not differ as a
function of the confederate's appearance in the control condition, mortality salient participants sat closer to the fellow
German and further away from the Turkish infidel. This finding establishes that mortality salience influences actual
behavior above and beyond changes in attitudes. More recently, McGregor et al. (1998) demonstrated
that subtle reminders of death produce actual physical aggression toward
those who threaten deeply cherished beliefs. Liberal or conservative college
students read an essay they believed was written by another student in the
study that condemned either liberals or conservatives (e.g., “Liberals are the cause of so
many problems in this country. … The bleeding heart stance they take, of trying to help everyone is a joke and incredibly
stupid. How can they help the world when they can't even help themselves?” Or “Conservatives are the cause of so many
problems in this country. … The cold-hearted stance they take, of trying to help only themselves is a joke and incredibly
stupid. They are too busy thinking of themselves, and don't care about anyone else”). Then, after a mortality
salience or control induction in what they believed to be a separate study,
participants were given an opportunity to administer a quantity of their
choosing of very hot salsa to the student who wrote the essay in the “first study,” and who
claimed to dislike spicy foods. We used hot sauce administration as a direct measure of physical aggression because
of some highly publicized incidents of hot sauce being used malevolently to
harm others (e.g., police officers assaulted by a cook at Denny's; children being abused by being forced to drink hot
sauce). Results indicated no differences in hot sauce allocation for similar and dissimilar others in the control condition;
however, following mortality salience, participants administered twice the
amount of hot sauce to different others than they did to similar others . Two
additional studies replicated these effects. Reminders of death thus produced direct
aggression toward those who challenge cherished aspects of cultural
worldviews. The general finding that mortality salience produces world-
view defense (i.e., exaggerated positive and negative responses to similar and dissimilar others, respectively) is
thus quite robust and extends beyond attitudinal preferences to behavior
and direct acts of physical aggression . Mortality salience effects have been
independently obtained in labs in the United States, Canada, Germany,
Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia, using a variety of mortality
salience manipulations, including fear of death scales (instead of our typical open-ended
questions) and films of gory automobile accidents. Mortality salience effects are also
apparently unique to thoughts of death. Asking people to ponder unpleasant
but nonlethal matters (e.g., failing an exam, giving a speech in public, being socially ostracized, being
paralyzed, being in pain at the dentist) often results in self-reported anxiety and negative affect, but does not
engender worldview defense (see Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997, for a review of this
research). Additionally, mortality salience effects have been obtained in natural settings, such as when people are
interviewed in front of a funeral parlor as opposed to 100 meters away from the funeral parlor (Pyszczynski, et al., 1996).
Thus, subtle reminders of mortality are sufficient to arouse these effects. In fact, mortality salience effects do not even
require a conscious confrontation with reminders of death at all! In three studies, Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and
Solomon (1997) found exaggerated reactions to pro- and anti-United States essay authors following subliminal reminders
of death (specifically, 28 millisecond exposures to the word “death” vs. “field” or “pain”). This work, along with other
findings (for a review, see Pyszczynski, Greenberg, and Solomon, 1999), has shown that worldview defense is intensified
whenever death-related thought is on the fringes of consciousness (i.e., high in accessibility).

More ev: Studies prove rhetoric of mortality results in

violence
Pyszczynski ‘4 (Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Social Research, “What are we so afraid of? A terror
management theory perspective on the politics of fear”, Winter,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_4_71/ai_n13807478/)
2) Reminding people of the inevitability of deathleads to a broad range of
attempts to maintain faith in their worldviews and self-esteem and defend them against
threats. These studies test the mortality salience hypothesis: if one's cultural worldview and self-esteem provide protection
against the fear of death, then reminding people of the inevitability of death should
increase their need to keep their worldviews and self-esteem strong. In the
typical study, participants are reminded of death or another aversive topic
that is not related to death (dental pain, failing an exam, giving a speech in front of a large audience, being
socially excluded, being uncertain), and then exposed to people or ideas that either
support or challenge their cultural worldviews. For example, in the first mortality salience
study, Rosenblatt et al. (1989) had half of their sample of municipal court judges in
Tucson, Arizona, fill out a questionnaire about death, and then all the judges
read a case brief about a woman accused of prostitution and then set bail for
her. Whereas control judges who were not reminded of their mortality set an average bond of
$50, those who were first reminded of their mortality set an average bond of $455. Later
studies have shown that such reminders of mortality can lead to increased
prejudice, aggression toward those with different worldviews, estimates of social
consensus for one's attitudes, anxiety when treating culturally valued objects in disrespectful ways, help for those within
one's group, identification with valued aspects of self, affection for those who love us, and many other important
psychological consequences (for more details, see Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski, 1997). What all these
effects of mortality salience have in common is that they entail behavior that
affirms or bolsters one's self-esteem or faith in one's worldview or behavior
that diffuses any threats that might be impinging on these two components of one's shield against
existential anxiety.
 2AC
Fem,Hdegger,Nietz,Orientalism
Fem
 A2 r/c War
Patriarchy is not the root cause of war
Martin 90
Brian Martin. 1990. (Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of
Wollongong. “Uprooting War.” http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw10.html)
While these connections between war and male domination are suggestive, they do not amount to a clearly defined link
between the two. It is too simplistic to say that male violence against women leads directly to organised mass warfare.
Many soldiers kill in combat but are tender with their families ; many male doctors are dedicated professionally to
relieving suffering but batter their wives. The problem of war cannot be reduced to the problem of individual violence.
Rather, social relations are structured to promote particular kinds of violence in particular circumstances. While there are
some important connections between individual male violence and collective violence in war (rape in war is a notable one),
these connections are more symptoms than causes of the relationship between patriarchy and other war-linked structures.
 A2 Enviro Destruction
Successful environmental efforts like CFC cooperation or
protected areas disprove - changing incentive structures solve
environmental destruction, which proves it’s a result of
incentives, not patriarchy
 More ev
Rethinking fails to alter material realities and gets coopted
Whitworth 94 [Assistant Professor of Political Science York University, Feminism and International
Relations, Towards a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions, page 22-23]
Even when not concerned with mothering as such, much of the politics that emerge from radical feminism within IR
depend upon a 're-thinking' from the perspective of women. What is left unexplained is how simply thinking differently
will alter the material realities of relations of domination between men and women.46 Structural (patriarchal) relations
are acknowledged, but not analysed in radical feminism's reliance on the experiences, behaviours and perceptions of
'women'. As Sandra Harding notes, the essential and universal 'man', long the focus of feminist critiques, has merely been
replaced here with the essential and universal 'woman'.47 And indeed, that notion of 'woman' not only ignores important
differences amongst women, but it also reproduces exactly the stereotypical vision of women and men, masculine
and feminine, that has been produced under patriarchy.48 Those women who do not fit the mould - who, for example,
take up arms in military struggle - are quickly dismissed as expressing 'negative' or 'inauthentic' feminine values (the same
accusation is more rarely made against men).49 In this way, it comes as no surprise when mainstream IR theorists such as
Robert Keohane happily embrace the tenets of radical feminism.50 It requires little in the way of re-thinking or movement
from accepted and comfortable assumptions and stereotypes. Radical feminists find themselves defending the same
account of women as nurturing, pacifist, submissive mothers as do men under patriarchy, anti-feminists and the New
Right. As some writers suggest, this in itself should give feminists pause to reconsider this position.51

Not the root cause

Goldstein 1 – IR, American U (Joshua, War and Gender, p. 412)
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars
and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then, if
one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justice specifically
(perhaps. among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women,
labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war . The evidence in this
book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of
capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these
influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other
injustices.9 So, “if you want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice
(gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through
the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs
downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the
military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.”
The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet,
in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to
be empirically inadequate.
 Permutation
Permutation do the plan and __. The permutation combines the
state based focus of the 1AC with the method of the alternative.

Policy Engagement: debates about government policies are

productive and important. Abandoning the state as an agent of
change prevents meaningful progress toward equality.
Patriarchy thrives in an environment of anti-statism.
Harrington 92 — Mona Harrington, lawyer and political scientist, 1992 (“What Exactly Is Wrong with the
Liberal State as an Agent of Change?,” Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, Edited
By V. Spike Peterson, Published by Lynne Rienner, ISBN 1555872980, p. 65-66)
The title of this chapter is a question that needs much more careful exploration by feminists than we have given it so far.
In fact, I raise the question in a somewhat belligerent tone because I am inclined to think that the liberal state is
a suitable, even elegant, agent to advance a feminist agenda in both
domestic and international relations . Yet most of my feminist colleagues who are probing the
gendered nature of the state vastly mistrust the liberal tradition and seek to formulate a politics that will displace it. My
aim here is to join some of their arguments before a consensus forms that liberalism is beyond the pale of seriously critical
feminist analysis. But let me hasten to say, before irreversible misunderstanding sets in, that what I am contesting is the
meaning, the content that antiliberals generally assign to liberalism. The object of most of their criticism is actually one
variant of the liberal tradition, and I think it is crucially important that we recognize another, more morally spacious, set
of liberal ideas and that we help to develop its deeper promise. I will review the antiliberal arguments in some detail and
answer them presently. First, I want to suggest why the whole argument is important. The crux of feminist
challenge to the liberal state is essentially an antistate analysis with demonstrations
that liberalism, while promising to divest the state of its destructive features, does not do so. In this analysis, states are
inherently oppressive and exploitative organizations of power. They are run by hierarchies in control of deadly force
deployed to protect the privileges of elites, which are, for the most part, capital-controlling, white, and male. In short,
feminist antiliberal, antistate analysis is similar to already established Marxist criticism of the state but with added
attention to gender. States are not only instruments of class interest but also of patriarchy. They perpetuate not only class
conflict and violence but also gender conflict and violence. And liberal systems that supposedly democratize power and
wealth simply mask the underlying fact of elite rule. Where can this analysis lead but to a call for deconstructing the
present sovereign state system? [end page 65] At this juncture in history—I am writing in the winter of 1990-91 with the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe decommunized, the Cold War over— other calls for deconstructing nation-states are also
in the air. Internationalists see the first opportunity since the mid-1940s to put a functioning system of international
organization in place, starting with a revived United Nations and extending, in some versions, to complex networks of
denationalized, depoliticized regimes rationally and efficiently organizing the world's business. In other words, the
state as a dealer in power, a wielder of weapons, an inherently violent
institution, is the object of suspicion and resistance by both antiliberal
feminists and liberal internationalists. And, especially now, when the international system is undergoing immense
change, pressures for denationalizing change—certainly discourse arguing for it—will be persistent. In the face of such
pressures, I believe that feminist
critics of the present state system should beware .
The very fact that the state creates, condenses, and focuses political power
may make it the best friend, not the enemy, of feminists —because the
availability of real political power is essential to real democratic control . Not
sufficient, I know, but essential. My basic premise is that political power can significantly disrupt
patriarchal and class (which is to say, economic) power . It holds the potential, at least,
for disrupting the patriarchal/economic oppression of those in the lower
reaches of class, sex, and race hierarchies. It is indisputable that, in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, it has been the political power of states that has confronted
the massive economic power privately constructed out of industrial
processes and has imposed obligations on employers for the welfare of
workers as well as providing additional social supports for the population at
large. And the political tempering of economic power has been the most
responsive to broad public needs in liberal democracies, where
governments must respond roughly to the interests of voters . Of course, this is not the
whole story. The nation-states of this period have also perpetrated horrors of torture and war, have aided the development
of elite-controlled industrial wealth, and have not sufficiently responded to the human needs of their less powerful
constituents. But I believe it is better to try to restrain the horrors and abuses than to
give up on the limits that state organized political power can bring to bear
on the forms of class-based, race-based, sex-based power that constitute
the greatest sources of oppression we are likely to face .
 No RC
Patriarchy is not the root cause—they are overly reductionist
and prioritize the privileged and paper over other issues like
racism and classism.
Carrie Crenshaw, 2. PhD, Former President of CEDA Perspectives In Controversy: Selected
Articles from Contemporary Argumentation and Debate 2002 p. 119-126
Feminism is not dead. It is alive and well in intercollegiate debate. Increasingly, students rely on
feminist authors to inform their analysis of resolutions. While I applaud these initial efforts to explore feminist
thought, I am concerned that such arguments only exemplify the general absence of
sound causal reasoning in debate rounds. Poor causal reasoning results from a debate practice that
privileges empirical proof over rhetorical proof, fostering ignorance of the subject matter being debated. To illustrate my
point, I claim that debate arguments about feminists suffer from a reductionism
that tends to marginalize the voices of significant feminist authors. David Zarefsky made a
persuasive case for the value of causal reasoning in intercollegiate debate as far back as 1979. He argued that
causal arguments are desirable for four reasons . First, causal analysis
increases the control of the arguer over events by promoting understanding
of them. Second, the use of causal reasoning increases rigor of analysis and fairness in the
decision-making process. Third, causal arguments promote understanding of the
philosophical paradox that presumably good people tolerate the existence of
evil. Finally, causal reasoning supplies good reasons for "commitments to
policy choices or to systems of belief which transcend whim, caprice, or the
non-reflexive "claims of immediacy" (117-9). Rhetorical proof plays an important role in the analysis
of causal relationships. This is true despite the common assumption that the identification of cause and effect relies solely
upon empirical investigation. For Zarefsky, there are three types of causal reasoning. The first type of causal reasoning
describes the application of a covering law to account for physical or material conditions that cause a resulting event This
type of causal reasoning requires empirical proof prominent in scientific investigation. A second type of causal reasoning
requires the assignment of responsibility. Responsible human beings as agents cause certain events to happen; that is,
causation resides in human beings (107-08). A third type of causal claim explains the existence of a causal relationship. It
functions "to provide reasons to justify a belief that a causal connection exists" (108). The second and third types of causal
arguments rely on rhetorical proof, the provision of "good reasons" to substantiate arguments about human responsibility
or explanations for the existence of a causal relationship (108). I contend that the practice of intercollegiate debate
privileges the first type of causal analysis. It reduces questions of human motivation and explanation to a level of
empiricism appropriate only for causal questions concerning physical or material conditions. Arguments about feminism
clearly illustrate this phenomenon. Substantive debates about feminism usually take one of two forms. First, on the
affirmative, debaters argue that some aspect of the resolution is a manifestation of patriarchy. For example, given the
spring 1992 resolution, "[rjesolved: That advertising degrades the quality of life," many affirmatives argued that the
portrayal of women as beautiful objects for men's consumption is a manifestation of patriarchy that results in tangible
harms to women such as rising rates of eating disorders. The fall 1992 topic, "(rjesolved: That the welfare system
exacerbates the problems of the urban poor in the United States," also had its share of patri- archy cases. Affirmatives
typically argued that women's dependence upon a patriarchal welfare system results in increasing rates of women's
poverty. In addition to these concrete harms to individual women, most affirmatives on both topics, desiring
"big impacts," argued that the effects of patriarchy include nightmarish
totalitarianism and/or nuclear annihilation . On the negative, many debaters countered with
arguments that the some aspect of the resolution in some way sustains or energizes the feminist movement in resistance to
patriarchal harms. For example, some negatives argued that sexist advertising provides an impetus for the reinvigoration
of the feminist movement and/or feminist consciousness, ultimately solving the threat of patriarchal nuclear annihilation.
likewise, debaters negating the welfare topic argued that the state of the welfare system is the key issue around which the
feminist movement is mobilizing or that the consequence of the welfare system - breakup of the patriarchal nuclear family
-undermines patriarchy as a whole. Such arguments seem to have two assumptions in
common. First, there is a single feminism. As a result, feminists are transformed into feminism. Debaters
speak of feminism as a single, monolithic, theoretical and pragmatic entity and feminists as women
with identical m otivations, methods, and goals. Second, these arguments assume that patriarchy is
the single or root cause of all forms of oppression . Patriarchy not only is responsible for
sexism and the consequent oppression of women, it also is the cause of totalitarianism,
environmental degradation, nuclear war, racism, and capitalist
exploitation. These reductionist arguments reflect an unwillingness to
debate about the complexities of human motivation and explanation. They betray a reliance upon a framework
of proof that can explain only material conditions and physical realities through empirical quantification. The
transformation of feminists to feminism and the identification of patriarchy as the sole cause
of all oppression is related in part to the current form of intercollegiate
debate practice. By "form," I refer to Kenneth Burke's notion of form, defined as the "creation of appetite in the
mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite" (Counter-Statement 31). Though the framework for this
understanding of form is found in literary and artistic criticism, it is appropriate in this context; as Burke notes, literature
can be "equipment for living" (Biilosophy 293). He also suggests that form "is an arousing and fulfillment of desires. A
work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence"
(Counter-Statement 124). Burke observes that there are several aspects to the concept of form. One of these aspects,
conventional form, involves to some degree the appeal of form as form. Progressive, repetitive, and minor forms, may be
effective even though the reader has no awareness of their formality. But when a form appeals as form, we designate it as
conventional form. Any form can become conventional, and be sought for itself - whether it be as complex as the Greek
tragedy or as compact as the sonnet (Counter-Statement 126). These concepts help to explain debaters' continuing
reluctance to employ rhetorical proof in arguments about causality. Debaters practice the convention
of poor causal reasoning as a result of judges' unexamined reliance upon
conventional form Convention is the practice of arguing single-cause links to
.

monolithic impacts that arises out of custom or usage. Conventional form is the expectation of judges that an
argument will take this form. Common practice or convention dictates that a case or disadvantage with nefarious impacts
causally related to a single link will "outweigh" opposing claims in the mind of the judge. In this sense, debate arguments
themselves are conventional. Debaters practice the convention of establishing single-
cause relationships to large monolithic impacts in order to conform to
audience expectation. Debaters practice poor causal reasoning because they are rewarded for it by judges.
The convention of arguing single-cause links leads the judge to anticipate the certainty of the impact and to be gratified by
the sequence. I suspect that the sequence is gratifying for judges because it relieves us
from the responsibility and difficulties of evaluating rhetorical proofs. We are
caught between our responsibility to evaluate rhetorical proofs and our reluctance to succumb to complete relativism and
subjectivity. To take responsibility for evaluating rhetorical proof is to admit that not every question has an empirical
answer. However, when we abandon our responsibility to rhetorical proofs, we sacrifice our students' understanding of
causal reasoning. The sacrifice has consequences for our students' knowledge of
the subject matter they are debating. For example, when feminism is defined as a single entity, not
as a pluralized movement or theory, that single entity results in the identification of patriarchy as the
sole cause of oppression. The result is ignorance of the subject position of the
particular feminist author, for highlighting his or her subject position might draw attention to the
incompleteness of the causal relationship between link and impact Consequently, debaters do not
challenge the basic assumptions of such argumentation and ignorance of
feminists is perpetuated. Feminists are not feminism. The topics of feminist inquiry are many and varied, as
are the philosophical approaches to the study of these topics. Different authors have attempted categorization of various
feminists in distinctive ways. For example, Alison Jaggar argues that feminists can be divided into four categories: liberal
feminism, marxist feminism, radical feminism, and socialist feminism. While each of these feminists may share a common
commitment to the improvement of women's situations, they differ from each other in very important ways and reflect
divergent philosophical assumptions that make them each unique. Linda Alcoff presents an entirely different
categorization of feminist theory based upon distinct understandings of the concept "woman," including cultural feminism
and post-structural feminism. Karen Offen utilizes a comparative historical approach to examine two distinct modes of
historical argumentation or discourse that have been used by women and their male allies on behalf of women's
emancipation from male control in Western societies. These include relational feminism and individualist feminism.
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron describe a whole category of French feminists that contain many distinct versions
of the feminist project by French authors. Women of color and third-world feminists have argued that even these broad
categorizations of the various feminism have neglected the contributions of non-white, non-Western feminists (see, for
example, hooks; Hull; Joseph and Lewis; Lorde; Moraga; Omolade; and Smith). In this literature, the very definition of
feminism is contested. Some feminists argue that "all feminists are united by a commitment to improving the situation of
women" (Jaggar and Rothenberg xii), while others have resisted the notion of a single definition of feminism, bell hooks
observes, "a central problem within feminist discourse has been our inability to either arrive at a consensus of opinion
about what feminism is (or accept definitions) that could serve as points of unification" (Feminist Theory 17).
The controversy over the very definition of feminism has political
implications. The power to define is the power both to include and exclude
people and ideas in and from that feminism. As a result, [bjourgeois white women interested in
women's rights issues have been satisfied with simple definitions for obvious reasons. Rhetorically placing themselves in
the same social category as oppressed women, they were not anxious to call attention to race and class privilege (hooks.
Feminist Wieory 18). Debate arguments that assume a singular conception of
feminism include and empower the voices of race- and class-privileged
women while excluding and silencing the voices of feminists marginalized
by race and class status. This position becomes clearer when we examine the second assumption
of arguments about feminism in intercollegiate debate patriarchy is the sole cause of oppression.
-

Important feminist thought has resisted this assumption for good reason.
Designating patriarchy as the sole cause f oppression allows the subjugation of
o

resistance to other forms of oppression like racism and classism to the

struggle against sexism ch subjugation has the effect of denigrating the
. Su

legitimacy of resistance to racism and classism as struggles of equal

importance. "Within feminist movement in the West, this led to the assumption that
resisting patriarchal domination is a more legitimate feminist action than
resisting racism and other forms of domination" (hooks. Talking Back 19). The relegation of
struggles against racism and class exploitation to offspring status is not the only implication of the "sole cause" argument
In addition, identifying patriarchy as the single source of oppression obscures
women's perpetration of other forms of subjugation and domination , bell hooks
argues that we should not obscure the reality that women can and do partici- pate in politics of domination, as
perpetrators as well as victims - that we dominate, that we are dominated. If focus on patriarchal
domination masks this reality or becomes the means by which women deflect attention from the real
conditions and circumstances of our lives, then women cooperate in suppressing and
promoting false consciousness, inhibiting our capacity to assume
responsibility for transforming ourselves and society (hooks. Talking Back 20).
Characterizing patriarchy as the sole cause of oppression allows mainstream
feminists to abdicate responsibility for the exercise of class and race
privilege. It casts the struggle against class exploitation and racism as secondary concerns. Current debate
practice promotes ignorance of these issues because debaters appeal to
conventional form, the expectation of judges that they will isolate a single link to a large impact Feminists
become feminism and patriarchy becomes the sole cause of all evil. Poor causal arguments arouse and fulfill the
expectation of judges by allowing us to surrender our responsibility to evaluate rhetorical proof for complex causal
relationships. The result is either the mar-ginalization or colonization of certain
feminist voices. Arguing feminism in debate rounds risks trivializing feminists. Privileging the act of
speaking about feminism over the content of speech "often turns the voices
and beings of non-white women into commodity, spectacle hooks, Talking Back 14). "(

Teaching sophisticated causal reasoning enables our students to learn more

concerning the subject matter about which they argue. In this case, students
would learn more about the multiplicity of feminists instead of reproducing
the marginalization of many feminist voices in the debate itself . The content of the
speech of feminists must be investigated to subvert the colonization of exploited women. To do so, we must explore
alternatives to the formal expectation of single-cause links to enormous impacts for appropriation of the marginal voice
threatens the very core of self-determination and free self-expression for exploited and oppressed peoples. If the identified
audience, those spoken to, is determined solely by ruling groups who control production and distribution, then it is easy
for the marginal voice striving for a hearing to allow what is said to be overdetermined by the needs of that majority group
who appears to be listening, to be tuned in (hooks, Talking Back 14). At this point, arguments about
feminism in intercollegiate debate seem to be overdetermined by the
expectation of common practice, the "game" that we play in assuming there
is such a thing as a direct and sole causal link to a monolithic impact To play
that game, we have gone along with the idea that there is a single feminism
and the idea that patriarchal impacts can account for all oppression . In making
this critique, I am by no means discounting the importance of arguments about feminism in intercollegiate debate. In fact,
feminists contain the possibility of a transformational politic for two reasons. First, feminist concerns affect each
individual intimately. We are most likely to encounter patriarchal domination "in an ongoing way in everyday life. Unlike
other forms of domination, sexism directly shapes and determines relations of power in our private lives, in familiar social
spaces..." (hooks. Talking Back 21). Second, the methodology of feminism, consciousness-raising, contains within it the
possibility of real societal transformation. "lE]ducation for critical consciousness can be extended to include politicization
of the self that focuses on creating understanding the ways sex, race, and class together determine our individual lot and
our collective experience" (hooks, Talking Back 24). Observing the incongruity between advocacy of single-cause
relationships and feminism does not discount the importance of feminists to individual or societal consciousness raising.
Patriarchy isn’t the cause of every single impact
Cat Maguire of EVE Online, an online feminist news source June 9 2005 http://eve.enviroweb.org/what_is/main.html
It assumes patriarchy is the root cause of all our problems . While the
patriarchal mindset is certainly accountable for much of humankind's
dysfunctionality, patriarchy is only 5,000 years old. Emerging theories from thinkers like
Chellis Glendinning contend that our dislocation from nature (and hence from ourselves) goes back at least 20,000 years
ago when humans moved from the gatherer/hunter stage to that of domesticating plants and animals.  As such, we
have come to believe that anthropocentrism and speciesism—the impulse to
conquer and control nature—are conceivably a more accurate source of
today’s problems than is patriarchy per se. 
 Alt fails
Total rejection bad
Shepherd 2007 [Laura J., Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of
Birmingham, “Victims, Perpetrators and Actors’ Revisited:1 Exploring the Potential for a Feminist Reconceptualisation of
(International) Security and (Gender) Violence,” BJPIR: 2007 VOL 9, 239–256]
This adherence is evidenced in the desire to fix the meaning of concepts in ways that are not challenging to the current
configuration of social/political order and subjectivity, and is product/productive of ‘the exclusionary presuppositions and
foundations that shore up discursive practices insofar as those foreclose the heterogeneity, gender, class or race of the
subject’ (Hanssen 2000, 215). However, the terms used to describe political action and plan
future policy could be otherwise imagined. They could ‘remain that which is,
in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted,
queered from prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’ (Butler 1993, 228). The
concepts both produced by and productive of policy could reflect an aversion to
essentialism, while recognising that strategic gains can be made through
the temporary binding of identities to bodies and constraining of authority
within the confines of the territorial state . This is, in short, an appeal to a
politics of both /and rather than either/or. Both the state (produced through representations of
security and vio- lence) and the subject (produced through representations of gender and violence) rely on a logic of
sovereignty and ontological cohesion that must be problematised if alternative visions of authority and subjectivity are to
become imaginable. International Relations as a discipline could seek to embrace the investigation of the multiple
modalities of power, from the economic to the bureaucratic, from neo- liberal capitalism to the juridical. Rather than
defending the sovereign boundaries of the discipline from the unruly outside constituted by critical studies of develop-
ment, political structures, economy and law, not to mention the analysis of social/ political phenomena like those
undertaken by always-already interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, IR could refuse to fix its own boundaries, and refuse
to exercise sovereign power, in terms of authority, over the meanings of its objects of analysis. Future research
on global politics could look very different if it were not for the inscription
of ultimately arbitrary disciplinary borderlines that function to constrain
rather than facilitate understanding. It may seem that there is a tension between espousing a
feminist poststructural politics and undertaking research that seeks to detail, through deconstruction, the ways in which
particular discourses have failed to manifest the reforms needed to address security and violence in the context of
gendered subjectivity and the constitution of political community. In keeping with the ontological position I hold, I argue
that there is nothing inherent in the concepts of (international) security and (gender) violence that necessitated their
being made meaningful in the way they have been. Those working on policy and advocacy in the
area of security and violence can use the reconceptualisation I offer ‘to enable
people to imagine how their being-in-the-world is not only changeable, but
perhaps, ought to be changed’ (Milliken 1999, 244).
 2AC-Mohanty
Homogenization of the concept of woman locks them into
powerlessness. The alt just inverts power relations; it doesn’t
resolve them
Mohanty, postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, 1986 (Chandra Talpade, Under Western Eyes,
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/RaeSpot/under%20wstrn%20eyes.pdf)
What does this imply about the structure and functioning of power relations? The setting
up of the
commonality of third world women's struggles across classes and cultures against a
general notion of oppression (primarily the group in power—i.e., men) necessitates the assumption of
what Michel Foucault calls the "juridico-discursive" model of power," the principle features of which are:
"a negative relation" (limit and lack); an "insistence on the rule" (which forms a binary system); a "cycle of prohibition";
the "logic of censorship"; and
a "uniformity" of the apparatus functioning at different levels.
Feminist discourse on the third world which assumes a homogeneous category—or
group—called women necessarily operates through the setting up of originary power
divisions. Power relations are structured in terms of a source of power and a cumulative reaction to power. Opposition
is a generalized phenomenon created as a response to power—which, in turn, is possessed by certain groups of people.
The major problem with such a definition of power is that it locks all revolutionary
struggles into binary structures—possessing power versus being powerless. Women
are powerless, unified groups. If the struggle for a just society is seen in terms of the move from powerless to
powerful for women as a group, and this is the implication in feminist discourse which structures sexual difference in
terms of the division between the sexes, then the
new society would be structurally identical to the
existing organization of power relations, constituting itself as a simple inversion of
what exists. If relations of domination and exploitation are defined in terms of binary divisions—groups which
dominate and groups which are dominated—surely the implication is that the accession to power of women as a group is
sufficient to dismantle the existing organization of relations? But women
as a group are not in some
sense essentially superior or infallible. The crux of the problem lies in that initial
assumption of women as a homogeneous group or category ("the oppressed "), a familiar
assumption in Western radical and liberal feminisms."
 Ecofem
Ecofeminism takes us backwards by reintroducing the male-
female dichotomy feminists have struggled to overcome
Wolfe 11 [Wolfe, Ross, Author of history and literary criticism. “Man and Nature, Part IV: A Marxist Critique of the
“Green” Environmental Movement.” The Charnel-House. March 25, 2011. Accessed online 12.30.2013 SW.
http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/man-and-nature-part-iv-a-radical-critique-of-the-“green”-environmental-
movement/

Closely related to, but distinct from, lifestyle politics is a

“gendered” strain of eco-activism — eco-
feminism. They offer an environmentalist critique that is at once broader and more particular than that
of the lifestylists. For many eco-feminists, the whole problem of man’s domination over
nature (and yes, specifically man’s) can be traced to a male way of viewing
the world. Men, they argue, seek to dominate and bend to their will everything that stands in their path. They will
stop at nothing to bring Nature, often culturally identified as female, under their dominion, and so they must beat it into
submission. And so patriarchal society has pursued throughout history a campaign against nature, as a test of manhood,
an eternal struggle. By contrast, a more feminine perspective on nature, the eco-feminists contend, would be more
empathetic and understanding. It would accept nature in all its abundance and fertility; it would show compassion where
the men showed none. The wanton destruction of natural ecosystems would thus appear to them as the result of a
specifically androcentric (and not more generally anthropocentric) worldview. The domination of nature,
eco-feminists argue, mirrors
the oppression of women and indigenous people by the
Western patriarchal tradition. “The reductionist mind,” states the Indian eco-feminist Vandana Shiva,
“superimposes the roles and forms of power of western male-oriented concepts on women, all non-western peoples, and
even on nature, rendering all three ‘deficient,’ and in need of ‘development.’”[16] A predominantly gynocentric, indigenous
perspective on society’s relationship to nature would be far less destructive, many eco-feminists claim. Many eco-
feminists draw inspiration from the mythological representation of nature
as a woman — Gaia, Terra, Prakriti,[17] Mother Earth, and so on. This often leads them to embrace numerous
mystifications, many of them anagogic or primitivist in nature.[18] These eco-feminists will then point to indigenous tribal
myths that teach that nature should be revered and held sacred. An eco-feminist spiritual worldview, its proponents insist,
would lead to a more harmonious relationship with nature. Of course, there are several problems with these arguments.
First of all, it essentializes (one could even say naturalizes) the difference between men and women. “One of
the reasons for ecofeminism’s association with an essentialist radical feminism,” Mary Mellor points out, “ is its
emergence alongside the cultural feminist radicalization of the feminist movement, particularly in the United States.”[19]
But this again hypostatizes the old patriarchal myth, so often repeated, that men are
strong, bold, and decisive, while women are weak, caring, and empathetic.
This is a dichotomy that feminists have for decades been trying to disprove,
and now many eco-feminists are looking to resurrect it to serve the
purposes of their argument. The old structuralist association man with culture and women with nature is
one that modern feminism sought to overturn.[20] Postmodern feminism, on the other hand, has been far more
ambivalent.[21] Secondly, the appeal to the mythological symbolism portraying
Nature as female must be seen as inadmissible superstition. The phantoms of religion
and mythological deities cannot be used as evidence in any rational discussion, no matter how “authentic” or “sincere”
some of these indigenous beliefs might seem. Finally, even if one were to accept such dubious
symbolic evidence, would it not stand to reason that men would refrain
from acts of environmental destruction like deforestation? After all, the act
of chopping down a tree (a longtime symbol of the phallus) could be easily
interpreted as an act of castration, the worst fear of men, according to
Freud. If the eco-feminists were to trot out such symbolic interpretations in
defense of their arguments, one could easily counter with symbolic
interpretations of his (or her) own.
Ecofeminism’s papers over the root cause of ecological
destruction and is overly reductionist
Archambault 93 [Archambault, Anne (Anne Archambault is finishing
her Master ofEnvironmenta1Studies at York University). "A critique of
ecofeminism." Canadian Woman Studies 13.3 (1993).]
However, Robyn Eckersley cautions ecofeminists to be wary of "over-identifying
with, and hence accepting uncritically, the perspective of women." She points out
three ways in which over privileging women's experiences can "inhibit the general
emancipatory process." First, such an analysis can overlook the extent to
which many women have been accessories in the process of ecological
destruction in the past. Second, it can fail to identify the different ways in
which men themselves have suffered from "masculine" stereotypes. Third, it
can be less responsive to the impact of other social dynamics and prejudices
that are unrelated to the question of gender. Ultimately, she feels that while
"rendering visible and critically incorporating" women's experiences is
commendable, over- privileging their experiences can only lead to a
"lopsided and reductionist analysis of social and ecological problems" (67).

Ecofeminist projects simply shifted responsibility, and

subsequently blame, onto women who were sometimes
unwilling and usually unable to execute them. Not only does
ecofem marginalize some women, but it skirts over the actual
problems surrounding the environment and women’s rights.
Leach 07 [Leach, Melissa. "Earth mother myths and other ecofeminist
fables: How a strategic notion rose and fell." Development and Change 38.1
(2007): 67-85] AJ
When translated into development practice, these women–environment links tended to come to mean one
of two things: acknowledging women’s en- vironmental roles so that they
could be brought into broader project activities such as tree planting, soil conservation
and so on, mobilizing the extra re- sources of women’s labour, skill and knowledge; or justifying environmental interventions

which targeted women exclusively, usually through women’s groups. Many, many
examples of both were spawned in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To take just one example, donor agencies in The Gambia relied principally on women’s labour to promote fruit tree agroforestry
for envi- ronmental stabilization. In justifying this, a UNDP official commented that ‘women are the sole conservators of the land . . . the willingness of women to participate in natural resource
management is greater than that of men. Women are always willing to work in groups and these groups can be formed for conservation purposes’. The promotional literature of an NGO involved in
tree planting echoed this perspective: ‘In the Gambia, our primary focus has been on women ... In the implementation of an environmental pro- gramme in the country, they could be deemed our

Such projects and programme approaches have had a variety of effects. As those who went on to
most precious and vital local resource’ (both cited in Schroeder, 1999: 109).

in practice, many have proved

question the assumptions have pointed out (see Green et al., 1998; Jackson, 1993; Leach, 1994),

counterproductive for women or have failed to conserve the environment, or

sometimes both. Project ‘success’ has often been secured at women’s
expense, by appropriating women’s labour, unremunerated, in activities which prove
not to meet their needs or whose benefits they do not control. New environment chores have sometimes been added to women’s already long list of caring
roles. At the same time, the focus on women’s groups — as if all women had

homogeneous interests — has often marginalized the interests and concerns

of certain women not well represented in such organizations.
Fundamentally, it came to be argued, the assumption of women’s natural
link with the environment obscured any issues concerning property and
power. This meant that programmes ran the risk of giving women responsibility for
‘saving the environment’ without addressing whether they actually had the
resources and capacity to do so.
 AT: Fem IR
Specifically – feminist IR theory recreates the oppressive structures they seek to
dismantle by assigning and categorizing by gender.
Stern and Zalewski 09 MARIA STERN, lecturer and researcher at the
Department of Peace and Development research at Gotberg university, AND
MARYSIA ZALEWSKI, Director of Centre for Gender Studies at university of
Aberdeen. “Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of
militarization” Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 611–630, Cambridge
journals) AT
In this section we clarify what we mean by the
problem of sexgender and how it transpires in the
context of feminist narratives within IR – which we will exemplify below with a recounting of a
familiar feminist reading of militarisation. To re-iterate, the primary reason for investigating this is that we suspect part of
the reason for the aura of disillusionment around feminism – especially as a critical theoretical resource – is connected to
the sense that feminist stories repeat the very grammars that initially incited
them as narratives in resistance. To explain; one might argue that there has been a normative feminist
failure to adequately construct secure foundations for legitimate and authoritative knowledge claims upon which to garner
effective and permanent gender change, particularly in regard to women. But for poststructural scholars this failure is not
surprising as the emancipatory visions of feminism inevitably emerged as illusory
given the attachments to foundationalist and positivistic understandings of
subjects, power and agency. If, as poststructuralism has shown us, we cannot – through language – decide
the meaning of woman, or of femininity, or of feminism, or produce foundational information
about it or her;42 that subjects are ‘effects’ rather than ‘origins of institutional practices and discourses’;43 that power
‘produces subjects in effects’;44 or that authentic and authoritative agency are illusory – then the sure foundations
for the knowledge that feminist scholars are conventionally required to produce – even hope to
produce – are unattainable. Moreover, post-colonial feminisms have vividly shown how
representations of ‘woman’ or ‘women’ which masquerade as ‘universal’ are,
instead, universalising and inevitably produced through hierarchical and intersecting
power relations.45 In sum; the poststructural suggestion is that feminist representations of
women do not correspond to some underlying truth of what woman is or can be;
rather feminism produces the subject of woman which it then subsequently
comes to represent.46 The implications of this familiar conundrum are far-reaching as the demands of
feminism in the context of the knowledge/political project of the gender industry are exposed as implicated in the re-
production of the very power from which escape is sought. In short, feminism emerges as complicit in
violent reproductions of subjects and knowledges/ practices. How does this recognisable puzzle
(recognisable within feminist theory) play out in relation to the issues we are investigating in this article? As noted above,
the broad example we choose to focus on to explain our claims is militarisation; partly chosen as both authors have
participated in pedagogic, policy and published work in this generic area, and partly because this is an area in which the
demand for operationalisable gender knowledge is ever-increasing. Our suggestion is that the increasing requirement47
for knowledge for the gender industry about gender and militarisation re-animates the sexgender paradox which
persistently haunts attempts to translate what we know into useful knowledge for redressing (and preventing) conflict, or
simply into hopeful scenarios for our students.

Feminist criticism of international relations is too insular and

self-referential—its own methodology is suspect because it
excludes all perspectives not from the margins –err aff because
only ones with specific solvency
Jarvis, lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations, Faculty at University of Sydney, 2k
(D.S.L, International relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, pg. 160-162) pont
Critical research agendas of this type, however, are not found easily in International Relations. Critics of
feminist perspectives run the risk of denouncement as either a misogynist malcontent or
an androcentric keeper of the gate. At work in much of this discourse is an
unstated political correctness, where the historical marginalization of
women bestows intellectual autonomy, excluding those outside the identity
group from legitimate participation in its discourse. Only feminist women can do real,
legitimate, feminist theory since, in the mantra of identity politics, discourse must emanate from a positional (personal)
ontology. Those sensitive or sympathetic to the identity politics of particular groups are, of course, welcome to lend
support and encourage- ment, but only on terms delineated by the groups themselves. In this way, they enjoy an
uncontested sovereign hegemony over their own self, identification,
insuring the group discourse is self constituted and that its parameters,
operative methodology, and standards of argument, appraisal, and
evidentiary provisions are self defined. Thus, for example, when Sylvester calls for a
"homesteading" of International Relations she does so "by [a] repetitive feminist insistence that we be included on our
terms" (my emphasis). Rather than an invitation to engage in dialogue, this is an
ultimatum that a sovereign intellectual space be provided and insulated
from critics who question the merits of identity-based political discourse .
Instead, Sylvester calls upon International Relations to "share space, respect, and trust in a re-formed endeavor," but one
otherwise proscribed as committed to demonstrating not only "that the secure homes constructed by IR's many debaters
are chimerical," but, as a consequence, to ending International Relations and remaking it along lines grounded in feminist
postmodernism. 93 Such stipulative provisions might be likened to a form of negotiated sovereign territoriality where, as
part of the settlement for the historically aggrieved, border incursions are to be allowed but may not be met with
resistance or reciprocity. Demands for entry to the discipline are thus predicated on conditions that insure two sets of
rules, cocooning postmodern feminist spaces from systematic analyses while "respecting" this discourse as it hastens
about the project of deconstructing International Relations as a "male space." Sylvester's impassioned plea for tolerance
and "emphatic cooperation" is thus confined to like-minded individuals, those who do not challenge feminist
epistemologies but accept them as a necessary means of rein- venting the discipline as a discourse between postmodern
identities-the most important of which is gender. 94 Intolerance or misogyny thus become the ironic epithets attached to
those who question the wisdom of this reinvention or the merits of the return of identity in international theory." Most
strategic of all, however, demands for entry to the disci- pline and calls for intellectual spaces betray a self-imposed,
politically motivated marginality. After all, where are such calls issued from other than the discipline and the intellectual-
and well established-spaces of feminist International Relations? Much like the strategies employed by male dissidents,
then, feminist postmodernists too deflect as illegitimate any criticism that derives from skeptics whose vantage points are
labeled privileged. And privilege is variously interpreted historically, especially along lines of race, color, and sex where
the denotations white and male, to name but two, serve as inter- generational mediums to assess the injustices of past
histories. White males, for example, become generic signifiers for historical oppression, indicating an ontologically
privileged group by which the historical expe- riences of the "other" can then be reclaimed in the context of their related
oppression, exploitation, and exclusion. Legitimacy, in this context, can then be claimed in terms of one's group identity
and the extent to which the history of that particular group has been "silenced." In this same way, self identification or
"self-situation" establishes one's credentials, allowing admittance to the group and legitimating the "authoritative"
vantage point from which one speaks and writes. Thus, for example, Jan Jindy Pettman includes among the introductory
pages to her most recent book, Worlding Women, a section titled "A (personal) politics of location," in which her identity
as a woman, a feminist, and an academic, makes appar- ent her particular (marginal) identities and group loyalties. 96
Similarly, Christine Sylvester, in the introduction to her book, insists, "It is impor- tant to provide a context for one's work
in the often-denied politics of the personal." Accordingly, self declaration reveals to the reader that she is a feminist, went
to a Catholic girls school where she was schooled to "develop your brains and confess something called 'sins' to always
male forever priests," and that these provide some pieces to her dynamic objec- tivity. Like territorial markers, self
identification permits entry to intel- lectual spaces whose sovereign
authority is "policed" as much by marginal subjectivities as they allege of the
oppressors who "police" the discourse of realism, or who are said to walk the corridors of the
discipline insuring the replication of patriarchy, hierarchical agendas, and "malestream" theory. If Sylvester's version of
feminist postmodernism is projected as tolerant, per- spectivist, and encompassing of a multiplicity of approaches, in
reality it is as selective, exclusionary, and dismissive of alternative
perspectives as mainstream approaches are accused of being.

Feminist criticism of IR just ignores “facts”—the notion that IR

is gendered is based upon the fallacy of composition. Assertive
prose isn’t evidence.
Jarvis, lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations, Faculty at University of Sydney, 2k
(D.S.L, International relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, pg. 170-172) pont
Apart from the problematic nature of identity discourse as a theoretical avenue germane to International Relations, there
is much else in postmodern feminist writings that are also questionable. Adam Jones, for example, is
concerned about the exclusivity with which women are made the ontological
essence of gendered analyses, creating skewed commentaries that, rather
than frame the important question of gender in more inclusive ways, tends
to imprison it amid a radical matriarchal discourse . 122 Unfortunately, this
all too often leads to narratives and modes of analysis whose treatment of
the facts in international relations is, at best, suspect . One of the recurrent
themes in feminist analyses of international politics , for example, is that women
everywhere suffer more violence, intimidation, torture, mutilation, and abuse than do men
who otherwise perpetrate these crimes. When Ann Tickner attempts to draw attention to the
"particular vulnerabilities of women within states," for instance, "the phrase 'particular vulnerabilities' suggests not just an
analytically separable category, but a disproportionate degree of vulnerability. "123 Yet, if we look at the facts
the contrary is true: men direct the overwhelming majority of their violence
toward other men. Unifed States Department of Justice (USD]) statistics for 1995 and 1996, for example, show
that, "except for rape/sexual assault, every violent crime victimization rate for males was higher than for females. "124
Moreover, if the incidence of male-to male prison rape is included in rape/sexual assault figures, then USDJ rape/sexual
assault statistics for 1990 show that 130,000 women were the victims of rape, while male-to-male prison rape claimed
290,000 victims"" In terms of homicide victimizations, USDJ figures show that of the 21,937 homicides in 1994, females
accounted for 20.4% or 4,489 of these, while males constituted 17,448 or 79.5% of homicide victims. 126 Inner city black
male youths, in particular, have fatality rates approaching those for front-line soldiers during the Vietnam War and are
significantly higher than those experienced by black and white female youths combined. As the statistician for the USDJ
notes of national crime figures for 1996, in terms of victimization, "the young, blacks, and males were most vulnerable to
violent crime." Similarly, British Home Office fig- ures for 1992, show that young men "are more than twice as likely than
are women to be killed by strangers" through acts of random street violence. It is young men, notes Lorraine Radford,
"who are most at risk from 'stranger-danger,''' not women. 127 Yet, according to V. Spike Peterson, "male
violence constitutes a 'global war against women ,''' perpetrated with state complicity because
of patriarchal relations that invariably see women suffer far more than men.J28 In Peterson's estimation, women suffer a
heavier burden than do men, suffer more emotional stress and bear the burden of patriarchal state expenditures that
benefit men at the expense of women. "Systematic violence," things like "sexual harassment, battery, rape, and torture,"
Peterson and Runyan argue, "is the persistent price that women pay for the maintenance of large militaries. "129 The
implication, of course, is that men pay no price and enjoy freedom from
violence when, in fact, we know that hazing rituals, physical and verbal abuse, torture, and mental torment are daily
occurrences throughout the armies of the world and these staffed almost exclusively by men. Human rights too suggest
Peterson and Runyan, are compromised by militarization. "Amnesty International vividly documents examples of mili-
tary and police forces around the world terrorizing, imprisoning, and even torturing women who seek information about
family members who have 'disappeared' at the hands of government-sponsored death squads." What Peterson and
Runyan forget to add, however, is that by Amnesty Interna- tional's own estimation, the overwhelming number of political
prisoners in the world who suffer cruel and inhumane treatment happen to be men; that those who "disappeared" under
Argentina's military junta and Nicaragua's and EI Salvador's U.S.-sponsored death squads in the 1980s were
disproportionately male; and that torture of political prisoners by sheer weight of numbers therefore concerns,
disproportionately, the torture of male political prisoners.130 Even the traditional concerns of International Relations,
war and conflict studies, are not spared from the biased faming of the gender variable. Cynthia Enloe, for instance, tells of
the plight of women during the Bosnian war and how Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian men used rape as an instrument of
terror. By implication, however, we are led to assume that men in the Bosnian conflict endured no terror, brutality, or
deprivations, but were simply the perpetrators of atrocities.131 Similarly, in discussing the Gulf War, Enloe is highly
exclusive in dealing with gender, adequately narrating the plight of female migrant workers in Kuwait who suffered
atrocities like rape and tor- ture at the hands of Iraqi troops, but neglecting the "wider Iraqi process of detention, torture,
execution, and forced removal. . . of tens of thousands of Kuwaitis" that, "judging from the human-rights and media
reports, [were] virtually all male."!32 ' Narratives of this type reveal how exclusive has been the framing of the "gender
variable" in International Relations, where men are characterized as a hegemonic gender-class whose interests, concerns,
actions, and writings are opposed to the interests and well- being of women. 133 As Sylvester writes, "states and their
regimes connect with people called women only to ensure. . . that the benefits of regime participation will flow from
'women' to 'men' and not ever the other way round."134. With such a mindset, facts become
superfluous to the argument(s), leading to a fallacy of composition where
assertive prose is itself offered as evidence of the disproportionate level of
burden or victimization that women suffer . Thus, for example, Jones is plainly bemused at Ann
Tickner's assertion that women have been forced to enter "the military primarily in the lower ranks." But, asks Jones,
"how el.!e does one enter the military, except at the lower levels?" 135 Like- wise, Peterson and Runyan assert that "the
plight of both Third World and Western women has been exacerbated by the debt crisis."136 Third World and Western
men, apparently, were untouched by this same debt crisis. And when commenting on the migration south of the border of
"the jobs of many working-class women in the United States," Peterson and Runyan announce with horror how, between
"1979 and 1983, 35% of the workers who lost jobs because of plant closings in the United States were women." What they
fail to point out, of course, is that this means that fully 65 per- cent of those who lost their jobs because of these same plant
closings were men." Moreover, if we look at the available evidence for issues like
murder, suicide, homelessness, life expectancy, and mortality rates, we find
that rather than a hcgemonic gender-class, statistically men kill each other
at a far greater rate thelll they do women , commit suicide at a rate almost three times that of
women, constitute about 80 percent of the homeless in the United States, throughout virtually every
community in the world live shorter lives than do women, and in the
developed world suffer a mortality rate to disease twice that for women . 138
Heidegger
 Heidegger = no action
The alt fails and results in passivity
Wolin, 90 - Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center- 1990
(Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being, P. 147)

As we suggested earlier, the essential thinking of the

later Heidegger promotes an "eclipse of
practical reason." For his post-Kehre reformulation of the relation between
Being and Dasein rebels so fervently against the voluntarist dimension of
his own earlier thinking that the very concept of "meaningful human action"
is seemingly rendered null and void. If the early Heidegger attempted to
rally Dasein to "decisiveness " (Entschlossenheit), the thought of the later Heidegger
appears at times to be a summary justification of human passivity and
inaction (Gelassenheit)-so prejudicially is the balance between Sein and Mensch struck in favor of the former term.
Thus, in the later Heidegger, the campaign against practical reason develops along a two-fold front: not only is the concept
of Being grossly inflated, but the powers of human reason and will are
correspondingly devalued. In the later writings, Being assumes the character of an
omnipotent primal force, a "first unmoved mover," whose "presencing"
proves to be the determinative, ultimate instance for events in the lowly
world of human affairs. In its other-worldly supremacy, this force both
withdraws from the tribunal of human reason and defies the meager
capacities of human description: "A Being that not only surpasses all beings-
and thus all men-but which like an unknown God rests and 'essences' in its
own truth, in that it is sometimes present and sometimes absent, can never
be explained like a being in existence; instead, it can only be 'evoked
 Tech Good
Technological thought is good rejection removes innovation that
creates a litany of extinction scenarios
Heaberlin, 4 – nuclear engineer, led the Nuclear Safety and Technology Applications Product Line at the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory (Scott, A Case for Nuclear-Generated Electricity, p. 31-40)
Well, then let's not do that, huh? Well, no, not hardly, because without that use of fertilizers
we
couldn't produce the food to feed the population. We just couldn't do it. Here
are some comparisons." If you used no fertilizers or pesticides you could get 500 kilograms of grain from a hectare in a dry
climate and as much as 1000 kilograms in a humid climate. If you got organic and used animal manure as fertilizer,
assuming you could find enough, you might get as much as 2000 kilograms per hectare. For a sense of scale, the average
in the United States, where recall we only get half the food value to hectare as the intensively farmed Chinese crop land, we
get about 4500 kilograms per hectare on the average. In serious cornfields with fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides, the
value is 7000 kilograms per hectare. Modern mechanized, chemically supported agriculture produces 7 to 14 times the
food that you would get without those advantages. Even the best organic farming would produce only 30 to 45% of the
food value you would get from the same sized chemically fertilized farm, and that is assuming you could get the manure
you needed to make it work. In very stark terms, without the chemically enhanced farming we would have probably
something like one-fifth the food supply we have now. That means four-fifths the population would not be fed, at least as
we are organized now. So, no, just giving up on fertilizers is not in the deal. However, we could get the hydrogen and
energy from sources other than natural gas. Nuclear energy could be used to provide electricity to extract hydrogen from
water and produce the process heat required to combine the hydrogen and nitrogen from the air. That is just a thought to
stick in your mind. While we are looking at energy use in agriculture, here are a few more numbers for you.10 If you look
at the energy input into agriculture and the energy you get out, you see some interesting facts. By combining the energy
used to make fertilizers and pesticides, power irrigation, and run the farm machinery in the United States, we use about
0.7 kcal of fossil fuel energy for each 1 kcal of food we make. This doesn't include the energy needed to process and
transport the food. In Europe where they farm more intensely, the amount of energy out is just about the same as energy
in. In Germany and Italy the numbers are 1.4 and 1.7 kcal energy input to each 1 kcal output respectively. The point is you
need energy to feed people, well at least a lot of people. Which gets us back to Cohen and his question. One of the studies
he examined looked at a "self-sustaining solar energy system." For the United States, this would replace all fossil energy
and provide one-fifth to one-half the current energy use. The conclusion of the study was that this would either produce" a
significant reduction in our standard of living ... even if all the energy conservation measures known today were adopted"
or if set at the current standard of living, "then the ideal U.S. population should be targeted at 40-100 million people." The
authors of that study then cheerfully go on to point out that we do have enough fossil fuel to last a least a century, as long
as we can work out the pesky environmental problems. So, you can go to a "self-sustaining" energy economy as long as you
are willing to shoot between 2 out of 3 and 6 out of 7 of your neighbors. And this is a real question. The massive use of
fossil fuel driven agriculture to provide the fertilizers and pesticides, and power the farm equipment, is a) vitally important
to feed everyone, and b) something we just can't keep up in a business-as-usual fashion. Sustainable means you can keep
doing it. Fossil energy supplies are finite; you will run out some time. Massive use of fossil energy and the greenhouse
gases they produce also may very well tip the planet into one of those extinction events in which a lot of very bad things
happen to a lot of the life on the earth. O.K. to Cohen's big question, how many people can the earth support? What it
comes down to is that the "Well, it depends" answer depends on • what quality of life you will accept, • what level of
technology you will use, and • what level of social integration you will accept. We have seen some of the numbers
regarding quality of life. Clearly if you are willing to accept the Bangladesh diet, you can feed 1.8 times more people than if
you chose the United States diet. If you choose the back-to-nature, live like our hearty forefathers, level of technology, you
can feed perhaps one-fifth as many people as you can with modern chemical fertilized agriculture. The rest have to go. And
here is the tough one. You can do a lot better, get a lot more people on the planet, if you just force a few things. Like, no
more land wasted in growing grapes for wine or grains for whiskey and beer. No cropland used for tobacco. No more grain
wasted on animals for meat, just grain for people. No more rich diets for the rich countries, share equally for everyone. No
more trade barriers; too bad for the farmers in Japan and France, those countries would just have to accept their
dependence on other countries for their food. It is easy to see that at least some of those might actually be a pretty good
thing; however, the kicker is how do you get them to happen? After all, Mussolinill did make the trains run on time. How
could you force these things without a totalitarian state? Are you willing to give up your ability to choose for yourself for
the common good? It is not pretty, is it? Cohen looked at all the various population
estimates and concluded that most fell into the range of 4 to 16 billion . Taking
the highest value when researchers offered a range, Cohen calculated a high median of 12 billion and taking the lower part
of the range a low median of 7.7 billion. The good news in this is 12 billion is twice as many people as we have now. The
bad news is that the projections for world population for 2050 are between 7.8 and 12.5 billion. That means we have
got no more than 50 years before we exceed the nominal carrying capacity of
the earth. Cohen also offers a qualifying observation by stating the "First Law of Information," which asserts that
97.6% of all statistics are made up. This helps us appreciate that application of these numbers to real life is subject to a lot
of assumptions and insufficiencies in our understanding of the processes and data. However, we can draw some insights
from all of this. What it comes down to is that if you choose the fully sustainable,
non-fossil fuel long-term options with only limited social integration, the
various estimates Cohen looked at give you a number like 1 billion or less
people that the earth can support. That means 5 out of 6 of us have got to go,
plus no new babies without an offsetting death. On the other hand, if you let
technology continue to do its thing and perhaps get even better, the picture
need not be so bleak. We haven't made all our farmland as productive as it
can be. Remember, the Chinese get twice the food value per hectare as we do in the United States. There is also
a lot of land that would become arable if we could get water to it. And, of
course, in case you need to go back and check the title of this book, there are alternatives to fossil
fuels to provide the energy to power that technology. So given a positive and perhaps
optimistic view of technology, we can look to some of the high technology assumption based studies from Cohen's review.
From the semi-credible set of these, we can find estimates from 19 to 157 billion as the number of people the earth could
support with a rough average coming in about 60 billion. This is a good time to be reminded of the First Law of
Information. The middle to lower end of this range, however, might be done without wholesale social reprogramming.
Hopefully we would see the improvement in the quality of life in the developing countries as they industrialize and
increase their use of energy. Hopefully, also this would lead to a matching of the reduction in fertility rates that has been
observed in the developed countries, which in turn would lead to an eventual balancing of the human population. The
point to all this is the near-term future of the human race depends on technology.
If we turn away from technology, a very large fraction of the current and
future human race will starve. If we just keep on as we are, with our current level of technology and
dependence on fossil fuel resources, in the near term it will be a race between fertility decrease and our ability to feed
ourselves, with, frankly, disaster the slight odds-on bet. In a slightly longer term, dependence on fossil fuels has got to lead
to either social chaos or environmental disaster. There are no other end points to that road. It doesn't go anywhere else.
However, if we accept that it is technology that makes us human, that
technology uniquely identifies us as the only animal that can choose its
future, we can choose to live, choose to make it a better world for everyone
and all life. This means more and better technology. It means more efficient technology that is kinder to the planet
but also allows humans to support large numbers in a high quality of life. That road is not easy and has a number of ways
to screw up. However, it is a road that can lead to a happier place, a better place. Two Concluding Thoughts on the Case for
Technology Two more points and I will end my defense of technology. First, I want to bring you back from all the
historical tour and all the numbers about population to something more directly personal. Let me ask you two questions.
What do you do for a living? What did you have for breakfast? Don't see any connection between these questions or of
their connection to·the subject of technology? Don't worry, the point will come out shortly. I am just trying to bring the
idea of technology back from this grand vision to its impact on your daily life. Just as a wild guess, your answer to the first
question was something that, say 500 years ago, didn't even exist. If we look 20,000 years ago, the only job was" get food."
Even if you have a really directly socially valuable job like a medical doctor, 20,000 years ago you would have been
extraneous. That is, the tribe couldn't afford you. What, no way! A doctor could save lives, surely a tribe would value such
a skill. Well, sure, but the tribe could not afford taking one of their members out of the productive /I getting the food" job
for 20 years while that individual learned all those doctor skills. If you examine the "what you do for a living" just a bit I
think you will see a grand interconnectedness of all things. I personally find it pretty remarkable that we have a society
that values nuclear engineers enough that I can make a living at it. Think about it. Somehow what I have done has been of
enough value that, through various taxpayer and utility ratepayers, society has given me enough money for food and
shelter. The tribe 20,000 years ago wouldn't have put up with me for a day. You see, that is why we as humans are
successful, wildly successful in fact. We work together. "Yeah, sure we do," you reply, " read a newspaper lately?" Well,
O.K., we fuss and fight a good deal and some of us do some pretty stupid and pretty mean things. But the degree of
cooperation is amazing if you just step back a bit. O.K., what did you have for breakfast: orange juice, coffee, toast, maybe
some cereal and milk? Where do these things come from? Orange juice came from Florida or California. Coffee came from
South America. Bread for the toast came perhaps from Kansas; cereal, from the Mid-West somewhere. The jam on the
toast may have come from Oregon, or maybe Chile. Milk is probably the only thing that came from within a hundred miles
of your breakfast table. Think about it. There were hundreds of people involved in your breakfast. Farmers, food-
processing workers, packaging manufacturers, transportation people, energy producers, wholesale and retail people.
Perhaps each one only spent a second on their personal contribution to your personal breakfast, but they touch thousands
of other people's breakfasts as well. In turn, you buying the various components of your breakfast supported, in your part,
all those people. They in turn, in some way or another, bought whatever you provide to society that allowed you to buy
breakfast. Pretty amazing, don't you think? Now when you look at all that, think about what ties all the
planetwide interconnection, Yep, you guessed it: technology. Without
technology, you get what is available within your personal reach, and what
you produce is available only to those who are near enough that you can
personally carry it to them on your own two feet. Technology makes our
world work. It gives you personally a productive and socially valuable way to
make both a living and to provide your contribution to the rest of us . I want you
to stop a minute and really think about that. What would your life be like without
technology? Could you do what you currently do? Would anyone be able to
use what you do? Would anyone pay you for that? "But I am a school teacher," you say, "of
course, they would pay me!" Are you sure? Why do you need schools if there is no technology? All I need is to teach the kid
how to farm and how to hunt. Sons and daughters can learn that by working in the fields along with their parents. See
what I mean? Now, I have hopefully reset your brain. Sure, you are still going to be hit with daily "technology is bad"
messages. Hopefully, you are a bit more shielded against that din, and you have
been given some perspective to balance that message and are prepared to
see the true critical value of technology to human existence. The point is that
technology is what makes us human. Without it, we are just slightly smarter
monkeys. You may feel that 6 billion of us are too many, and that may very
well be. I personally don't know how to make that value decision. Which
particular person does one select as being one of the excess ones? However,
the fact is that there are 6 billion of us, and it looks like we are headed for 10
to 12 billion in the next 50 years, Without not only the technology we have,
but significantly better and more environmentally friendly technology, the
world is going to get ugly as we approach these numbers, On the other hand,
with the right technologies we can not only support those numbers, we can
do it while we close the gap between the haves and have-nots. We can make
it a better place for everyone. It takes technology and the energy to drive it.
Choosing technology is what we have to do to secure the evolutionary
selection of us as a successful species, Remember, some pages back in
discussing the unlikely evolutionary path to us, I said we are not the chosen,
unless. Unless we choose us. This is what I meant. We are totally unique in all of evolutionary history.
We humans have the unique ability and opportunity to choose either our
evolutionary success or failure. A choice of technology gives us a chance. A
choice rejecting technology dooms us as a species and gives the cockroaches
the chance in our place. Nature doesn't care what survives , algae seas, dinosaurs,
humans, cockroaches, or whatever is successful. If we care, we have to choose correctly. As an
aside, let me address a point of philosophy here. If any of this offends your personal theology, I offer this for your
consideration. Genesis tells us God gave all the Earth to humanity and charged us with the stewardship thereof. So it is
ours to use as well as we can. That insightful social philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli put it this way in 1501: "What remains
to be done must be done by you; since in order not to deprive us of our free will and such share of glory as belongs to us,
God will not do everything Himself." O.K., you are saying, "I give." You have beaten the socks off me. Technology is good;
technology is the identifying human trait and our only hope. But what is this stuff about choosing technology or not?
Technology just happens doesn't it? I mean, technology always advances, it always has, so why the big deal? Well,
that is my last point on technology. It doesn't always just happen, and people
have chosen to turn away from technology. In what might have seemed at the time to be a
practical social decision, huge future implications were imposed on many generations to come. It has happened. Let me
take you on one more trip through history. I think you will find it enlightening. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
explores the question of why the European societies came to be dominate over all the other human cultures on earth. It is
a fascinating story and provides a lot of insight into how modern societies evolved. In moving through history, he comes
across a very odd discontinuity. He observes that if you came to earth from space in the year 1400 A.D., looked around,
and went home to write your research paper on the probable future of the earth, you would clearly conclude the Chinese
would run the entire planet shortly. Furthermore, you could conclude they would do it pretty darn well. If those same
extraterrestrial researchers were to pop into their time machine and come back to earth in any year from say 1800 to now,
they would be totally amazed to see China as a large, but relatively backward, country, struggling to catch up with their
European and American peers. To understand the significance of this, you have to go on that research trip with the
extraterrestrials and look at China before 1400. In The Lever af Riches, Joel Mokyr dedicates one chapter looking at the
comparisons of technology development in China to that in Europe. He lists the following as technology advantages China
had in the centuries before 1400: • Extensive water control projects, alternately draining and irrigating land, significantly
boosting agricultural production • Sophisticated iron plow introduced sixth century B.C. • Seed drills and other farm tools,
introduced around 1000 A.D. • Chemical and organic fertilizers and pesticides used • Blast furnaces and casting of iron as
early as 200 B.C., not known in Europe until fourteenth century • Advanced use of power sources in textile production, not
seen in Europe until the Industrial Revolution • Invention of compass around 960 A.D. • Major advances in maritime
technology (more in a bit on this) • Invention of paper around 100 A.D. (application as toilet paper by 590 A.D.). In the
year 1400 AD., China was a world power, perhaps the only true world power. Their technology in agriculture, textiles,
metallurgy, and maritime transportation were far in advance of any other country. They had a strong central government
and a very healthy economy. Their naval strength provides a real insight into the degree of this dominance. Dr. Diamond
sends us to an extremely readable book When China Ruled the Seas-The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405-1433
by Dr. Louise Levathes. Dr. Levathes takes us on an inside tour of the Chinese empire during these years. She focuses on
the great treasure fleets that China set forth in these early years of the fifteenth century. In her book she has a wonderful
graphic that overlays a Chinese vessel of the treasure fleet (-1410) with Columbus's St. Maria (1492). At 85 feet in length
and three masts, the St. Maria is dwarfed by the nine-masted, 400-foot-long Chinese vessel. The Chinese sailed fleets of
these magnificent vessels throughout oceans of South Asia, to India, and even as far as the eastern coast of Africa. With
this naval domination China claimed tribute from Japan, Korea, the nations of the Malay Archipelago, and various states
within what is now India. Through both trade and the occasional application of military force, China provided an
enlightened and progressive direction for all the nations within this sphere of influence. If two princes in India were
fighting over a throne, it was the recognition, or lack thereof, from the Chinese emperor that decided who would rule.
Setting a policy of religious inclusion and tolerance, the Chinese engaged the Arabian traders and calmed religious
disputes within Asia. With applications of power sources in textiles and advanced
metallurgy, the Chinese were in the same position in 1400 as the British
were in 1750, ready to launch into the Industrial Revolution. They traded with nations thousands of miles from
home with vast, sophisticated shipping fleets. They were poised to extend this trade all the way to Europe and perhaps find
the New World by going east instead of the European's going west in search of the rich Chinese markets. But if we pop
in 1800, we find a technologically
into that extraterrestrial time machine and drop into China
backward nation, humbled by a relatively small force of Europeans with
"modern" military technology who wantonly imposed their will on the Chinese. The Chinese have been struggling to catch
up with European and American technology ever since and so far not quite being able to do that. The domination of China
by the Japanese during World War II shows how complete the turnaround was. In 1400 Japan was but one of many vassal
states huddled about the feet of the Imperial Chinese throne. In 1940 the Japanese military crushed the Chinese
government while marching on to control much of South Asia. What could have happened to turn
this clear champion of technology, trade, enlightened leadership with all its advantages over both its
neighbors and yet-distant foreign competitors into such a weak, backward giant? Mokyr goes through
a pretty complete list of potential causes. He looks at diet, climate, and inherent philosophical mindset rejecting each as a
credible actor mainly on the bases that all of these conditions were present during the period of technological and
economic growth as well as the subsequent stagnation. Therefore, these were not determining factors in the turnabout. In
the end he concludes, as does Diamond and Levathes, that it was just politics. Yep, that is right. It was good, old human
politics. Dr. Levathes gives us a delightful insider's view of the personalities and politics of Imperial progressions during
this critical time period. To make a short story of it, the party that had been in control during the
supported the great treasure fleets, commerce with foreign nations, use and
expansionist period
expansion of technology, and a rather harsh control of the rival party. The rival party was
based on Confucian philosophy that preached a rigid, inward-looking,
controlled existence. When the Confucian party gained control of the
throne, they had their opportunity to push back on the prior ruling party that
had oppressed them so harshly for so long. And they did. They wanted nothing to do with foreigners; we have all we need
at home, here in China, they said. The fleet was disbanded and the making of ocean-going vessels forbidden.
Technology was no longer "encouraged." Again, their position was what we have is good enough,
stop with all this new nonsense. Over a period of just a few years, the course of the entire nation was shifted from what
would have appeared to be a bright future as the leading power in the world to a large, but relatively insignificant,
backwater, rich in history and culture, but all backward looking to a former glory. That was it. A shift in the political
agenda. At the time, to the leaders in control, one that made sense. Focus at home, use what you have now, create order,
discipline, control. In 50 years Japanese pirates controlled the coast of China, and the former ruler of the seas from Asia to
Africa could not get out of their harbors safely. So, you see if the "technology is bad" message gets
incorporated into too many of our daily decisions , we can turn from our bright future
into something else. The difference is that this time the stakes are much higher than they were
in fifteenth century China. If we, in the developed nations, make the wrong choices, we doom all
of humanity by our folly. It is not just that we miss the potential bright future, we miss the
chance to avoid the combined human population growth and resources
exhaustion disaster coming at us like a runaway train. Technology is the
only way to prevent that train wreck. We can hear the siren's call of anti-
technology, come back to nature and let the train run us down in a bloody
mess, or we can try our best to use technology wisely and win free to make a
better life for everyone.
 2AC Inevitable
Tech thought is inevitable
Kateb, professor of politics – Princeton, ‘97
(George, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_/ai_19952031)
But the question arises as to where a genuine principle of limitation on technological endeavor would come from. It is
scarcely conceivable that Western humanity--and by now most of humanity, because of their pleasures and
interests and their own passions and desires and motives-- would halt the technological project. Even if,
by some change of heart, Western humanity could adopt an altered relation to reality and
human beings, how could it be enforced and allowed to yield its effects? The
technological project can be stopped only by some global catastrophe that it had helped to
cause or was powerless to avoid. Heidegger's teasing invocation of the idea that a saving
remedy grows with the worst danger is useless. In any case, no one would want the
technological project halted, if the only way was a global catastrophe. Perhaps even the survivors
would not want to block its reemergence. As for our generation and the indefinite future, many of us are
prepared to say that there are many things we wish that modern science did not know or is likely to find out and many
things we wish that modern technology did not know how to do. When referring in 1955 to the new sciences of life,
Heidegger says We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and
nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little. For precisely if the hydrogen
bombs do not explode and human life on earth is preserved, an uncanny change in the world moves upon us (1966, p.
52). The implication is that it is less bad for the human status or stature and for the human relation to reality that there be
To such
nuclear destruction than that (what we today call) genetic engineering should go from success to success.
lengths can a mind push itself when it marvels first at the passions, drives, and
motives that are implicated in modern technology, and then marvels at the feats of
technological prowess. The sense of wonder is entangled with a feeling of horror. We are past
even the sublime, as conceptualized under the influence of Milton's imagination of Satan and Hell. It is plain
that so much of the spirit of the West is invested in modern technology. We have
referred to anger, alienation, resentment . But that cannot be the whole story. Other
considerations we can mention include the following: a taste for virtuosity, skill for its own sake, an
enlarged fascination with technique in itself, and, along with these, an aesthetic craving to
make matter or nature beautiful or more beautiful; and then, too, sheer exhilaration, a questing,
adventurous spirit that is reckless, heedless of danger, finding in obstacles opportunities for self-overcoming, for daring,
for the very sort of daring that Heidegger praises so eloquently when in 1935 he discusses the Greek world in An
Introduction to Metaphysics (1961, esp. pp. 123-39). All
these considerations move away from anger,
anxiety, resentment, and so on. The truth of the matter, I think, is that the project of modern technology,
just like that of modern science, must attract a turbulence of response . The very passions and drives
and motives that look almost villainous or hypermasculine simultaneously look like marks of
the highest human aspiration, or, at the least, are not to be cut loose from the highest human aspiration.
 --Engagement good
Engagement with technocracy is more effective than passive
rejection
Jiménez-Aleixandre 2, professor of education – University of Santiago de Compostela, and Pereiro-Muñoz
High School Castelao, Vigo (Spain) (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.
 2AC Medea TL
The earth is becoming uninhabitable—only management can
avoid extinction of all life
Ward, 9 (Peter, Professor of biology and Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and an
astrobiologist with NASA, The Medea Hypothesis, 52-54)
Calcium is an important ingredient in this process, and it is found in two main sources on a planet's surface: igneous rocks
and, most importantly, the sedimentary rocks called limestone. Calcium reacts with carbon dioxide
to form limestone. Calcium thus draws CO2 out of the atmosphere . When CO2
begins to increase in the atmosphere, more limestone formation will occur. This can only happen,
however, if there is a steady source of new calcium available . The calcium con-
tent is steadily made available by plate tectonics, for the formation of new mountains brings new
sources of calcium back into the system in its magmas and by exhuming ancient limestone, eroding it, and thus releasing
its calcium to react with more CO2. At convergent plate margins, where the huge slabs of the Earth's surface dive back
down into the planet, some of the sediments resting on the descending part are carried down into the Earth. High
temperature and pressure convert some of these rocks into metamorphic rocks. One of the reactions is the carbonate
metamorphic reaction, where limestone combining with silica converts to a calcium silicate—and carbon dioxide. The
CO2 can then be liberated back into the atmosphere in volcanic eruptions.
The planetary thermostat requires a balance between the amount of CO2 being
pumped into the atmosphere through volcanic action and the amount being
taken out through the formation of limestone. The entire system is driven by heat emanating
from the Earth's interior, which causes plate tectonics. But as we have seen there is more to this cycle than simply heating
from the interior. Weathering on the surface of the Earth is crucial as well, and the rate
of weathering is highly sensitive to temperature, for reaction rates involved in
weathering tend to increase as temperature increases. This will cause silicate rocks to break down faster and thus
create more calcium, the building block of limestone. With more calcium available, more
limestone can form. But the rate of limestone formation affects the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and when
more lime- stone forms there is less and less CO2 in the atmosphere, causing the climate to cool. Here is a key aspect of
the overall Earth system that helps refute either Gaia or Medea. If the Medea hypothesis is correct,
we should be able to observe or measure a reduction of habitability
potential (as measured by the carrying capacity, or total amount of life that can live on our planet at any give time)
through time, or as measured by an observable shortening of the Earth's ability to be habitable for life in the future. For
our own Earth, habitability will ultimately end for two reasons. The first of these is
not Medean; it is a one-way effect. The ever-increasing energy output of our Sun, a
phenomenon of all stars on what is called the main sequence, will ultimately
cause the loss of the
Earth's oceans (sometime in the next 2 to 3 billion years, according to new calculations). When the
oceans are lost to space, planetary temperatures will rise to uninhabitable
levels. But long before that, life will have died out on the Earth's surface through a mechanism that is
Medean: because of life, the Earth will lose one resource with out which the
main trophic level of life itself—photosynthetic organisms, from microbes to
higher plants—can no longer survive. This dwindling resource, ironically, (in this time when human
society worries about too much of it), is atmospheric carbon dioxide. The Medean reduction of carbon
dioxide will then cause a further reduction of planetary habitability because the
CO2 drop will trigger a drop in atmospheric oxygen to a level too low to support
animal life. This is an example of a "Medean" property: it is because of life that the amount of CO2 in the Earth's
atmosphere has been steadily dropping over the last 200 million years. It is life that makes most
calcium carbonate deposits, such as coral skeletons, and thus life that ultimately
caused the drop in CO2, since it takes CO2 out of the atmosphere to build this kind of skeleton. Life will
continue to do this until a lethal lower limit is attained. This finding is important: in chapter 8 I will show a graph that
supports this statement. As pointed out by David Schwartzman, while limestone can be formed with or without life, life is
far more efficient at producing calcium carbonate structures—a process that draws CO2 out of the atmosphere—than
nonlife. There is only one way out of the lethal box imposed by Darwinian life:
the rise of intelligence capable of devising planetary-scale engineering.
Technical, or tool-producing, intelligence is the unique solution to the planetary
dilemma caused by Medean properties of life. New astrobiological work indicates that Venus, Mars, Europa, and
Titan are potentially habitable worlds at the present time, at least for microbes, just as the Earth was early in its history.
Did they undergo a reduction in habitability because of prior Medean forces? And certainly the cosmos is filled with Earth-
like planets, based on both new modeling of still-forming solar systems and observations by the Butler and Marcy planet-
finding missions. While the "planet finders" cannot yet directly observe any planet that is Earth-sized (a planet of this size
is still too small for us to see with our current technologies), the orbits exhibited by some of the Jupiter- and Saturn-sized
planets that can be observed suggest that smaller, Earth-like planets might exist there. Would Medean forces occur in
alien life, as well as Earth life? If such life were Darwinian, the answer would be "certainly."
 ---Medea ext.
Prefer our evidence – most recent studies prove that
abandoning technology and civilization cause extinction, only
massive management campaign can solve
Ward 9 (Peter, Professor of biology and Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and an
astrobiologist with NASA, The Medea Hypothesis, XX – XXII)
To argue my case, I will use new discoveries from geology, biology, and most of the
fossil record. To me, these new understandings are like a memory exhumed from some deep sleep,
in reality from the deep past, that shows the absolute need to construct a new paradigm
about both past and future, one that will require a rather painful shift from the
kinds of conservation and environmentalism that are practiced now. The
philosophical underpinnings of modern environmentalism are that the planet must be returned to environmental condi-
tions that existed prior to the evolution of humankind's technological civilization, with the resulting planetwide changes to
almost every facet of the environment. Instead, we humans must resort to wholesale
planetary engineering if we are to overcome the tendencies of life around
us—and those of our own species— to make the Earth a less salubrious (and
eventually lethal) abode for life. The sum of this record, which is meant to be the theme of this work, is the
interpretation that the evolution of life triggered a series of disasters that are inimical to life and will continue to do so into
the future. If true, one implication is that the environmental challenges confronting our species and its civilizations are far
more than simple overpopulation and all that entails. The fact is that we live on a rapidly aging
planet, and we will soon have but two choices if our spe cies is to survive:
engineer on a planetary scale or get off. Instead of restoring our planet to how it
was before humans, we have to do exactly what the Gaia hypothesis suggests that life has done all
along: optimize conditions for further life . We have to confront the nature of
life itself and deal especially with groups of life that we animals have battled
throughout our history: armies of microbes that cause their own kind of
pollution, inimical to our kind of life. I will try to show in the pages to come that the cause of this in-
herent tendency of life on Earth is due to one of Earth life's most deeply inherent characteristics, so deeply rooted that it
would not be life without this aspect. It is that all Earth life is a slave to a process called evolution, Darwinian evolution in
fact, for Charles Darwin got the process spectacularly correct even without understanding how any characteristic could be
heritable. Along with replication and metabolism, evolution is one of the three tripods that defines life on Earth; take any
of these legs away and it falls into the nonlife category. Life can no more help evolving than we can stop breathing and stay
alive. You evolve or your species goes extinct, for the Earth keeps changing, and the formation of our own form of life was
made possible because of this characteristic. When life first appeared, some 3.7 billion years ago at the latest, our planet
was a far more energetic and dangerous place to live on or in, and only through the ability to change generation by
generation could the earliest forms of life survive. It was not only survival of the fittest, but also survival of the best and
fastest evolvers. Natural selection not only worked on better ways to get energy and
withstand environmental difficulties but evolved better ways to evolve . Before
all else, life worked on perfecting energy acquisition, replicating quickly and with fidelity, and evolving ever more quickly.
But the price to pay is that each and every species innately "tries" to become the
dominant species on the planet, with no regard to other species. Be it
bacteria or bees, all try to produce as many individuals as possible and in so doing can and do poison the
environment in various ways for all other species, including the species in question. How much longer will the Earth
sustain life in the face of this relentless overpopulation by a variety of species, which tends to use up resources—unless we
humans step in and save things, of course? Alone among all the creatures large and small,
our species can extend the length of the biosphere on Earth, which, like all of us, has a
finite lifespan. Yet that lifespan, currently dictated by life itself, can be lengthened. Vastly lengthened.
 AT: AI development
Any risk of A life risks extinction
Hawking 14 [Stephen Hawking, director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical
Physics at Cambridge. “Stephen Hawking: 'Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence - but are we
taking AI seriously enough?'” The Independent. 5.03.14 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-
transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence--but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html
SW]

With the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence playing in cinemas, with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman showcasing
clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly
intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and
potentially our worst mistake in history. Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly.
Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the
digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms
race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly
mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades
will bring. The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we
cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the
eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest
event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid
the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate
targets; the UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as
emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to
bring both great wealth and great dislocation. Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be
achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in
ways that perform even more advanced computations than the
arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is
possible, although it might play out differently from in the movie: as Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with
superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a
"singularity" and Johnny Depp's movie character calls "transcendence". One can imagine such
technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human
researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we
cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term
impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all. So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the
experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien
civilisation sent us a message saying, "We'll arrive in a few decades," would
we just reply, "OK, call us when you get here – we'll leave the lights on"?
Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI. Although we are
facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues
outside non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity
Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute. All of us should ask ourselves what
we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.
 AT: Authenticity
There is no capital B being—being on exists as a manifestation of
phenomena—authentic relationships to being are impossible
(LONG_)
Sartre 43 [Jean Paul, (philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist), “Being and Nothingness”, Translated by Hazel
Barnes, Washington Square Press; Reprint edition, preface (preface) ] RMT
THE appearanceis not supported by any existent different from itself ; it has its
own being. The first being which we meet in our ontological inquiry is the
being of the appearance . Is it itself an appearance? It seems so at first. The
phenomenon is what manifests itself, and being manifests itself to all in
some way, since we can speak of it and since we have a certain comprehension
of it. Thus there must be for it a phenomenon of being, an appearance of being,
capable of description as such. Being will be dis closed to us by some kind of
immediate access-boredom, nausea, etc., and ontology will be the description
of the phenomenon of being as it manifests itself; that is, without intermediary .
However for any ontology we should raise a preliminary question : is the
phenomenon of being thus achieved identical with the being of phenomena ?
In other words, is the being which discloses itself to me, which appears to me, of the
same nature as the being of existents which appear to me? It seems that there is no
difficulty. Husserl has shown how an eidetic reduction is always possible; that is,

how one can always pass beyond the concrete phenomenon toward its
essence . For Heidegger also "human reality" is ontic-ontological; that is, it
can always pass beyond the phemomenon toward its being. But the
passage from the particular object to the essence is a passage from homo
geneous to homogeneous . Is it the same for the passage from the existent to
the phenomenon of being: Is passing beyond the existent toward the passes
beyond the particular red toward its essence? Let us consider fur ther.¶ In a
particular object one can always distinguish qualities like color, odor, etc. And
proceeding from these, one can always determine an essence which they imply,
as a sign implies its meaning. The totality "object-essence" makes an
organized whole. The essence is not in the object ; it is the meaning of the
object, the principle of the series of appear ances which disclose it. But being
is neither one of the object's qualities , capable of being apprehended among
others, nor a meaning of the object. The object does not refer to being as to a
signification; it would be im possible, for example, to define being as a presence
since absence too dis closes being, since not to be there means still to be . The
object does not possess being , and its existence is not a participation in
being, nor any other kind of relation. It is. That is the only way to define its
manner of being; the object does not hide being, but neither does it reveal
being.¶ The object does not hide it, for it would be futile to try to push aside
certain qualities of the existent in order to find the being behind them; be
ing is being of them all equally. The object does not reveal being, for it would be
futile to address oneself to the object in order to apprehend its being. The
existent is a phenomenon; this means that it designates it self as an
organized totality of qualities. It designates itself and not its being. Being is simply the
 condition of all revelation . It is being-for-re vealing (etre-pour-dcvoiIer) and not
revealed being (etre devoiIe). What then is the meaning of the surpassing toward
the ontological, of¶ which Heidegger speaks? Certainly I can pass beyond this
table or this chair toward its being and raise the question of the being-of-
the-table or the being-of-the-chair.2 But at that moment I turn my eyes away
from the phenomenon of the table in order to concentrate on the
phenomenon of being, which is no longer the condition of all revelation, but
which is it self something revealed-an appearance which as such, needs in
turn a being on the basis of which it can reveal itself.
 2AC facism
Their kritik of technology is fascist—because it’s an ahistorical
and anti-humanist theory of the origins of technology it’s
inherently anti-democratic.
Tom ROCKMORE Philosophy @ Duquesne ’95 in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge eds. Andrew
Feenburg and Alastair Hannay p. 141-143 [gender paraphrased]

In his attention to technology as the prolongation of metaphysics by other means, Heidegger

fails to
understand the way in which technology is embedded in modern social and
historical contexts. On the one hand, his approach to technology through the problem of metaphysics sees
technology not as an end in itself but as a means to a further end, in this case as part of his effort to destroy the history of
metaphysics. But the terms metaphysics and ontology are not univocal. They have been understood in different ways in
the history of the philosophical tradition. Aristotle, who is usual!y regarded as the father of metaphysics, did not use that
term, which was only later applied to his writing. But he did speak of the science of being as being. Now it is clear why
Heidegger draws a connection between metaphysics and technology. For metaphysics is connected to representational
thinking, to what he elsewhere calls a world picture, in short to a two-worlds ontology which begins in Plato.
Technology, as he understands it, presupposes dualism of this kind since its essence
lies in enframing. This explanation of how Heidegger arrives at his view of technology as an offshoot of
metaphysics ought not to conceal the basically abstract, and therefore fundamentally incomplete, nature of his view.
Whatever else it is, technology is not called into being through the problem of metaphysics. Heidegger's
occasional suggestion that it is Being which lurks behind and affects
technology is evidently mythological. For it is clear that technology,
including modern technology, was called into being by human beings
confronted with specific tasks arising within a specific social and historical milieu. There is no
indication in "The Question Concerning Technology" or in Heidegger's other writings that he has a real comprehension of
the nature of society or of its historical evolution. In Being and Time, where he was clearly under the influence of
Kierkegaard, his understanding of the social as being-with was mainly negative, depicted as an inauthentic mode of life
which one must leave behind. In later writings, there is no evidence that he has made progress in comprehending the
social context. In this respect, he is clearly surpassed by Sartre, his most important French student. In his later
writings, Sartre went beyond the abstract analysis he presented in Being and
Nothingness to offer a concrete analysis of society in terms of such concepts
as practice and lack. Heidegger did not have a theory of society and, hence,
cannot integrate his view of technology into a wider understanding of the
social context. As a result, his theory of technology fails on at least two counts. First, he simply is
unable to grasp the origins of technology from a historical perspective ,
which in turn leads him to attribute these origins to an extension of
metaphysics. Second, he is unable to comprehend the social role of technology,
which he also attributes to Being. It is clear that technology arose to satisfy human needs and desires.
But Heidegger, who scrutinizes technology only within the context of his deeper concern with metaphysics,
seems incapable of grasping the relation of technology to society and human
being. Because he cannot grasp the relationship of modern technology to the modern social world, Heidegger
fails to comprehend the manner in which technology is not beyond human control but at
least potentially subject to the wishes of human being. As soon as we admit that our
actions often have consequences beyond our intentions, we can comprehend that there is something
about history which escapes human control. But even if we acknowledge that in principle there will always be something
about the historical process which will not merely coincide with the men and women whose actions constitute it, it does
not follow that technology as such is beyond human control. That is a leap which no rational argument seems to require,
but which Heidegger is apparently willing to make, because he has presupposed the action of a transpersonal reality like
Being which, he believes, communicates with us through technology. The deeper question is the extent to which
technology is or can come under human control. I have already indicated why I hold that we must reject the claim that the
technology we consciously employ for our own ends is something that lies under the control of a transpersonal reality. It is
difficult to deny that technology sometimes seems to serve human beings. Obviously, there is an
important distinction between one or another specific form of technology and
technology in a general sense. Perhaps the best way to understand the idea of technology in general
is as one aspect of modern social life. The history of mankind records the
continued striving of people and groups to free themselves from natural and
self-created constraints in order fully to develop their individual capacities. Whether human beings will
finally be successful in this effort, whether we will ever free ourselves from even self-imposed constraints, is part of the
larger experiment of human history whose outcome no one can know in ad-vance. We cannot rationally assert, Heidegger
notwithstanding, that [hu]man[s] will neve be able to bring technology under control. We may at least hope that such
control will occur. My conclusion is that Heidegger's reading of technology is deeply and irremediably flawed since he fails
to identify basic elements of technology and conflates the phenomenon in general with technique and art. It is no accident
that his reading of technology is flawed. The flaw follows directly from his profoundly antimodernist perspective. For
Heidegger, the way to understand the world in which we live is through the
elaboration of an alternative story of the meaning of Being. Such a story rejects the
story mainly embraced since the pre-Socratics as one that arises from a false turning early in the path, a divergence from
another, truer turning which would continue in the correct way. As in his analysis of modern thought, so in his
analysis of modernity Heidegger proceeds from the assumption that what
we think and what we are can be redeemed only by returning to an earlier
and truer view of things. Hence, it is hardly surprising that he cannot grasp the way in which technology
arose and functions within modernity since modernity itself, or at least what we mean by this term, functions for him as a
fall away from an earlier and truer way of being, and perhaps even as a fall away from Being. I submit that neither
Heidegger nor anyone else can comprehend modernity or its elements-including technology-unless these elements are
approached in their own right without preconditions and allowed to tell their own story. Certainly, we are entitled to
expect nothing less from any form of philosophy, including phenomenology. The anti-democratic nature
of Heidegger's thought is visible in his anti-anthropological conception of
technology. As a political theory, democracy in all its forms necessarily presupposes a general conception of human
being. In the course of the turning in his thought, or Kehre as he terms it, Heidegger turned away from the anthropological
perspective which underlay his earlier approach to Being. His writings after the turning presuppose an anti-humanist
perspective clearly described in his "Letter on Human- ism." But a theory which goes beyond an anthropological concept is
incompatible with any meaningful view of democracy which surely must depend on such a concept.30 His
anti-metaphysical theory of technology from the post-anthropological viewpoint of his new
thinking is by definition non-democratic and even anti-democratic since it
presupposes as its defining condition the rejection of the anthropological point of view
which is the foundation of democracy. It is, then, no accident that
Heidegger's fundamental ontology led him to embrace Nazi totalitarianism
since his con- ception of Being is incompatible, and was understood by him to be incompatible,
with any form of democratic theory.
 Camus DA
Heidegger’s anxiety is grounded in a nostalgia for unity—as the
dasein finds itself faced with the contradiction of the absurd, she
chooses to flee—failing to come to terms with her anxiety.
Mabie 10 [“Camus and Heidegger” Sturm Mabie December 20, 2010,
http://cryptm.org/~sturm/files/ch.pdf]RMT

Heidegger begins his discussion of anxiety with a definition of fleeing, specifically,

fleeing in the face of itself : Dasein’s absorption on the “they” and its
absorption in the “world” of its concern , make manifest something like a
fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself –of itself as an authentic potentiality
for-Being-its-Self... But to bring itself face to face with itself, is precisely what
Dasein does not do when it thus flees. It turns away from itself in accordance
with its own most inertia of falling. Heidegger then goes onto give a
preliminary description of anxiety: The turning-away of falling is grounded
rather in anxiety, which in turn is what makes fear possible... That in the
face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such . This marks the
first discrepancy between Heidegger’s anxiety and Camus’ absurd. For
Heidegger, the existential anxiety is grounded in out very own existence as
conscious beings, or as Dasein. That is, from our immersion in the world, this
Being-in-the-world that normally faces us except in times of angst, anxiety is
born as a questioning of this. For Camus and the absurd, this is not at all the case .
Instead, as aforementioned, the absurd is this divorce, this contradiction, between what
man needs to like, that is, meaning and value, and what is revealed to him by the
universe. It is not this turning away or reaction like how Heidegger characterizes
anxiety, it is simply a disconnect.

The impact is the global suicide of humanity—refusing absurd

reasoning forces a leap of faith or the reduction of motivation to
live which guarantee annihilation in struggles for meaning.
Camus 55—are quals necessary? [“The Myth Of Sisyphus And Other Essays”, Translated from the French by
Justin O’Brien, 1955]RMT
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide .
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the
fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest— whether or not the world has three
dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories— comes afterwards. These are games; one must first
answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can
appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call
for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. If I ask myself how to judge that this
question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it
entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontologi-cal argument. Galileo,
who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it
endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.[1] That truth was not worth the
stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of
profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see
many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others
paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for
living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that
the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions . How to answer it? On all
essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death
or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods
of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the
balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve
simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion,
the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest
attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and
understanding. Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are
concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought
and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a
great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it . One evening he pulls the
trigger or jumps . Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his
daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that that experience had “undermined” him. A more
exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
Society has but little connection with such beginnings . The worm is in man’s
heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal
game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light .
There are many causes for a suicide , and generally the most obvious ones were
not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded)
through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable . Newspapers often
speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These explanations
are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed
him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in
suspension.[2] But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to
deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself
amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that
you do not understand it. Let’s not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday
words. It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.” Living,
naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by
existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that
you have recognized, even instinc— tively, the ridiculous character of that
habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of
that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering . What, then, is that incalculable feeling
that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar
world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights ,
man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is
deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This
divorce between man and this life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of
absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that
there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.
The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is
a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what
he believes to be true must determine his action . Belief in the absurdity of
existence must then dictate his conduct. It is legitimate to wonder , clearly and
without false pathos, whether
a conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as
rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition . I am speaking, of course, of men
inclined to be in harmony with themselves. Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and insoluble. But it is
wrongly assumed that simple questions involve answers that are no less simple and that evidence implies evidence. A
priori and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself , it
seems that there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This
would be too easy . But allowance must be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning.
Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer “no” act as if they
thought “yes.” As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think “yes” in one way or another. On the
other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the
meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be said that they have
never been so keen as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so
desirable. It is acommonplace to compare philosophical theories and the
behavior of those who profess them. But it must be said that of the thinkers who refused a meaning
to life none except Kirilov who belongs to literature, Peregrinos who is born of legend,[3] and Jules Lequier who belongs
to hypothesis, admitted his logic to the point of refusing that life. Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter,
because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the tragic
seriously is not so grievous, but it helps to judge a man. In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we
conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us
not exaggerate in this direction. In a man’s attachment to life there is something
stronger than all the ills in the world. The body’s judgment is as good as the
mind’s and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring
the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead. In
short, the essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding
because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is the
invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is
hope. Hope of another life one must “deserve” or trickery of those who live not for life itself but
for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it . Thus everything

contributes to spreading confusion .Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort, people have
played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to
life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no
necessary common measure between these two judgments . One merely has
to refuse to be misled by the confusions , divorces, and inconsistencies previously
pointed out. One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real
problem. One kills oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth yet
an unfruitful one because it is a truism. But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from
the fact that it has no meaning? Does its absurdity require one to escape it through hope
or suicide—this is what must be clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does
the Absurd dictate death? This problem must be given priority over others,
outside all methods of thought and allexercises of the disinterested mind.
Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an “objective” mind can always introduce into all problems have
no place in this pursuit and this passion. It calls simply for an unjust—in other words, logical— thought. That is not easy.
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the
bitter end. Men who die by their own hand consequently follow to its
conclusion their emotional inclination . Reflection on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the
only problem to interest me: is there a logic to the point of death? I cannot know unless
I pursue, without reckless passion, in the sole light of evidence, the
reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source. This is what I call an
absurd reasoning . Many have begun it. I do not yet know whether or not
they kept to it.
Nietzsche
 2AC Nietzche
There is an inherent value to life
Bernstein 02 (Richard J., Vera List Prof. Phil. – New School for Social Research, “Radical Evil: A Philosophical
Interrogation”, p. 188-192)
This is precisely what Jonas does in The Phenomenon of Life, his rethinking of the meaning of organic life. He tealizes
that his philosophical project goes against many of the deeply embedded prejudices and dogmas of contemporary
philosophy. He challenges two well-entrenched dogmas: that there is no
metaphysical truth, and that there is no path from the "is" to the "ought". To
escape from ethical nihilism, we must show that there is a metaphysical
ground of ethics, an objective basis for value and purpose in being itself. These are strong
claims; and, needless to say, they are extremely controversial. In defense of Jonas, it should be said that he approaches
this task with both boldness and intellectual modesty. He frequently acknowledges that he cannot "prove" his claims, but
he certainly believes that his "premises" do "more justice to the total phenomenon of man and Being in general" than the
prevailing dualist or reductionist alternatives. "But in the last analysis my argument can do no more than give a rational
grounding to an option it presents as a choice for a thoughtful person — an option that of course has its own inner power
of persuasion. Unfortunately I have nothing better to offer. Perhaps a future metaphysics will be able to do more." 8 To
appreciate how Jonas's philosophical project unfolds, we need to examine his philosophical interpretation of life. This is
the starting point of his grounding of a new imperative of responsibility. It also provides the context for his speculations
concerning evil. In the foreword to The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas gives a succinct statement of his aim. Put at its
briefest, this volume offers an "existential" interpretation of biological facts. Contemporary existentialism, obsessed with
man alone, is in the habit of claiming as his unique privilege and predicament much of what is rooted in organic existence
as such: in so doing, it withholds from the organic world the insights to be learned from the awareness of self. On its part,
scientific biology, by its rules confined to the physical, outward facts, must ignore the dimension of inwardness that
belongs to life: in so doing, it submerges the distinction of "animate" and "inanimate." A new reading of the biological
record may recover the inner dimension — that which we know best -—for the understanding of things organic and so
reclaim for psycho-physical unity of life that place in the theoretical scheme which it had lost through the divorce of the
material and the mental since Descartes. p. ix) Jonas, in his existential interpretation of bios, pursues "this
underlying theme of all of life in its development through the ascending order of
organic powers and functions: metabolism, moving and desiring, sensing and
perceiving, imagination, art, and mind — a progressive scale of freedom and peril, culminating in
man, who may understand his uniqueness anew when he no longer sees himself in metaphysical isolation" (PL, p. ix). The
way in which Jonas phrases this theme recalls the Aristotelian approach to bios, and it is clear that Aristotle is a major
influence on Jonas. There is an even closer affinity with the philosophy of nature that Schelling sought to elaborate in the
nineteenth century. Schelling (like many post—Kantian German thinkers) was troubled by the same fundamental
dichotomy that underlies the problem for Jonas. The dichotomy that Kant introduced between the realm of
"disenchanted" nature and the realm of freedom leads to untenable antinomies. Jonas differs from both Aristotle and
Schelling in taking into account Darwin and contemporary scientific biology. A proper philosophical understanding of
biology must always be compatible with the scientific facts. But at the same time, it must also root out misguided
materialistic and reductionist interpretations of those biological facts. In this respect, Jonas's naturalism bears a strong
affinity with the evolutionary naturalism of Peirce and Dewey. At the same time, Jonas is deeply skeptical of any theory of
evolutionary biology that introduces mysterious "vital forces" or neglects the contingencies and perils of evolutionary
development.' Jonas seeks to show "that it is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of
freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe" (PL 3). Freedom, in this broad
sense, is not identified exclusively with human freedom; it reaches down to the first glimmerings of organic life, and up to
the type of freedom manifested by human beings. " 'Freedom' must denote an objectively
discernible mode of being, i.e., a manner of executing existence, distinctive of the organic per se and thus
shared by all members but by no nonmembers of the class: an ontologically descriptive term which can apply to mere
physical evidence at first" (PL 3). This coming into being of freedom is not just a success story. "The privilege of freedom
carries the burden of need and means precarious being" (PL 4). It is with biological metabolism that this principle of
freedom first arises. Jonas goes "so far as to maintain that metabolism , the basic stratum of
all organic existence, already displays freedom — indeed that it is the first form freedom takes." 1 ° With
"metabolism — its power and its need — not-being made its appearance in the world as an alternative embodied in being
itself; and thereby being itself first assumes an emphatic sense: intrinsically qualified by the threat of its negative it must
affirm itself, and existence affirmed is existence as a concern" (PL 4). This broad, ontological understanding of freedom as
a characteristic of all organic life serves Jonas as "an Ariadne's thread through the interpretation of Life" (PL 3). The way
in which Jonas enlarges our understanding of freedom is indicative of his primary argumentative strategy. He expands
and reinterprets categories that are normally applied exclusively to human beings so that we can see that they identify
objectively discernible modes of being characteristic of everything animate. Even inwardness, and incipient forms of self;
reach down to the simplest forms of organic life. 11 Now it may seem as if Jonas is guilty of anthropomorphism, of
projecting what is distinctively human onto the entire domain of living beings. He is acutely aware of this sort of objection,
but he argues that even the idea of anthropomorphism must be rethought. 12 We distort Jonas's philosophy of life if we
think that he is projecting human characteristics onto the nonhuman animate world. Earlier I quoted the passage in which
Jonas speaks of a "third way" — "one by which the dualistic rift can be avoided and yet enough of the dualistic insight
saved to uphold the humanity of man" (GEN 234). We avoid the "dualistic rift" by showing that there is genuine continuity
of organic life, and that such categories as freedom, inwardness, and selfhood apply to everything that is animate. These
categories designate objective modes of being. But we preserve "enough dualistic insight" when we recognize that
freedom, inwardness, and selfhood manifest themselves in human beings in
a distinctive manner. I do not want to suggest that Jonas is successful in carrying out this ambitious program.
He is aware of the tentativeness and fallibility of his claims, but he presents us with an understanding of animate beings
such that we can discern both continuity and difference.' 3 It should now be clear that Jonas is not limiting himself to a
regional philosophy of the organism or a new "existential" interpretation of biological facts. His goal is nothing less than to
provide a new metaphysical understanding of being, a new ontology. And he is quite explicit about this. Our reflections
[are] intended to show in what sense the problem of life, and with it that of the body, ought to stand in the center of
ontology and, to some extent, also of epistemology. . . The central position of the problem of life means not only that it
must be accorded a decisive voice in judging any given ontology but also that any treatment of itself must summon the
whole of ontology. (PL 25) The philosophical divide between Levinas and Jonas appears to be enormous. For Levinas, as
long as we restrict ourselves to the horizon of Being and to ontology (no matter how broadly these are conceived), there is
no place for ethics, and no answer to ethical nihilism. For Jonas, by contrast, unless we can enlarge our understanding of
ontology in such a manner as would provide an objective grounding for value and purpose within nature, there is no way
to answer the challenge of ethical nihilism. But despite this initial appearance of extreme opposition, there is a way of
interpreting Jonas and Levinas that lessens the gap between them. In Levinasian terminology, we can say that Jonas
shows that there is a way of understanding ontology and the living body that does justice to the nonreducible alterity of the
other (l'autrui). 14 Still, we might ask how Jonas's "existential" interpretation of biological facts and the new ontology he is
proposing can provide a metaphysical grounding for a new ethics. Jonas criticizes the philosophical prejudice that there is
no place in nature for values, purposes, and ends. Just as he maintains that freedom, inwardness, and
selfhood are objective modes of being, so he argues that values and ends are
objective modes of being. There is a basic value inherent in organic being, a
basic affirmation, "The Yes' of Life" (IR 81). 15 "The self-affirmation of being
becomes emphatic in the opposition of life to death. Life is the explicit
confrontation of being with not-being. . . . The 'yes' of all striving is here
sharpened by the active `no' to not-being" (IR 81-2). Furthermore — and this is the crucial point
for Jonas — this affirmation of life that is in all organic being has a binding
obligatory force upon human beings. This blindly self-enacting "yes" gains
obligating force in the seeing freedom of man, who as the supreme outcome of nature's
purposive labor is no longer its automatic executor but, with the power obtained from knowledge, can become its
destroyer as well. He must adopt the "yes" into his will and impose the "no" to not-
being on his power. But precisely this transition from willing to obligation is the critical point of moral theory
at which attempts at laying a foundation for it come so easily to grief. Why does now, in man, that become a duty which
hitherto "being" itself took care of through all individual willings? (IR 82). We discover here the transition from is to
"ought" — from the self-affirmation of life to the binding obligation of human beings to preserve life not only for the
present but also for the future. But why do we need a new ethics? The subtitle of The Imperative of Responsibility — In
Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age — indicates why we need a new ethics. Modern technology has
transformed the nature and consequences of human ac-tion so radically that
the underlying premises of traditional ethics are no longer valid. For the first time
in history human beings possess the knowledge and the power to destroy life on this planet, including human life. Not
only is there the new possibility of total nuclear disaster; there are the even
more invidious and threatening possibilities that result from the unconstrained use of technologies that
can destroy the environment required for life. The major transformation brought about by
modern technology is that the consequences of our actions frequently exceed by far anything we can envision. Jonas was
one of the first philosophers to warn us about the unprecedented ethical and political problems that arise with the rapid
development of biotechnology. He claimed that this was happening at a time when there was an "ethical vacuum," when
there did not seem to be any effective ethical principles to limit ot guide our ethical decisions. In the name of scientific and
technological "progress," there is a relentless pressure to adopt a stance where virtually anything is permissible, includ-ing
transforming the genetic structure of human beings, as long as it is "freely chosen." We need, Jonas argued, a new
categorical imperative that might be formulated as follows: "Act so that the
effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine
human life"; or expressed negatively: "Act so that the effects of your action are not
destructive of the future possibility of such a life"; or simply: "Do not
compromise the conditions for an indefinite continuation of humanity on
earth"; or again turned positive: "In your present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of
your will." (IR 11)
Altruism is best—
1. There are degrees of suffering—being angry about homework
isn’t as bad as being raped – proves there is a reason to do the
aff
2. Debate about potential catastrophes enables preventative
action– spurs collective solutions to nuclear war and
environmental threats
Kurasawa, 04 Professor of Sociology at York University of Toronto [Fuyuki, Constellations Volume 11, No 4,
2004]
In the twenty-first century, the lines of political cleavage are being drawn along those of competing dystopian visions.
Indeed, one of the notable features of recent public discourse and socio-political struggle is
their negationist hue, for they are
devoted as much to the prevention of disaster as to
the realization of the good, less to what ought to be than what could but
must not be. The debates that preceded the war in Iraq provide a vivid illustration of this tendency, as both camps
rhetorically invoked incommensurable catastrophic scenarios to make their respective cases. And as many analysts have
noted, the multinational antiwar protests culminating on February 15, 2003 marked the first time that a mass movement
was able to mobilize substantial numbers of people dedicated to averting war before it had actually broken out. More
generally, given past experiences and awareness of what might occur in the
future, given the cries of ‘never again’ (the Second World War, the Holocaust, Bhopal, Rwanda,
etc.) and ‘not ever’ (e.g., nuclear or ecological apocalypse, human cloning) that are emanating from
different parts of the world, the avoidance of crises is seemingly on
everyone’s lips – and everyone’s conscience. From the United Nations and regional multilateral
organizations to states, from non-governmental organizations to transnational social movements, the
determination to prevent the actualization of potential cataclysms has
become a new imperative in world affairs. Allowing past disasters to reoccur and unprecedented
calamities to unfold is now widely seen as unbearable when, in the process, the suffering of future
generations is callously tolerated and our survival is being irresponsibly
jeopardized. Hence, we need to pay attention to what a widely circulated report by the International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty identifies as a burgeoning “culture of prevention,”3 a dynamic that carries major,
albeit still poorly understood, normative and political implications. Rather than bemoaning the contemporary
preeminence of a dystopian imaginary, I am claiming that it can enable a novel form of
transnational socio-political action, a manifestation of globalization from
below that can be termed preventive foresight. We should not reduce the
latter to a formal principle regulating international relations or an
ensemble of policy prescriptions for official players on the world stage,
since it is, just as significantly, a mode of ethico-political practice enacted by
participants in the emerging realm of global civil society. In other words, what I want to
underscore is the work of farsightedness, the social processes through which civic associations are simultaneously
constituting and putting into practice a sense of responsibility for the future by attempting to prevent global catastrophes.
Although the labor of preventive foresight takes place in varying political and socio-cultural settings – and with different
degrees of institutional support and access to symbolic and material resources – it is underpinned by three distinctive
features: dialogism, publicity, and transnationalism. In the first instance, preventive foresight is an
intersubjective or dialogical process of address, recognition, and response
between two parties in global civil society: the ‘warners,’ who anticipate and
send out word of possible perils, and the audiences being warned, those who
heed their interlocutors’ messages by demanding that governments and/or
international organizations take measures to steer away from disaster.
Secondly, the work of farsightedness derives its effectiveness and legitimacy
from public debate and deliberation. This is not to say that a fully fledged
global public sphere is already in existence, since transnational “strong
publics” with decisional power in the formal-institutional realm are currently embryonic at best.
Rather, in this context, publicity signifies that “weak
publics” with distinct yet occasionally
overlapping constituencies are coalescing around struggles to avoid specific
global catastrophes.4 Hence, despite having little direct decision-making
capacity, the environmental and peace movements, humanitarian NGOs, and other similar globally-
oriented civic associations are becoming significant actors involved in
public opinion formation. Groups like these are active in disseminating
information and alerting citizens about looming catastrophes, lobbying
states and multilateral organizations from the ‘inside’ and pressuring them
from the ‘outside,’ as well as fostering public participation in debates about
the future. This brings us to the transnational character of preventive foresight ,
which is most explicit in the now commonplace observation that we live in an
interdependent world because of the globalization of the perils that
humankind faces (nuclear annihilation, global warming, terrorism, genocide, AIDS and
SARS epidemics, and so on); individuals and groups from far-flung parts of the planet
are being brought together into “risk communities” that transcend
geographical borders.5 Moreover, due to dense media and information flows, knowledge of impeding
catastrophes can instantaneously reach the four corners of the earth – sometimes well before individuals in one place
experience the actual consequences of a crisis originating in another. My contention is that civic associations
are engaging in dialogical, public, and transnational forms of ethico-
political action that contribute to the creation of a fledgling global civil
society existing ‘below’ the official and institutionalized architecture of
international relations. The work of preventive foresight consists of forging
ties between citizens; participating in the circulation of flows of claims,
images, and information across borders; promoting an ethos of farsighted
cosmopolitanism; and forming and mobilizing weak publics that debate and
struggle against possible catastrophes. Over the past few decades, states and
international organizations have frequently been content to follow the lead
of globally—minded civil society actors, who have been instrumental in
placing on the public agenda a host of pivotal issues (such as nuclear war,
ecological pollution, species extinction, genetic engineering, and mass human rights
violations).

3. The world may be perfect for US, but it is NOT for everyone
else
Marcel 6 (Joyce Marcel, free-lance journalist for the American Reporter, 4/30/06, http://www.american-
reporter.com/)
Polar bears are drowning but what the hell. Don't
worry, be happy. At least that's the
Republican philosophy as spelled out —at last! —by a letter-writer to The Boston Globe. According
to her, Democrats are miserable. Republicans are happy. It's as easy as that. Where have
liberals gone wrong? Headlined "Conservatives Have More Fun," the writer lays it out with a simplicity that is
nothing short of breathtaking. "Could it be that we conservatives have a more positive world view?" she says. "How about a
more positive view of the future?" How can you be happy, she asks, when you think your
country "consists of imperialist occupiers trying to take over the world." But if,
like her, you "realize the true road to freedom happens when democracies lead to thriving societies, you're feeling pretty
good right now." [continues] What this woman is really saying is, " I've got my
McMansion and my Escalade and my kids are in a private school, and
America works for me." The letter-writer's thinking drips with selfishness and
arrogance about her place in the universe. Jesus didn't say, "Don't worry, be
happy." I seem to recall him saying that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man
to enter into the kingdom of God." The combination of the "I've got mine, Jack"
philosophy with the "my happiness is the only thing that matters, and to hell
with everybody else" is how people like President Bush gain power. Why
should we care if we're torturing brown skinned folk in secret prisons? Who
cares if the government is listening to our phone calls and reading our e-
mails —we have nothing to hide. We must hate freedom. Only namby-pamby civil libertarians
care about due process and rule of law. There's a war on, don't you know? By ignoring the many
real problems that fester around her, the letter-writer can delude herself that everything is fine and liberals are just crabby
cry-babies. [continues] Happy, happy, happy. But on analysis, the letter- writer is
confusing personal happiness with political happiness. Speaking strictly for
my liberal self, I'm a pretty happy person. Most of the people I know are,
too. Just because we hate the direction our government has taken doesn't
mean we don't love and enjoy our families, our homes, our friends, our
community and our work. I refuse to allow my disgust with Mr. Bush and his
policies spoil my personal life. Life is short and wasting eight years of it
being miserable doesn't make any sense. If you fall into that trap, the terrorists have won. America
today isn't a case of happiness or depression. It's a matter of facing reality or living in a rose colored bubble where
everything is fine. And when the jumbo jet crashes into the office tower, you wonder what the hell happened. Why do they
hate us? Speaking of being happy, Tuesday was Town Meeting day in Vermont. My town, along with several others, voted
to ask our Washington representative to start impeachment proceedings against President Bush. The Associated Press
picked up the story. Reading it, liberals across America learned that they are not alone. Hopefully, this will further support
them in their struggles for political change and social justice. Frankly, a little political change and
social justice will make a lot of people very, very happy. In fact, when Mr.
Bush is gone, there will be dancing in the streets.
 1AR Marcel
Extend the Marcel evidence—
The claim that we should simply be happy in the face of suffering
and atrocity authorizes the worst forms of American colonialism
—fpeople sit passively in the face of the war on terror because
they rout their politics through the filter of complacent
happiness—prefer our Marcel evidence—
A) More contextualized to today’s political climate---even if
(Nietzsche/Heidegger/whoever) is correct theoretically, RIGHT
NOW the political climate is such that colonialism THRIVES on
‘happiness’---our evidence indicates that only by intervening in
the face of suffering can we make people TRULY happiness
B) Who is the subject?---their alternative is only possible
because of the position of privilege that we are in---our evidence
indicates that even if your alternative is appropriate for people
that are suffering, in THIS context it is simply spoiled privileged
politics which ignores the plight of other people
AND this is terminal defense against all of their ontology claims
—we CAN make a separation between criticism of
GOVERNMENT policies and our own lives—vote affirmative to
live out your own life as happily as possible while recognizing
that ________ is wrong
 Alt Fails
The alt fails – and the case is a disad to it
Strauss 59 Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago
[Leo “What is Political Philosophy and Other Studies” (p 54-55)]
The difficulties to which German idealism was exposed gave rise to the third wave of modernity-of the wave that bears us
today. This last epoch was inaugurated by Nietzsche. Nietzsche retained what appeared to him to be the insight due
to the historical consciousness of the 19th century. But he rejected the view that the historical process is rational as well as
the premise that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modern state is possible. He may be said to have
returned, on the level of the historical consciousness, from Hegel's reconciliation to Rousseau's antinomy. He taught
then that
all human life and human thought ultimately rests on horizon-
forming creations which are not susceptible of rational legitimization. The
creators are great individuals. The solitary creator who gives a new law unto himself and who subjects himself to all its
rigors takes the place of Rousseau's solitary dreamer. For Nature has ceased to appear as lawful
and merciful. The fundamental experience of existence is therefore the
experience, not of bliss, but of suffering, of emptiness, of an abyss. Nietzsche's creative call to
creativity was addressed to individuals who should revolutionize their own lives, not to society or to his nation. But he
expected or hoped that his call, at once stern and imploring; questioning and desirous to be questioned,
would tempt the best men of the generations after him to become true selves and thus to
form a new nobility which would be able to rule the planet. He opposed the possibility
of a planetary aristocracy to the alleged necessity of a universal classless and stateless society. Being certain of the
tameness of modern western man, he preached the sacred right of "merciless extinction"
of large masses of men with as little restraint as his great antagonist had done.
He used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for
making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism and
democracy as well. After having taken upon himself this great political
responsibility, he could not show his readers a way toward political
responsibility. He left them no choice except that between irresponsible
indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime
which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like the golden age. He tried to articulate his
understanding both of the modern situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of the will to power. The
difficulty inherent in the philosophy of the will to power led after Nietzsche to the
explicit renunciation of the very notion of eternity. Modern thought reaches its
culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to
oblivion the notion of eternity. For oblivion of eternity, or , in other words,
estrangement from man's deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is
the price which modem man had to pay, from the very beginning, for attempting to be absolutely
sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.
 1AR Alt Fails
Strauss proves case is a disad to the alternative – we have
identified oncoming political problems that absolutely exist –
even if we can’t eliminate suffering

turn and alt fails – fascists will take over

Stackelberg 02 Professor of Modern Hisory at Gonzaga University
[Roderick “Nietszche: Godfather of Fascism?”]
Nietzsche’s rejection of progress and equality made aspects of his philosophy usable for
the Nazis without having to distort them. Though a critic of idealist "self-deception" and national
vanity, he shared the idealist disdain for merely political freedoms. True to the idealist
heritage, Nietzsche's formula for human salvation was not to change material conditions through reform
or revolution, as progressives would have it, but to change human ideals. His precepts aimed not at the
creation of a just society, but at the development of a higher type of human being. To him, as to the Idealists he criticized,
politics (i.e., agitation for social and political reform) was a debased activity. The field of Nietzsche
interpretation will continue to provide the terrain, as it has throughout the twentieth century, on which fundamental
issues are symbolically fought out. Diverse movements and schools of thought will continue to appeal to his thought. It is
precisely because of his radical denial of ultimate truth that today he is hailed as the philosopher of postmodernism. But
the criticisms that have been raised against postmodernism – that its political implications even in its left-wing
appropriations are profoundly conservative – can be leveled against Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche's failure to
provide any concrete social analysis renders futile all efforts to pin down his
substantive political position and leaves concepts like “herd animals,”
“blond beasts,” “supermen,” “the will to power,” “parry of life,” and
“destruction of all that is degenerate and parasitical” to be filled with
substantive meaning by his various interpreters. This lack of political
consciousness made his philosophy useful to the Nazis and it makes his
thinking serviceable to their apologists today.
 AT: Chaos
Undergraduate-level physics, calculus, ordinary differential equations, and a
taste for computation are sufficient background for a full appreciation of the
book. For nearly twenty years the Academy of Applied Science (Concord, New Hampshire) has sponsored the summer
work of bright highschool seniors in the University of California’s Davis Campus’ Department of Applied Science at
Livermore. The example problems worked out in the book are representative of the summer projects to which these
students have contributed. The book is intended to appeal to advanced undergraduate as well as to graduate students, and
to research workers. I fervently hope that the generous assortment of examples that I have worked out in the text will
stimulate readers to explore and enjoy the rich and fruitful field of study which links fundamental reversible laws of
physics to the irreversibility which surrounds us all. I have chosen mainly one- and two-dimensional examples in order to
permit me to convey ideas with simple pictures. I stress here that the ideas so illustrated are not essentially different in
three space dimensions. To summarize the view I have reached, as the result of a decade of research,
the Second Law of Thermodynamics is most simply described as a
ubiquitous time-symmetry breaking which invariably accompanies the
dynamics of a sufficiently chaotic system connected to its environment. Now it
is certainly true that the “chaos” and symmetry breaking found in computer
simulations are idealizations of the chaos and irreversibility of “nature”.
Our simulations are classical and nonrelativistic . They have a finite and
digital representation. Nevertheless it is well-established by now that
computational “pseudochaos” provides results which show no important
differences from the idealizations of nature in the minds of mathematicians
and the real-world observations of experimentalists. Some of the popular books dealing
with chaos and irreversibility seek an understanding of the macroscopic
irreversibility of nature in terms of a comprehensive quantum mechanical and
cosmological explanation, by linking the present state of the Universe to its
“initial conditions”. To me it is completely implausible that particular initial
conditions, cosmological or not, are at all relevant to understanding the
irreversibility present in everyday diffusive, viscous, or conducting flows.
None of these ambitious books takes seriously the need for including
boundary conditions and constraints in dynamics, which seems to me a crucial ingredient to
obtaining irreversible behavior from time-reversible laws. It is clear that computer simulation has
been the catalyst for our new understanding of irreversible flows .
 AT Accept Vulnerability
Accepting vulnerability is the worst example of slippery slope
reasoning possible. It’s probably bad to live in constant paranoid
fear of every death threat but it’s not bad to eliminate pointless
catastrophic risks. For instance not walking in front of speeding
traffic does not imply you become a shut-in who won’t go
outside. Regardless of what their authors absurdely claim,
people CAN AND DO LIVE THIS MIDDLE GROUND ALL THE
TIME.

We can’t stop caring about our survival. The ONLY way humans
can deal with the terror of inevitable death is to manage it with
order and denial. The alternative LITERALLY makes life
unlivable.
Pyszczynski ‘4 (Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Social Research, “What are we so afraid of? A terror
management theory perspective on the politics of fear”, Winter,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_4_71/ai_n13807478/)
TMT starts with a consideration of how human beings are both similar to, and different from, all other animals. We start
with the assumption that, like all other animals, humans are born with a very basic
evolved proclivity to stay alive and that fear, and all the biological structures
of the brain that produce it, evolved , at least initially, to keep the animal
alive. This, of course, is highly adaptive, in that it facilitates survival, and an animal that does not stay
alive very long has little chances of reproducing and passing on its genes . But
as our species evolved, it developed a wide range of other adaptations that helped us survive and reproduce,
the most important being a set of highly sophisticated intellectual abilities that enable us to: a) think
and communicate with symbols, which of course is the basis for language, b) project
ourselves in time and imagine a future including events that have never happened before, and c) reflect
back on ourselves, and take ourselves as an object of our own attention--self-awareness. These are all very
adaptive abilities that play central roles in the system through which humans regulate their behavior--usually referred to
as the self (cf. Carver and Scheier, 1998). These abilities made it possible for us to survive and prosper in a far wider range
of environments than any other animal has ever done, and accomplish all that we humans have done that no other species
ever has been capable of doing. However, these unique intellectual abilities also created a major
problem: they made us aware that, although we are biologically
programmed to stay alive and avoid things that would cut our life short, the one absolute certainty in life is
that we must die. We are also forced to realize that death can come at any time for any number of reasons, none of
which are particularly pleasant--a predator, natural disaster, another hostile human, and an incredible range of diseases
and natural processes, ranging from heart attacks and cancer to AIDS. If we are "lucky" we realize that our bodies will just
wear out and we will slowly fade away as we gradually lose our most basic functions. Not a very pretty picture. TMT posits
that this clash of a core desire for life with awareness of the inevitability of
death created the potential for paralyzing terror. Although all animals experience fear in the
face of clear and present dangers to their survival, only humans know what it is that they are afraid of, and that ultimately
there is no escape from this ghastly reality. We suspect that this potential for terror would have
greatly interfered with ongoing goal-directed behavior, and life itself, if it
were left unchecked. It may even have made the intellectual abilities that
make our species special unviable in the long run as evolutionary
adaptations--and there are those who think that the fear and anxiety that results from our sophisticated
intelligence may still eventually lead to the extinction of our species. So humankind used their newly
emerging intellectual abilities to manage the potential for terror that these abilities
produced by calling the understandings of reality that were emerging as a result of these abilities into service as a way of
controlling their anxieties. The potential for terror put a "press" on emerging explanations for reality, what we refer to as
cultural worldviews, such that any belief system that was to survive and be accepted by the masses needed to manage this
potential for anxiety that was inherent in the recently evolved human condition. Cultural worldviews
manage existential terror by providing a meaningful , orderly, and
comforting conception of the world that helps us come to grips with the
problem of death. Cultural worldviews provide a meaningful explanation of life and our place in the cosmos; a
set of standards for what is valuable behavior, good and evil, that give us the potential of acquiring self-
esteem, the sense that we are valuable, important, and significant contributors to this meaningful
reality; and the hope of transcending death and attaining immortality in either a literal or symbolic sense. Literal
immortality refer to those aspects of the cultural worldview that promise that death is not the end of existence, that some
part of us will live on, perhaps in an ethereal heaven, through reincarnation, a merger of our consciousness with God and
all others, or the attainment of enlightenment--beliefs in literal immortality are nearly
universal, with the specifics varying widely from culture to culture. Cultures also provide us with
the hope of attaining symbolic immortality, by being part of something larger, more significant,
and more enduring than ourselves, such as our families, nations, ethnic groups, professions, and the like. Because these
entities will continue to exist long after our deaths, we attain symbolic immortality by being valued parts of them.

Fear of death is inevitable. Humans CANNOT change the

orientation of terror towards threats. It’s a natural product of
evolution.
Pyszczynski et al ‘6 (Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Sheldon Solomon, Prof. Psych. – Skidmore
College, Jeff Greenberg, Prof. Psych. – U. Arizona, and Molly Maxfield, U. Colorado, Psychological Inquiry, “On the
Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations” 17:4, Ebsco)
Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first specific complaint with TMT is that it is
wedded to an outmoded assumption that human beings share with many other
species a survival instinct. They argue that natural selection can only build instincts that respond to specific
adaptive challenges in specific situations, and thus could not have designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is
a broad and distal goal with no single clearly defined adaptive response. Our use of the term survival
instinct was meant to highlight the general orientation toward continued
life that is expressed in many of an organism’s bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc)
and the diverse approach and avoidance tendencies that promote its
survival and reproduction, ultimately leading to genes being passed on to fu- ture generations. Our use of
this term also reflects the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT of theorists like
Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank (1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler (1999), and Darwin
(1993). We concur that natural selection, at least initially, is unlikely to design a unitary survival instinct, but rather, a
series of specific adaptations that have tended over evolutionary time to promote the survival of an organism’s genes.
However, whether one construes these adaptations as a series of discrete mechanisms or a
general overarching tendency that encompasses many specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that
natural selection usually orients organisms to approach things that facilitate
continued existence and to avoid things that would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection
doesn’t also select for characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other ways, or that all species or even all humans, will
always choose life over other valued goals in all circumstances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward
continued life exists because staying alive is essential for reproduction in most species, as well as for child rearing and
support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an animal as a loose collection of independent modules that
produce responses to specific adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it overlooks the point that
adaptation involves a variety of inter-related mechanisms working together to insure that genes responsible for these
mechanisms are more numerously represented in future generations (see, e.g., Tattersall, 1998). For example, although
the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be useless
unless well-integrated with other aspects of the circulatory system. We believe it useful to think in terms of the
overarching function of the heart and pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve
specific adaptive problems within that system. In addition to specific solutions to specific adaptive problems, over time,
natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning(Dawkins, 1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved survival rates
and reproductive success of lifeformspossessing integrated systemic characteristics that determine whether those
characteristics become widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize a glucose-
approaching amoeba and a bear-avoiding salmon as oriented toward self-preservation and reproduction, even if neither
species possesses one single genetically encoded mechanism designed to generally foster life or insure reproduction, or
cognitive representations of survival and reproduction. This is the same position that Dawkins (1976)
took in his classic book, The selfish gene: The obvious first priorities of a survival
machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are individual
survival and reproduction. … Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to
find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid
disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic
conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children
advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves. (pp. 62–63) All that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that
humans fear death. Somewhat ironically, in the early days of the theory,we felt compelled to
explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because many critics
adamantly insisted, for reasons that were never clear to us, that most people
do not fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the inevitability
of death is frightening because people know they are alive and because they
want to continue living. Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really believe that
humans do not fear death? Although people sometimes claim that they are
not afraid of death, and on rare occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach their death, this
requires extensive psychological work, typically a great deal of anxiety, and
preparation and immersion in a belief system that makes this possible (see TMT
for an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interesting question, but not
essential to the logic of the theory. Even if Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary
self-preservation instinct was not, in and of itself, selected for, it is indisputable that many discrete and integrated
mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for. A desire to stay alive, and a fear of
anything that threatens to end one’s life, are likely emergent properties of
these many discrete mechanisms that result from the evolution of
sophisticated cognitive abilities for symbolic, future- oriented, and self-reflective thought. As Batson
and Stocks (2004) have noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our limbic reactions to threats of
death and of our many systems oriented toward keeping us alive that we have a general fear of death. Here are three
quotes that illustrate this point. First, for psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of TMT: “Such
constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving
life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant ” (p. 467). For
literature buffs, acclaimed novelist Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any intelligence above
that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewil- derment and
dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142) And perhaps
most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane flight: Phyllis: I learned
something up in that plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die. An important consequence of
the emergence of this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to
anxiety due to events or stimuli that are not immediately present and novel
threats to survival that did not exist for our ancestors, such as AIDS, guns,
or nuclear weapons. Regardless of how this fear originates, it is abundantly
clear that humans do fear death. Anyone who has ever faced a man with a
gun, a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires
further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into one’s lane can
attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on
an x-ray, a gun, a crossbow, or any number of weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these
things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical structures be if they didn’t have the ability to instigate fear
reactions in response to such threats?

Embracing death leads to violence. Psychological studies prove

we cannot simply accept vulnerability.
Solomon et al ‘3 (Sheldon, Prof. Psych. – Skidmore College, Jeff Greenberg, Prof. Psych. – U. Arizona, and
Tom Pyszczynski, Prof. Psych. – Colorado U., Psychoanalytic Review, “Fear of Death and Huma Destructiveness”, 90:457-
474,
(2003). Psychoanalytic Review, 90:457-474, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing)
The role of in-group identity in assuaging concerns about mortality has also been demonstrated in the domain of domestic
race relations. Specifically, mortality salience leads white Americans to react
sympathetically to a white racist (Greenberg, Schimel, Martens, Solomon, and Pyszcznyski, 2001)
and to react negatively to an African American individual who violates the
negative stereotype of African Americans-specifically, a studious chess-playing male African
American college student (Schimel et al., 1999). These results support the notion that
religious, political, and ethnic identities and beliefs serve a death-denying
function, in that people respond to momentary reminders of death by
increasing their affection for similar others and their disdain for dissimilar
others. But earlier we argued that even in the absence of others who differ in these salient ways, people would
designate others as a scapegoat to serve a terror-assuaging function. Harmon-Jones, Greenberg, Solomon, and Simon
(1995) examined this notion empirically by assigning previously unacquainted people to different groups on the basis of
their preference for abstract art works by Paul Klee or Wasily Kandinsky (the minimal group paradigm; Tajfel, Billig,
Bundy, & Flament, 1971). Participants then rated themselves and fellow in-group members and members of the other
group after a mortality salience or control induction. Thinking about death resulted in exaggerated regard for one's own
group and disparagement of those who preferred a different kind of art, despite the fact that the group had just been
formed minutes ago, participants did not know anyone in their group directly, and membership in the group was based on
a relatively unimportant preference for abstract art. One possible shortcoming of these findings is that they are all based
on attitudinal measures. Thinking about death may engender more positive and negative attitudes toward similar and
dissimilar others, respectively, but without leading people to behave accordingly. Additional research has,
however, demonstrated the effects of mortality salience on actual behavior.
After completing a mortality salience or control induction, Ochsmann and Mathy (1994) told German university students
that the experiment was over and had them sit in a reception area, presumably to be paid for participating in the study.
There was a row of chairs in the reception area, and in the center of the row was another student who was actually a
confederate of the experimenters. The confederate appeared to be a German student for half of the participants; for the
other half, the confederate appeared to be a Turkish student (currently a despised minority in Germany). The investigators
were interested in how close to or far away from the confederate each participant would sit as a function of his appearance
(German or Turkish) after thinking about death or a benign control topic. Although physical distance did not differ as a
function of the confederate's appearance in the control condition, mortality salient participants sat closer to the fellow
German and further away from the Turkish infidel. This finding establishes that mortality salience influences actual
behavior above and beyond changes in attitudes. More recently, McGregor et al. (1998) demonstrated
that subtle reminders of death produce actual physical aggression toward
those who threaten deeply cherished beliefs. Liberal or conservative college
students read an essay they believed was written by another student in the
study that condemned either liberals or conservatives (e.g., “Liberals are the cause of so
many problems in this country. … The bleeding heart stance they take, of trying to help everyone is a joke and incredibly
stupid. How can they help the world when they can't even help themselves?” Or “Conservatives are the cause of so many
problems in this country. … The cold-hearted stance they take, of trying to help only themselves is a joke and incredibly
stupid. They are too busy thinking of themselves, and don't care about anyone else”). Then, after a mortality
salience or control induction in what they believed to be a separate study,
participants were given an opportunity to administer a quantity of their
choosing of very hot salsa to the student who wrote the essay in the “first study,” and who
claimed to dislike spicy foods. We used hot sauce administration as a direct measure of physical aggression because
of some highly publicized incidents of hot sauce being used malevolently to
harm others (e.g., police officers assaulted by a cook at Denny's; children being abused by being forced to drink hot
sauce). Results indicated no differences in hot sauce allocation for similar and dissimilar others in the control condition;
however, following mortality salience, participants administered twice the
amount of hot sauce to different others than they did to similar others . Two
additional studies replicated these effects. Reminders of death thus produced direct
aggression toward those who challenge cherished aspects of cultural
worldviews. The general finding that mortality salience produces world-
view defense (i.e., exaggerated positive and negative responses to similar and dissimilar others, respectively) is
thus quite robust and extends beyond attitudinal preferences to behavior
and direct acts of physical aggression . Mortality salience effects have been
independently obtained in labs in the United States, Canada, Germany,
Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia, using a variety of mortality
salience manipulations, including fear of death scales (instead of our typical open-ended
questions) and films of gory automobile accidents. Mortality salience effects are also
apparently unique to thoughts of death. Asking people to ponder unpleasant
but nonlethal matters (e.g., failing an exam, giving a speech in public, being socially ostracized, being
paralyzed, being in pain at the dentist) often results in self-reported anxiety and negative affect, but does not
engender worldview defense (see Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997, for a review of this
research). Additionally, mortality salience effects have been obtained in natural settings, such as when people are
interviewed in front of a funeral parlor as opposed to 100 meters away from the funeral parlor (Pyszczynski, et al., 1996).
Thus, subtle reminders of mortality are sufficient to arouse these effects. In fact, mortality salience effects do not even
require a conscious confrontation with reminders of death at all! In three studies, Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and
Solomon (1997) found exaggerated reactions to pro- and anti-United States essay authors following subliminal reminders
of death (specifically, 28 millisecond exposures to the word “death” vs. “field” or “pain”). This work, along with other
findings (for a review, see Pyszczynski, Greenberg, and Solomon, 1999), has shown that worldview defense is intensified
whenever death-related thought is on the fringes of consciousness (i.e., high in accessibility).

Their rhetoric of death inevitability leads to violence and

bigotry.
Pyszczynski ‘4 (Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Social Research, “What are we so afraid of? A terror
management theory perspective on the politics of fear”, Winter,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_4_71/ai_n13807478/)
2) Reminding people of the inevitability of death leads to a broad range of
attempts to maintain faith in their worldviews and self-esteem and defend them against
threats. These studies test the mortality salience hypothesis: if one's cultural worldview and self-esteem provide protection
against the fear of death, then reminding people of the inevitability of death should
increase their need to keep their worldviews and self-esteem strong . In the
typical study, participants are reminded of death or another aversive topic
that is not related to death (dental pain, failing an exam, giving a speech in front of a large audience, being
socially excluded, being uncertain), and then exposed to people or ideas that either
support or challenge their cultural worldviews. For example, in the first mortality salience
study, Rosenblatt et al. (1989) had half of their sample of municipal court judges in Tucson,
Arizona, fill out a questionnaire about death, and then all the judges read a case
brief about a woman accused of prostitution and then set bail for her. Whereas
control judges who were not reminded of their mortality set an average bond of $50, those
who were first reminded of their mortality set an average bond of $455. Later studies
have shown that such reminders of mortality can lead to increased
prejudice, aggression toward those with different worldviews, estimates of social
consensus for one's attitudes, anxiety when treating culturally valued objects in disrespectful ways, help for those within
one's group, identification with valued aspects of self, affection for those who love us, and many other important
psychological consequences (for more details, see Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski, 1997). What all these
effects of mortality salience have in common is that they entail behavior that
affirms or bolsters one's self-esteem or faith in one's worldview or behavior
that diffuses any threats that might be impinging on these two components of one's shield against
existential anxiety.

Socialization guarantees that people do not accept death. It isn’t

a viable psychological response. Only denial and violenc are
possible.
Pyszczynski ‘4 (Tom, Prof. Psych. – U. Colorado, Social Research, “What are we so afraid of? A terror
management theory perspective on the politics of fear”, Winter,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_4_71/ai_n13807478/)
One thing that has become very clear from our studies of the effects of thinking about death is that the problem of death
affects us in very different ways, depending on whether we are consciously thinking of it or whether it is on the fringes of
consciousness--what cognitive psychologists would refer to as highly accessible but outside of current focal attention
(Pyszczynski, Greenberg, and Solomon, 1999). The clinging to the worldview and pursuit of
self-esteem that the studies described earlier document occur when thoughts of death are on
the fringes of consciousness--shortly after being reminded of the problem of
death and after a distraction; or when death-related words or symbols are presented subliminally, so that people are not
aware of them. What is interesting and important to realize about the pursuit of self-esteem and faith
in our worldviews is that these defenses bear no logical or semantic relation
to the problem of death--what does being a good American have to do with
the fact that I am going to die someday? In a logical sense, absolutely
nothing, but we are socialized early in life to use meaning and self-esteem as
ways of protecting ourselves from our fears and anxieties . On the other hand, when
people are consciously thinking about death, they cope in very different ways that do have
a logical connection to death. These defenses seem to make sense. We either distract ourselves from the
problem of death, by switching the topic or turning up the radio as we drive by an accident scene, or try to
convince ourselves that death is a problem for the distant future . We remind
ourselves that our grandmother lived to be 99, that we do not smoke, or we promise
to get more exercise, start taking that medicine our doctor has been pushing, or get on the latest fad diet. The
point here is that because it is highly accessible but unconscious thoughts of death that promote clinging to our
worldviews or self-esteem, it is difficult if not impossible to observe this in ourselves. But the empirical
evidence is really very clear now. So let us turn to a consideration of how this core human fear of death
affects us in ways that politicians and other leaders can manipulate. DEATH AND NATIONALISM One of our earliest
and most widely replicated findings is that reminders of death increase nationalism and
other forms of group identification, making people more accepting of those who are similar to
themselves and more hostile toward those who are different. For example, in a very early study we found that reminding
people of death led them to react more positively toward a person who praised America and more negatively toward a
person who criticized America (Greenberg et al., 1990). Similar patterns have been found all over the world. When
subtly reminded of death, Germans sit closer to fellow Germans and farther
away from Turks (Ochsman and Mathay, 1994) and, more recently, show an increased preference for the
deutsche mark over the euro (Jonas and Greenberg, in press); Dutch citizens exaggerate how badly the Dutch national
soccer team will beat the rival German team (Dechesne et al., 2000); Israelis are more accepting of
fellow Israelis and rejecting of Russian Jews who have immigrated to Israel
(Florian and Mikulincer, 1998); Italians view Italian identity as more "real," reflecting bigger differences between Italians
and people from other countries (Castano et al., 2002); and Scots are more discriminating in judging pictures as either
Scottish or English, viewing fewer faces of Englishmen as Scottish (Castano, Yzerbet, and Palladino, 2004). These findings
all come from highly controlled laboratory experiments.
 2AC Heidegger DA
Heidegger DA—rejection of human values and acceptance of
suffering replicate management and control. This indicts the alt
and means the alt eclipses being
Hicks 03 Professor and chair of philosophy at Queens College of the CUNY (Steven V., “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond,” Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p.
109, Questia)
Here again, one might raise objections to Heidegger's equating of Nietzsche's doctrine of will to power with the
metaphysics of subjectivity. After all, Nietzsche often attacked Descartes's “ego cogito” as a logical or linguistic fiction (cf.
BGE, §§ 16, 54). Yet according to Heidegger, Nietzsche still follows Descartes's lead in
making human beings the subject or foundation of things . Unlike Descartes, however,
Nietzsche's subject is not a fixed mental substance, but the body interpreted as a center of instincts, drives, affects, and
sublimations, i.e., as will to power. Heidegger claims that this “body as given” idea still involves Nietzsche in a “fixity” that
brings him into the philosophy of presence: “Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent” (N, 2:200). And
this forced sense of presence, Heidegger thinks, leads to the dangers of “radical objectifiability” and
to the “disposability of beings, ” i.e., treating beings as nothing but objects of
use, control, and management. 32 Moreover, like its Cartesian counterpart, the Nietzschean subject
reins supreme over the whole of beings and posits “the measure for the beingness of every … being” (N, 4:121). 33 In
claiming that “truths are illusions” and that “Being is an empty fiction, ” Nietzsche “fashions for the subject an absolute
power to enjoin what is true and what is false” and hence to define what it means “to be” or “not to be” a being (N, 4:145).
According to Nietzsche, what is true—what has being—is that which serves the interest of the subject whose essence is will
to power (in the mode of existence of eternal recurrence; cf. N, 2:203). Being is thus reduced to the status of a value or a
“condition of the preservation and enhancement of the will to power” (N, 4:176). This is why Heidegger
considers Nietzsche the “consummation, ” and not the overcoming, of
Western metaphysics: by reducing Being to a value, the doctrine of will to
power makes the nihilism of the metaphysical tradition (the assumption that Being itself
is nothing and the human will everything) a matter of philosophical principle . 34 Thus
Nietzsche's “counter-ideals” of will to power and eternal recurrence, far
from overcoming nihilism, actually express or exemplify the loss of any sense of
Being, or the withdrawal of Being itself, in favor of beings (i.e., products of human will). As Heidegger reads him,
Nietzsche understands Being in terms of value (or what is useful for enhancing the human will) because Being itself has
totally withdrawn in default. And this brings to completion traditional metaphysics, which, according to Heidegger, is the
history of Being in its withdrawal. As Heidegger sees it, Nietzsche's metaphysics of will to power is “the
most extreme withdrawal of Being” and thus “the fulfillment of nihilism
proper” (N, 4:204, 232). So Nietzsche brings to completion, in his denial of Being,
the very nihilism he wanted to overcome . Far from twisting free of the ascetic ideal, Heidegger
claims, Nietzsche 's doctrine of will to power actually provides the basis for its most complete expression in the modern
“secularized” ascetic “will-tocontrol” everything. In other words, instead of seeking salvation in a transcendent world by
means of ascetic self-denial—the aspect of metaphysics that Nietzsche most obviously rejects—salvation is now, Heidegger
claims, sought “exclusively in the free self-development of all the creative powers of man” (N, 4:89). This unlimited
expanding of power for power's sake parallels in many ways what Nietzsche characterized as the most terrifying aspect of
the ascetic ideal: the pursuit of “truth for truth's sake.” It is, according to Heidegger, the “hidden thorn” in the side of
modern humanity (cf. N, 4:99). This “hidden thorn” expresses itself variously in the Protestant “work ethic” and in the
“iron cage” of bureaucratic-technological rationality (discussed in the works of Max Weber); it also expresses itself in the
various power aims of modern scientific/technological culture as well as in the frenzied impulse to produce and consume
things at ever faster rates. Heidegger even suggests that Nietzsche's own figure of the Overman
(Ubermensch) foreshadows the calculating, technological attitude of modern
secularized asceticism: “His Overman [stands] for the technological worker-soldier who would disclose all
entities as standingreserve necessary for enhancing the ultimately aimless quest for power
for its own sake.” 35 This emerging technological human, grounded in a control-oriented anthropocentrism,
compels entities to reveal only those one-dimensional aspects of themselves that are consistent with the power aims of a
technological/productionist culture. Instead of dwelling and thinking in a world unified by what Heidegger metaphorically
terms the “fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals, ” impoverished modern technocrats occupy a world “bereft of
gods” in which thinking becomes calculating, and dwelling becomes tantamount to the “technological domination of
nature” and what Nietzsche calls “the common economic management of the earth” in which “mankind will be able to find
its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy” (WP, § 866). Thus citizens come to be viewed primarily as
consumers, wilderness is looked upon in terms of “wildlife management areas, ” and genuine human freedom is “replaced
by the organized global conquest of the earth, and the thrust into outer space” (N, 4:248). As Heidegger sees it, “our era
entertains the illusion that man, having become free for his humanity, has
freely taken the universe into his power and disposition ” (N, 4:248).In summary,
Nietzsche tried to combat the nihilism of the ascetic ideal (e.g., the collapse of the
Christian table of values) by bringing forth new nonascetic values that would enhance rather than devalue humanity's will
to power. According to Heidegger, however, instead of overcoming nihilism, Nietzsche
simply reinforced it. By characterizing Being as an “empty fiction” and “the last smoke of a vaporized reality ”
(TI, 2:2, 481), and by degrading it to the status of a value for enhancing the subject's will to power, Nietzsche
loses any sense of Being as such. For him it is a mere nothing, a “nihil.” And this brings to completion
the “fundamental movement” of history in the West, which is nihilism: the withdrawal of Being itself and the consequent
focus on beings as objects for “consolidating the power of Will and for expanding it out beyond itself” in an ever-increasing
spiral. 36 As Heidegger sees it, this “eternally recurring” will to power, or “will to will, ”
is a will-to-control that only reinforces the nihilism Nietzsche feared: the
loss of meaning or direction, the devaluation of the highest values, the
“constructs of domination, ” and the devotion to frenzied consumption and
production.

That outweighs and turns the alt

Zimmerman 94 Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University (Michael, Contesting Earth’s Future, p. 119-
120)
Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the
eclipse of being, threatens the relation
between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would
be even more dangerous than a
nuclear war that might “bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and
the destruction of the earth.” This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is
better to forfeit the world than to lose one’s soul by losing one’s relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these
lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it
is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing
through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity’s one-dimensional
disclosure of entities virtually denies them any “being” at all, the loss of humanity’s openness for being is already
occurring. Modernity’s background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing
material “happiness” for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in
nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity’s slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal
limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed
we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth , masquerading as
material paradise. Deep ecologists might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of
everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead. But most
of them could not agree that the loss of humanity’s relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide, for it is wrong
to suppose that the lives of millions of extinct and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never
“disclosed” by humanity.
 Heidegger Disad – OV
The attempt to achieve happiness in life is based on the
assumption that humanity can become superior if only we learn
how to control our obsession with suffering – our HICKS card is
amazing – this is indicted specifically by Heidegger as the prime
example of the attempt by humanity to use humanism as a way
to control the population.
Their no link arguments don’t assume the specificity of our
evidence – it speaks directly to the claims made in their 1nc
evidence that the alternative ends suffering. This problem –
solution mindset approach to humanity allows the eclipse of
being –
The impact is the Zimmerman evidence – the loss of ontological
being is the worst fate possible – it is the equivalent of a hell on
earth – and the impact operates on a different framework than
the aff and the K because ontology is critical to examining any
epistemology of humanity – err aff to maintain an ontological
clearing.
 Heidegger Disad – Link
Nietzsche’s positing of new, nonascetic values causes nihilism
Hicks 03 Professor and chair of philosophy at Queens College of the CUNY (Steven V., “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond,” Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p.
109, Questia)
In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger poses the following question: In Nietzsche's philosophy, “which for the first time
expresses and thinks nihilism as such, is nihilism overcome or is it not?” (N, 4:200). Heidegger 's direct answer:
Nietzsche's philosophy is “nihilism proper, ” and this implies not only that
Nietzsche's philosophy does not overcome nihilism, but also that “it can
never overcome it” because “it is the ultimate entanglement in nihilism ” (N,
4:203). Despite Nietzsche's valiant efforts to formulate a
nonascetic/antinihilistic ideal in terms of which humanity could affirm
rather than devalue the natural world, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche fails
precisely because he “posits new [nonascetic] values from the [perspective
of] will to power” (N, 4:203). According to Heidegger, this is simply the “culmination” of
the history of traditional (productionist) metaphysics, which , in turn, results in
the very nihilistic “constructs of domination” that Nietzsche feared the most .
“Such utterly completed, perfect nihilism is the fulfillment of nihilism proper” (N, 4:203). Why does Heidegger claim that
Nietzsche 's philosophy is the ultimate “fulfillment” of nihilism and not its overcoming? Heidegger believes that
Nietzsche's doctrines of “will to power” and “eternal recurrence” are themselves metaphysical doctrines; that is to say, they
are intended as answers to traditional metaphysical questions concerning essence and existence. As such, Heidegger
argues, they are connected to the whole history of nihilism and to the modern technological/productionist attitude toward
the world which that history entails. Let me enlarge on this. As we have seen, Nietzsche basically
understands traditional metaphysics as the acceptance of a “true” or
transcendent world that ultimately devalues this (ordinary, everyday) world. This
eventually leads to the idealization of asceticism, which in turn leads to
nihilism when the values propped up by metaphysics and its ascetic ideal
are devalued. Nietzsche aims to overcome nihilism and asceticism by overcoming metaphysics, and this he
attempts to do, in part at least, by means of his doctrines of will to power (which provides the basis for a new kind of
valuation) and eternal recurrence (which rules out a “true” or transcendent world). Heidegger argues, however,
that these supposed nonascetic doctrines are themselves thoroughly
metaphysical since they claim to offer Nietzsche's answer to the old question
concerning the “Being of beings”: “will to power” is the ultimate essence of
the world under the mode of existence of “eternal recurrence ” (cf. N, 2:203). 21
 AT Ev Assumes Nietzsche’s a nihilist – he’s not
1. None of our evidence assumes that – we are reading specific
evidence that is an indict of the assumptions about suffering and
accepting our will to power – those are both parts of the
philosophy that their K authors are specifically citing.

2. Err aff on this question – if we have evidence that Nietzsche’s

philosophy does ‘x’ and we’re making clear link arguments –
don’t ignore those arguments because they assert that it isn’t
what they are talking about. AND – if you are a Nietzsche
scholar not only should you find a better hobby – but you
shouldn’t insert your knowledge for them – they aren’t doing
that work.

3. Nietzsche is a nihilist – his philosophy is rooted in it

Hicks 03Professor and chair of philosophy at Queens College of the CUNY
(Steven V., “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond,” Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed.
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p. 109, Questia)
In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger poses the following question: In Nietzsche's philosophy, “which for the first time
expresses and thinks nihilism as such, is nihilism overcome or is it not?” (N, 4:200). Heidegger 's direct
answer: Nietzsche's philosophy is “nihilism proper, ” and this implies not
only that Nietzsche's philosophy does not overcome nihilism, but also that
“it can never overcome it” because “it is the ultimate entanglement in
nihilism” (N, 4:203). Despite Nietzsche's valiant efforts to formulate a
nonascetic/antinihilistic ideal in terms of which humanity could affirm
rather than devalue the natural world, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche fails
precisely because he “posits new [nonascetic] values from the [perspective
of] will to power” (N, 4:203). According to Heidegger, this is simply the “culmination” of
the history of traditional (productionist) metaphysics, which , in turn, results in
the very nihilistic “constructs of domination” that Nietzsche feared the most .
“Such utterly completed, perfect nihilism is the fulfillment of nihilism proper” (N, 4:203). Why does Heidegger claim that
Nietzsche 's philosophy is the ultimate “fulfillment” of nihilism and not its overcoming? Heidegger believes that
Nietzsche's doctrines of “will to power” and “eternal recurrence” are themselves metaphysical doctrines; that is to say, they
are intended as answers to traditional metaphysical questions concerning essence and existence. As such, Heidegger
argues, they are connected to the whole history of nihilism and to the modern technological/productionist attitude toward
the world which that history entails. Let me enlarge on this. As we have seen, Nietzsche basically
understands traditional metaphysics as the acceptance of a “true” or
transcendent world that ultimately devalues this (ordinary, everyday) world. This
eventually leads to the idealization of asceticism, which in turn leads to
nihilism when the values propped up by metaphysics and its ascetic ideal
are devalued. Nietzsche aims to overcome nihilism and asceticism by overcoming metaphysics, and this he
attempts to do, in part at least, by means of his doctrines of will to power (which provides the basis for a new kind of
valuation) and eternal recurrence (which rules out a “true” or transcendent world). Heidegger argues, however,
that these supposed nonascetic doctrines are themselves thoroughly
metaphysical since they claim to offer Nietzsche's answer to the old question
concerning the “Being of beings”: “will to power” is the ultimate essence of
the world under the mode of existence of “eternal recurrence ” (cf. N, 2:203). 21
 AT K Itself Is Ethical
The K is not ethical in any meaningful sense. If we win that
human life is good but that the criticism materially fails to
improve it then calling attention to violence isn’t distinctly
ethical.

Criticism isn’t ethical in itself because emancipation requires an

ability to publicly make distinctions.
Ryu ‘1 (Honglim, Dept. Pol. Sci. – Seoul National U., Human Studies, “Ethics of Ambiguity and Irony: Jacques
Derrida and Richard Rorty”, 24:5-28, Springer)
At issue here is the question of whether
postmodern ethics can incorporate
emancipatory ideals in their Nietzschean and Heideggerian perspectives. While
postmodernists’ criticism of modern philosophy and theory can be regarded as a radical move in intellectual and
academic circles, the very deconstruction deprives them of categories for elaborating
their “responsibility to otherness” in public, i.e., in
language for politics. Philosophical
deconstruction and “responsibility to otherness” undermine each other in the public sphere. In
order to make
“responsibility to otherness” comprehensible in public discussion, it
becomes crucial to make distinctions, for example, between the reactionary and
the progressive. Unless postmodern ethics provides criteria for distinguishing
between political positions, it cannot avoid the threat of another conservative ideology
attempting to devalue emancipatory ideals under the disguise of deconstruction (Habermas, 1981, 1987). This criticism
brings to the fore the underlying tension between the postmodern sensibility to otherness as an ethical dimension of
deconstruction and its commitment to articulating the unsettled, free-floating, and undecidable nature of texts with a
playful double gesture. But for postmodern thinkers, especially for Derrida, this does not posit a tension in its ordinary
meaning; rather, the latter is the condition for the former. Responsibility to otherness cannot be attained, Derrida
contends, without being sensitive to the suppressed side of historical texts with an untraditional, therefore awkward and
unfamiliar, gesture. Attempting to link deconstruction to ethical affirmation and thereby to elaborate their positions,
postmodern thinkers have both invented new languages and attributed new meanings to existing terms. More
importantly, they suggest that deconstruction itself as a textual practice should be
understood in ethical terms. Despite postmodern justification of this sort, however,
the limits of postmodern thinking become apparent when it is applied to most contemporary
ethical-political matters. The postmodern approach to ethics does not provide any
determinate framework for deciding how to adjudicate conflicting ethical
claims or how to link ethical unconditional affirmation of the emancipatory
ideals, enlightened social criticism, and democratic accountability in
determinate political terms. This argument constitutes the main thesis of this paper. Starting from the
postmodernist claim that the postmodern gesture inevitably involves an ethical-political dimension, it focuses on an
analysis of the Derridean “ethical re-turn” (Kearney, 1993) and Rorty’s pragmatist postmodern advocacy of ironist
liberalism.
Orientalism
 2AC Us v. Them
Us vs. Them mentality is inevitable
Dess 3 (Harold D., Nancy, Ph. D. University of Cincinnati psychology, Ph.D. Occidental College psychology
Evolutionary psychology and violence: a primer for policymakers and public policy advocates Ed. - Richard W. Bloom,
Nancy Kimberly Dess pg.157-158)
This chapter deals with an evolutionary analysis of intercultural conflict. The core assumption is that genes determine
some aspects of human social behavior Our genes make all of our social behavior possible ,
but because of our evolutionary design—as social primates and, later, as tribally organized hunters
and gatherers—we have inherited a genetic structure that makes certain kinds of
attitudes and social behavior inevitable. Further, the occurrence of some of these
attitudes and behaviors makes the development of prejudice and
discrimination toward members of other cultures highly likely . These attitudes and
behaviors constitute an "us versus them" psychology that is genetically determined.
On the basis of the current state of knowledge, it is highly likely that particular processes are
genetically coded that normally ensure that the evolved social behaviors
(phenotypic characteristics) will develop. For example, neither English nor Spanish is coded
in the genes, but language-inducing processes are. If a child is reared in an English-speaking
community, she'll learn English. If she's reared in an American Sign Language (ASL) community, she'll learn ASL. Either
outcome can occur because language-inducing processes that have evolved in the species have developed in the individual.
Although debate continues over whether these processes are modular or generic and about exactly how human
communication is unique, that children's great facility for learning human language is
an evolutionary legacy is clear

Enmity is good and avoids violence--- alt can’t solve because they
don’t have a replacement for the Cartesian subject
Reinhard 4 – Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Jewish Studies at UCLA, 2004, “Towards a Political Theology- Of
the Neighbor,” online: http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/Mellon/Towards_Political_Theology.pdf
If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition, the world we find
ourselves in today is one from which the political may have already disappeared, or at least has mutated into some strange
new shape. A world not anchored by the “us” and “them” binarisms that flourished as recently as the Cold War is
one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically, as Jacques Derrida points out in The Politics of
Friendship: ¶ The effects of this destructuration would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be looking for new
reconstitutive enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation-states; it would sustain at any price so-
called ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still identifiable
adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies without which … it would lose its political being … without an enemy, and
therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? (PF 77) ¶ If one accepts Schmitt’s account of the
political, the disappearance of the enemy results in something like global psychosis: since the mirroring relationship
between Us and Them provides a form of stability, albeit one based on projective identifications and repudiations, the loss
of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the “imaginary tripod” that props up the psychotic with a sort of
pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and
paranoia. ¶ Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is
surrounded by enemies; as Derrida writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for “an unheard-of
violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its
unprecedented – therefore monstrous –forms; a violence in the face of which what is called hostility, war, conflict,
enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be
identifiable” (PF 83).
 2AC Perm
Diagnosis of problems in our methodology fails in the absence of
a positive alternative. Only PRAGMATIC POLICY options can
break this deadlock
Varisco 07 Reading orientalism: said and the unsaid (Google eBook) Dr. Daniel Martin Varisco is chair of
anthropology and director of Middle Eastern and Central Asia studies at Hofstra University. He is fluent in Arabic and has
lived in the Middle East (Yemen, Egypt, Qatar) for over 5 years since 1978. He has done fieldwork in Yemen, Egypt, Qatar,
U.A.E. and Guatemala.
In sum, the essential argument of Orientalism is that a pervasive and endemic Western discourse of Orientalism has
constructed "the Orient," a representation that Said insists not only is perversely false but prevents the authentic
rendering of a real Orient, even by Orientals themselves. Academicized Orientalism is thus dismissed,in the words of one
critic, as "the magic wand of Western domination of the 0rient."283i The notion of a single conceptual essence of Orient is
the linchpin in Said's polemical reduction of all Western interpretation of the real or imagined geographical space to a
single and latently homogeneous discourse. Read through Orientalism and only the Orient of Western Orientalism is to be
encountered; authentic Orients are not imaginable in the text. The Orient is rhetorically available for Said simply by virtue
of not really being anywhere. Opposed to this Orient is the colonialist West, exemplified by France, Britain, and the United
States. East versus West, Occident over Orient: this is the debilitating binary that has framed the unending debate over
Orientalism. A generation of students across disciplines has grown up with limited challenges to the polemical charge by
Said that scholars who study the Middle East and Islam still do so institutionally through an interpretive sieve that divides
a superior West from an inferior East. Dominating the debate has been a tiresome
point/counterpoint on whether literary critic Edward Said or historian Bernard Lewis knows best. Here is
where the dismissal of academic Orientalism has gone wrong . Over and over again the same
problem is raised. Does the Orient as several generations ofWestern travelers, novelists, theologians, politicians, and
scholars discoursed it really exist? To not recognize this as a fundamentally rhetorical question because of Edward Said is,
nolo contendere, nonsense. No serious scholar can assume a meaningful cultural entity called "Orient" after reading Said's
Orientalism; some had said so before Said wrote his polemic. Most of his readers agreed with the thrust of the Orientalism
thesis because they shared the same frustration with misrepresentation. There is no rational retrofit between the imagined
Orient, resplendent in epic tales and art, and the space it consciously or unwittingly misrepresented. However,
there was and is a real Orient, flesh-and-blood people, viable cultural traditions, aesthetic domains,
documented history, and an ongoing intellectual engagement with the past, present, and future.
What is missing from Orientalism is any systematic sense of what that real Orient was and
how individuals reacted to the imposing forces that sought to label it and theoretically control it. ASLEEP IN
ORIENTALISM'S WAKE I have avoided taking stands on such matters as the real, true or authentic Islamic or Arab world.
—EDWARD SAID, "ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED" Orientalism is frequently praised for exposing skeletons in the
scholarly closet, but the book itself provides no blueprint for how to proceed .=84 Said's approach
is of the cut-and-paste variety—a dash of Foucauldian discourse here and a dram of Gramscian hegemony there—rather
than a howto model. In his review of Orientalism, anthropologist Roger Joseph concludes: Said has presented a thesis that
on a number of counts is quite compelling. He seems to me, however, to have begged one major question. If
discourse, by its very metanature, is destined to misrepresent and to be mediated by all sorts of private
agendas, how can we represent cultural systems in ways that will allow us to escape the very dock in which Said has placed
the Orientalists? The aim of the book was not to answer that question, but surely the book itself compels us to ask the
question of its author.a85 Another cultural anthropologist, Charles Iindholm, criticizes Said's thesis for its "rejection of
the possibility of constructing general comparative arguments about Middle Eastern cultures.286 Akbar Ahmed, a native
Pakistani trained in British anthropology, goes so far as to chide Said for leading scholars into "an intellectual cul-de-
sac."287 For a historian's spin, Peter Gran remarks in a favorable review that Said "does not fully work out the post-
colonial metamorphosis."288 As critic Rey Chow observes, "Said's work begs the question as to how otherness
—the voices, languages, and cultures of those who have been and continue to be marginalized and silenced— could become
a genuine oppositional force and a usable value." Said's revisiting and reconsidering of Orientalism, as well as his literary
expansion into a de-geographicalized Culture and Imperialism, never resolved the suspicion that the question
still goes begging. There remains an essential problem. Said's periodic vacillation in Orientalism on whether or
not the Orient could have a true essence leads him to an infinity of mere representations, presenting a default persuasive
act by not representing that reality for himself and the reader. If Said claims that Orientalism created the false essence of
an Orient, and critics counterclaim that Said himself proposes a false essence of Orientalism, how do we end
the cycle ofguilt by essentialization? Is there a way out of this
epistemologieal morass? If not a broad way to truth, at least a narrow path toward a clearing? With most of
the old intellectual sureties now crumbling, the prospect of ever finding a consensus is numbing, in part because the
formidably linguistic roadblocks are—or at least should be—humbling. The history of philosophy, aided by Orientalist and
ethnographic renderings of the panhumanities writ and unwrit large, is littered with searches for meaning. Yet,
mystical ontologies aside, the barrier that has thus far proved unbreachable is the very necessity of using
language, reducing material reality and imaginary potentiality to mere words. As long as concepts are
essential for understanding and communication, reality—conterminous concept that it must be—will be embraced through
worded essences. Reality must be represented, like it or not, so how is it to be done better?
Neither categorical nor canonical Truth" need be of the essence. One of the pragmatic results of much postmodern
criticism is the conscious subversion of belief in a singular Truth" in which any given pronouncement could be ascribed
the eternal verity once reserved for holy writ. In rational inquiry, all truths are limited by the inescapable force of
pragmatic change. Ideas with "whole truth"in them can only be patched together for so long. Intellectual
activity proceeds by characterizing verbally what is encountered and by reducing
the complex to
simpler and more graspable elements. A world without proposed and debated essences
would be an unimaginable realm with no imagination, annotation without nuance, activity without art. I suggest that
when cogito ergo sum is melded with "to err is human," essentialization of human realities becomes less an unresolvable
problem and more a profound challenge. Contra Said's polemical contentions, not all that has been created discursively
about an Orient is essentially wrong or without redeeming intellectual value. Edward Lane and Sir Richard Burton can be
read for valuable firsthand observations despite their ethnocentric baggage. Wilfrid and Anne Blunt can be appreciated for
their moral suasion. TheJ 'accuse of criticism must be tempered constructively with the louche of everyday human give-
and-take. In planed biblical English, it is helpful to see that the beam in one's own rhetorical eye usually blocks
appreciation of the mote in the other's eye. Speaking truth to power a la Said's oppositional criticism is appealing at first
glance, but speaking truths to varieties of ever-shifting powers is surely a more productive process for a pluralistic society.
AsRichard King has eloquently put it, "Emphasis upon the diversity, fluidity and complexity within as well as between
cultures precludes a reification of their differences and allows one to avoid the kind of monadic essentialism that renders
cross-cultural engagement an a priori impossibility from the outset."2?0 Contrasted essentialisms, as the debate over
Orientalism bears out, do not rule each other out. Claiming that an argument is essentialist
does not disprove it; such a ploy serves mainly to taint the ideas opposed and thus tends to rhetorically
mitigate opposing views. Thesis countered by antithesis becomes sickeningly cyclical
without a willingness to negotiate synthesis. The critical irony is that Said, the author as
advocate who at times denies agency to authors as individuals, uniquely writes and frames the entire script of his own text.
Texts, in the loose sense of anything conveniently fashioned with words, become the meter for Said's poetic
performance. The historical backdrop is hastily arranged, not systematically researched, to authorize the staging of his
argument. The past becomes the whiggishly drawn rationale for pursuing a present grievance. As the historian Robert
Berkhofer suggests, Said "uses many voices to exemplify the stereotyped view, but he makes no attempt to show how the
new self/otherrelationship ought to be represented. Said's book does not practice what it preaches multiculturally."29i
Said's method, Berkhofer continues, is to "quote past persons and paraphrase them to reveal their viewpoints as
stereotyped and hegemonic." Napoleon's savants, Renan's racism, and Flaubert's flirtations serve to accentuate the
complicity of modern-day social scientists who support Israel. Orientalism is a prime example of a historical study with
one voice and one viewpoint. Some critics have argued in rhetorical defense of Said that he should not be held accountable
for providing an alternative. The voice of dissent, the critique (of Orientalism or any other
hegemonic discourse) does not need to propose an alternative for the critique to be effective and
valid," claim Ashcroft and Ahluwalia.29= Saree Makdisi suggests that Said's goal in Orientalism is "to specify the
constructedness of reality" rather than to "unmask and dispel" the illusion of Orientalist discourse.=93 Timothy Brennan
argues that Said's aim is not to describe the "brute reality" of a real Orient but rather to point out the "relative
indifference" of Western intellectuals to that reality.=94 Certainly no author is under an invisible hand of presumption to
solve a problem he or she wishes to expose. Yet, it is curious that Said would not want tosuggest an alternative, to directly
engage the issue of how the "real" Orient could be represented. He reacts forcefully to American literary critics of the "left"
who fail to specify the ideas, values, and engagement being urged.=95 If, as Said, insists "politics is something more than
liking or disliking some intellectual orthodoxy now holding sway over a department of literature,"=9'6 then why would he
not follow through with what this "something more" might be for the discourse he calls Orientalism? As Abdallah Laroui
eloquently asks, "Having become concerned with an essentially political problem,
the Arab intelligentsia must inevitably reach the stage where it passes from
diagnosis of the situation to prescription of remedial action . Why should I escape this
rule?"=97 This is a question that escapes Edward Said in Orientalism, although it imbues his life work as an advocate
against ethnocentric bias. CLASH TALKING AD NAUSEAM The questioning of whether or not
there really is an Orient, a West, or a unified discourse called Orientalism might
be relatively harmless
philosophical musing, were it not for the contemporary, confrontational
political involvement of the United States and major European nations with buyable
governments and bombable people in the Middle East. One of the reasons Said's book has
been so influential, especially among scholars in the emerging field of post-colonial studies, is that it appeared at the very
moment in which the Cold War divide reached a zenith in Middle East politics. In 1979, the fall of the United States-
backed and anti-communist Shah allowed for the creation of the first modern Islamic republic in Iran, even as the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan to try to prevent the same thing happening there. Almost three decades later, the escalation of
tension and violence sometimes described as "Islamic terrorism" has become a pressing global
concern. In the climate of renewed American and British political engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq after
September 11, 2001, the essential categories of East and West continue to dominate public debate through the widely
touted mantra of a "clash of civilizations.* The idea of civilizations at war with each other is probably as old as the very
idea of civilization. The modern turn of phrase owes its current popularity to the title of a 1993 Foreign Affairs article by
political historian Samuel Huntington, although this is quite clearly a conscious borrowing from a 1990 Atlantic Monthly
article by Said's nemesis, Bernard Lewis. Huntington, speculating in an influential policy forum, suggests that Arnold
Toynbee's outdatedlist of twenty-one major civilizations had been reduced after the Cold War to six, to which he adds two
more. With the exception of his own additions of Latin America and Africa, the primary rivals of the West, according to his
list, are currently Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, and Slavic-Orthodox. To say, as Huntington insists, that the main
criterion separating these civilizations is religion, given the labels chosen, borders on the tautological.2?8 But logical order
here would suggest that the West be seen as Christian, given its dominant religion. In a sense, Huntington echoes the
simplistic separation of the West from the Rest, for secular Western civilization is clearly the dominant and superior
system in his mind. The rejection of the religious label for his own civilization, secular as it might appear to him, seriously
imbalances Huntington's civilizational breakdown. It strains credulity to imagine that religion in itself is an independent
variable in the contemporary world of nation-states that make up the transnationalized mix of cultural identities outside
the United Sates and Europe. Following earlier commentary of Bernard Lewis, Huntington posits a "fault line" between
the West and Islamic civilization ever since the Arabs were turned back in 732 CE at the Battle ofTours.=99 The fault of
Islam, however, appears to be less religious than politie-al and ideological. The fundamental clash Huntington describes
revolves around the seeming rejection by Islam (and indeed all the rest) of "Western ideas of individualism, liberalism,
constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and
state/300 In citing this neoconservative laundry list, Huntington is blind to the modern history of Western nations. He
assumes that these idealized values have in fact governed policy in Europe and America, as though divine kingship,
tyranny, and fascism have not plagued European history. Nor is it credible to claim that such values have all been rejected
by non-Western nations. To assert, for example, that the rule of law is not consonant with Islam, or that Islamic teaching
is somehow less concerned with human rights than Western governments, implies that the real clash is between
Huntington's highly subjective reading of a history he does not know very well and a current reality he does not like.
Huntington's thesis was challenged from the start in the very next issue of Foreign Affairs. "But Huntington is wrong,"
asserts Fouad Ajami.301 Even former U. N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, hardly a proponent of postcolonial criticism,
called Huntington's list of civilizations 'strange."3°= Ironically, both Ajami and Kirkpatrick fit Said's vision of bad-faith
Orientalism. Being wrong in the eyes of many of his peers did not prevent Huntington from expanding the tentative
proposals of a controversial essay into a book, nor from going well outside his field of expertise to write specifically on the
resurgence of Islam. Soon after the September 11,2001, tragedy, Edward Said weighed in with a biting expose on
Huntington's "clash of ignorance." Said rightly crushes the blatant political message inherent in the clash thesis,
explaining why labels such as "Islam* and "the West" are unedifying: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying
to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that."3°3 Exactly, but the
same must therefore be true about Said's imagined discourse of Orientalism. Pigeonholing all previous scholars who wrote
about Islam or Arabs into one negative category is discursively akin to Huntington's pitting of Westerners against
Muslims. Said is right to attack this pernicious binary, but again he leaves it intact by not posing a viable alternative. Both
Edward Said and Fouad Ajami, who rarely seem to agree on anything, rightly question the terms of Huntington's clash
thesis. To relabel the Orient of myth as a Confucian-Islamic militarycomplex is not only ethnocentric but resoundingly
ahistorical. No competent historian of either Islam or Confucianism recognizes such a misleading civilizational halfbreed.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Kim Jong Il's Korea could be equated as totalitarian states assumed to have weapons of mass
destruction, but not for any religious collusion. This is the domain of competing political ideologies, not the result of
religious affiliation. And, as Richard Bulliet warns, the phrase "clash of civilizations* so readily stirs up Islamophobia in
the United States that it "must be retired from public discourse before the people who like to use it actually begin to
believe it."3°4 Unfortunately, many policy-makers and media experts talk and act
as if they do believe it. The best way to defeat such simplistic ideology, I suggest,
is not to lapse into blame-casting polemics but to encourage sound
scholarship of the real Orient that Said so passionately tried to defend.
 2AC Motive Irrelevant
The K does not disprove our aff—even if they prove that the
motives of our authors are bad, that does not disprove the
accuracy of their work.
Jaffe 08 Georgetown University, Ph.D. in government, BrownUniversity, A.B. in political science, highest honors (Jacob
Jaffe “Critique of Said's Orientalism and Lockman's Contending Visions of the Middle East” 2008
http://www.jacobjaffe.com/1index.htm)
In his introduction, Lockman rejects empiricism and positivism with the claim that
knowledge is socially constructed and “is never simply the product of the
direct observation of reality and our capacity for reasoning.”[ 1] Similarly, his
favorable review of Orientalism first outlines Said’s own poststructuralist epistemology, wherein humans – unable to
perceive reality objectively – can only interpret reality through subjective
‘discourses,’ or “socially prevalent systems of meaning. ”[2] Initially, this premise does
not seem to be crucial to the argument. After all, the reality of the claim that humans cannot know reality would contradict
both itself and every other human argument, whether advanced by Bernard Lewis or Edward Said.[3] Thus were
he to truly embrace this epistemology, Said would have to adopt some
criterion other than historical accuracy with which to evaluate Orientalism.
The Ethical Premise Yet this is Said’s next step. More disconcerting to him than Orientalism’s
questionable ‘essentialist’ assumptions is his belief that this academic
discipline “hides the interests of the Orientalist ,”[4] whose guild’s veneer of unbiased
scholarship supposedly masks its ancient “history of complicity with [Western] imperial power.”[5] Although the
evidence he marshals in support of this claim is neither comprehensive[6]
nor demonstrably representative of the Western Orientalist literature[7] –
and although he uses this evidence to sketch his own ‘essentialist’ image of
Western attitudes toward the Orient[8] – these inconsistencies and
methodological imperfections obscure a deeper flaw: Even if Said had
incontrovertibly demonstrated that all Orientalists have an interest in, and
serve as accomplices to, Western imperialism, he still would fail to
invalidate Orientalist scholarship. No criticism of Orientalist motives or
ethics can disprove Orientalist-produced knowledge[9] – so long as such
scholarship is judged on its accuracy alone. Yet by postulating a
poststructuralist epistemology, Said can ignore the factual validity of a
scholar’s work – and can choose instead to judge it according to the ethical
validity of his motives. And measured against the yardstick of Said’s anti-imperialist moral views,
Orientalists tend to come up short. In sum, by eliminating any epistemological criteria for judging scholarship, Said
becomes free to judge it on its ethical underpinnings or implications.[10] The Ontological Premise Set In this context, Said
criticizes four “principal dogmas of Orientalism”: first, the assumption of an ahistorical and ontological difference between
Occident and Orient; second, a preference for classical Oriental texts over modern Oriental evidence; third, the assertion
of the Orient’s monolithic nature; and fourth, an underlying fear of, or will to dominate, the Orient.[11] The fourth ‘dogma’
is only an ethical prescription, not an academic premise, but the remaining three are, as he argues, questionable
assumptions. Still, his obvious misinterpretations of Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis[12] suggest that Said is prone to
misreading Orientalist scholarship, which may discredit even this portion of his argument. Yet Said himself subordinates
this ontological critique to the epistemological and ethical premises discussed above. He acknowledges that “the mind
requires order,”[13] that Orientalism fulfills this need through its “schematization of the entire Orient,”[14] and that
“cultural differences” play a “constitutive role” in human relations[15] – revealing how a reformed Orientalism, at least,
might attain empirical accuracy. Nevertheless, Said keeps judging scholarship on the basis of its ethical implications
rather than its objectivity: “[The] main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism,” he believes, is whether one can “divide
human society, as indeed human society seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures…and survive the
consequences humanly....I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding…hostility” among these groups.[16] Thus,
although such queries yield a detailed exposition of Edward Said’s moral
philosophy, Orientalism is hardly a substantive critique of Orientalist
scholarship.
 AT: Said
Said’s claims are wrong: ignores massive amounts of
scholarship, twists data to meet his own political agenda,
essentializes the West, uses Orientalist discourse himself, kills
academic scholarship and doesn’t solve anything: their
alternative links to itself and re-entrenches Orientalism
Teitelbaum 6—Senior Fellow, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies, Tel Aviv U. Adjunct Senior
Lecturer, Middle Eastern History, Bar Ilan U. PhD, Tel Aviv U—AND—Meir Litvak—Senior Research Fellow, Moshe
Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. Associate Professor, Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv
U. PhD, Harvard (Joshua, Students, Teachers, and Edward Said: Taking Stock of Orientalism, March 2006,
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2493, AMiles)
The critics did not deny that Western culture and scholarship in the past has included
ethnocentric, racist, or anti-Islamic components, but argued that these had been greatly exaggerated, to
the point of being made universal. Out of more than 60,000 works on the Middle East published in Europe and the United
States, he chose only those needed in order to prove his case that there was a discourse which he termed Orientalism. In
order to arrive at this conclusion he ignored much evidence critical to the historical documentation of research and
literature, material which would have supported the opposite position .[19] His choices, as Kramer writes, rejected
"all discrimination between genres and disregarded all extant hierarchies of knowledge ." This
was particularly true regarding Said's deliberate conflation of Middle Eastern studies as a research discipline and the
popular, artistic, or literary perspedctive of the Orient. It also disregarded the key question of which were the field's
main texts and which were those purely on the margins.[20] This approach led Said to ignore
several leading researchers who had a decisive influence on Middle Eastern
studies. For example, there is his almost complete ignoring of Ignaz Goldziher's work--
which made an undeniable contribution to the study of Islam--since his
persona contradicts Said's claims. Said chose to attack Goldziher's criticism
of anthropomorphism in the Koran as supposed proof of his negative
attitude toward Islam, while Goldziher himself felt great respect for Islam
and had even attacked Ernest Renan for his racist conceptions. [21] Malcolm
Kerr, for example, criticized Said's ignorance of the role and importance of Arab -
American Middle East researchers, who played an important role in the
field and could not easily be labeled anti-Arab or anti-Islamic. Reina Lewis and Joan
Miller argued that Said ignored women's voices which, they maintained, contradicted the monolithically masculine
representation which Said wished to present.[22] Said's selectivity enabled him to paint scholarship of the Middle East as
an essentialist, racist, and unchangeable phenomenon, whereas the evidence he ignored would have proven that the
Western understanding and representation of the Middle East--especially of the Arabs and Islam--had become quite rich
and multi-faceted over the years. Many scholars and literary figures were actually enamored with the residents of the
Middle East, and the "Orientalist
discourse" was not nearly as dominant as Said
would have his readers believe, as few examples among many would show. British literary figures and
activists, like Wilfred Scawen Blunt, actively sought to improve the lot of the Arabs. Traveler and M.P. David Urquhart
promoted Ottoman Turkey as a partner for Christian Europe. Marmaduke Pickthall, a famous convert to Islam and a
translator of the Koran, looked to Turkey for the formation of a modernist Islam. Finally, Cambridge Persian scholar E.G.
Browne wrote in favor of the Iranian revolution of 1906-1911 and published articles against Curzon. These examples
demonstrate the existence of discourses on the Middle East other than that
characterized by Said.[23] Moreover, a number of researchers have demonstrated
that though Islam was perceived as Europe's enemy in the Middle Ages, even
then it had already gained respect and appreciation in the fields of science and philosophy,
to the point of even idealizing it as a philosopher's religion.[24] A prominent example of the
complexity of the Western perspective on Islam is the attitude of the
Enlightenment movement in the eighteenth century, which Said perceives as
the parent of modern Orientalism. True, some attacked Islam as a part of their rational, secular
perception which criticized unenlightened religiosity--parallel arguments were simultaneously made by them against
Christianity and Judaism. Moreover, at times it was clear that their criticism of Islam was
actually a camouflaged criticism of Christianity . Yet, other contemporary
writers viewed Islam as a rational religion closer to the ideas of the
Enlightenment than Christianity. They saw it as a religion balanced between a
commitment to morality and an acknowledgement of the basic needs of man, as opposed to Christianity's distorted
attitude toward sex. There were among them, too, people who spoke admiringly of Islam and its tolerance of minorities,
and juxtaposed it with Christian fanaticism. An important factor in shaping the complex perspective of Oriental studies in
the nineteenth century was the entry of Jewish researchers into the field. They brought a deep knowledge of Judaism to a
comparative study of Islam. Unlike some Christian researchers of Islam, they had no
missionary approach or nostalgia for the Crusades or much interest in the
political aspects of the contemporary "Eastern Question." For these Jewish scholars,
Islam did not represent the same kind of religious challenge to Judaism that it did to Christianity, and therefore they were
free of most of the prejudices that tripped up many Christian scholars. On the contrary, many Jewish researchers
evolved an almost romantic approach toward Islam. They emphasized its tolerant attitude toward the Jews, as opposed to
Medieval Europe and the rising anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century. Some of them tended to portray Jewish history
in Muslim lands as a continuous golden age.[25] They stood somewhere between the two worlds, as Jews with histories
both Middle Eastern and European, contrary to Said's portrayal of unflagging European ethnocentrism. It was thus
convenient for Said to leave them out of his one-dimensional portrayal of the Orientalist discourse . Middle
Eastern Jews present a problem for the Saidian Orient-Occident dichotomy .
He deals with this by pointedly connecting "Oriental Jews" with Palestinians when writing of Israeli (i.e., Western)
discrimination. That the Jewish concept of peoplehood spans the West and the East is perhaps too threatening to the
dichotomy so central to his theory.[26] The argument that the Occident (or actually Europe prior to the
twentieth century) primarily defined
itself in opposition to the Orient may be questioned as
over-simplifying and essentialist. According to Keith Windschuttle, Europeans
identify
themselves as joint heirs of classical Greece and Christianity, each tempered
by the fluxes of medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernism. In other words,
Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves rather than by geographical
comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one
thousand years.[27] Conversely, the argument that Islam was the ultimate "other" in
Western culture, may be challenged as well. Christian theology and doctrine
emerged to a large degree as an antithesis to Judaism. Likewise, in popular culture the image of the
Jew was much more frightening than that of the Muslim. It can be argued that the number of explicit anti-Jewish tracts--
theological or political--throughout western history was probably higher than those devoted to Islam. The point here is not
made to win the race of victimhood, but rather to argue that the picture of defining the "self" and
the "other" in European culture was much more complex than the one Said
presented; the "Orient" was not necessarily the defining "other" of the Occidental self. In the final
analysis, then, contrary to what Said would have his readers believe, his idea of " Orientalism" is exaggerated and
fails to encompass the entirety of how the West understood and conceived Islam;
just as it cannot be said that because of anti-Semitism, all of European thought was hostile toward Jews, is it not true that
the West viewed the Middle East in a closed circle of interpretation disconnected from other historical developments.
New ideas that surfaced in intercultural contact undermined a priori assumptions time
after time. Prejudices and stereotypes were endemic but never shaped into an unchangeable united discourse
on the Middle East. In reality, academics who led the discourse often took the lead in undermining
prejudices. Said, concluded Bayly Winder, did to Western scholars of Islam exactly what he accused them of
doing to the Middle East.[28] Said's disregard of the scope and complexity of research on Islam and the Middle East
motivated Rodinson to comment that Said was not familiar enough with the main body of scholarly research on the
Middle East.[29] However, Said's disregarding of this scholarship does not appear to result from a lack of familiarity, but
rather from a political agenda, and the proof of this is that he continued to make his
arguments regarding the monolithic character of Middle Eastern studies
years after publishing this criticism. In order to demonstrate the nature of scholarship as an
instrument of domination Said excoriates scholars of the Middle East for dividing into categories, classifying,
indexing, and documenting "everything in sight (and out of sight)."[30] Does this, asks the Syrian
philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, imply something vicious or is it simply characteristic of all scientific academic
work, essential for a proper understanding of human societies and cultures
altogether?[31] Thus, Said's condemnation of the generalizations made by Western scholars
of the Middle East and his insistence that they study the Arabs and Muslims as individuals made some of his Arab
critics wonder if this meant that it was impossible or unnecessary to study
collective entities. If the inclusion of Marx in Orientalism comes from his lack of attention to individual cases,
added James Clifford rhetorically, perhaps it is simply impossible to form social or
cultural theory, and perhaps there is no room for research fields such as
sociology?[32] Said's over-generalized and non-historic conception of "Orientalism" is at its
most radical when he writes that "every European, in what he could say about the Orient,
was a racist, and imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."[33] According to Nikki Keddie, who was
praised by Said and who found positive points in his book, this argument generally encourages people to believe
Westerners have no right to study the Middle East and insists that only Muslims and Arabs can
investigate correctly Middle Eastern history.[34] Even the doyen of Middle Eastern scholarship of the
Middle East, Albert Hourani, a Christian Arab like Said, shared the feeling that the book might lend support to a Muslim
counter-attack based on the idea that no one understands Islam better than Muslims.[35] While Said denied that this was
his intention,[36] the actual text of the book and the conclusion of many readers belie this assertion. Moreover,
disqualifying all researchers who come outside the examined group--in every area of the world--would put an end to
all serious academic research. It also neglects the fact that outside researchers may have certain
advantages, since as an outsider the scholar might be free from the myths or preconceptions
which insiders share. Said also raises a doubt as to whether anyone can study
(in his words, "represent") any subject in any manner other than in an entirely
subjective way, which is determined by the culture of the scholar-observer. He believes that the unknown, the
exotic, and the foreign have always been perceived, assimilated, and represented in these terms. This leads him
to doubt that any scholarship can even come close to the truth , or in his words,
"whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any or all representations, because they are
representations," are so intertwined with the institutions, language, and culture of the representer to render the truth
impossible.[37] The obvious conclusion from this argument, as Winder and al-Azm show, is that according to Said,
"Orientalism" is inevitable since such distortions are inevitable. If one accepts this argument, however, as al-Azm suggests,
this only means the West was merely doing what all cultures must do: examine other cultures through
the concepts and frameworks it already holds.[38] If this is true, Winder explains,
that everyone who sees the "other" distorts it, then the West is no different
from other cultures, including Islamic culture, which also has a distorted
perspective of the "other." If indeed, Winder wonders, Said demands that Westerners should be
better, does he not accept that they have a certain supremacy, a certain mission that makes them superior? Or should
different criteria apply to the West simply because it was more "successful" than other societies? Thus, Said himself is
promoting a clearly "Orientalist" perspective, accepting and forgiving the "weakness" of
Middle Eastern society. "Westerners," claims Winder, "are not better, but Western science, including
‘Orientalism,' is self-bettering in that it is self-corrective."[39] By determining that all "representations" of the other are by
definition distortions, Said is saying that people can only study themselves, that only Muslims can properly "represent"
Islam. In our experience this has led to a crippling timidity amongst non-Muslim or non-Arab students. While it is good
scholarship to control for bias, Said's influence has made students chary of writing about Islam and the Arabs from a point
of view not necessarily shared by the objects of their research. They give more weight to an Arab or Islamic viewpoint and
are fearful of developing an opinion of their own. ORIENTAL STUDIES AND IMPERIALISM Said's selectivity
drove him to ignore the important intellectual achievement of the German
and Hungarian scholars of the Middle East. According to his argument, "the major steps
in Oriental scholarship were first taken in either Britain and France [sic], then
elaborated upon by Germans."[40] There is no historical basis for this argument. The main reason for his ignoring
research in these countries is that an accurate assessment of it would have undermined his central argument that
Orientalism was integrally linked to imperialism as an expression of the nexus between knowledge and power, and
therefore that Orientalists wished to gain knowledge of the Orient in order
to control it. To support his claims, Said even back-dated the development of British
and French imperialism in the Middle East to the seventeenth century,
which is clearly a historical error. Considering German leadership in
Oriental studies, it is unlikely that they took much from British and French
scholars. No doubt, agrees Bernard Lewis, some of the scholars of the Middle East served
imperialism or gained from it. Yet as an explanation of academic research of the Islamic world as a whole,
this argument is flawed. If the effort to gain power through knowledge is the main
or only motive, why did the study of Arabic and Islam in Europe begin hundred
of years before Western imperialism in the Middle East had appeared even as an ambition? Why did
these studies blossom in European countries that didn't take part in the
European domination effort? Why did scholars invest so much effort in trying to decipher
or study the monuments of the ancient East which
had no political value and were forgotten even by
the local people? The
importance of the German and Hungarian scholars was
tremendous in terms of their contribution to Middle East scholarship, even
though they were not residents of countries with any imperialist interest in the
region, and therefore the connection between power and knowledge did not exist in this case, sums up Lewis. [41] Said
also ignored the fact that many scholars opposed imperialism , and therefore the
connection he creates between their academic works and imperialism is forced . Edmond Burke, like Said,
criticizes Oriental studies scholars who at the start of the twentieth century dealt with minor issues: "studies on obscure
manuscripts, folk traits, rural sufism and popular religion," instead of dealing with topics he considered to be more
important, such as study of the national movements that developed in the region.[42] Yet again, if these scholars were so
"impractical," then obviously their studies had to do more with a search for knowledge rather than an effort to help
imperialism. Ironically, if they had been as Said and Burke would have them, they would have focused on precisely the
issues Burke criticizes them for ignoring. It appears then that many of Said's "Orientalists" actually pursued
knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Said cannot have it both ways,
complaining that scholars of
Islam and the Middle East dealt with the trivial and at the same time
asserting they were agents of imperialistic domination. In addition if there were any
researchers who participated in an "academic effort to embalm Islam," to use Said's words, these were the Germans, but
this was not because of imperialism. This was rather due to their more comprehensive approach to the study of cultures,
which they applied to their own society as well. It is very likely, writes Emmanuel Sivan, that if the Germans had been
involved in the imperialist effort, they would have been more conscious of Islam being a living and dynamic tradition.
Actually, the British and the French, who imitated the Germans, could not afford to be pure classicists because of their
country's imperialist demands. They studied Islam as a living civilization. Sivan concludes that the reality of the situation
was much more complicated and ironic than that presented by Said.[43] While Said disregarded German Middle Eastern
studies scholars because they were not connected to imperialism, if he had taken the time to examine their work, he would
have discovered that many saw Islam and the Middle East in all its variety, without essentializing.[44] Al-Azm raises
another issue, namely, the problematic cause and effect connection that Said makes between Orientalism as a cultural-
social phenomenon and imperialism. It is impossible to avoid the impression, al-Azm remarks, that for Said the presence
of observers, administrators, and intruders in the Middle East--such as Napoleon, Cromer, and Balfour--had become
inevitable and actually was caused by literary and intellectual Orientalism. Therefore, according to Said, we can
understand better the political inclinations and the aspirations of European imperialists if we turn to literary figures,
among them Barth?lemy d'Herbelot and Dante Alighieri, rather than if we actually explore strategic and economical
interests.[45] Another difficulty in Said's approach of connecting academic research to imperialism
lays, according to Halliday, in the assumption that if ideas come to the world in
circumstances of domination or even directly in the service of the dominator, they are not
valid. Yet according the Halliday, trying to subdue a land requires producing as accurate an image as possible of it.
For example, French ethnographers serving French imperialism in North Africa
did not necessarily produce worthless research, as Said would have his
readers believe. On the contrary, in order for the studies of those academic
researchers to serve the French, they had to be accurate. "To put it bluntly," writes
Halliday, "if you want to rob a bank, you would be well advised to have a pretty
accurate map if its layout....."[46] An ironic twist to the connection between political establishments and
scholarship was visible after Martin Kramer's fierce attack against the American academy for identifying with Said's
Orientalism critique. Kramer argued that Middle Eastern studies were so compromised by Said's world view that they
should no longer receive U.S. government aid. Said's supporters, who in the past had attacked the connection between
academic research and the political establishment, were quite alarmed at the notion. In effect they were arguing that the
large amounts of monies their institutions took from the government did not undermine their intellectual independence,
even as many of them characterized U.S. policy as imperialistic. Clearly, they do not really
believe that a connection with the political establishment, even an "imperialistic" one,
has any effect on their own research. Yet if that is so, then government funding does
not necessarily influence academic discourse. If this is true of today, it might well be true of the
past as well, despite Said's critique.
 AT: Chow
Zero risk of their Chow impact---instrumental knowledge
production doesn’t cause violence and discursive criticism could
never solve it anyway
Ken Hirschkop 7, Professor of English and Rhetoric at the University of Waterloo, July 25, 2007, “On Being
Difficult,” Electronic Book Review, online: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/transitive
This defect - not being art - is one that theory should prolong and celebrate, not remedy. For the most
egregious error Chow makes is to imagine that obstructing
instrumentalism is somehow a desirable and effective route for left-wing
politics . The case against instrumentalism is made in depth in the opening chapter, which
argues with reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that "[t]he dropping of the atomic bombs
effected what Michel Foucault would call a major shift in epistemes, a fundamental change in the organization, production
and circulation of knowledge" (33). It initiates the "age of the world target" in which war
becomes virtualized and knowledge militarized, particularly under the aegis of so-called "area
studies". It's hard not to see this as a Pacific version of the notorious argument that the Gulag and/or the Holocaust reveal
the exhaustion of modernity. And the first thing one has to say is that this interpretation of war as no
longer "the physical, mechanical struggles between combative oppositional
groups" (33), as now transformed into a matter technology and vision , puts
Chow in some uncomfortable intellectual company : like that of Donald
Rumsfeld, whose recent humiliation is a timely reminder that wars continue
to depend on the deployment of young men and women in fairly traditional
forms of battle. Pace Chow, war can indeed be fought, and fought successfully, "without the skills of playing video
games" (35) and this is proved, with grim results, every day. But it's the title of this new epoch - the title of the book as well
- that truly gives the game away. Heidegger's "Age of the World Picture" claimed that the
distinguishing phenomena of what we like to call modernity - science, machine technology,
secularization, the autonomy of art and culture - depended, in the last instance, on a particular
metaphysics, that of the "world conceived of and grasped as a picture", as something prepared, if you
like, for the manipulations of the subject . Against this vision of "sweeping global instrumentalism"
Heidegger set not Mallarmé, but Hölderlin, and not just Hölderlin, but also "reflection", i.e., Heidegger's own philosophy.
It's a philosophical reprise of what Francis Mulhern has dubbed "metaculture", the discourse in which culture is invoked
as a principle of social organization superior to the degraded machinations of "politics", degraded machinations which, at
the time he was composing this essay, had led Heidegger to lower his expectations of what National Socialism might
In the fog of metaphysics , every actually existing nation - America, the
achieve.
Soviet Union, Germany - looks just as grey, as does every conceivable form
of politics. For the antithesis of the "world picture" is not a more just
democratic politics, but no politics at all , and it is hard to see how this
stance can serve as the starting point for a political critique . If Chow decides to
pursue this unpromising path anyhow, it is probably because turning exploitation, military
conquest and prejudice into so many epiphenomena of a metaphysical
"instrumentalism" grants philosophy and poetry a force and a role in
revolutionising the world that would otherwise seem extravagant. Or it would do, if
"instrumentalism" was, as Chow claims a "demotion of language", if language was somehow more at home exulting in its
own plenitude than merely referring to things. Poor old language. Apparently ignored for centuries, it only receives its due
when poststructuralists force us to acknowledge it. In their hands, "language flexes its muscles and breaks the chains of its
hitherto subordination to thought" and, as a consequence, "those who pursue poststructuralist theory in the critical
writings find themselves permanently at war with those who expect, and insist on, the transparency - that is, the
invisibility - of language as a tool of communication" (48). We have been down this road before and will no doubt go down
it again. In fact, it's fair to say this particular journey has become more or less the daily commute of critical theory, though
few have thought it ought to be described in such openly military terms. There is good reason, however, to think
Chow's chosen route will lead not to the promised land of resistance and
emancipation, but to more Sisyphean frustration . In fact, there are several good reasons.
 AT: Global War
Global war does not result from a Western desire for control---it
results from lack of clearly defined strategic imperatives---the
aff is necessary to reclaim the political
David Chandler 9 , Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Westminster, War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War', Security Dialogue
2009; 40; 243
Western governments appear to portray some of the distinctive characteristics that Schmitt attributed to ‘motorized
partisans’, in that the shift from narrowly strategic concepts of security to more
abstract concerns reflects the fact that Western states have tended to fight
free-floating and non-strategic wars of aggression without real enemies at
the same time as professing to have the highest values and the absolute
enmity that accompanies these. The government policy documents and critical frameworks of
‘global war’ have been so accepted that it is assumed that it is the strategic
interests of Western actors that lie behind the often irrational policy
responses, with ‘global war’ thereby being understood as merely the
extension of instrumental struggles for control. This perspective seems
unable to contemplate the possibility that it is the lack of a strategic desire
for control that drives and defines ‘global’ war today. ¶ Very few studies of
the ‘war on terror’ start from a study of the Western actors themselves rather than
from their declarations of intent with regard to the international sphere itself.
This methodological framing inevitably makes assumptions about strategic
interactions and grounded interests of domestic or international regulation and control, which are
then revealed to explain the proliferation of enemies and the abstract and
metaphysical discourse of the ‘war on terror’ (Chandler, 2009a). For its radical
critics, the abstract, global discourse merely reveals the global intent of the
hegemonizing designs of biopower or neoliberal empire, as critiques of
liberal projections of power are ‘scaled up’ from the international to the global.¶ Radical critics working
within a broadly Foucauldian problematic have no problem grounding global war in the needs of neoliberal or biopolitical governance or US
hegemonic designs. These
critics have produced numerous frameworks, which seek to assert
that global war is somehow inevitable, based on their view of the needs of
late capitalism, late modernity, neoliberalism or biopolitical frameworks of
rule or domination. From the declarations of global war and practices of military intervention, rationality, instrumentality and
strategic interests are read in a variety of ways (Chandler, 2007). Global war is taken very much on its own terms, with the declarations of
Western governments explaining and giving power to radical abstract theories of the global power and regulatory might of the new global
order of domination, hegemony or empire¶ The
alternative reading of ‘global war’ rendered
here seeks to clarify that the declarations of global war are a sign of the lack
of political stakes and strategic structuring of the international sphere
rather than frameworks for asserting global domination . We increasingly
see Western diplomatic and military interventions presented as justified on the basis of value-
based declarations, rather than in traditional terms of interest-based
outcomes. This was as apparent in the wars of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia,
Somalia and Kosovo – where there was no clarity of objectives and therefore little possibility of strategic planning in terms of the military
intervention or the post-conflict political outcomes – as
it is in the ‘war on terror’ campaigns, still
ongoing, in Afghanistan and Iraq. ¶ There would appear to be a direct
relationship between the lack of strategic clarity shaping and structuring
interventions and the lack of political stakes involved in their outcome. In fact,
the globalization of security discourses seems to reflect the lack of political
stakes rather than the urgency of the security threat or of the intervention.
Since the end of the Cold War, the central problematic could well be grasped
as one of withdrawal and the emptying of contestation from the
international sphere rather than as intervention and the contestation for
control. The disengagement of the USA and Russia from sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans forms the backdrop to the policy
debates about sharing responsibility for stability and the management of failed or failing states (see, for example, Deng et al., 1996). It is
the lack of political stakes in the international sphere that has meant that
the latter has become more open to ad hoc and arbitrary interventions as
states and international institutions use the lack of strategic imperatives to construct
their own meaning through intervention . As Zaki Laïdi (1998: 95) explains:¶ war is not waged necessarily
to achieve predefined objectives, and it is in waging war that the motivation needed to continue it is found. In these cases – of which there
are very many – war
is no longer a continuation of politics by other means , as in
Clausewitz’s classic model – but sometimes the
initial expression of forms of activity or
organization in search of meaning. . . . War becomes not the ultimate means
to achieve an objective, but the most ‘efficient’ way of finding one. ¶ The lack
of political stakes in the international sphere would appear to be the
precondition for the globalization of security discourses and the ad hoc
and often arbitrary decisions to go to ‘war’. In this sense, global wars reflect the
fact that the international sphere has been reduced to little more than a
vanity mirror for globalized actors who are freed from strategic necessities
and whose concerns are no longer structured in the form of political
struggles against ‘real enemies ’. The mainstream critical approaches to
global wars, with their heavy reliance on recycling the work of Foucault, Schmitt and Agamben, appear to invert
this reality, portraying the use of military firepower and the implosion of
international law as a product of the high stakes involved in global struggle,
rather than the lack of clear contestation involving the strategic
accommodation of diverse powers and interests .
 AT: Prolif “racist”
This conflation of borders and race is co-opted to justify actual
racism.
Bizwas 1 – Prof @ Whitman, Shampa, “"Nuclear apartheid" as political position: race as a postcolonial resource?”,
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Oct-Dec, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3225/is_4_26/ai_n28886584/?
tag=content;col1
Where does that leave us with the question of "nuclear apartheid"? As persuasive as the nuclear-apartheid
argument may be at pointing to one set of global exclusions, its complicity in the production of
boundaries that help sustain a whole other set of exclusions also makes it
suspect. It is precisely the resonances of the concept of apartheid, and the strong visceral response it
generates, that gives it the ability to bound and erase much more effectively. In one
bold move, the nuclear-apartheid argument announces the place of nuclear weaponry as
the arbiter of global power and status, and how its inaccessibility or unavailability to a
racialized Third World relegates it forever to the dustheap of history. It thus makes it
possible for "Indians" to imagine themselves as a "community of resistance." However, with
that same stroke, the nuclear-apartheid position creates and sustains yet another racialized
hierarchy, bringing into being an India that is exclusionary and oppressive. And it is precisely
the boldness of this racial signifier that carries with it the ability to erase, mask, and
exclude much more effectively. In the hands of the BJP, the "nuclear apartheid" position
becomes dangerous--because the very boldness of this racial signifier makes it possible
for the BJP to effect closure on its hegemonic vision of the Hindu/Indian nation . Hence, this
article has argued, in taking seriously the racialized exclusions revealed by the use of the "nuclear apartheid" position at the
international level, one must simultaneously reveal another set of racialized exclusions effected by the BJP in consolidating its
hold on state power. I have argued that comprehending the force and effect of the invocation of "race" through the nuclear-
apartheid position means to understand this mutually constitutive co-construction of racialized domestic and international
hierarchical orders.
2AC Neolib
Perm
 Regulated Capitalism
The permutation also creates regulated capitalism—that allows
the benefits of capitalism while regulating the harms—their
indicts don’t apply
Melancon 11--history at Southeastern Oklahoma State University[Glenn, “Concentrated Power: Why We Need
Regulated Capitalism”, NOVEMBER 23, 2011, http://www.glennmelancon.com/?p=94\]RMT
Before the Great Depression the federal government let corporations grow relatively
unchecked. It was a free market paradise. No minimum wage. No workers’ compensation plans. No unemployment tax.
No bookkeeping rules. No environmental laws. No safety regulations. If the free market myth were true, then this era
should have been the greatest time in American history. It wasn’t. The Great Depression and the
New Deal brought
this corporate paradise to end. President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew unregulated capitalism hurts average
Americans. He decided to limit the power of corporations. They had to open their books to investors. Companies had to
deal honestly with labor unions. They had to pay taxes. Businesses had to pay their workers better. Did the American
economy crash? No. In fact regulated capitalism laid the foundation for the post war economic boom.
After World War Two the federal government took an even larger role in the economy. It provided
veterans with housing, education and health benefits. The federal government built the interstate
highway system. It invested in aerospace, nuclear and computer technologies. Federal
regulations required the automobile industry to improve safety and fuel efficiency . Industries
were forced to stop polluting our air and water. The free marketeers screamed in protest. Liberals were
destroying America. Socialists were punishing the successful. Capitalists would go on strike and bring the
economy to a standstill. Luckily, no one listened to these Chicken Littles. The sky didn’t fall. In fact
regulated capitalism produced the world’s largest middle class . Unfortunately, the
oil crisis of the 1970s opened the door for the Chicken Littles to gain power. Slowly and methodically the corporation elite
reasserted their hold on political power. The geniuses on Wall Street started selling snake oil again-Free Trade, electricity
deregulation and the grand daddy of them all, banking deregulation. They told us that the “market” would regulate itself
and no one would be hurt. Boy, were they wrong. American jobs moved overseas. Electricity prices went through the roof.
In 2008 American families lost $11 trillion worth of assets, setting them back by four years. Now what do we do? Do we
turn to the arsonist and say, “Are you an expert firefighter too?” No, we don’t. Can the free market and more deregulation
magically fix the current financial mess? No, it can’t. We need to return to sensible regulations that check excessive
corporate power. There is overwhelming bi-partisan support for this approach. Trade deals need to be fair, protecting
American workers and the environment. We need affordable consumer technology to produce energy locally and allow for
greater efficiency. Healthcare insurance needs to be affordable for all Americans. Stockholders need a greater say in
executive pay and long-term planning. Finally, hedge funds need to disclose their secret deals that threaten us all. Change
will not be easy. It never is. Chicken Little will be screaming the whole time. The sky will not fall. We’re Americans. We’ve
been in situations like this before. If we learn from our past successes and failures, we can effectively limit corporate
excess and create sustained economic growth. Our founding fathers would be proud that we too learned the lesson that
concentrated power hurts society and that we found a way to dilute it.
 State Good
The permutation allows the alt to be implemented via the state
based method of the 1AC—reforming the state is the only way to
challenge neolib.

Small movements cant overcome elite backlash and a lack of

popularity
Gordon 12 (PhD from Oxford, teaches environmental politics and ethics at the Arava Institute for Environmental
Studies) 12 (Uri, Anarchist Economics in Practice in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 215)
On the one hand, the anarchist movement is so small that even its most consistent
and visible efforts are but a drop in the ocean. On the other hand, political elites have
proven themselves extremely proficient at pulling the ground from under
movements for social change, be it through direct repression and
demonization of the activists, diversion of public attention to security and
nationalist agendas, or, at best, minimal concessions that ameliorate the most
exploitative aspects of capitalism while contributing to the resilience of the
system as a whole. It would seem that ethical commitments to social justice and the
enhancement of human freedom can only serve as a motivation for a
comparatively small number of people, and that without the presence of genuine
material interests among large sections of the population there is little hope
for a mass movement to emerge that would herald the departure from existing
social, economic, and political arrangements.
 Squo Solves
Neolib collapse is coming now
Li 8 [(Minqi, Chinese political economist, world-systems analyst, and historical
social scientist, currently an associate professor of Economics at the University of
Utah) “An Age of Transition: The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise
of Neoliberalism” Monthly Review 2008, Volume 59, Issue 11 (April)] AT
On February 1, Immanuel Wallerstein, the leading world system theorist, in his biweekly commentaries
pronounced the year 2008 to be the year of the “Demise of the Neoliberal
Globalization.” Wallerstein begins by pointing out that throughout the history of the
capitalist world-system, the ideas of free market capitalism with minimal government
intervention and the ideas of state regulated capitalism with some social protection have been in
fashion in alternating cycles. In response to the worldwide profit stagnation in the 1970s, neoliberalism
became politically dominant in the advanced capitalist countries, in the periphery, and eventually in the former socialist
bloc. However, neoliberalism failed to deliver its promise of economic growth,
and as the global inequalities surged, much of the world population suffered from declines in real
incomes. After the mid-1990s, neoliberalism met with growing resistance throughout the world
and many governments have been under pressure to restore some state
regulation and social protection. Confronted with economic crisis, the Bush administration has
simultaneously pursued a further widening of inequality at home and unilateral
imperialism abroad. These policies have by now failed decisively. As the United
States can no longer finance its economy and imperialist adventure with
increasingly larger foreign debt, the U.S. dollar, Wallerstein believes, faces the prospect of
a free fall and will cease to be the world’s reserve currency. Wallerstein concludes:
“The political balance is swinging back ….The real question is not whether this phase is over but
whether the swing back will be able, as in the past, to restore a state of relative equilibrium in the world-system. Or has too
much damage been done? And are we now in for more violent chaos in the world-economy and therefore in the world-
system as a whole?”9 Following Wallerstein’s arguments, in the coming years we are likely to witness a
major realignment of global political and economic forces. There will be an
upsurge in the global class struggle over the direction of the global social
transformation. If we are in one of the normal cycles of the capitalist world-system, then toward the end of the
current period of instability and crisis, we probably will observe a return to the dominance of Keynesian or state capitalist
policies and institutions throughout the world.
Neolib Good
 TL Neolib Good
Neoliberalism solves the environment, poverty, and growth
worldwide – we control uniqueness
Goklany 07 (Indur Golanky is an independent scholar who has more than 25 years of experience working and
writing on global and national environmental issues. He has published several peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on
an array of issues including air pollution, climate change, biodiversity, the role of technology and economic growth in
creating, as well as solving, environmental problems, and the impact of international environmental regimes on people
living in less-developed countries, 03-23-2007 The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier,
More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet)
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. Despite all of this progress and good news, then, there is
still much unfinished business. Millions of people die from hunger, malnutrition, and preventable disease such as malaria,
tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Over a billion people still live in absolute poverty, defined as less than a dollar per day. A third
of the world’s eligible population is still not enrolled in secondary school. Barriers to globalization, economic
development, and technological change—such as the use of DDT to eradicate malaria, genetic engineering, and
biotechnology—are a big source of the problem. Moreover, the global population will grow 50 percent to 100 percent this
century, and per capita consumption of energy and materials will likely increase with wealth. Merely preserving the status
quo is not enough. We need to protect the important sustaining institutions
responsible for all of this progress in the developed world, and we need to foster and
nurture them in countries that are still developing.  Man’s remarkable progress over the last 100 years is unprecedented in
human history. It’s also one of the more neglected big-picture stories. Ensuring that our incredible
progress continues will require not only recognizing and appreciating the progress itself, but also
recognizing and preserving the important ideas and institutions that caused it,
and ensuring that they endure.
 Impact D
All indicts of neolib are backwards, there’s no “growth at all
costs” mindset, and the alt makes everything worse
Bourne 1/15—Head of Public Policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs (Ryan, “In defence of rampant
consumerism” dml)
Some worry about the effect of growth and consumption on the
environment, or on economic inequality. For others, it’s the sheer vulgarity of desire for stuff
which perturbs – as evidenced by the backlash against the supposedly barbarous hordes fighting over flat-screen TVs on
the shopping day ‘Black Friday’. But in the public discourse, these views always come together in a predictable narrative:
ever-rising demand for material things, and political obsession with GDP, have caused us to lose sight of what matters –
community, family, and the duties we have to each other. In particular, the replacement over the past three decades of
what Dr Sentamu calls the "solidaristic" state with one which leaves more room for markets is
blamed for
eroding those values and dehumanising the poor. Wouldn’t it be better for
all of us if we placed less emphasis on growth , and instead re-shaped an activist state to target
other concerns? No. Every single one of these claims and hopes are mistaken .

Material advances are crucial to our well-being . Just three centuries ago,
average labourers earned just £2 a day in today’s money. Life was tough. Life expectancy
at birth was 36. Most of the world was equivalent to the poorest parts of
Bangladesh today. At that time it might have been considered materialistic to
desire things that we now take for granted, such as central heating, decent
sanitation and cheap clothes and food. Even in 1973, 2 million people in the UK lived without either an
indoor toilet, a bath or hot running water. It is therefore impossible to draw a line across 2015 and
suggest that our material goals are satisfied and further consumption frivolous.
Even Keynes recognised the folly of those who claim in each generation that we’ve
reached the limits of progress and should simply be content with our lot. Is it ‘consumerist’ to desire the washing
machine, the refrigerator, and the computer, which have all, in so many ways, enriched our lives? Few would wish to
reverse these innovations, and the idea that their development – or desire for
them – created an individualistic, materialistic culture which eroded social
solidarity is difficult to imagine. Far from being frivolous, we can see with hindsight that they
contributed to smashing the poverty and poor hygiene which had hitherto
characterised all human history. In fact, consumerism in itself is a crucial
driver of the innovations that have improved the well-being of the poor.
Their refusal to be satisfied with their lot created the conditions for labour-
saving devices to take off, first here, and now elsewhere. As the economies of developing
countries such as India and China have moved closer to the ‘market’ societies criticised by the
clerisy, what Marx described as the “absolute desire for enrichment” has reduced
poverty to a greater degree than any other economic system known to
humankind . In two decades since 1990 the global rate of absolute poverty
has halved. You’d be hard-pushed to think these results were somehow
immoral. But clergy in rich countries only see what they want to see. While denouncing the desire
for expensive gadgets, they ignore how wealth is used for philanthropic and
charitable causes – and all the future good that could come from consumer
products, from “stuff”. We can imagine a world where new gadgets allow old people
who are ill to stay with their families, monitored by devices rather than confined in
hospital, or one where even the poorest can access the expertise of the world’s
best teachers. If the clerisy’s agenda was just an articulated distaste for the desire for possessions, it would be one
thing. But their generalised denunciations of consumerism and growth in
themselves are increasingly becoming a demand for new government action. In particular,
many now suggest we should give up on ‘going for growth’ altogether, and instead embrace so-called
"solidaristic" aims, such as reducing inequality. These are more commonly understood as
"socialistic". This view is dangerous, and based on a falsehood. No government

ever has had the aim of maximising GDP above all . Were they doing so, we
would have much smaller government, huge tax cuts, no planning system,
no carbon-reduction targets, legalised drugs, no immigration controls
whatsoever and extremely limited regulation. Suggesting growth at all costs
has been the mantra of recent governments is to erect a giant straw man
[ person ]. Every government recognises values beyond the market. Yet it is
precisely when governments pursue other aims that their actions detriment the poor whom the clerisy purport to
represent. Planning restrictions have raised house prices. Green taxes have raised energy bills. Childcare regulations have
made it much more expensive. Sin taxes have been jacked up. All of these regressive measures hit the poor hardest. In any
case, inequality is not a useful measure of anything . You can have more
equality by having fewer rich people, but doing so does nothing to help
reduce poverty - in fact, it worsens it . Living standards are what matters ,
and all the evidence shows they are far higher in free enterprise economies
than in highly socialistic ones. Over time, their growth is faster, and their
labour markets perform better. Compare unemployment rates here or in the US to
Greece or Spain. Compare our growth in the last two decades to that of Chile
to Venezuela. Compare China now to China two decades ago. Nor does a
socialistic state guarantee social harmony; think of Britain in the 1970s, or
Venezuela today. Ironically for the clerisy, if anything is to blame for individualism and a dehumanisation of the
poor, then it is the rise of the welfare state which they now want to strengthen. Whereas civil society institutions like
friendly societies, trade unions and charitable organisations flourished prior to 1945, embedded in communities, the
centralised bureaucratic welfare state has now usurped them. This state provides essential services irrespective of
contribution and without reciprocity; it tells those in need to take a cheque and get on with it. This, too, drives
consumerism: state provision of health, education and pensions means less need to save and more money spent in
consumption of life’s luxuries. Money may not be everything. Relationships, our conduct toward our fellow beings, and all
the non-market actions we take to assist our friends and families are crucial to our well-being. But the desire for
enrichment is a natural human ambition, and the best way to achieve it in
future is to embrace precisely the values and economic liberty which enable
robust economic growth - and which the anti-consumerist, anti-growth
brigade lament. Conversely, a bigger state, and a turn away from growth, risks hurting
the people the clerisy claim to support. It is very rarely those at the bottom of the pile
who moan about an abundance of stuff.
 Solves Poverty/Growth
Neoliberalism solves poverty and conflict
Nagle 10 [John, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, September 1, “Nostrum or Palliative?
Contesting the Capitalist Peace in Violently Divided Societies,” pg. 23/AKG]
In this paper we have examined some of the normative assumptions underpinning the so-called ‘capitalist’ or ‘neoliberal’
peace. In essence, a body of theorists has turned away from the claim that the spread of democracy axiomatically
generates peace in violently divided societies. 99 The transition from an authoritarian state to one that advances free and
fair elections, it is claimed, can provoke a period of intense fragility characterised by extreme violence. On the other hand,
commentators posit that opening
up a state to economic liberal reform , like
encouraging entrepreneurialism, fostering economic interdependence
between states, privatising industry, promoting competitive market
structures and property rights, is highly conducive to peace. 100 Certainly, it is clear
that extreme poverty undergirds many ethnic conflicts, lowering the costs of
insurgents to mobilise and obstructing the ability of the state to adequately deal
with violent mobilisation. Bolstering the state’s economic performance and
raising levels of prosperity may thus be vital weapons in the fight against
ethnic violence. It is also evident that divided societies characterised by a top-heavy
public sector replete with the duplication of public resources have poor performing economies
that are the focus for distributive conflicts. Resizing the economy to create a more
sustainable balance between the private and public sector may, therefore, be complementary with
peacebuilding in some circumstances.
 Environment
Privatizing the environment solves environmental destruction
Adler 5 - JONATHAN ADLER Prof. of environmental law at Case Western, writes for the Case research series:
[“Back to the Future of Conservation: Changing Perceptions of Property Rights & Environmental Protection” Case
Research Paper Series in Legal Studies Working Paper 05-16, July 2005]
The problem with the dominant approach to environmental policy is its reliance upon
centralized political mechanisms. The limitations of such mechanisms-whether regulations,
fiscal instruments, or direct management of environmental resources-hamper the effectiveness of existing
environmental programs. As environmental problems become ever more complex, these limitations will only become
more severe. The answer is not greater government control or manipulation of the marketplace,
but a greater reliance upon property rights and voluntary arrangements. By
encouraging a more efficient use of resources, responsible stewardship, and technological
innovation, property rights in environmental resources provide a sounder
foundation for the advancement of environmental values than the modem
regulatory state.¶ Property-based environmental protection- commonly referred to as "free market environmentalism" 60 or
"FME"- rejects the "market failure" model. "Rather than viewing the world in terms of market failure, we should view the
problem of externalities as a failure to permit markets and create markets where they do not
yet - or no longer - exist." 61 Where environmental problems are most severe it is typically a lack
of markets, in particular a lack of enforceable and exchangeable property rights, that is to blame.
Resources that are privately owned or managed and therefore are incorporated into market institutions are
typically well-maintained. Environmental problems, therefore, are "essentially
property rights problems" which are solved by the extension , definition, and defense of
property rights in environmental resources. 62¶ Resources that are unowned or politically controlled,
on the other hand, are more apt to be inadequately managed. In his seminal essay on the [a] "tragedy of the commons," Garrett Hardin gave
an illustration of this principle, stating that there
is no incentive for any individual to protect the
commonly owned grazing pasture in a rural village. Indeed, it is in every shepherd's self-
interest to have his herd overgraze the pasture and before any other herd. Every shepherd who
acquires additional livestock gains the benefits of a larger herd, while the cost of overusing the pasture is spread across all members of the
village. The
benefits of increased use are concentrated, while the costs are
dispersed. Inevitably, the consequence is an overgrazed pasture, and everyone loses. The shepherd with foresight, who anticipates
that the pasture will become barren in the future, will not exercise forbearance. Quite the opposite: he will have the added incentive to
overgraze now to capture gains that otherwise would be lost. Refusing to add another animal to one's own herd does not change the
incentive of every other shepherd to do so. The world's fisheries offer a[n] contemporary example of the tragedy of the commons. Because
oceans are unowned, nofishing fleet has an incentive to conserve or replenish the fish it takes, but each has every incentive to take as many
fish as possible lest the benefits of a larger catch go to someone else.64¶ Efforts
to control access through
prescriptive regulations do relatively little to change this equation.0 Shorten the fishing
season, and the fishing merely becomes more intense. Limit the use of
certain gear, and fishermen will simply employ more hands to maximize the
catch. Private ownership overcomes the commons problem because owners can
prevent overuse by controlling access to the resource. As Hardin noted, " The
tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property , or something
formally like it."66 In the case of fisheries, the creation of property rights, whether in fisheries themselves or portions of a given catch,
promotes sustainable fishing practices.' With
property rights, the incentives faced by fishing
fleets are aligned with the long-term sustainability of the underlying
resource. As conservation scholar R.J. Smith explains: Wherever we have exclusive private
ownership, whether it is organized around a profit-seeking or nonprofit undertaking, there are incentives for
the private owners to preserve the resource .... [P]rivate ownership allows the
owner to capture the full capital value of the resource, and self-interest and
economic incentive drive the owner to maintain its long-term capital value.0¶ For
incentives to work, the property right to a resource must be definable,
defendable, and divestible. Where property rights are insecure, owners are less
likely to invest in improving or protecting a resource. In many tropical nations, for
example, the lack of secure property rights encourages deforestation as there is
no incentive to maintain forest land, let alone invest in replanting. 69 Where existing
environmental regulations undermine the security of property rights, they
discourage conservation . The foremost example of this is the ESA, which effectively punishes
private landowners for owning habitat of endangered species by restricting land-use. As
Sam Hamilton, former Fish and Wildlife Service administrator for the State of Texas, noted, " The incentives are wrong
here. If I have a rare metal on my property, its value goes up. But if a rare bird
occupies the land, its value disappears."" This economic reality creates a
powerful incentive for landowners to destroy present or potential habitat on
private land. Thus, in North Carolina, timber owners are dramatically shortening their
cutting rotations and cutting trees at a much younger age-at significant economic cost-so as to avoid
regulatory proscriptions that could force them to lose their investments
altogether.'

Neoliberalism solves environmental collapse.

Taylor 01 American businessman and the head of a privately held multinational company, Professor Christmann
specializes in research of the global economy (Petra and Glen, Globalization and the environment: Determinants of firm
self-regulation in China. Journal of International business studies, 32(3), 439-458, ABI/INFORM
In contrast, globalization proponents contend that lower barriers to trade and foreign investment encourage firms to transfer
environmental technologies and managemement systems from countries with stricter environmental standards to developing
Governmental failure to
countries, which lack access to environmental technologies and capabilities (Drezner, 2000).
protect the environment, it is suggested in this line of argument, might also be ameliorated through
self-regulation of environmental performance by firms in developing countries. Self-regulation refers
to a firm’s adoption of environmental performance standards or environmental management systems (EMS) beyond the
requirements of governmental regulations. Globalization can increase self-regulation pressures in
several ways. First, globalization increases MNEs’ investment in developing countrie s where
their subsidiaries can be expected to self-regulate their environmental performance more than domestic firms do. MNEs can
transfer the more advanced environmental technologies and management systems
developed in response to more stringent regulations in developed countries to their
subsidiaries. MNEs also face pressures from interest groups to improve their worldwide environmental performance.
Second, globalization might contribute to environmental performance as a supplier-
selection criterion, which also pressures domestic firms in developing countries to
self-regulate environmental performance…Globalization does not necessarily have negative effects on the
environment in developing countries to the extend suggested by the pollution-haven and industrial-flight hypotheses. Our study
suggests that globalization
increases institutional and consumer pressures on firms to
surpass local requirements, even when they may be tempted by lax regulations and enforcement in countries
offering themselves as pollution havens (Hoffman, 1999; Rugman and Verbeke, 1998).

Neoliberalism solves the environment – localism will fail.

Chen, 2K, Jim, Professor of Law University of Minnesota Law School, November/December, 2000 Fordham
International Law Journal, PAX MERCATORIA: GLOBALIZATION AS A SECOND CHANCE AT "PEACE FOR OUR
TIME, 24 Fordham Int'l L.J. 217, Lexis
"Across-the-board globalism"
is the best way of coordinating free trade and environmental
protection as "complementary" policies. Admittedly, simultaneously advocating free trade and environmental
integrity typically earns a deluxe suite at the "very small hotel" that will be hosting the next "global convention of rabid free trade
environmentalists." Yet this jarring juxtaposition is unavoidable in a world of falling frontiers. The creation
of
"transboundary communities" causes "environmental interconnection" and in turn
the "inevitable" abandonment of "localism in all spheres." Strictly localist solutions
will not suffice; "haphazard local encouragement" cannot replace coordinated responses
to "diffuse, cross-jurisdictional" problems such as mobile source emissions and
nonpoint-source runoff.
 A2 Sustainability
Sustainability impacts are bad science – no basis for running
into tech barriers
Matt Ridley, visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, former science editor of The Economist, and
award-winning science writer, 14 (“The World's Resources Aren't Running Out,” April 25, 2014,
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156.html)
"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will
grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for
Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).
But here's a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again .
After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone.
Ecologists call this "niche construction" —that people (and indeed some other animals) can
create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive
in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature's bounty and
substituted an artificial and much larger bounty. Economists call the same phenomenon
innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter's tendency to think in terms of
static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out,
petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes
along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls. That frustration is heartily
reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of
superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest
way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. I have lived among
both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then
worked at the Economist magazine for eight years . When I was an ecologist (in the academic
sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the
carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because
we can invent new ways of doing more with less. This disagreement goes to the heart of many
current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the
climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere's
capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic
growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic
growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-
carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does
much harm. It is striking, for example, that the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change's recent forecast that temperatures would rise by 3.7 to 4.8
degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels by 2100 was based on several assumptions: little technological change,
an end to the 50-year fall in population growth rates, a tripling (only) of per
capita income and not much improvement in the energy efficiency of the
economy. Basically, that would mean a world much like today's but with lots more people burning lots more coal and
oil, leading to an increase in emissions. Most economists expect a five- or tenfold increase
in income, huge changes in technology and an end to population growth by 2100: not so many more people needing
much less carbon. In 1679, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist,
estimated that the planet could hold 13.4 billion people , a number that most
demographers think we may never reach. Since then, estimates have bounced around between 1 billion and 100 billion,
with no sign of converging on an agreed figure. Economists point out that we keep improving the
productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanization,
pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upward. Jesse Ausubel at
Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over
the past 50 years, world-wide. Ecologists object that these innovations rely on
nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas, or renewable ones that are
being used up faster than they are replenished, such as aquifers. So current yields cannot be
maintained, let alone improved. In his recent book "The View from Lazy Point," the ecologist Carl Safina estimates that if
everybody had the living standards of Americans, we would need 2.5 Earths because the world's agricultural land just
couldn't grow enough food for more than 2.5 billion people at that level of consumption. Harvard emeritus professor E.O.
Wilson, one of ecology's patriarchs, reckoned that only if we all turned vegetarian could the world's farms grow enough
food to support 10 billion people. Economists respond by saying that since large parts of the world, especially in Africa,
have yet to gain access to fertilizer and modern farming techniques, there is no reason to think that the global land
requirements for a given amount of food will cease shrinking any time soon. Indeed, Mr. Ausubel, together with his
colleagues Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner, came to the startling conclusion that, even with generous assumptions about
population growth and growing affluence leading to greater demand for meat and other luxuries, and with ungenerous
assumptions about future global yield improvements, we will need less farmland in 2050 than we needed in 2000. (So
long, that is, as we don't grow more biofuels on land that could be growing food.) But surely intensification
of yields depends on inputs that may run out? Take water, a commodity that limits the
production of food in many places. Estimates made in the 1960s and 1970s of water demand by the year 2000 proved
grossly overestimated: The world used half as much water as experts had projected 30 years before. The reason
was greater economy in the use of water by new irrigation techniques. Some
countries, such as Israel and Cyprus, have cut water use for irrigation through the use of drip irrigation . Combine
these improvements with solar-driven desalination of seawater world-wide,
and it is highly unlikely that fresh water will limit human population. The
best-selling book "Limits to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome
(an influential global think tank), argued that we would have bumped our heads against
all sorts of ceilings by now, running short of various metals, fuels, minerals
and space. Why did it not happen? In a word, technology : better mining
techniques, more frugal use of materials, and if scarcity causes price increases,
substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times thinner gold plating on
computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel content of cars and
buildings keeps on falling. Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that
natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to
happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining
rain forest to grow food, or starve. But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak
oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the
sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat
west out of a harbor in Ireland . Just as you are likely to stop rowing long
before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes
for fossil fuels long before they run out.
 Heg
Neolib is key to heg
Cafruny 8 (Alan, Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Affairs, PhD, “The Imperial Turn and the Future
of Us Hegemony: Terminal Decline or Retrenchment?” March 25th, 2008)
The role played by U.S. structural financial power in the construction of Europe’s neoliberal project has been analyzed by many
scholars (Helleiner, 1994; Gowan, 1999; Seabrooke, 2001; Baker, 2003); Panitch and Gindin, 2005; Cafruny and Ryner, 2007a; Ryner,
2007). However, the relationship between neoliberalism and geopolitics has received less
attention. In the first part of this chapter I discuss the role of U.S. military power as it has served, in tandem
with U.S. structural financial power, to consolidate the turn to neoliberalism in Europe. Beginning in
the mid-1990s the United States transformed NATO from a containment-oriented and defensive alliance to an instrument designed
to promote the forward expansion of American power across the European continent and into central Asia.
This reinforced Europe’s geopolitical dependence on the United States and buttressed
neoliberal social forces across the continent. In the second part of the chapter I consider the long-range
possibilities for the United States and Europe in view of growing challenges to U.S. power in both its geoeconomic and geopolitical
dimensions. The uncertain status of the dollar is the natural accompaniment to relative industrial decline and the
transnationalization of production even as U.S.
hegemony has been prolonged through financial
deregulation and a resultant series of bubbles. In this context the Bush administration’s policy of geopolitical advance and
militarization, designed in part to maintain its hold over global energy resources, is a compensatory strategy (Harvey, 2003) that has,
however, encountered substantial costs and risks. Notwithstanding the deepening crisis of the U.S. imperium, the possibilities
for a European challenge are sharply circumscribed by its subordinate participation within a U.S.-led
neoliberal transnational financial order and its related inability to develop an autonomous regional security
structure. U.S. power in both its structural financial and military dimensions has been central to the construction and consolidation
of a European neoliberalism. It has not, however, led to transnational class formation or the suppression of inter-imperialist rivalry
either at the Atlantic level or within the European Union. Neoliberal
ideology cements national capitalist
classes together in an organic alliance under a declining but still minimally hegemonic U.S. superpower. From
within the framework of this intersubjective agreement the United States continues to provide collective goods in the form of
liquidity, trade openness, and military security, albeit very much on its own terms as it externalizes its own problems and social
contradictions into the international system. In the eurozone mercantilist rivalry has been displaced from the sphere of national
monetary policy to “structural labor reform” and, intermittently, fiscal policy. AFTER THE COLD WAR: INTERREGNUM AND
RESTORATION OF U.S. COERCIVE SUPREMACY IN EUROPE 3

Extinction
Khalilzad 11 (Zalmay, Former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the UN and Former Director of Policy
Planning @ the DOD, “The Economy and National Security,” February 8 th)
The stakes are high. In modern history, the longest period of peace among the
great powers has been the era of U.S. leadership. By contrast, multi-polar systems
have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and
major wars among the great powers. Failures of multi-polar international systems produced
both world wars. American retrenchment could have devastating
consequences. Without an American security blanket, regional powers could rearm in an
attempt to balance against emerging threats. Under this scenario, there would be a heightened
possibility of arms races, miscalculation, or other crises spiraling into all-
out conflict. Alternatively, in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their
geopolitical posture away from the United States. Either way, hostile states would be emboldened
to make aggressive moves in their regions.
 Neolib Solves War
Globalization lessens the intensity and quantity of wars---best
and most recent studies prove
Julian Adorney 13, economic historian, entrepreneur, and contributor for the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He’s
citing Professor McDonald who teaches courses on international relations theory, international political economy, and
international security at University of Texas at Austin. (, Foundation for Economic Education, “Want Peace? Promote Free
Trade”, 10/15, http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/want-peace-promote-free-trade
if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will." Bastiat argued that
Frédéric Bastiat famously claimed that “

free trade between countries could reduce international conflict because

trade forges connections between nations and gives each country an
incentive to avoid war with its trading partners. If every nation were an
economic island, the lack of positive interaction created by trade could leave
more room for conflict. Two hundred years after Bastiat, libertarians take this idea as gospel. Unfortunately, not
everyone does. But as recent research shows, the historical evidence confirms Bastiat’s
famous claim. To Trade or to Raid In “Peace through Trade or Free Trade?” professor Patrick J.
McDonald, from the University of Texas at Austin, empirically tested whether greater levels of
protectionism in a country (tariffs, quotas, etc.) would increase the probability of international conflict in that
nation. He used a tool called dyads to analyze every country’s international
relations from 1960 until 2000. A dyad is the interaction between one country and another country: German and
French relations would be one dyad, German and Russian relations would be a second, French and Australian relations would be a third. He
further broke this down into dyad-years; the relations between Germany and France in 1965 would be one dyad-year, the relations between
France and Australia in 1973 would be a second, and so on. Using these dyad-years, McDonald
analyzed the
behavior of every country in the world for the past 40 years. His analysis
showed a negative correlation between free trade and conflict: The more
freely a country trades, the fewer wars it engages in. Countries that engage
in free trade are less likely to invade and less likely to be invaded. The Causal Arrow
Of course, this finding might be a matter of confusing correlation for causation .
Maybe countries engaging in free trade fight less often for some other reason, like the fact that they tend also to be more democratic.
Democratic countries make war less often than empires do. But McDonald controls for these variables.
Controlling for a state’s political structure is important, because democracies and republics tend to fight less than authoritarian regimes.
McDonald also controlled for a country’s economic growth, because
countries in a recession are more likely to go to war than those in a boom, often in order to
distract their people from their economic woes. McDonald even controlled for factors like
geographic proximity: It’s easier for Germany and France to fight each other than it is for the United States and China,
because troops in the former group only have to cross a shared border. The takeaway from McDonald’s
analysis is that protectionism can actually lead to conflict. McDonald found
that a country in the bottom 10 percent for protectionism (meaning it is less
protectionist than 90 percent of other countries) is 70 percent less likely to
engage in a new conflict (either as invader or as target) than one in the top
10 percent for protectionism. Protectionism and War Why does protectionism lead to
conflict, and why does free trade help to prevent it? The answers, though well-known to classical
liberals, are worth mentioning. First, trade creates international goodwill. If Chinese and
American businessmen trade on a regular basis, both sides benefit. And mutual
benefit disposes people to look for the good in each other. Exchange of
goods also promotes an exchange of cultures . For decades, Americans saw China as a mysterious
country with strange, even hostile values. But in the 21st century, trade between our nations has increased
markedly, and both countries know each other a little better now . iPod-wielding
Chinese teenagers are like American teenagers, for example. They’re not terribly mysterious. Likewise, the Chinese understand democracy
and American consumerism more than they once did. The
countries may not find overlap in all of
each other’s values, but trade has helped us to at least understand each
other. Trade helps to humanize the people that you trade with. And it’s
tougher to want to go to war with your human trading partners than with a
country you see only as lines on a map. Second, trade gives nations an
economic incentive to avoid war. If Nation X sells its best steel to Nation Y, and its businessmen reap plenty of
profits in exchange, then businessmen on both sides are going to oppose war. This was actually the case with Germany and France right
before World War I. Germany sold steel to France, and German businessmen were firmly opposed to war. They only grudgingly came to
support it when German ministers told them that the war would only last a few short months. German steel had a strong incentive to
oppose war, and if the situation had progressed a little differently—or if the German government had been a little more realistic about the
timeline of the war—that incentive might have kept Germany out of World War I. Third, protectionism
promotes
hostility. This is why free trade, not just aggregate trade (which could be accompanied by high tariffs and quotas),
leads to peace. If the United States imposes a tariff on Japanese
automobiles, that tariff hurts Japanese businesses. It creates hostility in
Japan toward the United States. Japan might even retaliate with a tariff on U.S. steel, hurting U.S. steel makers
and angering our government, which would retaliate with another tariff. Both countries now have an excuse
to leverage nationalist feelings to gain support at home; that makes outright
war with the other country an easier sell, should it come to that. In
socioeconomic academic circles, this is called the Richardson process of
reciprocal and increasing hostilities; the United States harms Japan, which retaliates, causing the United
States to retaliate again. History shows that the Richardson process can easily be applied to
protectionism. For instance, in the 1930s, industrialized nations raised
tariffs and trade barriers; countries eschewed multilateralism and turned
inward. These decisions led to rising hostilities, which helped set World
War II in motion. These factors help explain why free trade leads to peace,
and protectionism leads to more conflict. Free Trade and Peace One final note: McDonald’s
analysis shows that taking a country from the top 10 percent for
protectionism to the bottom 10 percent will reduce the probability of future
conflict by 70 percent. He performed the same analysis for the democracy of a country and showed that taking a country
from the top 10 percent (very democratic) to the bottom 10 percent (not democratic) would only reduce conflict by 30 percent. Democracy
is a well-documented deterrent: The more democratic a country becomes, the less likely it is to resort to international conflict. But
reducing protectionism, according to McDonald, is more than twice as
effective at reducing conflict than becoming more democratic. Here in the United
States, we talk a lot about spreading democracy. We invaded Iraq partly to “spread democracy.” A New York Times op-ed by Professor Dov
Ronen of Harvard University claimed that “the United States has been waging an ideological campaign to spread democracy around the
world” since 1989. One of the justifications for our international crusade is to make the world a safer place. Perhaps we
should
spend a little more time spreading free trade instead. That might really lead
to a more peaceful world.

Neolib solves war

Harrison 11 (Mark, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Centre for Russian and East European
Studies, University of Birmingham, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, “Capitalism at
War”, Oct 19 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/papers/capitalism.pdf)
Capitalism’s Wars America is the world’s preeminent capitalist power. According to a poll of more than 21,000 citizens of
21 countries in the second half of 2008, people tend on average to evaluate U.S. foreign policy as inferior to that of their
own country in the moral dimension. 4 While this survey does not disaggregate respondents by educational status,
many apparently knowledgeable people also seem to believe that, in the modern world,
most wars are caused by America; this impression is based on my experience of presenting work on
the frequency of wars to academic seminars in several European countries. According to the evidence,
however, these beliefs are mistaken. We are all aware of America’s wars, but they
make only a small contribution to the total . Counting all bilateral conflicts
involving at least the show of force from 1870 to 2001, it turns out that the
countries that originated them come from all parts of the global income
distribution (Harrison and Wolf 2011). Countries that are richer, measured by GDP
per head, such as America do not tend to start more conflicts, although there is a
tendency for countries with larger GDPs to do so. Ranking countries by the numbers of
conflicts they initiated, the United States, with the largest economy, comes
only in second place; third place belongs to China. In first place is Russia (the
USSR between 1917 and 1991). What do capitalist institutions contribute to the
empirical patterns in the data? Erik Gartzke (2007) has re-examined the hypothesis of the “democratic
peace” based on the possibility that, since capitalism and democracy are highly correlated
across countries and time, both democracy and peace might be products of
the same underlying cause, the spread of capitalist institutions. It is a problem that
our historical datasets have measured the spread of capitalist property rights and economic
freedoms over shorter time spans or on fewer dimensions than political variables. For the period from 1950 to 1992,
Gartzke uses a measure of external financial and trade liberalization as most likely to signal robust markets and a laissez
faire policy. Countries that share this attribute of capitalism above a certain
level, he finds, do not fight each other, so there is capitalist peace as well as
democratic peace. Second, economic liberalization (of the less liberalized of the pair of countries)
is a more powerful predictor of bilateral peace than democratization,
controlling for the level of economic development and measures of political
affinity.

Neoliberalism checks war through interdependence and

democracy
Griswold 6 director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute [Daniel T. Griswold, , 2006 CATO
Institute, Peace on earth? Try free trade among men, http://www.freetrade.org/node/282)]
First, trade and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy,
and democracies don't pick fights with each other. Freedom to trade nurtures democracy by
expanding the middle class in globalizing countries and equipping people with tools of communication such as cell
phones, satellite TV, and the Internet. With trade comes more travel, more contact with people in other countries, and
more exposure to new ideas. Thanks in part to globalization, almost two thirds of the world's countries today are
democracies -- a record high. Second, as national economies become more integrated with
each other, those nations have more to lose should war break out . War in a
globalized world not only means human casualties and bigger government, but also ruptured trade and investment ties
that impose lasting damage on the economy. In short, globalization has dramatically raised the
economic cost of war. Third, globalization allows nations to acquire wealth
through production and trade rather than conquest of territory and
resources. Increasingly, wealth is measured in terms of intellectual property, financial assets, and human capital.
Those are assets that cannot be seized by armies. If people need resources outside their
national borders, say oil or timber or farm products, they can acquire them peacefully by
trading away what they can produce best at home.
 Disease
Growth and globalization are key to solve enables diffusion of
good health practices and knowledge globally that prevent
outbreaks
Mahmoud et al 6 – Adel Mahmoud, Senior Molecular Biologist in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs at Princeton University, former President of Merck Vaccines, et al., 2006, THE IMPACT OF
GLOBALIZATION ON INFECTIOUS DISEASE EMERGENCE AND CONTROL: Exploring the Consequences and
Opportunities,” online: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11588&page=80
Changes in travel and trade and the disruption of economic and cultural norms have accelerated and made it much more
difficult to control the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, as described in Chapters 1 and 2 of this report. Even as
progress is made, the public health community will likely encounter further setbacks, such as growing antimicrobial
resistance. Yet there is a positive side to these developments as well. While globalization intensifies the
threat of infectious disease, it also results in stronger tools for addressing
that threat . From technological advances in information dissemination (e.g., the Internet) to
the growing number of bidirectional infectious disease training programs that are bringing
clinicians, scientists, and students from both sides of the equator together , the
opportunities made available by globalization appear as endless as the
challenges are daunting.
At the same time, the opportunities afforded by globalization do not necessarily come easily. Workshop participants
identified obstacles that, if not addressed, may prevent or retard the ability to take full advantage of some of these new global
tools. Global surveillance capabilities made possible by advances in information and communications technologies, for
example, are still fraught with numerous challenges. This chapter summarizes the workshop presentations and discussions
pertaining to some of these opportunities and obstacles.
One of the most enthusiastically discussed opportunities made available by our increasingly interconnected world is the type
of transnational public health research, training, and education program exemplified by the
Peru-based Gorgas Course in Clinical Tropical Medicine. This program not only benefits its northern
participants, but also helps build a sustainable public health capacity in the
developing world. Historically, the goal of many tropical disease training programs was to strengthen the northern
country’s capacity for tropical disease diagnosis and treatment. The trend toward a bidirectional, more
egalitarian approach that benefits the developing-country partner as much
as its northern collaborator reflects a growing awareness that a sustainable
global public health capacity can be achieved only with the full and equal
participation of the developing world. Thus, not only are the Gorgas Course and other, similar programs
becoming more popular, both politically and among students, but their nature is also changing in significant and telling ways.
The shifting focus of many of the international training programs of the Fogarty International Center (FIC) within the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) further reflects the increased awareness, funding, and efforts needed to strengthen
bidirectional international training in epidemiology, public health, and tropical medicine in particular.
 Optimism Defense
No impact – every credible measure proves the world is getting better now
Ridley, visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, former science editor of The Economist, and award-
winning science writer, 2010
(Matt, The Rational Optimist, pg. 13-15)
If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since
1800, the population of
the world has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more
than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter
perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet
Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-
third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and
could expect to live one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of
war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping
cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles,
smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer,
heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have
finished school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a
refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the world
population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by
population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the
world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement. Averages conceal
a lot. But even if you break down the world into bits, it is hard to find any
region that was worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955. Over that half-century, real income
per head ended a little lower in only six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia), life
expectancy in three (Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and infant survival in none. In the rest they have rocketed
upward. Africa’s rate of improvement has been distressingly slow and patchy compared with the rest of the world, and
many southern African countries saw life expectancy plunge in the 1990s as the AIDS epidemic took hold (before
recovering in recent years). There were also moments in the half-century when you could have caught countries in
episodes of dreadful deterioration of living standards or life chances – China in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s,
Ethiopia in the 1980s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Congo in the 2000s, North Korea throughout. Argentina had a
disappointingly stagnant twentieth century. But overall, after fifty years, the outcome for the
world is remarkably, astonishingly, dramatically positive. The average South Korean lives twenty-six
more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen times as much as his
North Korean counter part). The average Mexican lives longer now than the average
Briton did in 1955. The average Botswanan earns more than the average
Finn did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy
in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has
dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got
richer, but the poor have done even better. The poor in the developing world
grew their consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between 1980
and 2000. The Chinese are ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-lived than they were
fifty years ago. Even Nigerians are twice as rich, 25 per cent less fecund and nine years longer-lived than they were in 1955.
Despite a doubling of the world population, even the raw number of people
living in absolute poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the
1950s. The percentage living in such absolute poverty has dropped by more
than half – to less than 18 per cent. That number is, of course, still all too horribly
high, but the trend is hardly a cause for despair: at the current rate of
decline, it would hit zero around 2035 – though it probably won’t. The United Nations estimates
that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.
 A2 Santos
1. No impact—Santos indicts the entire project of neoliberalism, not a single
application of it, and their alternative doesn’t get rid of it
2. Santos isn’t qualified—he makes sweeping generalizations without evidence
or demonstrating causality. Santos’s argument is so totalizing its no different
from saying the US entry into Germany during World War 2 was genocidal
because it killed Germans to save the Jews. And his argument is idiotic,
intervention in Iraq wasn’t genocidal, and to call it that just demonstrates his
ideological opposition to the war has clouded his ability to be rational
Alt Fails
 TL No Alt
Neolib is sustainable and the alt is a useless political abstraction
Arvidsson 13—teaches sociology at the University of Milano [Adam, “Thinking beyond neo-liberalism: A
response to Detlev Zwick”, ephemera: theory & politics in organization 13(2): 407-412]
This makes it trickier to do critical theory. We can of course still criticize the actual state of
things. We can point to the precarious relations that prevail among creative knowledge workers; show how exploitative
and unjust conditions are intensified by the very forces that drive the globalization of communicative capitalism, like the
outsourcing of design work; or lament the fact that a triumphant neoliberal regime subsumes and appropriates aspects of
subjectivity and social life that we think should have been left alone. To produce such critiques remains useful intellectual
work – I have done it in other contexts (Arvidsson et al., 2010; Arvidsson, 2007), as has Detlev Zwick (2008), and many
others. To the extent that such critiques reach a mass audience, they can become a progressive impulse to action and
reflection – as in the case of Naomi Klein’s work inspiring the ‘no global’ movement (to use an inadequate name coined by
the mainstream press). But such a critique without an alternative remains
unsatisfactory for at least three reasons. First, and most superficially, since everyone else is
doing it, the marginal utility of yet another piece of critical theory rapidly
diminishes, as does the intellectual satisfaction that can be derived form
producing it. Second, and more seriously, the absence of a realistic alt ernative, or even of a
historical subject in the name of which such a critique can be pronounced,
risks rendering critical theory moralistic and rather toothless . We might agree
with Zwick when he suggests that the outsourcing of design work from Toronto to the Philippines is
somehow wrong, but it is difficult to understand exactly why this would be the
case. (Why shouldn’t Philippine designers be allowed to compete with Canadian designers? Can the ‘creative class’
claim an exemption from the global economy? Perhaps the answer is ‘yes’, but I do not know of any viable alternative
vision of society that is able to substantiate that ‘yes’.) Third, and most importantly, in the absence of an
alternative vision, critical theory remains rather unconvincing to the
people in the name of whom it proposes to speak . I can assure you – and I’ve tried! – that
you won’t become an organic intellectual among social entrepreneurs or
precarious creative workers by telling them that they are exploited , that
they sell out their subjectivity , or that the system in which they operate is
unjust . Pure critique is simply not attractive enough to make the multitude
of new productive subjects, fragmented by neoliberalism, cohere into a
historical subject. To do that you need at least the myth of an alternative , as
agitators from Sorel via Lenin to Subcomandante Marcos could tell you. Don’t get me wrong. I am not proposing that it is
wrong to point to the precarious conditions of knowledge work, or that we should not do this as academics and
researchers. This is still an important task. But it is not enough . Critical theory
must do this, but it must also do more . It must also engage with the
question of what a realistic alternative to neoliberalism could be, and it
must elaborate a realistic political vision in the name of which a critique
that is productive and progressive, and not simply moralistic, can be
articulated. By realistic, I mean that such an alternative must be sought in the actual
relations of production that characterize the contemporary information
economy. Zwick’s suggestion that we imagine a commonism of productive
consumption as collaborative sharing in the absence of private property and combined with an
inclusive model of political determination, collective sovereignty, belonging and justice – and so on – is simply

unproductive to my mind. We might all agree that an economy of commons that

has done away with capitalism might be more desirable, but the reality is
that hybrid forms, like the game modders that Zwick cites, where a an economy of commons co-exists with a
capitalist value logic, in some form, are indeed becoming the norm. At that point the interesting
thing to do is not so much to criticize the enduring capitalist nature of these
hybrid forms, but rather to investigate the new forms of politics that they
might give rise to. This in no way implies that one does away with conflict and politics. Rather, it implies
investigating and understanding the new spaces and discourses through
which such a new type of politics can be articulated. In order to do this we must
start with what the actors involved in these processes actually think
themselves. It is quite useless to simply deploy existing philosophical
perspectives, or to compare the reality of communicative capitalism to utopian
projections of the political visions of last century . Instead we must start with the ‘empirical
metaphysics’, to use Bruno Latour’s term, that actually prevail among people engaged in such hybrid practices. We
might all want to do away with neoliberalism and the forms of life that it has
promoted. But at the same time, we all recognize that the neoliberal project has
been one of the most successful projects of governmentality since, perhaps, the very
project of disciplinary power that Foucault himself described. Rebus sic stantibus we cannot simply wish
it away . We need to recognize that people have changed, that competitive
individualism, self-branding and an entrepreneurial mentality are, by now, normal features of
life. The same thing goes for the popular political myths that prevail among advanced knowledge workers, what Zwick
calls ‘cyber-utopianism’. We need to recognize that notions like peer-to-peer production, high-tech gift economies and the
like have the power to mobilize the energies of the subjects that are most likely to become the pioneers of a new political
vision – today’s version of the skilled workers that have taken the lead in most modern political movements. Even though
the social theory that they produce might be shallow and imperfect, and even though they might not have read Marx and
Foucault as well as we have, we cannot simply dismiss this vision as a mere ideology to be replaced by our theoretically
more refined ideology. Like the relations of production that are emerging in communicative capitalism and the subjectivity
of knowledge workers, these myths are part of the raw material with which the Gramscian intellectual must engage in
order to articulate new understandings of common sense that are both politically progressive and intuitively attractive to
the people that they are supposed to mobilize. In other words, in order to articulate an
alternative, we cannot simply dismiss the reality of communicative
capitalism and fall back on what remains of the political utopias of last
century. We need to engage with the reality of neoliberal communicative
capitalism and try to push its dialectic beyond its apolitical present state. We must investigate what
the real conditions of production and imagination are and ask ourselves
where they might lead. Critical theory needs to become an empirical , and
not simply a philosophical, enterprise.
 “neolib” not a thing
Starting with “neoliberalism” encourages fake radicalism,
oversimplification, and greater levels of cooptation than positive
and pragmatic politics.
-Ad hoc policies of neoliberalism also originate from Leftist movements for greater autonomy
-Sustainability politics also emerged during this time, but the neolib K ignores those and lumps them all together
-Ignores positive action that doesn’t conform to a romantic view of rebellion (i.e. the plan)
CliveBARNETT Faculty of the Social Sciences @ Open University (UK) 05
[“The Consolations of
‘Neoliberalism’” Geoforum 36 (1) p. Science Direct]
3. There is no such thing as neoliberalism! The blind-spot in theories of neoliberalism —whether
neo-Marxist and Foucauldian— comes
with trying to account for how top-down
initiatives ‘take’ in everyday situations. So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop
thinking of “neoliberalism” as a coherent “hegemonic” project altogether .
For all its apparent critical force , the vocabulary of “neoliberalism” and
“neoliberalization” in fact provides a double consolation for leftist academics : it
supplies us with plentiful opportunities for unveiling the real workings of
hegemonic ideologies in a characteristic gesture of revelation; and in so doing, it invites us to
align our own professional roles with the activities of various actors “out
there”, who are always framed as engaging in resistance or contestation. The
conceptualization of “neoliberalism” as a “hegemonic” project does not need refining by adding a splash of Foucault.
Perhaps we should try to do without the concept of “neoliberalism” altogether, because it might actually compound rather
than aid in the task of figuring out how the world works and how it changes. One reason for this is that , between an
overly economistic derivation of political economy and an overly statist
rendition of governmentality, stories about “neoliberalism” manage to
reduce the understanding of social relations to a residual effect of
hegemonic projects and/or governmental programmes of rule (see Clarke, 2004a).
Stories about “neoliberalism” pay little attention to the pro-active role of
socio-cultural processes in provoking changes in modes of governance, policy, and
regulation. Consider the example of the restructuring of public services such as health care, education, and criminal justice
in the UK over the last two or three decades. This can easily be thought of in terms of a “hegemonic” project of
“neoliberalization”, and certainly one dimension of this process has been a form of anti-statism that has rhetorically
contrasted market provision against the rigidities of the state. But in fact these ongoing changes in the
terms of public-policy debate involve a combination of different factors that
add up to a much more dispersed populist reorientation in policy, politics,
and culture. These factors include changing consumer expectations, involving shifts in expectations towards public
entitlements which follow from the generalization of consumerism; the decline of deference, involving shifts in
conventions and hierarchies of taste, trust, access, and expertise; and the refusals of the subordinated, referring to the
emergence of anti-paternalist attitudes found in, for example, women’s health movements or anti-psychiatry movements.
They include also the development of the politics of difference, involving the emergence of discourses of institutional
discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, and disability. This has disrupted the ways in which welfare agencies
think about inequality, helping to generate the emergence of contested inequalities, in which policies aimed at addressing
inequalities of class and income develop an ever more expansive dynamic of expectation that public services should
address other kinds of inequality as well (see Clarke, 2004b J. Clark, Dissolving the public realm? The logics and limits of
neo-liberalism, Journal of Social Policy 33 (2004), pp. 27–48.Clarke, 2004b). None of these populist tendencies is simply
an expression of a singular “hegemonic” project of “neoliberalization”. They are effects of much longer rhythms of socio-
cultural change that emanate from the bottom-up. It seems just as plausible to suppose that what we have
come to recognise as “hegemonic neoliberalism” is a muddled set of ad hoc,
opportunistic accommodations to these unstable dynamics of social change
as it is to think of it as the outcome of highly coherent political-ideological projects. Processes of
privatization, market liberalization , and de-regulation have often followed
an ironic pattern in so far as they have been triggered by citizens’
movements arguing from the left of the political spectrum against the
 rigidities of statist forms of social policy and welfare provision in the name
of greater autonomy, equality, and participation (e.g. Horwitz, 1989). The political
re-alignments of the last three or four decades cannot therefore be
adequately understood in terms of a straightforward shift from the left to
the right, from values of collectivism to values of individualism , or as a re-
imposition of class power. The emergence and generalization of this populist ethos has much longer, deeper, and wider
roots than those ascribed to “hegemonic neoliberalism”. And it also points towards the extent to which easily the most
widely resonant political rationality in the world today is not right-wing market liberalism at all, but is, rather, the
polyvalent discourse of “democracy” (see Barnett and Low, 2004). Recent theories of “neoliberalism”
have retreated from the appreciation of the long-term rhythms of socio-
cultural change, which Stuart Hall once developed in his influential account of Thatcherism as a variant of
authoritarian populism. Instead, they favour elite-focused analyses of state
bureaucracies, policy networks, and the like. One consequence of the residualization of the social is
that theories of “neoliberalism” have great difficulty accounting for, or indeed
even in recognizing, new forms of “individualized collective-action” (Marchetti, 2003) that have
emerged in tandem with the apparent ascendancy of “neoliberal
hegemony”: environmental politics and the politics of sustainability ; new forms
of consumer activism oriented by an ethics of assistance and global solidarity ; the
identity politics of sexuality related to demands for changes in modes of health care provision, and so on
(see Norris, 2002). All of these might be thought of as variants of what we might want to call bottom-up governmentality.
This refers to the notion that non-state and non-corporate actors are also engaged in trying to govern various fields of
activity, both by acting on the conduct and contexts of ordinary everyday life, but also by acting on the conduct of state and
corporate actors as well. Rose (1999, pp. 281–284) hints at the outlines of such an analysis, at the very end of his
paradigmatic account of governmentality, but investigation of this phenomenon is poorly developed at present .
Instead, the trouble-free amalgamation of Foucault’s ideas into the Marxist
narrative of “neoliberalism” sets up a simplistic image of the world divided
between the forces of hegemony and the spirits of subversion (see Sedgwick, 2003,
pp. 11–12). And clinging to this image only makes it all the more difficult to

acknowledge the possibility of positive political action that does not

conform to a romanticized picture of rebellion , contestation, or protest against domination
(see Touraine, 2001). Theories of “neoliberalism” are unable to recognize the emergence of new and innovative forms of
individualized collective action because their critical imagination turns on a simple evaluative opposition between
individualism and collectivism, the private and the public. The radical academic discourse of
“neoliberalism” frames the relationship between collective action and
individualism simplistically as an opposition between the good and the bad .
In confirming a narrow account of liberalism, understood primarily as an
economic doctrine of free markets and individual choice, there is a peculiar
convergence between the radical academic left and the right-wing
interpretation of liberal thought exemplified by Hayekian conservatism. By obliterating the political
origins of modern liberalism—understood as answering the problem of how to live freely in societies divided by
interminable conflicts of value, interest, and faith— the discourse of “neoliberalism” reiterates a
longer problem for radical academic theory of being unable to account for
its own normative priorities in a compelling way . And by denigrating the value
of individualism as just an ideological ploy by the right, the pejorative
vocabulary of “neoliberalism” invites us to take solace in an image of
collective decision-making as a practically and normatively unproblematic
procedure. The recurrent problem for theories of “neoliberalism” and “neoliberalization” is their two-dimensional
view of both political power and of geographical space. They can only account for the relationship between top-down
initiatives and bottom-up developments by recourse to the language of centres, peripheries, diffusion, and contingent
realizations; and by displacing the conceptualization of social relations with a flurry of implied subject-effects. The
turn to an overly systematized theory of governmentality, derived from
Foucault, only compounds the theoretical limitations of economistic
conceptualizations of “neoliberalism”. The task for social theory today remains a quite classical one,
namely to try to specify “the recurrent causal processes that govern the intersections between abstract, centrally promoted
plans and social life on the small scale” (Tilly, 2003, p. 345). Neither neoliberalism-as-hegemony nor neoliberalism-as-
governmentality is really able to help in this task, not least because both invest in a deeply embedded picture of subject-
formation as a process of “getting-at” ordinary people in order to make them believe in things against their best interests.
With respect to the problem of accounting for how “hegemonic” projects of “neoliberalism” win wider consensual
legitimacy, Foucault’s ideas on governmentality seem to promise an account of how people come to acquire what Ivison
(1997) calls the “freedom to be formed and normed”. Over time, Foucault’s own work moved steadily away from an
emphasis on the forming-and-norming end of this formulation towards an emphasis on the freedom end. This shift was
itself a reflection of the realization that the circularities of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity can only be broken by
developing an account of the active receptivity of people to being directed. But, in the last instance, neither the story of
neoliberalism-as-hegemony or of neoliberalism-as-governmentality can account for the forms of receptivity, pro-activity,
and generativity that might help to explain how the rhythms of the everyday are able to produce effects on macro-scale
processes, and vice versa. So, rather than finding convenient synergies between what are already closely related theoretical
traditions, perhaps it is better to keep open those tiresome debates about the degree of coherence between them, at the
same time as trying to broaden the horizons of our theoretical curiosity a little more widely.
 Material Alt Key
No alt – any attempts to crush neoliberalism without a clear
alternative radicalize neoliberalism and re-entrench their
impacts
Jones 11 [(Owen, journalist and author, Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most Influential People on the Left') "Owen
Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing" The Independent October 21, 2011] AT
My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at its
peak. The turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement feels largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a
left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up
in the headlines was thrilling. Thousands of apparently unstoppable protesters chased the world's rulers from IMF to
World Bank summits – from Seattle to Prague to Genoa – and the authorities were rattled.¶ Today, as protesters in nearly
a thousand cities across the world follow the example set by the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what
happened to the anti-globalisation movement. Its activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack
a coherent alternative to the neo-liberal project. With no clear political
direction, the movement was easily swept away by the jingoism and turmoil that
followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa.¶ Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity amid
today's economic madness. By descending on the West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the
banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a cliché) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of public
spending. The founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The
Occupiers direct their fire at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so – as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class
warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."¶ The Occupy movement has
provoked fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who – predictably – labelled it
"anti-American". They're right to be worried: those camping outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the real
villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent. But a coherent alternative to the tottering global
economic order remains, it seems, as distant as ever. Neo-liberalism crashes
around, half-dead, with no-one to administer the killer blow. There's always a
presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great
Depression, fascism consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the
1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on both left and right. But, spearheaded by
Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s. This time round,
there doesn't even seem to be an alternative for the right to defeat. That's not the
fault of the protesters. In truth, the left has never recovered from being virtually smothered
out of existence. It was the victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neo-
liberal globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union
movement.¶ But, above all, it was the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left. As US neo-
conservative Midge Decter triumphantly put it: "It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to
the African National Congress, left-wing movements across the world hurtled to the right in an almost synchronised
fashion. It was as though the left wing of the global political spectrum had been sliced off. That's why, although we
live in an age of revolt, there remains no left to give it direction and purpose.

And, No political crises

Stelzer 9 Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute,
“Death of capitalism exaggerated,” http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26174260-5013479,00.html
A FUNNY thing happened on the way to the collapse of market capitalism in
the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It didn't. Indeed, in Germany
voters relieved Chancellor Angela Merkel of the necessity of cohabiting with a left-wing party, allowing her to form a
coalition with a party favouring lower taxes and free markets. And in Pittsburgh leaders representing
more than 90 per cent of the world's GDP convened to figure out how to
make markets work better, rather than to hoist the red flag . The workers are
to be relieved, not of their chains but of credit-card terms that are excessively onerous, and helped to retain their
private property - their homes. All of this is contrary to expectations. The communist spectre that Karl
Marx confidently predicted would be haunting Europe is instead haunting
Europe's left-wing parties, with even Vladimir Putin seeking to attract
investment by re-privatising the firms he snatched. Which raises an
interesting question: why haven't the economic turmoil and rising
unemployment led workers to the barricades, instead of to their bankers to
renegotiate their mortgages? It might be because Spain's leftish government
has proved less able to cope with economic collapse than countries with more centrist
governments. Or because Britain, with a leftish government, is now the sick man
of Europe, its financial sector in intensive care, its recovery likely to be the slowest in Europe, its prime credit rating
threatened. Or it might be because left-wing trade unions, greedily demanding their public-
sector members be exempted from the pain they want others to share, have lost their credibility and
ability to lead a leftward lurch. All of those factors contribute to the
unexpected strength of the Right in a world in which a record number of families are being tossed out
of their homes, and jobs have been disappearing by the million. But even more important in
promoting reform over revolution are three factors: the existence of
democratic institutions; the condition of the unemployed; and the set of
policies developed to cope with the recession . Democratic institutions give the aggrieved an
outlet for their discontent, and hope they can change conditions they deem unsatisfactory. Don't like the way George W.
Bush has skewed income distribution? Toss the Republicans out and elect a man who promises to tax the rich more
heavily. Don't like Gordon Brown's tax increases? Toss him out and hope the Tories mean it when they promise at least to
try to lower taxes. Result: angry voters but no rioters, unless one counts the nutters who break windows at McDonald's or
storm banks in the City. Contrast that with China, where the disaffected have no choice but to take to the streets. Result:
an estimated 10,000 riots this year protesting against job losses, arbitrary taxes and corruption. A second factor
explaining the Left's inability to profit from economic suffering is
capitalism's ability to adapt , demonstrated in the Great Depression of the
1930s . While a gaggle of bankers and fiscal conservatives held out for the status quo, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his
experimenters began to weave a social safety net. In Britain, William Beveridge produced a report setting the stage for a
similar, indeed stronger, net. Continental countries recovering from World War II did the same. So unemployment no
longer dooms a worker to close-to-starvation. Yes, civic institutions were able to soften the blow for the unemployed
before the safety net was put in place, but they could not cope with pervasive protracted lay-offs. Also, during
this and other recessions, when prices for many items are coming down, the
real living standard of those in work actually improves. In the US, somewhere between
85 per cent and 90 per cent of workers have kept their jobs, and now see their living costs declining as rents and other
prices come down. So the impetus to take to the streets is limited. Then there are the steps taken by
capitalist governments to limit the depth and duration of the downturn . As the
economies of most of the big industrial countries imploded, policy went through two phases. The first was triage - do what
is necessary to prevent the financial system from collapse. Spend. Guarantee deposits to prevent runs on banks and money
funds, bail out big banks, force relatively healthier institutions to take over sicker ones, mix all of this with rhetorical
attacks on greedy bankers - the populist spoonful of sugar that made the bailouts go down with the voters - and stop the
rot. Meanwhile, have the central banks dust off their dog-eared copies of Bagehot and inject lots of liquidity by whatever
means comes to mind. John Maynard Keynes, meet Milton Friedman for a cordial handshake . Then came more
permanent reform, another round of adapting capitalism to new realities, in
this case the malfunctioning of the financial markets. Even Barack Obama's
left-wing administration decided not to scupper the markets but instead to
develop rules to relate bankers' pay more closely to long-term performance;
to reduce the chance of implosions by increasing the capital banks must
hold, cutting their profits and dividends, but leaving them in private hands; and to channel most stimulus spending
through private-sector companies. This leaves the anti-market crowd little room for
manoeuvre as voters seem satisfied with the changes to make capitalism and
markets work better and more equitably. At least so far. There are exceptions. Australia moved a
bit to the left in the last election, but more out of unhappiness with a tired incumbent's environmental and foreign policy.
Americans chose Obama, but he had promised to govern from the centre
before swinging left. And for all his rhetorical attacks on greedy bankers and
other malefactors of great wealth, he sticks to reform of markets rather than
their replacement, with healthcare a possible exception. Even in these countries, so far, so
good for reformed capitalism. No substitutes accepted.
 Transition Wars DA
Alt causes transition wars
Kothari, 82 [Professor of political science at University of Delhi, “Towards a Just Social Order”, p. 571]
Attempts at global economic reform could also lead to a world racked by
increasing turbulence, a greater sense of insecurity among the major
centres of power -- and hence to a further tightening of the structures of
domination and domestic repression – producing in their wake an intensification of the
old arms race and militarization of regimes, encouraging regional
conflagrations and setting the stage for eventual global holocaust.
 2N Transition Wars
Backlash from the alt culminates in extinction
Perry Anderson, Professor of Sociology at UCLA, Marxist Scholar, ’84
(In the tracks of historical materialism, p. 102-103)
That background also indicates, however, what is essentially missing from his work. How are we to get from where we are
today to where he point us to tomorrow? There is no answer to this question in Nove. His halting discussion of “transition”
tails away into apprehensive admonitions to moderation to the British Labor Party, and pleas for proper compensation to
capitalist owners of major industries, if these are to be nationalized. Nowhere is there any sense of what a titanic political
change would have to occur, with what fierceness of social struggle, for the economic model of socialism he advocates ever
to materialize. Between the radicalism of the future end-state he envisages, and the conservatism of the present measures
he is prepared to countenance, there is an unbridgeable abyss. How could private ownership of the means of production
ever be abolished by policies less disrespectful of capital than those of Allende or a Benn, which he reproves? What has
disappeared from the pages of The Economics of Feasible Socialism is virtually all attention to the historical dynamics of
any serious conflict over the control of the means of production, as the record of the 20th century demonstrates them. If
capital could visit such destruction on even so poor and small an outlying province of its empire
in Vietnam, to prevent its loss, is it likely that it would suffer its extinction
meekly in its own homeland? The lessons of the past sixty-five years or so are in this respect
without ambiguity or exception, there is no case, from Russia to China, from
Vietnam to Cuba, from Chile to Nicaragua, where the existence of capitalism has
been challenged, and the furies of intervention, blockade and civil strife have not
descended in response. Any viable transition to socialism in the West must seek to
curtail that pattern: but to shrink from or to ignore it is to depart from the world of
the possible altogether. In the same way, to construct an economic model of socialism in one advanced
country is a legitimate exercise: but to extract it from any computable relationship with a surrounding, and necessarily
opposing, capitalist environment—as this work does—is to locate it in thin air
 Non-International Alt Fails
Only international factors can affect neoliberalism.
Overbeek 2 – Henk Overbeek, associate professor in international relations
at the Free University, Amsterdam, “Neoliberalism and the Regulation of
Global Labor Mobility,” May 2002, The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences, JSTOR
These neoliberal forms of mobility controls will not disappear with political changes
in countries at the receiving end. Because of their inclusion into regional
frameworks of integration, these mechanisms become locked in, and it would be
extremely costly, both economically and politically, not to respect them (Gill
1998). Accordingly, states become more accountable to external than to
internal forces. States are made responsible for maintaining the direction or
the orientation taken by the regional system and to upholding the principles or social
purpose of the agreements signed. Both the Budapest Process and the Puebla Process have developed
mechanisms to strengthen these tendencies and to monitor the compliance of the participating states. Particular emphasis
is placed in both contexts on the selective criminalization of migration.
 Can’t Reject Consumerism
Alt doesn’t solve the case – institutional focus key
Doran and Barry 6 – worked at all levels in the environment and sustainable development policy arena - at the United
Nations, at the Northern Ireland Assembly and Dáil Éireann, and in the Irish NGO sector. PhD--AND-- Reader in Politics, Queen's
University School of Politics, International Studies, and Philosophy. PhD Glasgow (Peter and John, Refining Green Political Economy:
From Ecological Modernisation to Economic Security and Sufficiency, Analyse & Kritik 28/2006, p. 250–275, http://www.analyse-
und-kritik.net/2006-2/AK_Barry_Doran_2006.pdf)
The aim of this article is to offer a draft of a realistic, but critical, version of green political economy to underpin the
economic dimensions of radical views of sustainable development. It is written explicitly with a view to encouraging others
to respond to it in the necessary collaborative effort to think through this aspect of sustainable development. Our position
is informed by two important observations. As a sign of our times, the crises that we are addressing under the banner of
sustainable development (however inadequately) render the distinction between what is ‘realistic’ and ‘radical’
problematic. It seems to us that the only realistic course is to revisit the most basic assumptions embedded within the
dominant model of development and economics. Realistically the only longterm option available is radical. Secondly, we
cannot build or seek to create a sustainable economy ab nihilo, but must begin —in an
agonistic fashion—from where we are, with the structures, institutions, modes of production,
laws, regulations and so on that we have. We make this point in Ireland with a story about the motorist who stops at
the side of the road to ask directions, only to be told: “Now Ma’m, I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.” This does not
mean simply accepting these as immutable or set in stone— after all, some of the current institutions, principles and
structures underpinning the dominant economic model are the very causes of unsustainable development— but we do
need to recognise that we must work with (and ‘through’—in the terms of the original German
Green Party’s slogan of “marching through the institutions”) these existing structures as well as changing
and reforming and in some cases abandoning them as either unnecessary or positively
harmful to the creation and maintenance of a sustainable economy and society. Moreover, we have a particular
responsibility under the current dominant economic trends to name the neo-liberal project as the hegemonic influence on
economic thinking and practice. In the words of Bourdieu/Wacquant (2001), neoliberalism is the new ‘planetary vulgate’,
which provides the global context for much of the contemporary political and academic debate on sustainable
development. For example, there is a clear hierarchy of trade (WTO) over the environment (Multilateral Environmental
Agreements) in the international rules-based systems. At the boundaries or limits of the sustainable development debate
in both the UK and the European Union it is also evident that the objectives of competitiveness and trade policy are
sacrosanct. As Tim Luke (1999) has observed, the relative success or failure of national economies in head-to-head global
competition is taken by ‘geo-economics’ as the definitive register of any one nation-state’s waxing or waning international
power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this
context, many believe ecological considerations can, at best, be given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the
continuing quest to mobilise the Earth’s material resources. ¶ Our realism is rooted in the demos. The realism with which
this paper is concerned to promote recognises that the path to an alternative economy and society must begin with a
recognition of the reality that most people (in the West) will not democratically vote (or be given the opportunity to vote)
for a completely different type of society and economy overnight. This is true even as the merits of a ‘green economy’ are
increasingly recognised and accepted by most people as the logical basis for safeguards and guarantees for their basic
needs and aspirations (within limits). The realistic character of the thinking behind this article accepts that
consumption and materialistic lifestyles are here to stay. (The most we can
probably aspire to is a widening and deepening of popular movements towards ethical consumption,
responsible investment, and fair trade.) And indeed there is little to be gained by
proposing alternative economic systems which start from a complete rejection of
consumption and materialism. The appeal to realism is in part an attempt to correct the common
misperception (and self-perception) of green politics and economics requiring an excessive degree of self-denial and a
puritanical asceticism (see Goodin 1992, 18; Allison 1991, 170– 78). While rejecting the claim that green political theory
calls for the complete disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, it is true that green politics does require the collective re-
assessment of such lifestyles, and does require new economic signals and pedagogical attempts to encourage a delinking—
in the minds of the general populus—of the ‘good life’ and the ‘goods life’. This does not mean that we need necessarily
require the complete and across the board rejection of materialistic lifestyles. It must be the case that there is room and
tolerance in a green economy for people to choose to live diverse lifestyles—some more sustainable than others—so long as
these do not ‘harm’ others, threaten long-term ecological sustainability or create unjust levels of socio-economic
inequalities. Thus, realism in this context is in part another name for the acceptance of a broadly ‘liberal’ or ‘post-liberal’
(but certainly not anti-liberal) green perspective.2¶ 1. Setting Out¶ At the same time, while critical of the ‘abstract’ and
‘unrealistic’ utopianism that peppers green and radical thinking in this area, we do not intend to reject utopianism.
Indeed, with Oscar Wilde we agree that a map of the world that does not have utopia on it, isn’t worth looking at. The
spirit in which this article is written is more in keeping with framing green and sustainability concerns within a ‘concrete
utopian’ perspective or what the Marxist geographer David Harvey (1996, 433–435) calls a “utopianism of process”, to be
distinguished from “closed”, blueprint-like and abstract utopian visions. Accordingly, the model of green political
economy outlined here is in keeping with Steven Lukes’ suggestion that a concrete utopianism depends
on the ‘knowledge of a self-transforming present, not an ideal future’ (Lukes 1984, 158).¶ It
accepts the current dominance of one particular model of green political economy—namely ‘ecological modernisation’
(hereafter referred to EM)—as the preferred ‘political economy’ underpinning contemporary state and market forms of
sustainable development, and further accepts the necessity for green politics to positively engage in the debates and
policies around EM from a strategic (as well as a normative) point of view. However, it is also conscious of the limits and
problems with ecological modernisation, particularly in terms of its technocratic, supply-side and reformist ‘business as
usual’ approach, and seeks to explore the potential to radicalise EM or use it as a ‘jumping off’ point for more radical views
of greening the economy. Ecological modernisation is a work in progress; and that’s the point. ¶ The article begins by
outlining EM in theory and practice, specifically in relation to the British state’s ‘sustainable development’ policy agenda
under New Labour.3 While EM as currently practised by the British state is ‘weak’ and largely turns on the centrality of
‘innovation’ and ‘eco-efficiency’, the paper then goes on to investigate in more detail the role of the market within current
conceptualisations of EM and other models of green political economy. In particular, a potentially powerful distinction
(both conceptually and in policy debates) between ‘the market’ and ‘capitalism’ has yet to be sufficiently explored and
exploited as a starting point for the development of radical, viable and attractive conceptions of green political economy as
alternatives to both EM and the orthodox economic paradigm. We contend that there is a role for the
market in innovation and as part of the ‘governance’ for sustainable development in
which eco-efficiency and EM of the economy is linked to non-ecological demands of green politics and sustainable
development such as social and global justice, egalitarianism, democratic regulation of the market and the conceptual
(and policy) expansion of the ‘economy’ to include social, informal and noncash economic activity and a progressive role
for the state (especially at the local/municipal level). Here we suggest that the ‘environmental’ argument or basis of green
political economy in terms of the need for the economy to become more resource efficient, minimise pollution and waste
and so on, has largely been won. What that means is that no one is disputing the need for greater resource productivity,
energy and eco-efficiency. Both state and corporate/business actors have accepted the environmental ‘bottom line’ (often
rhetorically, but nonetheless important) as a conditioning factor in the pursuit of the economic ‘bottom line’
 A2 accelerations
Capitalism will not collapse under its own contradictions – they
misread Marx.
Derbyshire, 14 (Jonathan, Prospect Magazine, Interview with David Harvey, 4/11/14, “The contradictions of
capitalism: an interview with David Harvey,” http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/jonathan-derbyshire/the-
contradictions-of-capitalism-an-interview-with-david-harvey)
One of the things I say about contradictions is that they are always latent. So the existence of
a contradiction doesn’t necessarily give rise to crisis . It does so only under certain
circumstances. Therefore, it is possible to construct theoretically the idea that all a “nightwatchman” state does is protect
private property. But we know that a nightwatchman state actually has to do rather more than that. There are externalities
in the market that need to be controlled, there are public good that need to provided—so very soon the state has to get
involved in all sorts of things other than simply setting the legal framework of contract and private property rights. ¶ You
deny that there’s any necessary connection between capitalism and democracy. Could you explain why? ¶ The question of
democracy depends very much on definitions. We supposedly have democracy in the United States, but it’s clear that it’s a
bit of a charade—it’s a democracy of money power, not people power. In my view, since the 1970s, the Supreme Court have
legalised corruption of the political process by money power. ¶ There’s one aspect of state power that moved centre-stage
during the recent crisis and its aftermath, particularly during the Eurozone debt crisis, and that’s the power of central
banks. Do you think the function of central banks has changed in any significant ways during the era of the “bailout”? ¶ It
clearly has. The history of central banking is itself terribly interesting. I’m not sure what the Federal Reserve did during
the crisis had any legal basis. The European Central Bank, on the other hand, is a classic case of what Marx talked about
when he talked about the Bank Act of 1844 which in his view had the effect of extending and deepening the crisis of 1847-8
in Britain. But in both cases, that of the Fed and the ECB, what we’ve seen is a kind of seat-of-the-pants adjustment of
major institutions and the emergence of policies that could be only be justified after the fact. So there’s definitely been
movement on the central bank front.¶ There’s one concept to which you return to again and again in the book, and that’s
commodification. ¶ Capital is about the production of commodities. If there is terrain that is non-commodified, then
capital can’t circulate through it. One of the easiest ways for capital to find a way through it is for the state to set up a
system of privatisation, even to the extent of privatising something that is fictional. Take carbon trading, for example—the
trading of pollution rights is an excellent example of setting up fictional commodities that have very real effects in terms of
the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so on. Creating markets where there have been none before is one of
the ways in which, historically, capital has expanded. ¶ You’re heavily influenced by the work of Karl Polanyi in this area
aren’t you? Specifically, his masterpiece, The Great Transformation. ¶ Polanyi wasn’t a Marxist, but he understood, as Marx
did, the idea that land, labour and capital are not commodities in the ordinary sense but that they assume a commodity
form.¶ One of the most impressive, even moving, aspects of the book is your account of the human costs of
commodification—specifically, the commodification of those areas of human experience that were previously not part of
the cash nexus. This is connected to what you call “universal alienation”. What do you mean by that? ¶ We’ve lived in a
world in which capital has constantly struggled to diminish labour, its power, by increasing productivity, removing the
mental aspect of jobs. When you live in society of that kind the question arises as to how anyone can have any kind of
meaning in their lives, given what they do in the workplace. For example, 70 per cent of the population of the United
States either hates going to work or are totally indifferent to the work they do. In a world of that kind, people have to find
some identity for themselves that is not based on the work experience. If that’s the case, then the question arises as to
what kind of identity they can assume. One of the answers is consumption. Then we get a kind of mindless consumerism
which tries to compensate for absent meaning in a world in which there are very few meaningful jobs. I get very irritated
when I hear politicians saying we’ve got to create more jobs. But what kind of jobs? ¶ Alienation stems, I think, from a
feeling that we have the capacity and power to be someone very different from what our possibilities define. Then the
question arises, to what degree is political power sensitive to the creation of other possibilities? People look at the political
parties and say, “There’s nothing there.” So there’s an alienation from the political process, which is expressed in falling
turnout at elections, there’s alienation from the commodity culture, which creates a longing for a different kind of
freedom. The periodic eruptions we’re seeing around the world—Gezi Park in Istanbul, protests in Brazil, the riots in
London in 2011—pose the question whether alienation can become a positive political force. And the answer is yes, there is
a possibility, but it’s not there in the political parties or movements. You’ve seen elements of it in the way the Occupy
movement or the Indignados in Spain tried to mobilise, but it’s ephemeral; it hasn’t coalesced into something substantial.
That said, there’s a lot of ferment in dissident cultural fields; there is something in motion out there that is the source of
some hope.¶ When you discuss the “dangerous” contradictions, you offer what looks to me like a version of Marx’s
historical materialism. That is, you do think, as Marx did, that the present is pregnant with the future, though you don’t
construe that in an inevitabilitarian way—and in fact you also don’t think Marx himself construed it like that, do you? ¶ No.
There are people who think Marx said that capital will collapse under the
weight of its own contradictions and that he had a mechanical theory of
capitalist crisis. But I can’t find anywhere where he says that! What he did
say is that contradictions are at the heart of crises and crises are moments
of opportunity. He also said that human beings can create their history , but
that they don’t do so under conditions of their own choosing . So there is to my mind a
Marx who, if he’s not a libertarian, is saying that human beings are capable of deciding, collectively, to take things in one
direction rather than another. Marx was critical of utopian socialism because he thought it didn’t deal with where you
were. Marx
said you had to analyse where you are, see what’s available to you
and then try to construct something radically different.

Their notion of accelerationism is wrong – it incorrectly

conceives of capitalism and lets the ruling class plan the future.
Wark, 13 (McKenzie, Public Seminar, Nov 18th, 2013, “Accelerationism,”
http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/11/accelerationism/#.VDBK5ildXIo)
Its striking that most ideas about accelerationism – pro and con – assume that capitalism is always more or
less the same thing. It can affirm itself, speeding up, becoming something else in the future. Or it can be
negated, overthrown by something else. But capitalism itself always seems to be the same thing.¶ 02. But is
it? Is this still capitalism? What if it was something worse? As I have argued elsewhere, we could imagine the
commodity economy passing through three stages already: the enclosure of land, the mass production of
the thing, and the commodification of information. Each stage is a distinct private property form,
producing a successive polarization of classes, of owners and non-owners.¶ 03. The transformative
possibilities change with each stage of development of the property form. Land enclosure produced reactive and utopian
peasant resistance. The mass production of the thing as commodity produced both the radical and reformist labor
movements. The new forms of exploitation layered on top of these ongoing ones is producing new kinds of contestation
and accommodation.¶ 04. The new stage of commodification is less about extracting surplus value from labor as extracting
surplus information from play. It extracts value by offering information for free, but extracting more information in return
– surplus information.¶ 05. But this new form of the commodity economy does not go unchallenged. The counter-currents
it produces may not however be adequately captured by the category of ‘politics’. Maybe the struggle is, as Bogdanov
would say, between commodification and the possibility of better forms of organization. The problem of organization is at
once one of resources, techniques, human and inhuman forces, affect and information. ¶ 06. Is it not strange that so much
of what was once forward-looking leftist discourse is now longing for the past? It wants its October a second time. Or: It
wants a Christ-Lenin-messiah. It wants leaps and events. It wants an autonomous sphere of political action at a time when
any such autonomous domain seems clearly not to exist. The problem of modes of organization must be posed again, and
outside the domain of political theory.¶ 07. Of course political theory is preferable to the apolitical theory that caved in to
the language of ‘there is no alternative’. But our alternatives must be based on an analysis of current forms of
commodity relation, not on ahistorical, philosophical understandings of eternal capitalism . We must
restart what Castoriadis called the imaginary institution, by which organization finds the phase changes implied in its own
form.¶ 08. By their rhetoric you shall know them. The talk these days is of disruption, creation, destruction. The old
language of the avant gardes and revolutionaries is now the province of Silicon valley publicists. So we
need a careful analysis of that language – and we need a new avant garde. Its clear that this is a commodity economy
busy cannibalizing its own means of subsistence. It has run out of ideas. The task of the neo-liberal state is to destroy the
social so that it may be commodified, even though this will result in less efficient and effective forms of organization. So:
let there be iPads in the charter schools! The result will be less effective, and more expensive, which is of course the goal. ¶
09. The ruling class of our time is a rentier class. It is not actually innovative and disruptive. It is not accelerating
anything. Technical innovation pushed commodification onto a new, more abstract plane, that of information. But the
plan is mostly to rope off and sustain quasi-monopoly rent seeking behavior in those domains. The ruling class of our time
– what I call the vectoral class – wants information to be a mode of organizational control, not really of ‘innovation.’ ¶ 10.
The challenge to this baroque order is entirely within its relation to its material conditions of existence, at the base of the
stack. Negation always comes from below. There is no negation from above. There is no other domain of absolute alterity
which will rend judgment against Gomorrah. There is no communism as avenging angel of pure universal equality. There
is no absurdist leap into the unknown. What calls the vectoral class to account is the now systematic quality of its
own disorganization. First but not last on the list: ever rising levels of atmospheric carbon. What will spark a disruption is
a leap in food prices, not philosophy or art.¶ 11. The commodity economy is not what Althusser called an ‘expressive
totality’, infecting any and everything with its poison touch. It isn’t everything. It isn’t even all capitalism, but rather a
heterogeneous mix of commodity and non-commodity organizational modes. The commodity forms themselves also
differentiate into at least three historical forms, making land, capital and then information into forms of private property.
Since capitalism is not a totality its negation is not total either. One needs a language of organization that is both more
abstract and more specific, which articulates together heterogeneous forms and goals. In this respect at least the legacy of
Laclau, Mouffe and Stuart Hall is still with us.¶ 12. Critics of accelerationism might say that I too lack faith in a total
negation. Yes, indeed. But this clears away what Debord called the “silly chatter of optimism” and opens the space of
strategic thinking. The most difficult thing for any organizational thinker is to organize the orderly retreat. In many
respects orderly retreat might be our task at the moment. Which is not to say one lets go of utopian imagining, even if it is
the queer cosmos of Charles Fourier to which one turns rather than the exterminating angels of Saint Paul. ¶ 13. So a
qualified accelerationism, then. One which does not accept that capitalism is either ahistorical, or that its acceleration is
actually ‘progress.’ But which does not put too much faith in the past or in a mystical other. The challenge is to do better
with the various infrastructures to hand in organizing the world. ¶ 14. There is a certain charm to the language of what EP
Thompson called exterminism. After two millennia of failure as the abstract thought of a human centered world, perhaps
philosophy could simply skip that part and become the thought of a world without us. But perhaps the problem is not with
correlationist philosophies but with philosophy tout court. If the philosophers were going to save us they would have done
so already. Its time for quite different kinds of organization of thought in other webs of relation to the world. The problem
of thought is an organizational one. Let us be done with the spectacle of master thinkers. ¶ 15. There’s no going back, then.
We need a new temporal jazz connecting pasts-presents-futures. But let’s think in a more plural fashion with
those actual others who think that temporal jazz. Let’s put accelerationism together with the afrofuturism of Kodwo
Eshun, the gender de-engineering of Beatriz Preciado, the techno-feminism of the late Shulamith Firestone and many
others. Let’s try to think at scale again, and with a certain historical legato. Certain accelerationist comrades have resorted
to rather shopworn modes of abstracting from differences. We need rather a new kind of abstraction, one which does not
flatten such differences by simply reasserting the old patriarchal norms. Asking dad to plan a future for us isn’t
going to fly. There can be no large-scale planning base on an abstracted rationality of the old type.
Infrastructure hence forth has to be a big mesh of little things rather than a little mesh of big things. We have so
destabilized the bedrock on which infrastructure rests that it is becoming increasingly failure-prone.

Accelerationism fails – it relies on a selective notion of

capitalism based within a false dialectic.
Anarchist Without Content, 13 (Anarchist Without Contest, 12/5/13, “Against Accelerationism:
The Need For Speed,” http://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/against-acelerationism-the-need-for-
speed/)
THE PROBLEM¶ 1. Accelerationism is impossible to think outside of the problematic set up by Marx in The Poverty of
Philosophy.¶ History advances by its bad side, Marx states, arguing against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s selective notion of
capitalism. For Proudhon, capitalism has both a good and a bad side whereby the good side can be kept
while the bad side can be left behind. Such Proudhonism represents the false dialectic.¶ 2. Proudhonism has
been repeated again and again. Liberal socialists, who often rehearse Sweezy and Baran’s critique of monopoly capitalism,
praise cooperative production as well as capitalist markets and criticize capital only when it is tied up in private property.
Network enthusiasts, such as Manuel DeLanda, tout the benefits of collective fragmentation and merely call for
moderation when mixing hierarchies and meshworks. Celebrants of the commons, seen especially in the becoming-rent
theory of capital that emphasizes a feudal-like structure of production, value the free labor of postmodern society and ask
that the wealth is generates remain shared.¶ 3. Accelerationism is also guilty of Proudhonism – it affirms the
liberal pole of power in an attempt to overcome the repressive pole without antagonism. TOOLS AND
WEAPONS¶ 1. Accelerationists clarify that speed has previously been confused with acceleration. Acceleration is then
nothing but a new name for Proudhonian selectivity. The destabilizing flows of capitalism should not be
sped up, they argue, but certain ones selected for an accelerated agenda .¶ 2. By framing the problems as a
problem of mastery, accelerationism actualizes Empire’s model for producing force that operates on an exterior, meets
resistances during incorporation, loses its cause at the completion of every task, and requires renewal for each use.
 Alt Fails/Sustainable
Neolib is sustainable—mere philosophizing is useless
Arvidsson 13—teaches sociology at the University of Milano
(Adam, “Thinking beyond neo-liberalism: A response to Detlev Zwick”, ephemera: theory & politics in organization 13(2):
407-412, dml)

This makes it trickier to do critical theory. We can of course still criticize the actual state of
things. We can point to the precarious relations that prevail among creative knowledge workers; show how exploitative
and unjust conditions are intensified by the very forces that drive the globalization of communicative capitalism, like the
outsourcing of design work; or lament the fact that a triumphant neoliberal regime subsumes and appropriates aspects of
subjectivity and social life that we think should have been left alone. To produce such critiques remains useful intellectual
work – I have done it in other contexts (Arvidsson et al., 2010; Arvidsson, 2007), as has Detlev Zwick (2008), and many
others. To the extent that such critiques reach a mass audience, they can become a progressive impulse to action and
reflection – as in the case of Naomi Klein’s work inspiring the ‘no global’ movement (to use an inadequate name coined by
the mainstream press). But such a critique without an alternative remains
unsatisfactory for at least three reasons. First, and most superficially, since everyone else is
doing it, the marginal utility of yet another piece of critical theory rapidly
diminishes, as does the intellectual satisfaction that can be derived form
producing it. Second, and more seriously, the absence of a realistic alt ernative, or even of a
historical subject in the name of which such a critique can be pronounced,
risks rendering critical theory moralistic and rather toothless . We might agree
with Zwick when he suggests that the outsourcing of design work from Toronto to the Philippines is
somehow wrong, but it is difficult to understand exactly why this would be the
case. (Why shouldn’t Philippine designers be allowed to compete with Canadian designers? Can the ‘creative class’
claim an exemption from the global economy? Perhaps the answer is ‘yes’, but I do not know of any viable alternative
vision of society that is able to substantiate that ‘yes’.) Third, and most importantly, in the absence of an
alternative vision, critical theory remains rather unconvincing to the
people in the name of whom it proposes to speak . I can assure you – and I’ve tried! – that
you won’t become an organic intellectual among social entrepreneurs or
precarious creative workers by telling them that they are exploited , that
they sell out their subjectivity , or that the system in which they operate is
unjust . Pure critique is simply not attractive enough to make the multitude
of new productive subjects, fragmented by neoliberalism, cohere into a
historical subject. To do that you need at least the myth of an alternative , as
agitators from Sorel via Lenin to Subcomandante Marcos could tell you. Don’t get me wrong. I am not proposing that it is
wrong to point to the precarious conditions of knowledge work, or that we should not do this as academics and
researchers. This is still an important task. But it is not enough . Critical theory
must do this, but it must also do more . It must also engage with the
question of what a realistic alternative to neoliberalism could be, and it
must elaborate a realistic political vision in the name of which a critique
that is productive and progressive, and not simply moralistic, can be
articulated. By realistic, I mean that such an alternative must be sought in the actual
relations of production that characterize the contemporary information
economy. Zwick’s suggestion that we imagine a commonism of productive
consumption as collaborative sharing in the absence of private property and combined with an
inclusive model of political determination, collective sovereignty, belonging and justice – and so on – is simply

unproductive to my mind. We might all agree that an economy of commons that

has done away with capitalism might be more desirable, but the reality is
that hybrid forms, like the game modders that Zwick cites, where a an economy of commons co-exists with a
capitalist value logic, in some form, are indeed becoming the norm. At that point the interesting
thing to do is not so much to criticize the enduring capitalist nature of these
hybrid forms, but rather to investigate the new forms of politics that they
might give rise to. This in no way implies that one does away with conflict and politics. Rather, it implies
investigating and understanding the new spaces and discourses through
which such a new type of politics can be articulated. In order to do this we must
start with what the actors involved in these processes actually think
themselves. It is quite useless to simply deploy existing philosophical
perspectives, or to compare the reality of communicative capitalism to utopian
projections of the political visions of last century . Instead we must start with the ‘empirical
metaphysics’, to use Bruno Latour’s term, that actually prevail among people engaged in such hybrid practices. We
might all want to do away with neoliberalism and the forms of life that it has
promoted. But at the same time, we all recognize that the neoliberal project has
been one of the most successful projects of governmentality since, perhaps, the very
project of disciplinary power that Foucault himself described. Rebus sic stantibus we cannot simply wish
it away . We need to recognize that people have changed, that competitive
individualism, self-branding and an entrepreneurial mentality are, by now, normal features of
life. The same thing goes for the popular political myths that prevail among advanced knowledge workers, what Zwick
calls ‘cyber-utopianism’. We need to recognize that notions like peer-to-peer production, high-tech gift economies and the
like have the power to mobilize the energies of the subjects that are most likely to become the pioneers of a new political
vision – today’s version of the skilled workers that have taken the lead in most modern political movements. Even though
the social theory that they produce might be shallow and imperfect, and even though they might not have read Marx and
Foucault as well as we have, we cannot simply dismiss this vision as a mere ideology to be replaced by our theoretically
more refined ideology. Like the relations of production that are emerging in communicative capitalism and the subjectivity
of knowledge workers, these myths are part of the raw material with which the Gramscian intellectual must engage in
order to articulate new understandings of common sense that are both politically progressive and intuitively attractive to
the people that they are supposed to mobilize. In other words, in order to articulate an
alternative, we cannot simply dismiss the reality of communicative
capitalism and fall back on what remains of the political utopias of last
century. We need to engage with the reality of neoliberal communicative
capitalism and try to push its dialectic beyond its apolitical present state. We must investigate what
the real conditions of production and imagination are and ask ourselves
where they might lead. Critical theory needs to become an empirical , and
not simply a philosophical, enterprise.
Cap Good
 2AC Cap ethics/human nature
Capitalism is ethical and human nature
Bast and Walberg 3 (Joseph, Fellow @ The American Association for the Advancement of Science and
Founder @ The International Academy of Education, Herbert, Distinguished Visiting Fellow @ Hoover, “Education and
Capitalism,” Chapter 6, http://media.hoover.org/sites/default/files/documents/0817939717_137.pdf, EMM)

Recognizing the challenge capitalism presents to some of our traditional notions of

morality does not mean that capitalism is an immoral way to organize an
economy. The most common error made by critics of capitalism is failing to
recognize that greed or ambition (the desire to gain power or distinction without regard to its
effects on others) long predates capitalism. Greed, Max Weber wrote in 1904, “exists and has existed among
waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars.
One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all
times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given.” 6 All political and
economic systems must cope with greed. Societies that rely on tradition to shape their economies
allow some people—usually those with inherited status or willingness to use force against others—to express their greed by
imposing their will on others. Sociologist Orlando Patterson calls this sovereignal freedom, or the freedom to rule others. 7
Nietzsche termed it “Will to Power.” Although it may fulfill the material and psychological needs of those who exercise it,
this is the freedom that led to the slave societies of ancient Rome, the nationalism of Nazism, and the tribal societies of
much of impoverished Africa today. Socialism, as it was formulated by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and the British
Fabians, assumed greed to be a social phenomenon conjured by man’s alienation from his work and the rest of society,
allegedly caused by the institutions of capitalism. Greed could be extinguished, they thought, if social institutions were
organized along collectivist lines, such as those described in the 1962 Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union: Joint planned labor by the members of society, their daily participation in the management of state and public
affairs, and the development of communist relations of comradely cooperation and mutual support, recast the minds of
people in a spirit of collectivism, industry, and humanism. Increased communist consciousness of the people furthers the
ideological and political unity of the workers, collective farmers, and intellectuals and promotes their gradual fusion in the
single collective of the working people of communist society. 8 The New Soviet Man, as he was called, never emerged.
Repression of the most severe type was justified in the spirit of collectivism, and the result was a criminal society.
Socialists are quick to deny that the collapse of the Soviet Union reflects in any way on the tenets of their faith. But the
passage of time has revealed that the rot that destroyed the footings of the Soviet Union began in the denial of individual
liberty, especially the denial of property rights that stands at the core of socialist thinking. 9 Unlike its
alternatives, capitalism does a remarkably good job of constraining greed and
ambition. The most basic rule of capitalism—that all exchanges are voluntary—
is a formidable check on the pursuit of selfish interest at the expense of others. In a
capitalist society, attaining wealth, respect, and status requires appealing to the self-interest of others,
specifically by discovering, creating, and delivering goods and services that others are willing to buy. Getting around this
requirement— attempting to live at other people’s expense by using force or fraud to
take things from them or enslave them—violates the laws of property, exchange, and voluntary contract.
Assuming government is performing its proper role, those who would break the rules are
stopped and punished. Capitalism goes beyond simply checking greed and ambition by yoking the pursuit of
self-interest to the advancement of the public good. Once we learn the use of force is forbidden, we discover that the more
effectively we serve others the greater the rewards we receive. As explained in Chapter 4, markets tend to place control
over goods and property in the hands of those who value them most and who make decisions that produce the most
benefit to others. Competition makes the ban on the use of coercion self-enforcing
because others will refuse to trade or contract with us if we violate the rules
 2AC Self correcting/transition DA
Capitalism is self-correcting: Status quo collapses allow a shift
to an effective middle ground—anything else guarantees a failed
transition from forced policies.
Newman 12--author of Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback to Success and the co-author of two
other books. [Rick Newman, “Why the Tension Between Socialism and Capitalism Will Intensify”, Dec 6, 2012,
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/12/06/why-the-tension-between-socialism-and-capitalism-
will-intensify]RMT
This year's presidential election included many bastardized references to both economic systems, which have been broadly
mischaracterized for a long time. Many defenders of capitalism argue that the nation's economic system was more pure a
decade ago (or two, or three), but America hasn't had pure capitalism in well over a
century. And when it did have a raw form of capitalism, the consequences were
often disastrous for significant chunks of the population, which is why public
support grew for the kind of regulated capitalism we have now. In the 1800s, the
federal government largely stayed out of the economy , with nothing like the
regulatory apparatus we have now. That's one reason people like Andrew Carnegie,
John Jacob Astor, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan built vast fortunes — often from
monopolies or cartels--that still exist in various forms today . But unregulated
capitalism also generated speculative bubbles, financial panics and destitution
much more frequently than those things have occurred over the last 70 years. Public pressure led to a long series of
reforms that morphed into the regulated free-market economy we have today. In the early 1900s, Teddy
Roosevelt started to break up some of the all-powerful monopolies that
enriched a few while overcharging the masses. Congress created the Federal
Reserve and the income tax in 1913. A slew of regulatory agencies grew out of
the Great Depression. During the 20th century, presidents of both parties signed
legislation creating new agencies to oversee food, medicine, the
environment and Wall Street (ahem). We still have a capitalist system centered on
private ownership and prices set by the free market, but it's layered with rules meant to prevent abuses.
Some Americans obviously feel there are too many rules, with a vocal set of critics claiming that Obama in particular has
ushered in a system that's more like socialism than capitalism. That's hyperbole. Obama's new healthcare
plan obviously will involve a lot more government involvement in the
delivery of health care. But that happened because the prior system (which was
itself governed by a dense thicket of insurance-company rules ) failed to keep
medical costs at affordable levels or make healthcare available to
everybody. As in the past, public pressure for something better led to
government intervention. Anybody familiar with real socialism ought to know that it's not what we have in
America today. If it were, the government would control most industries and own most of the property, and most
Americans would be paid similar wages determined by government bureaucrats.
 Cap Good ext: War
Regression study proves that capitalism makes war much less
likely
 Erik Gartzke, Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and a member of the
SaltzmanInstitute of War and Peace Studies.   2005
Chapter 2: Economic Freedom and Peace               Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual
Report           http://www.cato.org/pubs/efw/efw2005/efw2005-2.pdf
 
The substantive effects of Economic Freedom and the Democracy Score on international disputes
can be seen in Figures 2.1 and 2.2, respectively. In both figures, the horizontal axis lists the
ordinal scales for the respective explanatory variable (either the Index of Economic Freedom or
the Polity Democracy Index), while the vertical axis reports the probability of a MID in a given
year for states with a given level of either of the two explanatory variables. The solid line
sloping down and to the right in Figure 2.1 is the relationship between Economic
Freedom and militarized disputes, as estimated by the regression in Table 2.1. In
Figure 2.2, the effect of the Democracy Score variable on conflict also appears as a solid line,
which slopes slightly down and to the right. In Figure 2.1, the two light dashed lines that appear to
run in parallel above and below the line for Economic Freedom represent confidence intervals.
Ninety-five percent of all the solid lines estimated from regressions on similar data would be
contained within the interval bounded by the two dashed lines. In other words, the relationship
depicted in the figure between Economic Freedom and an absence of militarized violence is very
likely to be at least approximately correct. As can be seen from the figure, the impact of
free markets and limited government is substantial. The least free states have about
a 7% chance of experiencing a dispute, while the freest states experience disputes in
only about half of 1% of the years examined. Making economies freer translates into
making countries more peaceful. At the extremes, the least free states are about 14
times as conflict prone as the most free.

Strong data supports the theory that capitalism is good.

Mcdonald 10--Professor McDonald teaches courses on international relations theory, international political
economy, and international security at UT Austin [Patrick J. McDonalda* pages 146-168“Capitalism, Commitment, and
Peace”Volume 36, Issue 2, 2010]RMT
This paper builds on the growing capitalist peace research program by examining how large quantities of
public property influence the likelihood of conflict between states. Drawing on the
logic of the commitment problem, it develops two explanations linking the predominance of public property in an
economy to the likelihood of being the target of military conflict, defined to include both militarized disputes and war.
Empirical support for this hypothesis is generated with a brief illustrative case and
a series of statistical tests with monadic and directed dyadic research
designs. A final section discusses how these findings suggest that capitalism plays a
larger role than democracy in limiting military conflict between states.

Robust ICB data proves cap reduces war

Hewitt 10--Director for Government Relations at the Center for International Development and Conflict
Management (CIDCM), University of Maryland, where he specializes in quantitative analysis of international conflict.[ &
J. Joseph Hewitt, Erik Gartzke* “International Crises and the Capitalist Peace”18 May 2010,Volume 36, Issue 2,
2010]RMT
Recent research suggests that free markets and economic development contribute to a
reduction in interstate conflict . This “capitalist peace” has been seen alternately to complement or to
supplant the more well-known democratic peace effect. Here, we compare the behavior of
democracies and capitalist dyads in the context of the Interstate Crisis
Behavior (ICB) dataset. The ICB data offers a number of advantages in
assessing the conflict decisions of national leaders, rather than the accidents
of subordinates or others. In particular, we explore as yet untested implications of
each perspective, examining the effect of regime type and economic and interest
variables on escalation and crisis intensity. Our findings provide new evidence
that free markets, economic development, and similar interests account for the
special peace in liberal dyads.
 2AC Cap good: Wolf
Capitalism is good—it’s the only way to create sustained ethical
conduct and protect the environment—comparative studies
prove
Wolf’ 03 – Master in Economics at Oxford, a British journalist, widely considered to be one of the world’s most
influential writers on economics. He is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times
[Martin, “The Morality of the Market”, Foreign Policy, Sept 1, 2003,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2003/09/01/the_morality_of_the_market%5D]
A sophisticated market economy works better than any other economic
arrangement that has ever existed . After two centuries of unprecedented
economic advance, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and
China’s transition to capitalism, it is hard to argue anything else. Yet the
victory of the market model is detested almost everywhere. Critics
grudgingly concede that capitalism may work better than any plausible
alternative, but they insist it remains a wicked system, one that rewards
immoral behavior — greed, ruthlessness, and indifference to the fate of
others — and produces immoral outcomes, namely widening inequality.
This view is most stridently expressed by the anti-globalization left. But a similar, if
more subtle, critique has emerged among economists themselves, some of whom even decry capitalism as inherently inhumane and in need
of a “human face.” It
is easy to agree that a market economy requires a supporting
system of laws and regulations. It is also easy to accept the desirability of
government-sponsored programs of social welfare, provided these are kept
within manageable bounds. But the claim that the market economy is
immoral is nonsense . The market economy rests on and encourages
valuable moral qualities ; provides unprecedented opportunities for people
to engage in altruistic activities ; underpins individual freedom and
democracy ; and has created societies that are, in all significant respects,
less unequal than the traditional hierarchies that preceded them. In short,
capitalism is the most inherently just economic system that humankind has
ever devised. It is true that market economies neither create, nor reward, saints. But consider the virtuous
behavior that capitalism fosters: trustworthiness , reliability , individual
initiative , civility , self-reliance , and self-restraint . These qualities are, critics correctly note,
placed in the service of self-interest. Since people are, with few exceptions, self-interested, that should be neither surprising nor shocking.
Yet people are also not completely self-interested. Prosperous market
economies generate a vast number of attractive opportunities for those
who are not motivated by wealth alone . People can seek employment with non-governmental
organizations or charities. They can work in the public sector, as doctors, teachers, or
police officers. They can teach the iniquities of capitalism in schools and
universities. Those who make a great deal of money can use it for any
purpose they wish. They can give it away, for example. Quite a few have. In
the advanced market economies, people care deeply about eliminating pain
and injustice and ensuring the welfare of fellow humans and, more
recently, animals. This concern exists because a rich, liberal society places enormous emphasis on the health and well-being
of the individual. Life is no longer nasty, brutish, and short; rather, it is gentle, kind, and long, and more precious than before. The
savage punishments and casual indignities of two centuries ago are no
longer acceptable to civilized people. Nor are slavery and serfdom, both of
which were rendered obsolete and immoral under the capitalist system.
Militarists, extreme nationalists, communists, and fascists — the anti-
liberals — brought these horrors back, if only temporarily. And it is no
accident that the creeds that brought them back were fiercely anti-
individualistic and anti-market . Yet another example of changed sensibilities is environmentalism. The
environmental catastrophes caused by supposedly benevolent state socialist
economies are well documented. The market economy has largely avoided
such disasters . That is because prosperous people tend to care more about
the environment in which they live than those who are condemned to squalor. Moreover, only liberal
democracy makes it possible for concerns about the environment to be
routinely aired and addressed . It affords environmentalists the right to pursue their agendas and to raise money
in support of their goals. It segregates the public and private sectors, which enables government to regulate business. And because
information is widely disseminated in a free society, companies must
adhere to environmental standards if they hope to maintain their
reputations. Branding Dissent One of the more insidious charges now leveled against the market economy is that it undermines
individual liberty and subverts democracy. In her book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, acclaimed anti-globalization campaigner
Naomi Klein lapses into paranoia and delusion when she writes of “corporate space as a fascist state where we all salute the logo and have
little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by
multinational corporate interests.” In reality, a competitive market economy is a necessary condition for democracy. The bedrock of a
market economy is, as the 17th-century philosopher John Locke argued, the right of individuals to own and use property freely, subject to
reasonable legal constraints. In turn, the right to own and use property freely gave rise to ideas about political liberty and the rule of law.
Secure property rights require stable, durable governments interested in the long-term health of their countries. As the late economist
Mancur Olson observed, “The only societies where individual rights to property and contract are confidently expected to last across
generations are the securely democratic societies.” But sustained democracy requires the rule of law: The system can only endure if those in
power accept free speech and political competition and abide by the results of elections. The
rule of law came about
as a means of facilitating commerce; in this sense, capitalism provides the
basis for democracy , not vice versa. A planned economy, by contrast, will
always go hand-in-hand with tyranny. Vaclav Havel, erstwhile dissident and later president of the Czech
Republic, has pointed out that a government that controls the economy will inevitably also
control the civic life of a nation. True, some countries have proved the
reverse: They have market economies but not democracy nor civil and
human rights. But even if all nations with market economies are not (yet)
democratic, all democracies have market economies. As the distinguished
Hungarian economist Janos Kornai notes, “There has been no country with a
democratic political sphere, past or present, whose economy has not been
dominated by private ownership and market coordination.” The market
supports democracy in another way — through growth. When per capita
output rises, a society’s condition can be described as “positive sum” —
every person in that society can become better off. This outcome makes
politics relatively easy to manage. In a static society, however, a “zero-sum”
condition prevails: If anyone is to receive more, someone else must receive
less. It is a safe bet that if environmentalists imposed a zero-economic
growth agenda on a country, that country would swiftly become
authoritarian. And far from stifling democracy, as Klein and her cohorts contend, the market economy manufactures political
dissent with unparalleled efficiency. As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, liberal
democracies are the only societies that create their own opposition. Only in a market economy would the wealthy give large sums of money
to universities, despite the contempt that many professors and students express for capitalism and the affluent. Only in a market economy
could books and newspaper articles condemning the rich and powerful be published and promoted with such success. Indeed, for all her
jeremiads against capitalism, multinationals, and global brands, Klein appears to have done quite well by the market economy. Under no
other system could her book have become such an international sensation. Her complaints about media conglomeration ring somewhat
hollow considering what a media darling she has become. It could even be said that No Logo is now a brand of its own. The market economy
does not merely support its critics; it embraces them. The Great Leveler Inequality is considered the scourge of capitalism. Yes, the rewards
in market economies are far from equally distributed. However, all complex societies with elaborate divisions of labor are unequal. Those
countries with market economies are not only the least unequal, but the inequality they generate is the least harmful. In agrarian kingdoms
and feudal societies, kings and lords could seize at will the labor, possessions, and even the lives of subjects, serfs, and slaves. Perhaps the
most unequal societies of all were the state-socialist and national-socialist regimes of the 20th century. When, on a whim, Chinese leader
Mao Zedong initiated the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, some 20 million people died. The irony is that such tyranny was justified by
the alleged depredations of capitalism. To eliminate market-driven inequality, all power was concentrated in the hands of the state; the
result was an infinitely more unjust distribution of wealth that benefited those who controlled the economy. It is fashionable now to claim
that the market economy has produced staggering global inequality. Disparity in the global distribution of household incomes did increase
The proportion of
progressively from the early 19th century to around 1965. But this trend must be properly understood.
the world’s population living on the margins of subsistence — that is, on an
income of $1 per day — has actually decreased from more than 80 percent
in 1820 to around 20 percent today, despite a roughly six-fold increase in
world population. Moreover, the rise in global inequality was not caused by
increased inequality within countries but increased inequality among them.
This gap reflects the success of those countries that embraced capitalism
and the failure of those that did not. Likewise, the reduction in global inequality
that has apparently occurred in the past two decades reflects the successful
introduction of dynamic market economies in China and, to a lesser extent, in India.
 ----Cap good ext:facism
Privatization sustains representative governments
Rahoc 14--policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity [Dailbor, “The Dead
Hand of Socialism: State Ownership in the Arab World” Cato Institute Aug 25, 2014]RMT
Extensive government ownership in the economy is a source of inefficiency and
a barrier to economic development. Although precise measures of government ownership across the Middle
East and North Africa (MENA) are hard to come by, the governments of Algeria, Egypt, Libya,
Syria, and Yemen all operate sizeable segments of their economies —in some cases
accounting for more than two-thirds of the GDP. International experience
suggests that private ownership tends to outperform public ownership . Yet
MENA countries have made only modest progress toward reducing the share of government ownership in their economies
and are seen as unlikely candidates for wholesale privatization in the near future. MENA countries need to
implement privatization in order to sustain their transitions toward more
representative political systems and inclusive economic institutions. Three main
lessons emerge from the experience of countries that have undergone large privatization programs in the past. First, the
form of privatization matters for its economic outcomes and for popular
acceptance of the reform. Transparent privatization, using open and competitive bidding, produces
significantly better results than privatization by insiders, without public scrutiny. Second , private ownership
and governance of the financial sector is crucial to the success of
restructuring. Third, privatization needs to be a part of a broader reform
package that would liberalize and open MENA economies to competition.
 2AC Resource Allocation (Gongol)
Market economies are the only way to allocate resources—the
1AC warneke evidence says that it guarantees conflict
Gongol 9—owner Gongol.com[Brian, “Is Socialism Good for the
Environment?”,http://www.gongol.com/research/economics/socialismandtheenvironment/]RMT

Socialism assumes that someone or some group of people has the ability to
predict and plan for the needs of the many. This kind of omniscience is plainly
impossible. Pretend, for instance, that everything that people might need or want can be lumped together in a
single category, called "Stuff." In any given planning period, the planner must determine
how much Stuff people will want and how much Stuff must be produced. But
there will inevitably be some difference between what the planner expects
supply and demand for Stuff to be and what actually emerges. Even if the planner is
occasionally correct, every deviation from the actual demand for Stuff causes waste
-- when too little Stuff is produced to meet demand, people needlessly suffer.
When too much Stuff is produced to meet demand, all that extra Stuff represents
waste. Even a really, really good planner will be unable to accurately predict the
vast fluctuations in day-to-day demand for Stuff, leading to huge amounts of either waste
or suffering. Yet this planning function is routinely achieved with great
efficiency by the feedback systems of a market economy, in which freely-
moving prices effectively tell everyone in the market whether too much or too
little of anything is being produced.
 --Resource allocation ext: Socialism link
It applies to socialism
Fedako 12—Ludwig Von Mises Institute for advancing Austrian economics, Liberty and Peace [Jim, “Health Care
and the Candy Store Called Socialism”May 08, 2014]RMT

And given these real experiences, is it any wonder that folks return championing socialized medicine? Is it any wonder
that a kid from the hills north of Pittsburgh still remembers juice so deliciously sweet and thick and cookies so delectably
fruity and fresh? But the folks championing socialized medicine are always
repeating tales of visits for simple cases of the flu or other travel-related
illnesses. What is seen is the overflowing abundance of care at that level. This is the
sugar, so to speak. Unseen are other types of care. The meat, eggs, etc. And this is where the failures of
socialized medicine are as obvious as the lack of nutritious food in a
Yugoslavian store.[1] The stories from travelers paint a different picture from those told by people living in
countries with socialized medicine. Many of these folks — those looking for meat —
complain about either the unavailability of care or wait times that exceed the
life expectancy of those suffering from the disease. So we end up hearing contrasting stories:
ones from visitors who are amazed by the candy, and others from residents who complain about no meat. And both are
right. Can a society (or a sector of the economy) organized under socialism
efficiently allocate resources? No. Can it produce overflowing shelves of sugar in dingy stores barren of
essentials? Absolutely. And can it overstaff emergency rooms as a means to satisfy
short-term cravings for healthcare even while essential long-term needs go
wanting. Certainly, with real examples all around. Can it ever balance the two? And can it balance the two
along with all other goods and services desired? Not in this world of scarcity. So not in this world at all. Bastiat and Hazlitt
pushed the idea of the unseen front and center for important reasons. It is essential that the unseen is
included in any consideration of a situation. And that is true even when, like me at 13, you
want to overlook barren, dirty shelves in order to focus on the oasis of sugar

Resource trigger a litany of conflicts and trigger the impacts of

the aff
Klare 13 [(Michael, Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, natural resource expert, serves on
the board of the Arms Control Association) “RESOURCE WARS: THE COMING GLOBAL EXPLOSION” Phantom Report
April 22] AT
Brace yourself . You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the U.S. intelligence community, the earth is already shifting
you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort
under you. Whether you know it or not,

humanity has never before experienced. Two nightmare scenarios — a global

scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change — are already beginning to converge and in
the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion,

competition, and conflict . Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like
may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems,
global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant

violence), and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is

likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia, and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet

will be affected. To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to
produce this future cataclysm. Resource Shortages and Resource Wars Start with one simple given: the prospect of future

scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water, land, food, and critical minerals. This in itself would
guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction, and war. It is important to note that absolute scarcity
doesn’t have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate supplies to

meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanized and industrialized global population is enough.
Psychoanalysis
Psycho
 Alt Fails
Alt Fails at social change
Robinson 5 [Andrew Robinson, Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham, 2005, “The Political
Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique,” Theory & Event, Volume 8, Issue 1, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions
via Project Muse]
There is more than an accidental relationship between the mythical operation of the concept of "constitutive lack" and
Lacanians' conservative and pragmatist politics.Myth is a way of reducing thought to the
present: the isolated signs which are included in the mythical gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical
abstractions.On an analytical level, Lacanian theory can be very "radical",
unscrupulously exposing the underlying relations and assumptions
concealed beneath officially-sanctioned discourse. This radicalism,
however, never translates into political conclusions : as shown above, a radical
rejection of anti-"crime" rhetoric turns into an endorsement of punishment,
and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns into a pragmatist endorsement of
structural adjustment. It is as if there is a magical barrier between theory
and politics which insulates the latter from the former . One should recall a remark once
made by Wilhelm Reich: 'You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you'133. Lacanians have a "radical"
theory oriented towards happiness, but politically, their primary concern is security. As long as they are engaged in
politically ineffectual critique, Lacanians will denounce and criticize the social system, but
once it comes to practical problems, the "order not to think" becomes
operative. This "magic" barrier is the alibi function of myth. The short-circuit between specific
instances and high-level abstractions is politically consequential. A present evil can
be denounced and overthrown if located in an analysis with a "middle level", but Lacanian theory tends in practice to add
an "always" which prevents change. At the very most, such change cannot affect the basic matrix
posited by Lacanian theory, because this is assumed to operate above history. In this way, Lacanian theory
operates as an alibi: it offers a little bit of theoretical radicalism to inoculate the

system against the threat posed by a lot of politicized radicalism 134.In Laclau
and Mouffe's version, this takes the classic Barthesian form: "yes, liberal democracy involves violent exclusions, but what
is this compared to the desert of the real outside it?"The Zizekian version is more complex: "yes, there can be a revolution,
but after the revolution, one must return to the pragmatic tasks of the present".A good example is provided in one of
Zizek's texts.The author presents an excellent analysis of a Kafkaesque incident in the former Yugoslavia where the state
gives a soldier a direct, compulsory order to take a voluntary oath - in other words, attempts to compel consent.He then
ruins the impact of this example by insisting that there is always such a moment of "forced choice", and that one should
not attempt to escape it lest one end up in psychosis or totalitarianism135. The political function of
Lacanian theory is to preclude critique by encoding the present as myth.
There is a danger of a stultifying conservatism arising from within Lacanian
political theory, echoing the 'terrifying conservatism' Deleuze suggests is active in any reduction of history to
negativity136.The addition of an "always" to contemporary evils amounts to a "pessimism of the will", or a "repressive
reduction of thought to the present".Stavrakakis, for instance, claims that attempts to find causes and thereby to solve
problems are always fantasmatic137, while Zizek states that an object which is perceived as blocking something does
nothing but materialize the already-operative constitutive lack138.While this does not strictly entail the necessity of a
conservative attitude to the possibility of any specific reform, it creates a danger of discursive slippage and hostility to
"utopianism" which could have conservative consequences.Even if Lacanians believe in surplus/contingent as well as
constitutive lack, there are no standards for distinguishing the two.If one cannot tell which social blockages result from
constitutive lack and which are contingent, how can one know they are not all of the latter type?And even if
constitutive lack exists, Lacanian theory runs a risk of "misdiagnoses" which
have a neophobe or even reactionary effect.To take an imagined example, a Lacanian
living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that democracy is a
utopian fantasmatic ideal and would settle for a pragmatic reinterpretation
of the ancien regime.Laclau and Mouffe's hostility to workers' councils and Zizek's insistence on the need for a
state and a Party139 exemplify this neophobe tendency. The pervasive negativity and cynicism of
Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity. Instead of radical
transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of "containment" which involves a
conservative de-problematization of the worst aspects of the status quo. The
inactivity it counsels would make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by
acting as a barrier to transformative activity.To conclude, the political theory of
"constitutive lack" does not hold together as an analytical project and falls
short of its radical claims as a theoretical and political one. It relies on central
concepts which are constructed through the operation of a mythical discourse in the Barthesian sense, with the result that
it is unable to offer sufficient openness to engage with complex issues . If
political theory is to make use of poststructuralist conceptions of contingency, it would do better to look to the examples
provided by Deleuze and Guattari, whose conception of contingency is active and affirmative.In contrast, the idea of
"constitutive lack" turns Lacanian theory into something its most vocal proponent, Zizek,
claims to attack: a "plague of fantasies".
 No Lack
There’s no constitutive lack – their kritik is self-referential non-
sense
Robinson 5, PhD in political theory at the University of Nottingham, 2005 (Andrew, “The Political Theory of
Constitutive Lack,” Johns Hopkins University Press, 8/1)
 More precisely, I would maintain that "constitutive
lack" is an instance of a Barthesian
myth.  It is, after all, the function of myth to do exactly what this concept does: to
assert the empty facticity of a particular ideological schema while rejecting
any need to argue for its assumptions.  'Myth does not deny things; on the
contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes
them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it is a clarity
which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact ' .  This is 37

precisely the status of "constitutive lack": a supposed fact which is supposed to

operate above and beyond explanation, on an ontological level instantly
accessible to those with the courage to accept it.  Myths operate to construct
euphoric enjoyment for those who use them, but their operation is in
conflict with the social context with which they interact .  This is because their operation
is connotative: they are "received" rather than "read"38, and open only to a "readerly" and not a "writerly" interpretation. 
A myth is a second-order signification attached to an already-constructed
denotative sign, and the ideological message projected into this sign is
constructed outside the context of the signified .  A myth is therefore, in Alfred Korzybski's
sense, intensional: its meaning derives from a prior linguistic schema, not from interaction with the world in its
complexity39.  Furthermore, myths have a repressive social function, carrying in
Barthes's words an 'order not to think' .  They are necessarily projected onto
40

or imposed on actual people and events, under the cover of this order.   The
"triumph of literature" in the Dominici trial consists precisely in this41

projection of an externally-constructed mythical schema as a way of

avoiding engagement with something one does not understand .       Lacanian
theory, like Barthesian myths, involves a prior idea of a structural matrix which is
not open to change in the light of the instances to which it is applied.   Žižek's
writes of a 'pre-ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the
construction of reality' , while Laclau suggests there is a formal structure of any chain of equivalences which
42

necessitates the logic of hegemony .  Specific analyses are referred back to this underlying
43

structure as its necessary expressions, without apparently being able to

alter it; for instance, 'those who triggered the process of democratization in eastern Europe... are not those who today
enjoy its fruits, not because of a simple usurpation... but because of a deeper structural logic' .  In most instances, the
44

mythical operation of the idea of "constitutive lack" is implicit, revealed only

by a rhetoric of denunciation. For instance, Mouffe accuses liberalism of an
'incapacity... to grasp... the irreducible character of antagonism ' , while 45

Žižek claims that a 'dimension' is 'lost' in Butler's work because of her

failure to conceive of "trouble" as constitutive of "gender " .   This language of 46

"denial" which is invoked to silence critics is a clear example of Barthes's

"order not to think": one is not to think about the idea of "constitutive lack",
one is simply to "accept" it, under pain of invalidation.   If someone else
disagrees, s/he can simply be told that there is something crucial missing
from her/his theory.  Indeed, critics are as likely to be accused of being "dangerous" as to be accused of being
wrong. 
 No Dynamic Conscious
Psychoanalysis is factually inaccurate—the model of the dynamic
unconscious it is modeled on is factually inaccurate
O’Brien & Jureidini, 2002 [Gerard & Jon, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Adelaide & PhD (Flinders) is a child psychiatrist who has completed a doctorate in philosophy of mind,
“Dispensing With the Dynamic Unconscious,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2, project muse]
IT IS THE PRIMARY TENET of psychoanalysis that there is a subterranean
region of our minds inhabited by mental entities—such as thoughts, feelings, and motives—
that are actively prevented from entering consciousness because of their painful or
otherwise unacceptable content. These mental entities, in spite of being consciously
inaccessible, are assumed to have a profound impact on our conscious
mental life and behavior, and in so doing are thought to be responsible for many of the psychopathologies, both
major and minor, to which we are subject. This conjectured subterranean region of our minds is
nowadays known as the dynamic unconscious , and there is no more important explanatory
concept in all of psychoanalytic theory. Yet, despite its importance to psychoanalytic thought and practice,
and despite almost a century of research effort since its first systematic articulation, the
dynamic unconscious is in deep trouble. The methodologic difficulties
associated with theorizing about this putative mental underworld are
legion (Grunbaum 1984), and recent years have seen a growing skepticism about
the very notion of a dynamic unconscious and with it the whole apparatus of psychoanalysis (see, for example,
Crews 1996). In the face of these difficulties, a number of proponents of psychoanalysis have turned to contemporary
cognitive science for assistance (see, for example, Epstein 1994; Erdelyi 1985; Shevrin 1992; and Westen 1998). Their aim
has been to show that psychoanalytic conjectures about the dynamic unconscious receive a great deal of support from the
empirical evidence in favor of the cognitive unconscious. By variously integrating the dynamic unconscious with the
cognitive unconscious (Epstein 1994) or extending the cognitive unconscious to cover psychical entities and processes
traditionally associated with the dynamic [End Page 141] unconscious (Westen 1998), the hope is that the struggling
psychoanalytic concept will be buttressed by its healthier counterpart in cognitive science. It is our contention, however,
that this hope is misplaced. Far from supporting the dynamic unconscious,
recent work in the cognitive science suggests that the time has come to
dispense with this concept altogether. We will defend this claim in two ways. First, we will
argue that any
attempt to shore up the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive
unconscious is bound to fail, simply because the latter, as it is understood in
contemporary cognitive science, is incompatible with the former as it is
traditionally conceived by psychoanalytic theory. Second, we will show how psychological
phenomena traditionally cited as evidence for the operation of a dynamic
unconscious can be accommodated more parsimoniously by other means. But
before we do either of these things, and to set the scene for our subsequent discussion, we will offer a very brief
recapitulation of the dynamic unconscious, especially as it was originally conceived by Sigmund Freud.
 No Support for Psycho Theory
There is no justification for psychoanalytic theory
Robinson 5 — Andrew Robinson, Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham, 2005 (“The Political
Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique,” Theory & Event, Volume 8, Issue 1, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions
via Project Muse)
Lacanian analysis consists mainly of an exercise in projection. As a result,
Lacanian "explanations" often look more propagandistic or pedagogical
than explanatory. A particular case is dealt with only in order to, and to the
extent that it can, confirm the already-formulated structural theory. Judith Butler
criticizes Zizek's method on the grounds that 'theory is applied to its examples', as if 'already
true, prior to its exemplification'. 'The theory is articulated on its self-
sufficiency, and then shifts register only for the pedagogical purpose of
illustrating an already accomplished truth'. It is therefore 'a theoretical
fetish that disavows the conditions of its own emergence' 52. She alleges that
Lacanian psychoanalysis 'becomes a theological project' and also 'a way to
avoid the rather messy psychic and social entanglement' involved in
studying specific cases 53. Similarly, Dominick LaCapra objects to the idea of constitutive lack because
specific 'losses cannot be adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalised discourse of absence...
Conversely, absence at a "foundational" level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses'54. Attacking 'the
long story of conflating absence with loss that becomes constitutive instead of historical'55, he accuses several theorists of
eliding the difference between absence and loss, with 'confusing and dubious results', including a 'tendency to avoid
addressing historical problems, including losses, in sufficiently specific terms', and a tendency to 'enshroud, perhaps even
to etherealise, them in a generalised discourse of absence'56. Daniel Bensaid draws out the political consequences of the
projection of absolutes into politics. 'The fetishism of the absolute event involves... a suppression of historical
intelligibility, necessary to its depoliticization'. The space from which politics is evacuated 'becomes... a suitable place for
abstractions, delusions and hypostases'. Instead of actual social forces, there are 'shadows and spectres'57.
 Epistemology Sound
their psychological thesis doesn’t disprove our impact
Yudkowsky 6 – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence that
has published multiple peer-reviewed papers on risk assessment. Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global
risks Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic. August 31, 2006.
Every true idea which discomforts you will seem to match the pattern of at
least one psychological error. Robert Pirsig said: “The world’s biggest fool can say the sun is shining, but
that doesn’t make it dark out.” If you believe someone is guilty of a psychological error,
then demonstrate your competence by first demolishing their consequential
factual errors. If there are no factual errors, then what matters the
psychology? The temptation of psychology is that, knowing a little
psychology, we can meddle in arguments where we have no technical
expertise – instead sagely analyzing the psychology of the disputants . If someone
wrote a novel about an asteroid strike destroying modern civilization, then someone might criticize that novel as extreme,
dystopian, apocalyptic; symptomatic of the author’s naive inability to deal with a complex technological society. We should
recognize this as a literary criticism, not a scientific one; it is about good or bad novels, not good or bad hypotheses. To
quantify the annual probability of an asteroid strike in real life, one must study astronomy and the historical record: no
amount of literary criticism can put a number on it. Garreau (2005) seems to hold that a scenario of a mind slowly
increasing in capability, is more mature and sophisticated than a scenario of extremely rapid intelligence increase. But
that’s a technical question, not a matter of taste; no amount of psychologizing can tell you the exact slope of that curve. It’s
harder to abuse heuristics and biases than psychoanalysis. Accusing someone of conjunction
fallacy leads naturally into listing the specific details that you think are
burdensome and drive down the joint probability. Even so, do not lose track
of the real- world facts of primary interest; do not let the argument become
about psychology. Despite all dangers and temptations, it is better to know about psychological biases than to
not know. Otherwise we will walk directly into the whirling helicopter blades of life. But be very careful not
to have too much fun accusing others of biases . That is the road that leads to
becoming a sophisticated arguer – someone who, faced with any
discomforting argument, finds at once a bias in it . The one whom you must watch above all
is yourself. Jerry Cleaver said: “What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique.
It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball.” Analyses should finally center on testable real-world
assertions. Do not take your eye off the ball.

Experience is a sound epistemology – their knowledge is

subjective and lack evidence
Curtler 97 - Hugh, “rediscovering values: coming to terms with postnmodernism” 38-9
Idealism, like skepticism, rests upon the fact that we cannot prove that objects are
real (i.e., exist independently of the subject). We cannot know it beyond the
shadow of a doubt. But outside of logic and arithmetic, "knowing" is seldom
"proving," and skepticism fades when confronted by cumulative experience
over time. This cumulative experience allows us to attach a very high
probability to our claims that the book in your hands is real and not a
fiction. In the "real world," probabilities are the best we can hope for, and the claim that objects in that world are real
is most probable. One can also speak of objectivity in another sense, of course. One can speak of claims that are
objective to the extent that they can be verified or disproved by independent
persons. A subjective claim, on the other hand, lacks the evidence necessary to verify
it and amounts to little more than personal opinion. I shall explore this sense of objectivity
in greater detail in a later chapter. For the moment, suffice it to say that, in both cases, objectivity connotes
independence from the subject, either through its presence to the subject
and consequent independence of his or her will, or through the evidence
that supports a claim and renders it "reasonable" or "true." In a word, we can agree
with what is most important in the postmodern view—to wit, that knowledge is perspectival—without accepting the view
that reality is a construct made up of individual perspectives. Postmodernists would, of course, deny the legitimacy of my
entire analysis because of its reliance on reasonability and notions such as "probability" and "truth." Their contention, as
we have seen, is that truth is a matter (at best) of convention and for the most part arbitrary. But it is difficult to see how
this is so when truth and objectivity obtrude themselves into our consciousness and lay claim to our assent whether or not
we want to give it. Unlike the world of ideas, there is, as Peirce noted long ago, "an element of brute compulsion" in our
confrontation with the real world (Peirce 1934, 5:97).

Dodds is factually wrong

Lertzmen 12 – Renee Lertzman has a Ph.D. and works in the Associate Faculty of Royal Roads University in Victoria, British
Columbia, in Canada. (“Review of Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Deleuze/Guattari and Psychoanalysis for
a Climate in Crisis by Joseph Dodds”, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., Volume 4, Issue 3, September 2012, we don’t endorse any ableist language in this
evidence)
However, Dodds doesn’t rest easy with psychoanalysis entirely. As others have pointed out (Lertzman, 2012b; Zizek, 2010),
psychoanalysis has its blind spots as well. Specifically, going back to the legacy of Freud’s exclusive focus on the
human-populated world— interpsychic and the intrapsychic dimensions, also referred to as object relations
—psychoanalysis runs the great risk of being too disconnected with the physical, breathing, and natural
world, and frankly too caught up in its own intricate theories of the human psyche to take notice of concurrent streams of ecological thought over
the past several decades. In other words, when psychoanalysts come to ecological topics, there can be a lack of
acknowledgement and recognition of related bodies of work and research that can both support and
complement the psychoanalytic contributions. As a result, the risk of appearing “out of touch” and in a bubble
continues to be negotiated.
 A2 Death Drive
Death drive doesn’t explain violence
Havi Carel 6, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England, “Life and Death in Freud and
Heidegger”, Google Books
Once the passive model of
Secondly, the constancy principle on which these ideas are based is incompatible with observational data.

the nervous system has been discarded, there was no need for external
excitation in order for discharge to take place, and more generally, " the
behavioural picture seemed to negate the notion of drive, as a separate
energizer of behaviour " {Hcbb. 1982. p.35). According to Holt, the nervous system is not passive;
it does not take in and conduct out energy from the environment, and it
shows no tendency to discharge its impulses. 'The principle of constancy is
quite without any biological basis" (1965, p. 109). He goes on to present the difficulties that arise from the pleasure principle
as linked to a tension-reduction theory. The notion of tension is "conveniently ambiguous ": it has

phenomenological, physiological and abstract meaning. But empirical evidence against the theory of tension

reduction has been "mounting steadily" and any further attempts to link
pleasure with a reduction of physiological tension are "decisively refuted " (1965,
pp. 1102). Additionally, the organism and the mental system are no longer considered

closed systems. So the main arguments for the economic view collapse, as
does the entropic argument for the death drive (1965, p. 114). A final, more general criticism of Freud's
economic theory is sounded by Compton, who argues, "Freud fills in psychological discontinuities with neurological hypotheses" (1981, p. 195). The

Nirvana principle is part and parcel of the economic view and the
incomplete and erroneous assumptions about the nervous system (Hobson, 1988,
p.277). It is an extension ad extremis of the pleasure principle, and as such is vulnerable to all the above criticisms. The overall contemporary view provides strong
support for discarding the Nirvana principle and reconstructing the death drive as aggression.
 A2 Us v. Them
Us vs. Them mentality is inevitable
Dess 3 (Harold D., Nancy, Ph. D. University of Cincinnati psychology, Ph.D. Occidental College psychology
Evolutionary psychology and violence: a primer for policymakers and public policy advocates Ed. - Richard W. Bloom,
Nancy Kimberly Dess pg.157-158)
This chapter deals with an evolutionary analysis of intercultural conflict. The core assumption is that genes determine
some aspects of human social behavior Our genes make all of our social behavior possible ,
but because of our evolutionary design—as social primates and, later, as tribally organized hunters
and gatherers—we have inherited a genetic structure that makes certain kinds of
attitudes and social behavior inevitable. Further, the occurrence of some of these
attitudes and behaviors makes the development of prejudice and
discrimination toward members of other cultures highly likely . These attitudes and
behaviors constitute an "us versus them" psychology that is genetically determined.
On the basis of the current state of knowledge, it is highly likely that particular processes are
genetically coded that normally ensure that the evolved social behaviors
(phenotypic characteristics) will develop. For example, neither English nor Spanish is coded
in the genes, but language-inducing processes are. If a child is reared in an English-speaking
community, she'll learn English. If she's reared in an American Sign Language (ASL) community, she'll learn ASL. Either
outcome can occur because language-inducing processes that have evolved in the species have developed in the individual.
Although debate continues over whether these processes are modular or generic and about exactly how human
communication is unique, that children's great facility for learning human language is
an evolutionary legacy is clear

Enmity is good and avoids violence--- alt can’t solve because they
don’t have a replacement for the Cartesian subject
Reinhard 4 – Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Jewish Studies at UCLA, 2004, “Towards a Political Theology- Of
the Neighbor,” online: http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/Mellon/Towards_Political_Theology.pdf
If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition, the world we find
ourselves in today is one from which the political may have already disappeared, or at least has mutated into some strange
new shape. A world not anchored by the “us” and “them” binarisms that flourished as recently as the Cold War is
one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically, as Jacques Derrida points out in The Politics of
Friendship: ¶ The effects of this destructuration would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be looking for new
reconstitutive enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation-states; it would sustain at any price so-
called ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still identifiable
adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies without which … it would lose its political being … without an enemy, and
therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself, qua a self? (PF 77) ¶ If one accepts Schmitt’s account of the
political, the disappearance of the enemy results in something like global psychosis: since the mirroring relationship
between Us and Them provides a form of stability, albeit one based on projective identifications and repudiations, the loss
of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the “imaginary tripod” that props up the psychotic with a sort of
pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and
paranoia. ¶ Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is
surrounded by enemies; as Derrida writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for “an unheard-of
violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its
unprecedented – therefore monstrous –forms; a violence in the face of which what is called hostility, war, conflict,
enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be
identifiable” (PF 83).
 A2 Lacan
The alternative destroys real action by scapegoating real
progress on engaging theoretical signifiers
Johnston 05 – Adrian Johnston is the Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. (“The Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Zizek And
The Dynamis of Belief”, 1005, http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/8/24)

However, the absence of this type of Lacan-underwritten argument in Zizek's sociopolitical thought indicates something important.
Following Lacan, Zizek describes instances of the tactic of 'lying in the guise of truth" and points to late-capitalist cynicism as a key example
of this (here, cynically knowing the truth that 'the System" is a vacuous sham produces no real change in behavior, no decision to stop
acting as if this big Other is something with genuine substantiality). Zizek proclaims that, "the starting point of the critique of ideology has
to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth." Although
the Lacanian
blurring of the boundary between theoretical thinking and practical action
might very well be completely true, accepting it as true inevitably risks strengthening a
convenient alibi—the creation of this alibi has long been a fait accompli for which Lacan alone could hardly be held responsible
—for the worst sort of intellectualized avoidance of praxis. Academics can convincingly reassure
themselves that their inaccessible, abstract musings, the publications of which are perused only by their tiny self-
enclosed circle of "ivory lower" colleagues, aren't irrelevant obscurities made possible by tacit complicity with a
certain socio-economic status quo, but, rather, radical political interventions that promise
sweeping changes of the predominating situation. If working on signifiers is the same as
working in the streets, then why dirty one's hands bothering with the latter?
Consequently, if Zizek is to avoid allowing for a lapse into this comfortable academic illusion, an illusion for which Lacan could all too easily
be perverted into offering rationalizing excuses, he must eventually stipulate a series of "naive" extra-theoretical/extra-discursive actions
(actions that will hopefully become acts after their enactment) as part of a coherent political platform for the embattled Left His rejection of
Marx's positive prescriptive program as anachronistic is quite justified. But, in the wake of Zizeks clearing of the ground for something New
in politics, there is still much to be done A brief remark by Zizek hints that, despite his somewhat pessimistic assessment of traditional
Marxism, he basically agrees with the Marxist conviction that the demise of capitalism is an inevitable, unavoidable historical necessity
—"The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are Utopian should thus be that, today, the true Utopia is the belief
that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes."" This hurling of the charge of
utopianism back at those making it is quite convincing. In fact, any system proclaiming to be the embodiment of 'the end of history"
invariably appears to be Utopian. Given what is known about the merciless march of history, believing that an ultimate, unsurpassable
socio-political arrangement finally has arrived is almost impossible. So, one should indeed accept as true the unlikelihood of capitalism
continuing on indefinitely; it must eventually give way to something else, even if this "x" cannot be envisioned clearly from within the
present context. Nonetheless, Zizek's own theorizing calls for a great deal of cautious reservation about the consequences of embracing this
outlook as true, of falling into the trap of (to invoke this motif once more) lying in the guise of truth. Just as the combination of a purely
negative, critical Marxism with the
anticipation of the event of the act-miracle threatens to
turn into an intellectual fetish (in the Zizekian ideological sense of something that renders the present reality
bearable), so too might acknowledging the truth of capitalism's finitude have the same unfortunate side-effect. One can tolerate today's
capitalism, because one knows that it cannot last forever; one can passively and patiently wait it out (at one point. Zizek
identifies this anticipation of indeterminate change-yet-to-come as a disempowering lure,
although he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that his own work on ideology sometimes
appears to be enthralled by just such a lure). In both cases, the danger is that the very analyses
developed by Zizek in his assault upon late-capitalist ideology might serve to facilitate the sustenance of the cynical distance whose
underlying complicity with the present state of affairs he describes so well.
 A2 chocolate Laxative
Chocolate laxatives K totally stupid
Dan T. Olson 9 - MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and am in the process of completing another
MA in philosophy at LMU, 8/1/9, HAUERWAS, ZIZEK, PATAGONIA AND ROB BELL: CAPITALISM’S CHOCOLATE
LAXATIVES AND THE CHURCH
http://dtomolson.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/hauerwas-zizek-patagonia-and-rob-bell-capitalisms-chocolate-laxatives-
and-the-church/
To get back to the point, Zizek suggests that the reason these liberal-communists and their chocolate
laxatives must be rejected is that they are the quick fixes that allow the
system to continue to grind on, grinding up the masses as it does. The chocolate laxative may momentarily
loosen your stool, but it will not fix the main cause of the problem. In order to do that one must stop living off of chocolate
and eat some roughage, which doesn’t taste all that good to a palate used to sugar, cocoa and butter. One possible
danger in Zizek’s answer, for me, is
that it is in danger of making the same mistake that
every other purely human revolution, insurrection, or rescue mission has
made . That is, in view of what must be achieved some sacrifices must be made—some heads of the aristocracy, some
infidels, a couple of thousand Iraqi or Afghani civilians lives or the massive suffering and starvation of many of the
wretched of the earth who depend on the charity of the liberal communists . For the
Christian this is always unacceptable. People are not goods to be used no matter how lofty the purpose but persons to be
loved. (Of course how this love works itself out is what is in question here.) Many theologians have told us, rightly, that the
poor are the sight of the in breaking and redeeming work of Christ. This is different than being the subjective location of,
or potential for, the revolution. One must be careful that in order to achieve one’s end, the end of capitalist hegemony, an
one does not sacrifice those who cannot
end that I believe is completely in line with the Gospel,
choose otherwise . This does not mean that on the other hand we shut our
eyes and continue to rejoice in liberal communists and chocolate laxatives .
We cannot be content to wear our Tom’s Shoes and Gap Red T-shirts while drinking our fair trade coffee
and going about our day pleased with the current social order . There has to
be a third or middle way, a political option better than Elizabeth’s ecclesial via media.
IR
 A2 Construction/Anxiety
Threats aren’t psychological projections and the alt fails
Hoffman, 86 [Stanley, Center for European Studies at Harvard,  “On the Political Psychology of Peace and
War: A Critique and an Agenda,” Political Psychology 7.1 JSTOR]
The traditionalists, even when, in their own work, they try scrupulous-ly to transcend national prejudices and to seek
scientific truth, believe that it is unrealistic to expect statesmen to stand above
the fray: By definition, the statesmen are there to worry not only about planetary survival, but —
first of all—about national survival and safety. To be sure, they ought to be able to see how certain policies,
aimed at enhancing security, actually increase in-security all around. But there are sharp limits to how far
they can go in their mutual empathy or in their acts (unlike intellectuals in their advice), as long as the
states' antagonisms persist, as long as uncertainty about each other's intentions prevails, and as long as there is reason to
fear that one side's wise restraint, or unilateral moves toward "sanity," will be met, not by the rival's similar restraint or
moves, but either by swift or skillful political or military exploitation of the opportunity created for unilateral gain, or by a
for-midable domestic backlash if national self-restraint appears to result in ex-ternal losses, humiliations or perceptions of
weakness. There is little point in saying that the state of affairs which imposes such limits is "anachronistic" or
"unrational." To traditionalists, the radicals' stance — condemnation from the top of Mount Olympus — can
only impede understanding of the limits and possibilities of reform. To be sure, the fragmentation of mankind
is a formidable obstacle to the solution of many problems that cannot be handled well in a national framework, and a
deadly peril insofar as the use of force, the very distinctive feature of world politics , now
entails the risk of nuclear war. But one can hardly call anachronistic a
phenomenon—the assertion of national identity — that, to the bulk of [HU]mankind,
appears not only as a necessity but also as a positive good, since humanity's
fragmentation results from the very aspiration to self-determination . Many
people have only recently emerged from foreign mastery, and have reason to fear that the alternative to national self-
mastery is not a world government of assured fairness and efficiency, but alien domination. As for "unrationality," the
drama lies in the contrast between the ra-tionality of the whole, which scholars are concerned about—the greatest good of
the greatest number, in utilitarian terms — and the rationality or greatest good of the part, which is what statesmen worry
about and are responsible for. What the radicals denounce as irrational and irresponsible from the viewpoint of mankind
is what Weber called the statesman's ethic of responsibility. What keeps ordinary "competitive conflict processes"
(Deutsch, 1983)— the very stuff of society — from becoming "unrational" or destructive, isprecisely what the nature of
world politics excludes: the restraint of the partners either because of the ties of affection or responsibility that mitigate
the conflict, or because of the existence of an outsider — marriage counselor, arbitrator, judge, policeman or legislator
— capable of inducing or imposing restraints. Here we come to a third point of difference. The very absence
of such safeguards of rationality, the obvious discrepancy between what each part intends, and what it
(and the whole world) ends with, the crudeness of some of the psychological mechanisms at
work in international affairs—as one can see from the statements of leaders, or from the media, or from inflamed publics—
have led many radicals, especially among those whose training or profession is in
psychoanalysis or mental health, to treat the age-old contests of states in terms, not of the
psychology of politics, but of individual psychology and pathology. There are two manifestations
of this. One is the tendency to look at nations or states as individuals writ large, stuck
at an early stage of development (similarly, John Mack (1985) in a recent paper talks of
political ideologies as carrying "forward the dichotomized structures of childhood"). One of my predecessors writes about
"the correspondence between development of the individual self and that of the group or nation," and concludes "that
intergroup or international conflict contains the basic elements of the conflict each individual experiences psychologically"
(Volkan, 1985). Robert Holt, from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, finds "the largest part of the American public"
immature, in a "phase of development below the Conscientious" (Holt, 1984). The second related aspect is the
tendency to look at the notions statesmen or publics have of "the enemy," not only as
residues of childhood or adolescent phases of development, but as images that express
"disavowed aspects of the self" (Stein, 1985), reveal truths about our own fears and
hatreds, and amount to masks we put on the "enemy," because of our own
psychological needs. Here is where the clash between traditionalists and radicals is strongest. Traditionalists
do not accept a view of group life derived from the study of individual development or family relations, or a view of
modern society derived from the simplistic Freudian model of regressed followers identifying with a leader. They don't see
in ideologies just irra-tional constructs, but often rationally selected maps allowing individuals to cope with reality. They
don't see national identification as pathological, as an appeal to the people's baser instincts, more aggressive impulses or
un-sophisticated mental defenses; it is, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau so well understood, the competition of sovereign states
that frequently pushes people from "sane" patriotism to "insane" nationalism (Rousseau's way of preventing the former
from veering into the latter was, to say the least, im-practical: to remain poor in isolation). Nor do they see anything
"primitive" in the nation's concern for survival: It is a moral and structural requirement. Traditionalists also believe
that the "intra-psychic" approach distorts reality. Enemies are not mere
projections of negative identities; they are often quite real . To be sure, the
Nazis' view of the Jews fits the metaphor of the mask put on the enemy for
one's own needs. But were, in return, those Jews who
understood what enemies they had in the Nazis, doing the same? Is the
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, is the Soviet regime's treatment of
dissidents,  was the Gulag merely a convenient projection  of our
intrapsychic battles ? Clichés such as the one about how our enemy
"understands only force" may tell us a great deal about ourselves; but sometimes
they contain half-truths about him, and not just revelations about us. Our fears flow not only
from our private fantasies but also from concrete realities and from the fantasies
which the international state of nature generates. In other words, the psychology of politics which
traditionalists deem adequate is not derived from theories of psychic development and
health; it is derived from the logic of the international milieu, which breeds the
kind of vocabulary found in the historians and theorists of the state of nature : fear and
power, pride and honor, survival and security, self-interest and reputation, distrust and misunderstanding, commitment
and credibility. It is also derived from the social psychology of small or large groups, which resorts to the standard
psychological vocabulary that describes mental mechanisms or maneuvers and cognitive processes: denial,
projection, guilt, repression, closure, rigidity, etc.... But using this vocabulary does not imply
that a group whose style of politics is paranoid is therefore composed of
people who, as private individuals, are paranoid. Nor does it relieve us of the duty to
look at the objective reasons and functions of these mental moves, and of
the duty to make explicit our assumptions about what constitutes a "healthy,"
wise, or proper social process. Altogether, traditionalists find the mental health approach to world affairs
unhelpful. Decisions about war and peace are usually taken by small groups of people; the
temptation of analyzing their behavior either, literal-ly, in terms of their
personalities, or, metaphysically, in terms borrowed from the study of human development, rather than in those
of group dynamics or principles of international politics is understandable. But it is misleading.
What is pathological in couples, or in a well-ordered community, is, alas, frequent, indeed normal, among states, or in a
troubled state. What is malignant or crazy is usually not the actors or the social process in which they are engaged: it is
the possible results. The grammar of motives which the mental health approach brands as primitive or immature is
actually rational for the actors. to the substitution of labels for explanations, to bad analysis and fanciful
prescriptions. Bad analysis: the tendency to see in group coherence a regressive response to a threat, whereas it often is a
rational response to the "existential" threats entailed by the very nature of the international milieu. Or the tendency to see
in the effacement or minimization of individual differences in a group a release of unconscious instincts, rather than a
phenomenon that can be perfectly adaptive—in response to stress or threats—or result from governmental manipulation
or originate in the code of conduct inculcated by the educational system, etc.. . The habit of comparing the state, or
modern society, with the Church or the army, and to analyze human relations in these institutions in ways that stress the
libidinal more than the cognitive and superego factors, or equate libidinal bonds and the desire for a leader. The view that
enemies are above all products of mental drives, rather than inevitable concomitants of social strife at every level. Or the
view that the contest with the rival fulfills inter-nal needs, which may be true, but requires careful examination of the
nature of these needs (psychological? bureaucratic? economic?), obscures the objective reasons of the contest, and risks
confusing cause and function. Indeed, such analysis is particularly misleading in dealing with the pre-sent scene. The
radicals are so (justifiably) concerned with the nuclear peril that the traditional
ways in which statesmen and publics behave seem to vindicate the pathological
approach. But this, in turn, incites radicals to overlook the fundamental
ambiguity of contemporary world politics. On the one hand, there is a nuclear revolution—the
capacity for total destruction. On the other hand, many states, without nuclear weapons, find that the use of force remains
rational (in terms of a rationality of means) and beneficial at home or abroad—ask the Vietnamese, or the Egyptians after
October 1973, or Mrs. Thatcher after the Falklands, or Ronald Reagan after Grenada. The superpowers themselves, whose
contest has not been abolished by the nuclear revolution (it is the stakes, the costs of failure that have, of course, been
transformed), find that much of their rivalry can be conducted in traditional ways — including limited uses of force —
below the level of nuclear alarm. They also find that nuclear weapons, while—perhapsunusable rationally, can usefully
strengthen the very process that has been so faulty in the prenuclear ages: deterrence (this is one of the reasons for nuclear
proliferation). The pathological approach interprets deterrence as expressing the deterrer's belief that his country is good,
the enemy's is bad. This is often the case, but it need not be; it can also reflect the conviction that one's country has
interests that are not mere figments of the imagination, and need to be protected both because of the material costs of
losing them, and because of the values embedded in them. As for war planning, it is not a case of
"psychological denial of unwelcome reality" (Montville, 1985). but a — perhaps
futile, perhaps dangerous—necessity in a world where deterrence may once
more fail. The prescriptions that result from the radicals' psychological approach also run into traditionalist
objections. Even if one accepts the metaphors of collective disease or pathology, one must understand
that the "cure" can only be provided by politics . All too often, the radicals'
cures consist of perfectly sensible recommendations for lowering tensions, but fail to tell
us how to get them carried out —they only tell us how much better the world
would be, if only "such rules could be established" (Deutsch, 1983). Sometimes, they
express generous aspirations — for common or mutual security—without much awareness of the obstacles which conflict-
ing interests, fears about allies or clients, and the nature of the weapons themselves, continue to erect.
Sometimes, they too neglect the ambiguity of life in a nuclear world: The much lamented redundancy of weapons, a
calamity if nuclear deterrence fails, can also be a cushion against failure. Finally, many of the remedies offered are based
on an admirable liberal model of personality and politics: the ideal of the mature, well-adjusted, open-minded person
(produced by liberal education and healthy family relations) transposed on the political level, and thus accompanied by
the triumph of democracy in the community, by the elimination of militarism and the spread of functional cooperation
abroad. But three obstacles remain unconquered: first, a major part of the world rejects this ideal and keeps itself closed to
it (many of the radicals seem to deny it, or to ignore it, or to believe it doesn't matter). Second, the record shows that real
democracies, in their behavior toward non-democratic or less "advanced" societies, do not conform to the happy model
(think of the US in Central America). Third, the task of reform, both of the publics and of the statesmen, through
consciousness raising and education is hopelessly huge, incapable of being pursued equally in all the important states, and
— indeed — too slow if one accepts the idea of a mortal nuclear peril. These, then, are the dimensions of a split that should
not be minimized or denied
 A2 Psycho = War
Psychoanalysis doesn’t explain war, evolutionary psychology
does
Thayer, 2000 Bradley A., Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, Associate
Professor of Defense & Strategic Study, Missouri State University, International Security, 01622889,
Fall2000, Vol. 25, Issue 2 “"Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International
Politics"
War is a phenomenon that has been usefully studied from multiple, often interdisciplinary, perspectives--psychological,
regime type, and systemic, among others.[71] Although the causes of modern war are often
complex, its prevalence throughout human history suggests that it is not
caused principally by modern developments, such as imperialism or
militarism, although these no doubt contribute to the scope, if not necessarily the intensity, of conflict.[72] The
human capacity for aggression and warfare has been widely studied by eminent psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and
Erich Fromm. Freud interpreted aggressive human behavior as the outcome of a
drive that constantly seeks release.[73] For Freud, war results from many motives, "some of which
are openly declared and others which are never mentioned," but "a lust for aggression and destruction is certainly among
them."[74] Building on Freud's work, Fromm argued that humans are subject to a unique
death instinct that leads to pathological forms of aggression beyond those found in other animals.[75] An
evolutionary perspective on war improves upon the insights of Freud and
Fromm, because it explains the origin of war without depending on a "lust"
for destruction as a causal mechanism. Evolutionary theory gives students
of war a perspective not provided by psychological or systemic approaches and offers three important
insights. First, warfare is not uniquely human. Second, although it may seem paradoxical,
evolutionary theory explains how warfare contributes to fitness . Third,
evolutionary theory explains the role war plays in creating human societies.
 A2 Desire Catastrophe
Claims of desire for catastrophe are baseless assertions
Robinson 4, PhD in political theory at the University of Nottingham, 2004 (Andrew, “Notes on Zizek,” 11/15)
one
This is in many ways a repetition of Zizek's favourite themes, rearticulated around a new subject-matter. As usual,
has to be able to follow Zizek's more-or-less arbitrary twists and turns, and
willing to endorse a number of heavy metaphysical and psychological
postulates, as well as to accept the validity of a string of unsupported
assertions, to buy into Zizek's account. For instance: the theme recurs of how
something which has a horrifying effect is always a realisation of a
repressed/disavowed fantasy. Behind this is a clumsy conflation of concern
motivated by fear (eg. being aroused by a threatening stimulus) with actual desire (in the sense that
one fantasises about, and secretly wants, what one fears). This is as far as I can tell an exegetical
derivative of Lacanian theory, and I have yet to find a single argument or
piece of evidence to support such a conflation.
Environment
 A2 Dodds
Fear of nature good – the neg’s elitist knowledge production
closes its eyes from reality and is counter-productive
Duran 12 [Ramón Fernández Durán (Spanish activist and writer, co-founder of Ecologistas en Acción, board
member of CEO (Corporate Europe Observatory), and an associate fellow of the TNI (Transnational Institute)). “The
Breakdown of Global Capitalism: 2000-2030.” Libros en Accion. May 2012] AJ
The second question from readers may be as follows: ‘Is this exercise in political fiction not excessively apocalyptic?’ We
The current reality is extremely serious for millions of
modestly believe that this is not the case.
people in the world and it will be so for billions in the next decades, ending up by affecting all of
humanity. No one will be immune from its impact, although undoubtedly those who initially suffer the worst
consequences will be the weakest social sectors and the most outlying territories. However, when the
breakdown of global capitalism deepens and the long decline of industrial
civilisation sets in, nobody will be immune from its effects, not even the elite, although there will
be winners and losers, depending on how the processes unfold. Some responses will undoubtedly view our
approach as apocalyptic, but these will come from a predominantly elitist
and middle-class grouping that believes these events will not take place and above all
will not affect them. The elite close their eyes to reality and seek shelter in
their unshakeable faith in progress and above all in technology, hol- ding that this final element will always
impede the worst. However, we believe the opposite to be true, that attempts to maintain the current
hyper-technological society at any cost could precipitate an even more abrupt collapse of
industrial society. Therefore, we hold that reality must be faced head on, without masking it.
While we expressly wish to avoid an apocalyptic tone, we feel a strong duty to outline future scenarios that we and those
who follow us most likely face.
2AC Wilderson
Wilderson
 2AC – Framework
The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences
of the aff world.
Anything else moots the 1AC by shifting the debate away from
the aff framework
state engagement allows revolutionaries to learn the
techniques of state oppression and infiltrate the oppressor
from within
Williams 70 [1970, Robert F. Williams, interviewed by The Black Scholar, “Interviews,”, Vol. 1, No. 7, BLACK
REVOLUTION (May 1970), pp. 2-14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41163455]
Williams: It is erroneous to think that one can isolate oneself completely from
institutions of a social and political system that exercises power over the
environment in which he resides. Self-imposed and premature isolation, initiated by the
oppressed against the organs of a tyrannical establishment, militates against
revolutionary movements dedicated to radical change. It is a grave error for
militant and just-minded youth to reject struggle-serving opportunities to join the man's
government services, police forces, peace corps and vital organs of the power
structure. Militants should become acquainted with the methods of the
oppressor. Meaningful change can be more thoroughly effectuated by militant
pressure from within as well as without. We can obtain valuable know-how
from the oppressor. Struggle is not all violence. Effective struggle requires tactics,
plans, analysis and a highly sophisticated application of mental aptness. The forces of oppression and
tyranny have perfected a highly articulate system of infiltration for undermining and
frustrating the efforts of the oppressed in trying to upset the unjust status quo. To a
great extent, the power structure keeps itself informed as to the revolutionary
activity of freedom fighters. With the threat of extermination looming menacingly before black
Americans, it is pressingly imperative that our people enter the vital organs of the
establishment. Infiltrate the man's institutions.
 2AC - State Good
The state can be repurposed for good ends, even if it is
grounded in bad purposes now. The nature of the machine
doesn’t determine what it can be used for.
Ferguson 11, James, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, “The Uses of Neoliberalism”, Antipode, Vol. 41,
No. S1, pp 166–184
If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political struggle— not
only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it—then there is much to be
said for focusing, as I have here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and
politics, even if doing so inevitably puts us on the compromised and
reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high ground of
revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also insist that there is more at stake
in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the

miseries of the chronically poor, or a technically superior method for

relieving the suffering of famine victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its
implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries that would bring the whole
proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the “informal”,
help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic
income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor,¶ in a context where many of the
poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding
the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the
technocrats’ dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit
pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine,
and lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming).¶ My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow
policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that
governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to
they illustrate a process through which specific

may be in the process of being peeled away

associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”)

from that agenda, and put to very different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to
at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of considerable interest.¶ As Steven
Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic
“neoliberal” political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific “neoliberal” techniques, on the other. Close attention
to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case,
fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic “is much more polymorphous and
unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work”, and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact “deployed in relation to diverse political
projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare
social technologies need not have any essential or eternal loyalty to the
states,

political formations within which they were first developed. Insurance rationality at the end of
the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial
Specific ways of solving or posing
measure) because it was available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use.

governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms,

can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social
ends . With social, as with any other sort of technology, it is not the
machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do. Foucault
(2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet another search
through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within
socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked
up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le v́i- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally
intended for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such
tinkering, keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve. If we
can go beyond seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of
specific governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed,
and put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually

associated with that word. If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first
appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.
Totalizing demonizations of power and government ignore
complexities and uncertainties within power – exploiting these
uncertainties from within challenges power and is more
effective than simple rejection
Laura Zanotti 13, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the University of
Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-
thinking Political Agency in the Global World”, originally published online 30 December, Sage
Unlike positions that adopt governmentality as a descriptive tool and end up embracing the liberal substantialist ontological assumptions and epistemological framework they criticize, positions that embrace an intra-agential (or relational)

nothing ‘‘is’’ but everything is made within specific practices.

ontology, maintain that Governmentality as

a program that explores ‘‘the present as multiply constituted

research , polytemporal . . . and recombinatory . . .

and not just the expression of a singular logic has an important or the resultant of a linear process’’61

role to play as a methodology of inquiry that brings to the foreground the

techniques through which power is practically enacted, and the the ambiguity embedded in its practices,

various tactics for unsettling it that become possible in the context of

multifarious political encounters. Because political power scripts do not stand as substances that preexist the practices of their making and the specific relations that
construct them, the application of a relational ontology and of an archival methodology opens the way for nonidealist, engrained in praxis, analyses of politics and conceptualizations of political agency. In this framework, the space for politics is
rooted on ambiguity and performativity, that is on the making and remaking of meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of agonic relations. What Does This All Matter for Political Agency? I will now turn to elaborating more
specifically on the relevance of scholarly positions that, while not necessarily relying mainly on governmentality as a research program, have imagined both power and subjects in non-substantialist ways and embraced situatedness and ambiguity
as the very constitutive space for politics for conceiving political agency beyond liberal straightjackets. For Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, far from being issues to be resolved or feared in the name of a sovereign universal truth and the
definition of what one’s identity is, ambiguity and uncertainty are indeed political resources to be deployed in sites of struggles where the ‘‘differences between inside and outside are uncertain.’’62 Here political action is not predicated on
asserting ‘‘the life and freedom or some sovereign identity, some community of truth that is victimized and repressed by power.’’63 Instead, resistance is very much about questioning practices of power that attempt ‘‘to impose and fix ways of
knowing and doing that shall be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous being.’’64 For Ashley and Walker, in other words, political action is about questioning assumptions about the unity of identity, the mighty homogeneity of
power, and the stability of categories of thought. Downplaying ambiguity is indeed itself a technique of power. In taking issue with ‘‘descriptive’’ governmentality theories, Jacqueline Best argued representing social events as totally calculable is
itself a governmental strategy, part of government’s very attempts to depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what ‘‘exceeds efforts to govern through risk.’’66 Therefore, one should not be seduced by
contemporary governmental strategies’ own promise of infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the foreground the limits of knowledge and should be included in current analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory
of power, rooted in the nontransparency of language that always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation even in the presence of governmental strategies of regulation. Indeed, pace liberal
institutionalism that looks at norms as ‘‘entities’’ and explanatory variables for institutional behavior, regulations are only a shell and norms are always in context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces within which they are
interpreted. Postcolonial literature has also offered interesting insights of how political agency may be exerted in the face of power’s self representation as a powerful and mighty script. Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial power’s self-
representation as ‘‘unity’’ is a colonial strategy of domination and explored the subversive potential of the mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha, The display of hybridity—its peculiar ‘‘replication’’—terrorizes authority with the
ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its
reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a range of justificatory Western ‘‘civil’’
discourses. 68 Bhabha sees subjection and resistance as intimately related. Political agency is a process of hybridization through transformation of meaning. Thus, ‘‘Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two
different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter
upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.’’69 Political agency is not portrayed as the free subjects’ total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage of power. While (the colonizer’s) power
attempts to reproduce its script by creating the ‘‘mimic men,’’ that is, the ‘‘docile colonial subjects who are ‘almost the same, but not quite’,’’70 it also creates an ambivalence, a contradiction between ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘not quite’’ that can be
appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is easily camouflaged as mockery, with the colonial subject consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the master’s lessons. Instead of producing a controlled imitation or a managed response

Agency is exerted through moves that

from the native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look, a distorted and disturbing echo.71

are imbricated with discourses of power but also recognize and question
them In this way, universal claims are unsettled and power’s purported
.

unity menaced. Bhabha sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that ‘‘overcoming domination, far from getting rid of it, often occasions its mere reversal.’’72
Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that ‘‘the agent must play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the hegemon, despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires the subaltern.’’73 Purity of identity may not ever have been a possibility, even less
when the very ideas of what accounts for identity and alterity are being rapidly reworked. In relying on Foucault’s understanding of power and on feminist elaborations of Identity,74 Roland Bleiker has embraced a non- substantialist standpoint
and the acceptance of ambiguity as central for conceptualizing human agency and for exploring its actual transformative possibilities. Bleiker questions positions that see agency as a reflection of externally imposed circumstances as well as
traditions that ‘‘bestow the human subject . . . with a relatively large sense of autonomy.’’75 Assumptions of fundamental autonomy (or ‘‘freedom’’) would ‘‘freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’76 As Bleiker puts
it: ‘‘A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one-sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human agency. There is no essence to human agency, no core that can be
brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’77 For Bleiker,

universals are indeed tainted with an imperial flavor This includes the .

imperialism of ideas of identity based on liberty and freedom (rather than imbrication, situatedness, and

as the ontological horizon for understanding human nature and

relationality)

assessing political agency. Non-substantialist positions do not assume the existence of monolithic power scripts or ontologically autonomous subjects; do not establish linear links between
intentions and outcomes, and do not assume that every form of agency needs an identifiable agent. Instead, they call for careful attention to contexts. In this disposition, Bleiker advocates a modest conceptualization of agency, one that relies
upon Michel de Certeau’s operational schemes, Judith Butler’s contingent foundations, or Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomes.78 In a similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has highlighted the problematic aspects of assessing political
agency based upon actors’ intention and focused on contexts as the yardstick for assessing political actions.79 For Steele, ‘‘as actors practice their agency within the space of a public sphere, intentionality—at best—becomes dynamic as new spaces
in that sphere open up. Intentions, even if they are genuine, become largely irrelevant in such a dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm of human interaction.’’80 In shifting attention from ‘‘intention’’ to the context that made some actions possible,

Steele sees agency as a ‘‘redescription’’ of existing conditions, rather than the

total ‘‘rejection’’ of or ‘‘opposition’’ to a totalizing ‘‘script.’’ As a consequence, Steele advocates ‘‘pragmatist humility’’ for
politicians and scholars as well.81 In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifarious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized
engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of power aimed at the construction of new openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which are

is not imagined as a quest for individual authenticity in

always to an extent unpredictable. Political agency here

opposition to a unitary oppressive Leviathan nefarious aimed at the creation of a ‘‘better totality’’ where subjects can float freed of ‘‘oppression,’’ or
a multitude made into a unified ‘‘subject’’ will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with freedom non-substantialist positions open

‘‘pragmatist humility,’’ that is the

the way for conceptualizing political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called for is

patience of playing with the cards that are dealt to us enacting ,

redescriptions and devising tactics for tinkering with what exists in 82

specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist ontologies that

see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay processes of coconstitution and the importance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically
limit the possibility for imagining political agency outside the liberal straightjacket. They represent international liberal biopolitical and governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress ‘‘subjects,’’

The complexity of
that are in turn imagined as free ‘‘by nature.’’ Transformations of power modalities through multifarious tactics of hybridization and redescriptions are not considered as options.

politics is reduced to homogenizing narratives and political and/or romanticizing

engagements are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary

moments . By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent
 Options for resistance to government scripts are not
processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. al

limited to ‘‘rejection, It is found instead

’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order.

in contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of

multifarious and

government rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them.
al

This approach questions oversimplifications of complex political the ities of liberal

rationalities and nurtures skepticism about identifying

and of their interactions with non-liberal political players a radical

universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems.

power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces
International and within these spaces it is

Government as a heuristic
appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. invites ality focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It

careful differentiations rather than overarching demonization

historically situated explorations and s

of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist

and
terms focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of

foster an ethic of political engagement

oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also taken s , to be continuously up

through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention

to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be. Such ethics of ’’83

engagement would not await the revolution Instead, it to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained.

would constantly attempt to twist power by playing with whatever are the working of cards

available and require intense processes of reflexivity on the

would

consequences of political choices . To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which

is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84

Oppression operates through law – only addressing legal

violence can solve
Solyom 12 [(Jessica, Ph.D. student in the department of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University)
“Tearing at the Seams of (In)visibility: Anti-counterfeiting, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Project of Neocolonization”
Kaleidoscope: Vol. 11, 2012] AT
Since the FANIF campaign is dedicated to exposing illegal acts, a reasonable solution would beto
call for a legal remedy. In the U.S., race has historically served as a factor in
law to benefit some while effectively disenfranchising others. Elite White
males have benefited the most as legal measures have served to advance their
personal accumulation of material wealth (Harris, 1993; Nunn, 2000). The legacy of
racial and economic stratification advanced by legal policies remains today:
Law works to legitimate White institutions…[and] champion the desirability
and inevitability of White dominance…[thus] whenever the European American
majority in the United States desires to ostracize, control or mistreat a group of people
perceived as different, it passes a law—an immigration law, a zoning law, or a
criminal law. (Nunn, 2000, p. 433) Law plays an important role in the maintenance
of race, class, and genderbased inequity. Given the extensive history of using legal tactics to
marginalize and disenfranchise the bodies, lands, and labor of people of color (Crenshaw, 1994; Harris, 1993), perhaps it
is not so ironic that the experiences of garment workers become visible only when their exploitation can be used to
promote and uphold the legal and economic interests of the fashion elite.
 2AC - Case O/w
Case outweighs – concretely affects insecurity of African people
Util is true – physical experience is the source of value
Sam Harris 2010. [CEO Project Reason; PHD UCLA Neuroscience; BA
Stanford Philosophy]. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine
Human Values.” Page 62]
Here is my (consequentialist) starting point:all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.)
depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential
consequences at the level of experience —happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc.—all talk of
value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary , or evil, or
blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures
(whether actual or potential). I am unaware of any interesting exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is
worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are
conscious (in some sense) and cognizant of human behavior. It also generally assumes [and] that it is possible to
suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion,
therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values.

Prioritize existence because value is subjective and could improve in the

future
Torbjörn Tännsjö 11, the Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011,
“Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing,” online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf
I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living,
then according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an
end to humanity. But this does not mean that, each of us should commit
suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism should be
applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people
rarely commit suicide. Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as
evidence for the claim that people live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may
avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself. It is also a possibility that, even
if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if some may
believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future
lives will be better. They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future.¶ From
the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age
to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary
people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from psychology, should warn us that we
may come to believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My strong belief is that most of us live
lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living.
But then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too
optimistic.¶ Let us just for the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not
worth living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we should all kill ourselves.
As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should do, each one of
us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill
myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ... suicide
“survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the
belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability
to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of
vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates
many popular perceptions of suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning , if they do,
does not mean that others will follow my example. They will go on with their lives and their
false expectations — at least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake, to
go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in my
life).
LINKS
 LTurn
Wilderson would obviously agree with the plan – the US military
presence is an institution of civil society that attempts to control
African populations the same way they critique – the plan is
negative state action which is consistent with their alt
And, antiblackness operates by pretending imperialism isn’t
part of it—pinpointing the connection between this violence is
key—connecting the dots between drones and antiblackness is
absolutely critical
Janani Balasubramanian 13, B.A. Feminist and Engineering (Atmosphere & Energy), studying issues of
food sovereignty, food justice, and sustainability from a scientific, social, cultural, and ethical perspective. “Zimmermans
and Drones: Antiblackness and Global Domination,” 8/8/,
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/08/201388zimmermans-and-drones-antiblackness-and-global-domination/
I launch this piece from the challenge that Asam Ahmad offers in his piece: ‘ We are NOT all Trayvon
Martin.‘ It’s a useful phrase that breaks through the multicultural ‘people of color’
rhetoric quickly. Ahmad keeps us cognizant of the specificity of antiblack
violence : ‘Trayvon was not murdered because he was a person of color. This
verdict was not delivered because he was a person of color. Trayvon was murdered because he was
Black. This verdict was delivered because he was Black.’ Ahmad concludes by asking non-Black POC to question and
challenge the ways that antiblackness operate in our communities and social spheres. I want to build on this
analysis further, to a structural level. I want to work from the acknowledgement that we are
absolutely not all Trayvon Martin, but the violence that different
communities experience is entangled with and fulcrumed by the violence
against him , and against each Black life executed in the US every 28 hours. Antiblackness is not
only contained in the interpersonal (because racism never is), but instead manifests also
as patterns of violence and exploitation by the state and its regimes, as history, as
legacy. Antiblackness, and other patterns of racism, are not contained in single incidents or
moments of time (like Trayvon Martin’s murder), but are situated in the accumulated violence

against peoples . It is for this reason that I ask us to move from a situational/social analysis of antiblack violence
and consider how it materially undergirds patterns of violence against other people of color. Because the erasure
of antiblack violence is not only manifested as failure to talk about, acknowledge,
and resist violence on Black bodies, but also the erasure of how violence
against other POC (and the whole US imperialist project) operates in
relation to antiblackness . I maintain that solidarity does not just look like calling
out antiblack appropriation, comments, etc, but also pinpointing the
material connections between struggles , especially at moments of extreme duress and mass
racialized violence. In their piece ‘Figuring the Prison’ Jared Sexton
and Elizabeth Lee ask us to situate
the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison (in Baghdad, Iraq) in relation to Black
incarceration, which in turn represents a continuous translation across
generation from the Black-subject-as-Slave to the Black-subject-as-Prisoner .
Torture at Abu Ghraib, according to mass media and public conversation, appeared to be a
racist project carried out against the vague idea of ‘brownness’, a
racialization separate from domestically incarcerated Black people . This is
an era rife with ‘replacement Negros’ , Sexton and Lee argue, with characters (‘the
terrorist’, for example) whoare uncritically inserted into 21st century conversations
around racism without an interrogation of their linkages to antiblackness .
Following Sexton and Lee, Abu Ghraib (or Guantanamo, for that matter), without an analysis of
antiblackness, can be construed as a ‘space of exception’, rather than an
experiment that fully follows from slavery and the US prison-industrial
complex. Without understanding how Blackness and antiblackness are tied
up in brutal and mass incarceration, the political reaction to Abu Ghraib has
the danger of promoting ‘reform’ and ‘revision’ rather than the more radical
vision: prison abolition. This is an urgent structural analysis. I write this as President Obama
is sending drones to Pakistan, which you can visualize here. I write this as the US sends $3 billion a
year in military aid to Israel, materially supporting the maintenance of the gaza strip as an open air prison. I write this on
the heels of the anniversary of the shooting at a Sikh Gurudwara in Wisconsin. Last year, Harsha Walia wrote a
poignant response in commemoration of the Wisconsin tragedy, that did
precisely the work of connecting this incident of violence against Sikhs and
other, broader structures of White supremacy and empire. She calls for fellow Sikhs
to build solidarity with other racialized communities: ‘with Muslim communities bearing the brunt of Islamophobia, with
Blacks who disproportionately endure police violence and over- incarceration, with Indigenous people who are being
dispossessed of their lands and resources, with non-status migrants who have been deemed illegal and are facing
deportation.’ Walia’s piece does the critical, challenging work of maintaining the
specificity of violence against her community, while also putting it in
context with other struggles . Cornel West makes a similar move in his interview with Democracy
Now!, where he calls out President Obama for talking about race in relation to Trayvon
Martin’s murder without talking about other structures of domination , in
which the President and the state are brutally complicit . West calls Obama
a ‘global George Zimmerman’, meaning that the President, like
Zimmerman , racially profiles and murders . So when [Obama] comes to talk
about the killing of an innocent person, you say, “Well, wait a minute. What
kind of moral authority are you bringing? You’ve got $2 million bounty on
Sister Assata Shakur. She’s innocent, but you are pressing that intentionally.
Will you press for the justice of Trayvon Martin in the same way you press
for the prosecution of Brother Bradley Manning and Brother Edward Snowden?” So you
begin to see the hypocrisy. In a way, Obama’s statements about Trayvon Martin
and the viral refrain ‘I am Trayvon Martin’ are both failures of the same
multiculturalism, of considering racism as something broad and incidental,
rather than specific and material. West asks: ‘Will [Obama's identification with Trayvon Martin]
hide and conceal the fact there’s a criminal justice system in place that has nearly destroyed two generations of very
precious, poor black and brown brothers?’. A material consideration of antiblackness in
relation to patterns of violence against other POC, and to US imperialism in
particular , would hold space for both parallels and specificity . Abu-Ghraib,
Guantanamo, and the US prison-industrial complex. Zimmerman and Obama.
COINTELPRO and XKeyscore. These are patterns of policing and violence
that inform each other, in psychology, and also in that the military/police
strategies deployed domestically and abroad mirror each other . For example,
Obama is a global George Zimmerman, but also: Zimmerman is a domestic
drone. Solidarity can begin with challenging attitudes in our communities ,
but it must also include connecting those dots between the tactics of
enslavement, incarceration, colonialism, and empire .
 NGOs K2 Culture
Eurocentrism has attempted to replace Ugandan culture – NGOs
are key to revitalize it and spill over more broadly
Drani 14 [(Emily, Regional coordinator of the Hivos Knowledge programme in Uganda) “ the role of ngos in
preserving and promoting” volkskunde 2014 | 3 : 405-409] AT
To understand why such immense potential is not sufficiently harnessed, it is necessary to reflect on the some historical factors and contextual issues that affect
efforts to promote and preserve intangible cultural heritage. The influence of conventional religions in Uganda have had a significant impact on the local
perceptions of the value of culture and general skepticism about its relevance in addressing contemporary development concerns. Traditional beliefs and practices
The perception that culture is
which form the foundation of local cultures were to a large extent, perceived as pagan and satanic.

negative and irrelevant was reinforced by an education system which, until recently,
also dismissed culture as irrelevant to contemporary development concerns.

Formal education and the written word in English were, and are still often

glorified without question. As such oral traditions which constitute much of

Uganda’s intangible cultural heritage are still largely underdeveloped – to
be replaced by new wisdom derived from academic achievements. During
the colonial era, a quest for modernization informed by western ideologies
and interests took center stage. Some of the laws established by the colonial
administration further reinforced an aversion for indigenous knowledge
and practices, for instance, traditional spirituality termed as witchcraft have
remained on the statute book, contributing to the perception that local culture is evil, primitive and therefore unlawful (e.g. Anti-
witchcraft Act). Too often the definition of culture is limited to traditional rituals and practices, especially to those that are considered oppressive and negative,
There is hardly any mention of
such as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), widow cleansing, and wife sharing to mention a few.

positive aspects of culture in respect to values, principles of community

labour and solidarity, the spirit of communal responsibility and
accountability, conflict resolution, and the value of chastity (and general abstinence from sexual activity by the youth before
marriage) which were often manifested in social practices and rituals. The post-independence governments of

Uganda continued to give low priority to the development of culture , evident in the
very low budgetary allocation and investment in heritage development and promotion. With the abolition of traditional institutions in 1966, traditional practices
including non-formal heritage education were subdued. As a result the development of oral traditions and indigenous knowledge and skills expressed through
creative narration of history, artistic skills, cultural practices, expressions, drama and innovation based on traditional knowledge and skills has been very slow and
minimal. Although the traditional institutions were restored in the 1995 Constitution, the heritage development trends had been distorted and many institutions
are still struggling to restore a connection between the past and the present. This is compounded by the fact that a little less than one third of the Ugandan
population lives in extreme poverty (less than 1 dollar a day). Productive energies tend to be geared towards basic needs such as food, medical care, shelter and
security. Developing cultural human potential through experimentation of local innovative thinking, science and technology is thus perceived as secondary. While
cultural heritage presents a potential source of livelihood if harnessed, this has to be accompanied by concerted effort to learn about the value of heritage, build the
capacity to device effective means to safeguard intangible and tangible heritage and link it to sustainable development. Currently there are very limited avenues
through which the younger generation, who are increasingly becoming the majority in Uganda, can learn to appreciate cultural heritage. They are not only the
future custodians of our heritage but are also future decision makers on how or whether cultural heritage will be preserved and promoted. Legal Framework for the
Promotion and Preservation of Culture There are however some efforts made by the Government of Uganda to provide for the protection and promotion of cultural
heritage. The 1995 Constitution enshrines a right to culture and stipulates that “Every person has a right to belong to, enjoy, practice, profess, maintain and
promote any culture, cultural institution, language, tradition, creed or religion in community with others.” This coupled with the 2006 National Cultural Policy,
among other policies, provide the framework within which various actors in the culture sector operate, however with limited resources and technical support the
achievements of the objectives of these instruments is slow. The ratification of the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage in 2009, provides a valuable opportunity not only to emphasize the importance of cultural heritage at international and national levels but also to provide
guidance on how heritage can be safeguarded. Thus examples of elements that have been inscribed on the urgent list for safeguarding (such as bark cloth from
central Uganda; oral tradition of the royal trumpets of the Basoga – the Bigwala, and a traditional naming practice in western Uganda called the Empaako are eye
openers for communities to rigorously identify, assess and inventory their heritage. This also serves as an important avenue for community learning and capacity
Appreciating the need to preserve heritage, a
building as well as a point of reference for heritage education.

growing number of NGOs in Uganda have taken the initiative to promote

different aspects of cultural heritage through the development of local
languages, promotion of the creative arts (visual and performing), heritage education (in
school clubs as well as a holiday programme), production of literature , cultural tourism, support to

collection and exhibition of artifacts through community museums,

traditional dances, cultural festivals and galas, research and
documentation, and cultural cooperation, among others. The Cross-Cultural Foundation of
Uganda: Promoting Heritage Education In a bid to counter the negative attitudes towards culture and

nurture an appreciation of heritage as a resource, the Cross-Cultural

Foundation of Uganda (CCFU)2 , has documented a number of case studies to
illustrate the relevance of culture (e.g. traditional knowledge, social and governance systems etc.) in
development. The knowledge generated is used a point of reference in
capacity building initiatives. Recognizing the important role the youth have in preserving intangible cultural heritage, the
Foundation embarked on a heritage education programme that is currently
operational in 60 secondary schools across the country. The overall objective of this programme is
to enhance the recognition of the importance of heritage in Uganda’s current development context. This is done by enhancing teachers’ skills and knowledge,
promoting the development of the cultural heritage resources in the vicinity of schools; supporting community museums and their outreach activities and raising
the profile of heritage nationally through a nationwide competition. Teachers of the selected secondary schools are trained using a heritage education kit and
equipped with materials to support heritage clubs. Refreshers courses are also organized to update the information provided and get feedback on the relevance of
the material in the kit. The Foundation has linked these secondary schools to 12 community museums in the country through which the youth can meet cultural
resource persons, gain exposure to cultural information, provide voluntary services, sell their art and crafts products and learn to appreciate cultural diversity.
Some museums that promote living culture also train the youth in traditional music and dance. 2 The Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda is a national NGO
dedicated to promoting the recognition of culture as vital for human development that reflects Uganda’s cultural diversity and identity. To increase the
involvement of youth across the country in appreciating heritage, CCFU holds an annual heritage competition. The youth are guided by an annual theme to
illustrate their understanding of heritage through drawings, creative writing – poetry, short stories, and proverbs. The best 12 entries, as determined by an
independent jury, are used to develop a heritage calendar, which is launched and distributed widely. In addition, the Foundation provides communication outputs
including a “heritage passport” for heritage club members. To ensure sustainability of this intervention, CCFU has approached the National Curriculum
Development Centre to advocate for the integration of cultural heritage in the national secondary school curriculum, which is currently under review. This process
involved presenting content on cultural heritage to representatives of the relevant learning areas and developing relevant resource materials as teaching aids. The
content is yet trial tested and revised for incorporation in the curriculum. CCFU is at the last stages of this process. As an accredited NGO under the 2003 UNESCO
Convention, the Foundation has acquired enhanced knowledge about ICH and has incorporated elements of it in the heritage education kit. In addition, using
inscribed ICH elements in its resource materials has been another way to publicize the elements as well as encourage communities to explore opportunities to
safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. At a recent conference co-organised by CCFU and the International National Trust Organisation, two of the inscribed
ICH elements (bark cloth and the royal trumpets) were included on learning journeys programme to be visited by for 150 international heritage experts. As an
accredited NGO, CCFU also provides technical support and guidance in inventorying and the nomination process, when requested. Prospects for ICH NGOs’
Activities At national level, the impending integration of culture in the national curriculum will enhance accessibility to knowledge and skills in heritage
appreciation in secondary schools. In addition, the implementation of a national thematic curriculum which promotes the use of local languages as the medium for
instruction in lower primary is another way through which language, the conduit for transmitting intangible cultural heritage may be preserved. There is an
increasing emergence of community museums across the country, which indicates the potential of new and widespread references for learning, research and
cultural tourism. In addition, Makerere University Kampala, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in Uganda has developed the concept of Orature (the
study of African oral literature) and by so doing has contributed to the promotion of literature and creative writing in tertiary institutions. In Uganda efforts have
been made to forge partners to promote cultures across the globe. Cultural cooperation between Uganda and the European Union, China, Germany, Britain, France
and Korea through the UgandaKorea Cultural Friendship Association provides opportunities for exchanges and study visits, joint festivals and exhibitions which
foster respect, support learning and an appreciation of cultural diversity especially for the youth who not only need to understand and embrace their own heritage
but also learn to appreciate and respect other cultures within and outside Uganda. In the East African region and beyond there are other NGOs such as Arterial
Network, Bayimba Cultural Foundation, Centre for Heritage Development in Africa, AFRICOM – International Council of African Museums, Culture and
Development East Africa (CDEA) among others play that play an important role by providing platforms for information and experience sharing, technical support
and resource mobilization, and culturally rooted talent development. In the absence of National Trusts or heritage authorities in these countries, most NGOs tend
to operate individually. It is only recently that efforts have been made to hold joint initiatives such as exhibitions, annual cultural festivals and heritage conferences
that provide opportunities for forging partnerships on intangible and tangible cultural heritage in the region. In conclusion, despite the challenges that the culture
sector in Uganda faces,conducive national and international policy frameworks provide
the necessary political support to preserve, develop and promote intangible
cultural heritage. If sustained, heritage education on a national scale has
potentially far reaching effects, not only in respect to enhanced knowledge
on intangible cultural heritage but also to foster respect and appreciation of
cultural diversity – a necessity in a country as diverse as Uganda. With the increasing number of
heritage focused NGOs and community museums, the competence to support heritage
development initiatives is growing. International and regional heritage networks and associations also offer the much needed expertise
and professionalism to harness cultural heritage resources for posterity and sustainable development. Partnerships and cultural

cooperation with NGOs and other like-minded institutions within and

outside the Uganda present valuable experiences from which lessons may be
drawn, home grown models for heritage development produced and best
practices publicized. Notably however these prospects would have greater impact if a deliberate effort is made to coordinate interventions
in the culture sector nationally, regionally and internationally.

Social death does not apply to East Africa the same way – it was
not a direct participant in the transatlantic slave trade – the
colonialism there is structurally different. Even if they’re right
about antiblackness in general, people have a different
relationship to it based on their social location. Ugandan people
can use culture to preserve their agency.
EVEN IF their social death arguments are true, black culture can
still heal ontological wounds and solve black self-annihilation –
Wilderson is wrong about the destruction of African culture
Terrell Anderson Taylor 13 [Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University (master of Arts in
English)], "Optimism and Pessimism in Twentieth Century African American Literature," Georgetown University Thesis,
Washington D.C., March 19, 2013
These artists, scholars, and intellectuals who posit strategies of recoverability
and reconciliation¶ for blackness with civil society have
been colloquially referred to as afro-
optimists. Afro-¶ optimists are not a self recognized group (in fact, many of them are likely to be unconcerned ¶ with
the dichotomy of pessimism and optimism, believing that optimism is the correct ¶ orientation and instead focusing on
issues of method, strategy, etc.) and interactions between ¶ afro-optimists and afro-pessimists are difficult to track.
Wilderson does relate his work to one hopeful scholar in particular, as a way of revealing that even optimistic approaches
to the¶ situation of African Americans must grapple with the issue of anti-blackness. It is necessary to ¶ explore the exact
common ground between Wilderson on the one hand, and Cornel West on the ¶ other, particularly in West's essay "B1ack
Strivings in a Twilight Civilization": ¶ [America’s] unrelenting assault on black humanity
produced the fundamental condition of black culture that of black invisibility and
namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the first difficult

challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit

suicide as a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black culture is
that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars, and
existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and self-
annihilation. This is why the ‘ur-text’ of black¶ culture is neither a word not a book, not an architectural
monument or a legal¶ brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan - a cry not so much for ¶ help as for home, a
moan less out of complaint than for recognition. (1996, pp. ¶ 80-81).¶ This quote does suggest that Wilderson has found an
unlikely supporter for his theories. West is¶ known as an opponent of capitalism, a supporter of multicultural and
democratic struggle and a¶ radical leftist (he was a common commentator and proponent of the Occupy movement during
its¶ prominence). His concepts here of "invisibility" and "namelessness" seem to work well with ¶ Wilderson‘s notions of
social death, gratuitous violence, and slavery as ontology. However, West ¶ actually makes an opposing claim within this
essay; While social death and gratuitous violence are obstacles to the
liberation of African Americans, West contends that black culture and the artifacts
that it produces serve the purpose of "confronting" ontological and
existential wounds and "fending off insanity and self-annihilation." West
certainly agrees that African Americans face violence at a deeper level than ¶ contingent acts of physical violence or even
economic acts of exploitation and alienation. In ¶ Race Matters, Wat discusses the "nihilistic threat," which he defines as
"the lived experience of¶ coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessnms, hopelessness, and (most important) ¶
lovelessness," as the most significant threat to African American communities and individuals ¶ (22-23). He emphasizes
that while it should not absolve African Americans of responsibility for ¶ moral failures and criminal activity, an
understanding of phenomena such as high crime rates in ¶ primarily black communities should account for the nihilistic
threat as a factor (Race Matters¶ 25). West's diverse intellectual influences are obvious here. He is committed
to affirming the agency of African Americans from a philosophical and perhaps
even theological perspective , but is unwilling to think of the individual in a
vacuum, separated from history and the environment.¶ For West, African Americans
should indeed be accountable to moral codes and laws, but the ¶ institutions should also be aware of the racial turmoil
within America as a unique burden¶ contributing to what is often referred to as "the problem of black America." ¶ Drawing
on W.E.B. Du Bois among others, West elaborates that both liberals and ¶ conservatives have always viewed black people
as a "problem people" in the words of Dorothy¶ Height.¶ for liberals, black people are to be "included" and "integrated"
into "our" society and¶ cultme, while for conservatives they are to be "well behaved" and "worthy of acceptance" ¶ by "our"
way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people ¶ are neither additions to nor defections
fiom American life, but rather constitutive¶ elements of that life (Race Matters 6).¶ Here, West implies that blackness has
always been the domain of another's agency. Similar to¶ Wilderson, West identifies this usurpation of agency as an
inherent aspect of America. Although¶ he does not say it explicitly, West establishes the premises for the conclusion that
the nihilism¶ and lack of self-determination of black America are not only profitable for white America, but its ¶ necessary
condition. He meets Wilderson at this point, locating anti-black structures of agency ¶ and identity at the heart of America,
and demonstrating that these structures still shape the ¶ political terrain of the present Unlike Wilderson and Patterson,
West argues that black culture exists, and that it has served vital purposes. He
argues against the thesis of natal alienation by explaining that African
Americans have maintained certain African cultural features, specifically
"kinetic orality, passionate physicality, improvisational intellectuality, and
combative spirituality" ("Black¶ Strivings" 80). While the ur-text of black culture may not be a tangible text
but a guttural cry (a¶ reference possibly drawn from the work Aime Cesaire), West argues that black culture, at
its best, transfigures and transforms that cry into an "existential arsenal"
that simultaneously expresses "the profoundly tragicomic character of black
life" and generates "creative ways of fashioning power and strength... ("Black
Strivings" 81-82). West contends that black culture¶ generates community, agency, and identity in a society that would
deny African Americans these¶ anchors of humanity. West
finds examples of these cultural
moments and practices within the arts, music, and especially literature .¶
Ultimately, West contends that the survival of African American people despite an ¶ American culture invested in their
spiritual, political and economic disenfranchisement is a ¶ testament to the cultural leaders who have "creat[ed] powerful
buffers to ward off the nihilistic¶ threat" and "equipp[ed] black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of
hopelessness,¶ meaninglessness, and lovelessness" (Race Matters 23). West remarks that "the shattering of ¶ black civil
society" is a consequence of "the saturation of market forces and market moralities in ¶ black life and the present crisis in
black leadership" (23). While West is publically an advocate ¶ for movements against capitalism, such as the Occupy
movement, he remains critical of marxism¶ for its reliance of notions of determinism and explicit structural critique that
overlook a cultural¶ and social dimension to the analysis of racial inequality (18-19). West contends that attention ¶
towards material inequality must be combined with an ethic of care and love in the face of a nihilistic threat," which in the
current moment "seems insurmountable" (30). such an approach¶ favors a pluralism,
"incorporating the best of black nationalist movements, the perennial hope ¶ against hope for transracial
coalition in progressive movements, and the painful struggle for self¶
affirming sanity" (30).
 A2 “Baby Civ Society”
Their evidence takes for granted that civil society is inevitably
tied to native genocide – the analogy of “baby civil society” isn’t
a warrant for anything and has no examples or explanation for
why civil society is connected to genocide even if it was a
concurrent process
 A2 White Savior
Their allies link assumes we’re a white savior attempting to end
racism and stop suffering, which isn’t the aff advantages
We link turn this – the US military presence in Uganda is part of
the white savior mentality that portrays the US as a savior of a
helpless Uganda
Mackey 12 [(Robert Mackey, reporter for The New York Times, where I am was the editor and main writer of The
Lede, a news blog, and a contributor to Timescast) African Critics of Kony Campaign See a 'White Man's Burden' for the
Facebook Generation, Lede 3-9-2012] AT
As my colleagues David Goodman and Jennifer Preston explain, a viral marketing campaign to raise awareness of the
suffering inflicted on African children by the warlord Joseph Kony has dominated social media conversations this week,
despite concerns that the young Americans behind it might be spreading factual inaccuracies and wasting donors’ money.
While much of the backlash reported in the American news media this week cited objections raised by development
experts in the United States and Europe, several African bloggers and activists have objected to what they see as more
fundamental problems. Among them, the possibility that the “ Kony 2012″ campaign reinforces the old
idea, once used to justify colonial exploitation, that Africans are helpless and
need to be saved by Westerners. Many African critics of the new effort to make Mr. Kony, the brutal
leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a household name in the United States — five months after President Obama
pleased Human Rights Watch and annoyed Rush Limbaugh by dispatching military advisers to aid in his capture — said it
echoed the ideas in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 to urge Americans to embrace
their imperial destiny and rule over the “new-caught, sullen peoples,” of the Philippines — even though the typical native
was “half-devil and half-child.” In a critique of the campaign posted on YouTube, Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan blogger,
observed that the filmmaker behind the “Kony 2012″ viral video calling for action “plays so much on
the idea that this war has been going on because millions of Americans” and
other Westerners, “have been ignorant about it.” Speaking directly to the camera, Ms.
Kagumire added: this is another video where I see an outsider trying to be a hero rescuing African children. We have seen
these stories a lot in Ethiopia, celebrities coming in Somalia, you know, it does not end the problem. I think we need to
have kind of sound, intelligent campaigns that are geared towards real policy shifts, rather than a very sensationalized
story that is out to make one person cry, and at the end of the day, we forget about it. I think it’s all about trying to make a
difference, but how do you tell the story of Africans? It’s much more important what the story is,
actually, because ifyou are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless… you shouldn’t be
telling my story if you don’t believe that I also have the power to change
what is going on. And this video seems to say that the power lies in America, and it does not lie with my
government, it does not lie with local initiatives on the ground, that aspect is lacking. And this is the problem, it is
furthering that narrative about Africans: totally unable to help themselves
and needing outside help all the time. A Ugandan journalist, Angelo Izama, took up the same
theme, arguing that all such campaigns aimed at “saving hapless Africans,” were problematic because, “ the
simplicity of the ‘good versus evil,'” narrative, “where good is inevitably
white/Western and bad is black or African, is also reminiscent of some of the
worst excesses of the colonial-era interventions.” In an angry blog post, dismissing the Kony
campaign as a “fund-raising stunt,” the Ugandan-American activist TMS Ruge wrote: “We as Africans, especially the
diaspora, are waking to the idea that our agency has been hijacked for far too long by well-meaning Western do-gooders
with a guilty conscience, sold on the idea that Africa’s ills are their responsibility.” He added: Africa is our problem, we
hereby respectfully request you let us handle our own matters. We will make mistakes here and there, sure. That is
expected. But the trade-off of writing our own destiny far outweighs the self-assigned guilt the world assigned to us. If you
really want to help, keep the guilt and charity in your backyard. Bring instead, respect, and the humility to let us
determine our destiny. As Max Fisher reported for The Atlantic, the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole, responded to
the Kony campaign on Twitter with “Seven thoughts on the banality of sentimentality.” In his biting critique,
Mr. Cole wrote that the American charity behind the Kony campaign, Invisible Children, was
part of what he called
the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” along with the economist Jeffrey Sachs, The Times Op-Ed
columnist Nicholas Kristof and the organizers of the TED conferences on technology, entertainment and design. Watching
the viral hubbub over the campaign build from North Africa, the Egyptian activist Mosa’ab Elshamy was distinctly
unimpressed. Mr. Elshamy, who took part in the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak last year, and
documented it on Twitter, told The Lede: “I felt awkward about the whole thing without even reading the tons of critiques
on the Internet. It just doesn’t make sense: the whole exploiting teenagers to buy bracelets and paint graffiti just to make
them feel they’ve done something.” On the brighter side, he observed, the campaign did at least generate some inspired
comedy, in the form of an online photo book imagining how the entire thing might have been dreamed up at the White
House to justify President Obama’s deployment of troops to Africa. Updated: After this post was originally published, the
blogger Rosebell Kagumire pointed to an outraged open letter to Jason Russell, the American filmmaker behind Invisible
Children and the “Kony2012″ video, written by Amber Ha, a student at Columbia University. Ms. Ha wrote: “Last year I
went to Gulu, Uganda, where Invisible Children is based, and interviewed over 50 locals. Every single person questioned
Invisible Children’s legitimacy and intention.” On her blog, Ms. Ha also posted a link to a response to the video from
Adam Branch, an American expert on “the politics of human rights intervention,” who currently lives and works in
Kampala, Uganda. Writing on the Web site of Uganda’s Makerere Institute of Social Research, Mr. Branch observed: “As
someone who has worked in and done research on the war in northern Uganda for over a decade, much of it with a local
human rights organization based in Gulu, the Invisible Children organization and their videos have infuriated me to no
end.” He added: My frustration with the group has largely reflected the concerns expressed so eloquently by those
individuals who have been willing to bring the fury of Invisible Children’s true believers down upon themselves in order to
point out what is wrong with what this group of young Americans is doing: the warmongering, the self-
indulgence, the commercialization, the
reductive and one-sided story they tell, their
portrayal of Africans as helpless children in need of rescue by white
Americans, and the fact that civilians in Uganda and central Africa may have to pay
a steep price in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good
about themselves, and a few can make good money. This, of course, is sickening, and I think that Kony
2012 is a case of Invisible Children having finally gone too far. They are now facing a backlash from people of conscience
who refuse to abandon their capacity to think for themselves…. Invisible Children is a symptom, not a cause. It
is an excuse that the US government has gladly adopted in order to help
justify the expansion of their military presence in central Africa. Invisible
Children are “useful idiots,” being used by those in the US government who seek to
militarize Africa, to send more and more weapons and military aid, and to
build the power of military rulers who are US allies. The hunt for Joseph
Kony is the perfect excuse for this strategy—how often does the US
government find millions of young Americans pleading that they intervene
militarily in a place rich in oil and other resources? The US government would be pursuing this
militarization with or without Invisible Children—Kony 2012 just makes it a bit easier. Therefore, it is the
militarization we need to worry about, not Invisible Children.
 A2 Colonial Linear Time
We don’t understand time as passing – nothing in the aff denies
the accumulation of the past and all our impacts recognize how
past US actions contribute to current insecurity
 A2 White Allies Bad
We’re not white…
Specifically forefronting the anti-blackness behind US military
policy towards Africa is better than white people staying silent
Tim Wise No Date, Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator, former adjunct faculty member at the Smith
College School for Social Work, "F.A.Q.s", www.timwise.org/f-a-q-s/
But it makes no sense to think that if I receive privilege, I must therefore be a
hypocrite for also criticizing the privileges and the system that bestows them. By that
logic, members of dominant groups should never speak out on behalf of
equity . They should just passively accept — or maybe even actively pursue — their
advantages, and the maintenance of the system that bestows those advantages, so as to seem
“consistent.” Or perhaps we should silently oppose the system from which we benefit, but
do nothing openly to oppose it, for fear that doing so might draw attention to
ourselves. But to do either of those things — passively accept or just silently oppose
white supremacy — would seem like an abdication of all moral agency, not to
mention strategic wisdom.¶ Although there may be an inherent tension between
fighting white privilege and receiving it — as I do, for instance, by often being taken more seriously than people of color
when they offer the same types of arguments — the alternative (to not speak out) would only
further the deafening white silence on these issues , and allow other whites
to believe that the only people who oppose racism and white supremacy are people
of color. This belief, directly or indirectly, contributes to white ambivalence and white
racism, by seeming to vest whites with a personal stake in the maintenance
of the system, rather than getting them to think how we would all be better off were that system to fall.
Furthermore, to remain silent so as to defer to the voices of people of color, perpetuates the
imbalance whereby people of color are responsible for doing all the heavy
lifting against white supremacy. How is that an example of solidarity or allyship? Certainly it
cannot help the antiracist struggle to say, in effect, “No really, you do all the
work, and I’ll just watch, thanks. Because, ya know, I wouldn’t want to draw attention to myself!” ¶
Although whites who challenge racism need to be as accountable as possible to
people of color in the way we do the work (see the Appreciation and Accountability Statement, here, for examples of how I
try to do that, as well as the newly published Code of Ethics for Anti-Racist White Allies, which I helped develop, for
additional information), the argument that somehow white folks shouldn’t engage in
that work in any real way (or at least not publicly) makes very little sense ethically,
and is absurd from a strategic perspective.

Afropessimism doesn’t recognize that consciousness but equates

blackness to a slave. They essentialize the ontology of the black
body --- you have to see yourself outside the anti-black world and
be conscious of that awareness
Progress Good
 Progress – Hayman
The fact that government hasn’t made us equal does not mean
that it can’t. Racial inequality is contingent and history proves
inequality has decreased. Refusing government action results in
worse suffering for minorities
Hayman 2k [Robert L. HAYMAN, Jr., Professor of Law, Widener University School of Law AND **Nancy
LEVIT, Professor of Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, 2K [Fall, 2000, “Thinking Critically About
Equality: Government Can Make Us Equal,” Harvard Latino Law Review, 4 Harv. Latino L. Rev. 67, Lexis]
C. Premise Three: These People "Cannot" Be Made Equal--It is Not Achievable--At Least Not by "Government" 1.
Precisely What Is It About the Inequality of These People that Ensures that It
"Cannot" Be Overcome by the Force of Government? The choice of helping verbs in the
articulation of this maxim seems to us quite instructive. Note that the maxim might have read,
"Government may not make us equal," in which case it might fairly be read as an acknowledgment of some restrictive
normative standard (perhaps of a doctrinal nature). Using somewhat stronger language, it might have otherwise read,
"Government shall not" or "Government should not" make us equal, in which case the restriction would assume the
character of a moral or political imperative. Finally, the maxim might have read, "Government might not
make us equal," in which case it might be fairly read as a tentative
hypothesis or a somewhat qualified observation. But instead we are advised that
Government "cannot" make us equal. The maxim thus purports to be
descriptive, and the futile relationship it describes--that Government is
powerless, and the equality it seeks is unattainable-- admits of no
contingencies, conditions, or exceptions . But how could this be? What is it about this
inequality that would render it absolutely immune from governmental
action? There are, in theory, two possibilities. The first rests in the devotion to the idea of a social realm thoroughly
insulated from the state--the public/private dichotomy. The second rests in the commitment to theories of innate racial
superiority or inferiority--the "natural order." As to the first possibility, the notion would be that the inequality resides in
the realm of the private, where only private action--not state action--can remedy it. We have already seen [*107] some of
the conceptual problems with this notion, and if they alone do not demonstrate that the public/private dichotomy fails to
offer an authentic description of our condition, they are at least sufficient to counsel a healthy skepticism. Some
evidence is needed to support the dichotomy, and none, as we will see, seems
available. As to the second, the notion would be that the inequality resides in the natural make-up of the racial
groups: it is hence innate, inherent, and inevitable. This notion of a race-based "natural order" has been with us literally
from the beginning of the Republic. Indeed, it likely originated as an attempt to reconcile the avowed political principles of
the revolutionary generation with the reality of chattel slavery. n136 A "scientized" hierarchy of race took hold sometime
in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It was used in several fashions: to justify slavery in the antebellum era; to
oppose civil rights during Reconstruction; to enact Jim Crow legislation through the middle of the twentieth century; and
to restrict immigration and naturalization throughout the twentieth century. n137 Its most notable - and insidious -
feature has been its commitment to a natural hierarchy of intellect, a commitment that has substantially shaped the
development of intelligence testing in America: the first IQ tests were normalized in accordance with the pre-conceived
racial order, and these tests have provided the operative standard for each subsequent generation of instruments. n138 Of
course, the presumed intellectual hierarchy has shaped more than psychometrics. It also profoundly influenced [*108]
governmental policy at both the federal and state levels, particularly with respect to immigration and education. And as
recent works like The Bell Curve make clear, there are those who believe that the natural intellectual order should
continue to guide official policy. n139 But we do not mean to judge the proposition solely by the company it has kept; the
more damning verdict has come from science itself. We reiterate that the notion that there is an intellectual hierarchy
naturally ordered by race is unsupported by the evidence. The notion has been thoroughly discredited in every scientific
discipline save psychology, n140 where a noisy band of "psychometricians" continue to spew their racist babble to the
general embarrassment of serious psychologists. n141 In short, there is, as a conceptual matter, simply no
reason to suspect that racial inequality is beyond remedy by government al
action. And, indeed, the evidence from the historical record thoroughly embarrasses
the claim. 2. Exactly How Do We Know that Government Is Powerless to Redress This Inequality? The races
are, in America, unequal. However, that does not mean that racial inequality is
inevitable , that inequality inheres in race. Delgado and other critical theorists have warned
against this [*109] essentialist error: that because Group A exhibits
characteristic X, group A must be X, innately, inherently, and inevitably. n142 They have
consistently reminded us of the contingent nature of race, of the ways in which its salient
characteristics are constructed, and of the ways in which it may be reconstructed. n143 Race is made. Race
can be re-made. As the foregoing analysis suggests, it can be remade - and made equal - by
Government. To prove the contrary, to establish that inequality truly does inhere in race and is beyond
governmental remedy, defenders of the anti-egalitarian maxim must demonstrate the real-world inefficacy of egalitarian
efforts. Their proof must satisfy two conditions. First, it must demonstrate relevant and persistent governmental action
directed at racial inequality. Second, it must establish more-or-less constant levels of inequality in spite of this action.
Neither condition is satisfied. Regarding the first condition, history belies the suggestion that our
governments have truly pursued equality in a persistent and appropriate fashion. Indeed, one of the
most compelling claims advanced by race theorists is directed at this somewhat comforting myth. The sad truth is that
[*110] our efforts to achieve equality have been tentative , spasmodic, and
palsied by opposition and ambivalence: we promised "legal equality" but not "social equality," "equal
opportunity" but not "equal outcomes"; we desegregated our schools "with all deliberate speed," but only if the segregation
was de jure and not de facto. The First Reconstruction was opposed with rhetoric and violence; it lasted just over a decade
and was largely undone within a generation. The Second Reconstruction followed a similar course, and the fate of its gains
there have been gains . Advancements in law -
now hangs in the balance. And yes,
governmental initiatives - have indeed produced social and economic gains -
greater equality in the real world. Consider the effects of the Second Reconstruction. The percentage
of white Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine who had completed at least twelve years of education
increased from 40% in 1940 to 65% in 1965 to 86% in 1987. The percentage of black Americans in the same category
increased from only 12% in 1940 to 50% in 1965 to 83% in 1987, nearly at parity with whites. Meanwhile, the percentage of
Latinos in that category increased from just 6% in 1940 to 52% in 1965 to 60% in 1987. With in the schools, the
racial achievement gap, as measured by standardized achievement tests, has narrowed
substantially: the math gap between black and white students was reduced 25 to 40% during the seventies and
eighties alone, the science gap was reduced 15 to 25%, and the reading gap was reduced by half. The math gap between
Latino and white students was reduced between 33 and 45%. Regional analyses suggest that the achievement gap has seen
particularly significant reduction in the Southeast, due in part to desegregation. n144 Meanwhile, a national study
designed to proportionally reflect all mediating factors concluded that " desegregation, net of all other
status characteristics, is positively associated with racial tolerance for both whites
and blacks." Furthermore, a review of longitudinal studies noted that the studies, without
exception, revealed that school desegregation leads to increased desegregation in
later life, a phenomenon that frequently translated into significant
economic advantages for minority adults . n145 Moreover, a survey of racial
attitudes over the past half century found "a great normative shift" in the conception
of appropriate relations between the races: by century's end, for example, white Americans
voiced near unanimous condemnation of overt racial discrimination and segregation, a result simply unthinkable before
the civil rights era. n146 The case, of course, should not be overstated : Government has
not made us equal. But there is every reason to believe that it can , and the evidence
from its modest initiatives strongly supports that belief. V. CONCLUSION There are more than 340,000 people living in
shantytowns along the Texas border. The impoverished residents of the colonias live in conditions that Delgado describes
as "deplorable," "unspeakable" and "dreadful." n147 Others too have described the plight of these colonistas; the
descriptions, Delgado notes, are enlivened by tragic detail, and enriched with real compassion. But the discussion of
governmental remedies for conditions in the colonias are not so alive or rich; they are marked by an utter failure [*112] of
will and imagination. n148 When it is time to consider governmental remedies, the shameful details fade into the margins;
the compelling stories can barely be heard. Here, reason yields to stubborn convention, empathy to brutal indifference.
Truth is reduced to a simple-minded maxim: "Government cannot make us equal." But Delgado's Rodrigo
demands more. Government, he insists, "must be activist." It must relieve the
suffering of the colonistas; it must guarantee them their place in the community. In the
absence of governmental intervention, Rodrigo notes, We would inevitably see a
ratcheting-down in which we tolerate worse and worse conditions for those we
see as different from ourselves. And those conditions, in turn, will simply confirm to us that the
residents are indeed a different order of humanity, in a self-reinforcing spiral. In time, ghetto, barrio, or colonia
conditions will seem natural and just, 'the way things are.' n149 "That's why," Rodrigo insists, " we need
governmental enforcement, formally administered, under universal
conditions." n150 Government, properly charged with "redressing historical wrongs," must not forsake its
responsibility; Government, "which could and should side with the underdog,"
must not simply look the other way. n151 There is room, of course, for "private" assistance, and
solidarity with the colonistas is part of the remedy. But only part. "We stand shoulder to shoulder with them, offering hope
and resistance," Rodrigo says, "at the same time that we insist that Government do its duty." n152 Government, Rodrigo
knows, can make us equal: indeed, only Government can. Government, Rodrigo knows, can make us equal: it needs [*113]
to. Government, Rodrigo knows, can make us equal: if it chooses to. Government, Rodrigo knows, can make us equal: it
must. Justice Thomas, we think, can see this as well if he looks critically at the evidence, listens attentively to the stories,
and is faithful to the aspirations he is charged with making real. Above all, he has to use the old noodle: he must think
critically about equality to see that Government can make us equal - if only it is allowed
the chance .
 Progress – Omi and Winant

Reform is sometimes inadequate but that does not mean

resistance is futile – racism is unstable and state reform can
challenge it
Omi and Winant 13 [Michael, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, and Howard, Professor of Sociology at
UC Santa Barbara, Winter, “Resistance is Futile?: a Response to Feagin and Elias,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 36 No.
6, Taylor & Francis]
In conclusion, do Feagin and Elias really believe that white power is so complete, so
extensive, so ‘sutured’ (as Laclau and Mouffe might say) as they suggest here? Do they mean to
suggest, in Borg-fashion, that ‘resistance is futile?’ This seems to be the
underlying political logic of the ‘systemic racism’ approach , perhaps unintentionally
so. Is white racism so ubiquitous that no meaningful political challenge can be mounted against it? Are black and
brown folk (yellow and red people, and also others unclassifiable under the
always- absurd colour categories) utterly supine, duped, abject, unable to exert
any political pressure? Is such a view of race and racism even recognizable in the USA of 2012? And is
that a responsible political position to be advocating ? Is this what we want to teach our students of
colour? Or our white students for that matter? We suspect that if pressed, Feagin and Elias would concur with our
judgement that racial conflict, both within (and against) the state and in everyday
life, is a fundamentally political process. We think that they would also accept our claim that
the ongoing political realities of race provide extensive evidence that people of
colour in the USA are not so powerless, and that whites are not so omnipotent, as
Feagin and Elias's analysis suggests them to be. Racial formation theory allows us to see that there
are contradictions in racial oppression . The racial formation approach reveals that
white racism is unstable and constantly challenged , from the national and
indeed global level down to the personal and intra-psychic conflicts that we all
experience, no matter what our racial identity might be. While racism – largely
white – continues to flourish, it is not monolithic . Yes, there have been
enormous increases in racial inequality in recent years. But movement-
based anti-racist opposition continues, and sometimes scores victories. Challenges to white racism
continue both within the state and in civil society. Although largely and
properly led by people of colour, anti-racist movements also incorporate
whites such as Feagin and Elias themselves. Movements may experience setbacks, the
reforms for which they fought may be revealed as inadequate, and indeed
their leaders may be co-opted or even eliminated, but racial subjectivity and self-
awareness, unresolved and conflictual both within the individual psyche
and the body politic, abides. Resistance is not futile .

Pessimism ignores specific reforms that reduced racial

inequality and spilled over to broader pro-equality demands
Omi 13 Michael Omi (Sociologist at UC Berkeley, focusing on antiracism scholarship and Asian American studies)
and Howard Winant (Professor of Sociology affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments of UC
Santa Barbara), Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-
973, Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial Formation Theory. 2013.
In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and
permanent. There is little sense that the ‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant
ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as
merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying
inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept
they call ‘surface flexibility’ to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely
engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is
an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the
USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people
of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic
country in many ways, but in our view it is also in
many respects a racial democracy, capable
of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies,
social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second
World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of
efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial
inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases
have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home
mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by
predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It
would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has
been continuous and unchanging throughout US history . But such a
perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have
occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era. Feagin and Elias claim that we overly
inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of
racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do
not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well.
Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us.
While we argue that the right wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back
some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to
what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree that the
present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not
think that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-
Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms
of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces
in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black
movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well
as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the
Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like
Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional .
While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’
effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon
signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a generation’ – count as ‘convergence’? The US
racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the
incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this
process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that
such reforms – which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions
must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there
were important if partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the
significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can take
place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social
interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in
many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of
the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based
movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and
the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and
validation by both the state and civil society of racial ly-defined experience and
identity . These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only
the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but
also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion
accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay
liberation , and the environmentalist and anti-war movements among others.
 Progress – Stats
Racism still exists, but reform is possible; the best statistical
evidence shows a history of racial progress
Feldscher 13 Karen Feldscher (Senior Writer/Project Manager at Harvard School of Public Health), “Progress,
but challenges in reducing racial disparities,” Harvard School of Public Health, 9 September 2013.
September 19, 2013 — Disparities between blacks and whites in the U.S. remain
pronounced—and health is no exception. A panel of experts at Harvard School of Public Health
(HSPH) discussed these disparities—what they are, why they persist, and what to do about them—at a
September 12, 2013 event titled “Dialogue on Race, Justice, and Public Health.” The event was held in Kresge G-1
and featured panelists Lisa Coleman, Harvard University’s chief diversity officer;
David Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in
the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Chandra Jackson, Yerby Postdoctoral
Research Fellow in the HSPH Department of Nutrition; and Zinzi Bailey, a fifth-year doctoral
student in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Robert Blendon,
Richard L. Menschel Professor of Public Health and Professor of Health Policy and
Political Analysis at HSPH, moderated the discussion. Gains, but pains Health care disparities are
troubling, Coleman said. One study found that doctors recommended coronary revascularization—bypass surgery that
replaces blocked blood vessels with new ones—among white patients with heart disease 50% of the time, but just 23% of
the time for blacks. Black women are less likely to be given a bone marrow density test than white women, even when it’s
known they’ve had prior fractures. And the black infant mortality rate is 2.3 times higher than that of non-Hispanic
whites. Each speaker acknowledged that racial minorities have made
significant gains over the past half-century, but said there is much more
work still to do. They cited statistics providing stark evidence of continuing disparities in
health, wealth, education, income, arrest and incarceration rates,
foreclosure rates, and poverty. Coleman called the data “disconcerting; in some cases, alarming.”
Schools are desegregated, she said, but not integrated; median income is $50,000 per year for
whites but $31,000 a year for blacks and $37,000 a year for Hispanics; since the 1960s, the unemployment rate among
blacks has been two to two-and-a-half times higher than for whites; and one in three black men can expect to spend time
in prison during their lifetimes. Blendon shared results from surveys that accentuate sharp differences of opinion about
how well blacks are faring in the U.S. For instance, in a survey that asked participants if they thought that the lives of black
Americans had changed dramatically over the past 50 years, 54% of whites said yes but only 29% of blacks did. Another
survey asked whether or not people approved of the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial; 51% of whites approved but
only 9% of blacks did. Reducing disparities through research, education Jackson
talked about growing up in a segregated neighborhood in Atlanta and
attending a school with 99% black students and inadequate resources. She
became the first in her family to attend college. Now, through her research, she hopes to
expose and reduce racial health disparities. In a recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Jackson and
colleagues reported that blacks—particularly black professionals—get less sleep than whites, which can have potentially
negative impacts on health. Bailey discussed what’s known as the “school-to-prison
pipeline”—a trajectory in which black teens do poorly in school, get held back a grade, drop out, commit a crime,
then end up in jail. On the flip side, she said, there are “diversity pipelines” to recruit minority
students into higher education. “Often these programs target students who have already avoided the school-to-
prison pipeline,” Bailey said, noting that she would like to see higher education institutions connect with black students at
earlier ages to steer them toward positive choices.

Frame this debate through statistical evidence – instances of

racism obviously still exist, but don’t deny the overall trend that
equality is improving
Not Ontological
 Not Ontological – Hudson
Anti-blackness not ontological
Hudson ’13 (Peter Hudson 13, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg ,
South Africa, has been on the editorial board of the Africa Perspective: The South African Journal of Sociology and
Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory and Transformation, and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in
Theory and Criticism, The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 2013)
There always has to exist an outside,
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself.

to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the

which is also inside,

possibility of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But
although the excluded place which isn’t excluded insofar as it is necessary
for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered
“ontological”), its content (what fills it) – as well as the mode of this filling and its

reproduction – are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not
determined once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself
over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the other and the
same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone
but is political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the “curvature of
intersubjective space” (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the “othering” of “otherness”
are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism might
have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into white
and black , and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary – because they
are signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in a
way barred to blacks – who are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of the

ontic – that is, of all contingently constructed identities, rather than the ontology
of the social which refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack
of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic
itself, including its most intimate structuring relations – division is constitutive of the social, not the

colonial division. “Whiteness” may well be very deeply sediment in

modernity itself, but respect for the “ontological difference” (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as ontic. It
may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the
very possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but
from this it does not follow that the “void” of “black being” functions as the
ultimate substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible forms
of sociality are said to rest . What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of
its constitutive axis,its “ontological” differential. A crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by
the imaginary in the way it is under capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give way

because non-identity (the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the “lived
experience” (vécu) of the colonised subject. The colonised is “traversing the fantasy” (Zizek 2006a, 40–60) all the time; the
void of the verb “to be” is the very content of his interpellation. The colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety

for whom the symbolic and the imaginary never work , who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4
“Fixed” into “non-fixity,” he is eternally suspended between “element” and

“moment”5 – he is where the colonial symbolic falters in the production of

meaning and is thus the point of entry of the real into the texture itself of
colonialism. Be this as it may, whiteness and blackness are (sustained by) determinate
and contingent practices of signification; the “structuring relation” of colonialism
thus itself comprises a knot of significations which, no matter how tight, can
always be undone. Anti-colonial – i.e., anti-“white” – modes of struggle are not (just)
“psychic” 6 but involve the “ reactivation ” (or “de-sedimentation”)7 of colonial objectivity itself. No
matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chapter 11, 771
n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time – because it is the
presence of one object in another – undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a differential relation is the condition of possibility and the
condition of impossibility of each other. It is this dimension of antagonism that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of
symbolisation produces an ineradicable excess
itself, reducing it to a condition of its possibility.8 All

over itself, something it can’t totalise or make sense of, where its production of meaning falters.
This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant “object” that has no place of its own, isn’t
recognised in the categories of the system but is produced by it – its “part of
no part” or “object small a.”10 Correlative to this object “a” is the subject “stricto sensu” – i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier
without an identity that pins it down.11 That is the subject of antagonism in confrontation with

the real of the social, as distinct from “subject” position based on a

determinate identity.
 Not Ontological – Bouie
Anti-blackness is not ontological—white Europeans had contact
with black Africans long before explicit policy choices made anti-
blackness possible. Public policy is similarly key to combat
racism.
Jamelle Bouie 13, staff writer at The American Prospect, Making and Dismantling Racism,
http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and
public policy, with a focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political
decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that
anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy choices
—the decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants
has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second, that it's possible to
dismantle this prejudice using public policy . Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had
the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans
understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and actually see racism being inscribed in the
law and the country changing as a result. If we accept that racism is a creation, then we
must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then
accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was

created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy . Over at his
blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I don’t believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or
envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology – it can create racist structures
as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary
strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting
not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNC’s utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but
I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan
writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—basically just prejudice—then Sullivan is
right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or
hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That there's nothing natural about the
black/white divide that has defined American history. White Europeans had
contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave trade
without the emergence of an anti-black racism . It took particular choices
made by particular people—in this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginia— to make black
skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By
enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility, colonial
landowners began the process that would make white supremacy the ideology of America. The position of
slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavement—blacks are
lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect

racism as much as it was built in tandem with it . And later policy , in the late 19th
and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block black
people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums .
Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under
the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In other words, create a prohibition
preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned
behavior—owning a home, getting married—and then blame them for the
adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and responding to conservative critics, Sullivan
has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New Republic that builds on earlier
ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more
sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they
could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains
of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social
stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny
this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But with legal
marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life linked to
stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that society can
create stigmas by using law to force particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay
men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with the fact that society refused to
recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire
encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too degenerate to participate in this institution."
If the prohibition against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay stigma ,
then lifting it—as we've seen over the last decade—has helped destroy it.
There's no reason racism can't work the same way.
 Int’l Racism
Can’t explain international racism
Paul Spickard 9, University of California, Santa Barbara, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the
Critique of Multiracialism (review) American Studies - Volume 50, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127
One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of
multiraciality. From a theoretical perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by
the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life
experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge mixed parentage. The leading figures in this
scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as eminent as Gary Nash
and Randall Kennedy. A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and
Lewis Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps [End Page 125] because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their
arguments do not make a great deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding
multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as
social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan Graham) have been coopted by the Gingrichian right (to
be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension between some Black
intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being
Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment. With
Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically
informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very
least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because
the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing
is abstract, referential, and at key points
vague. For Sexton (as for the Spencers and Gordon) race is about Blackness, in the United States and
around the world. That is silly, for there are other racialized relationships . In the U.S.,

native peoples were racialized by European intruders in all the ways that
Africans were, and more: they were nearly extinguished. To take just one example from many around
the world, Han Chinese have racialized Tibetans historically in all the ways
(including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the
United States. So there is a problem with Sexton's concept of race as Blackness. There
is also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever
and only to be Black. I don't have a problem with that as a political choice, but to
insist that it is the only
possibility flies in the face of a great deal of human experience, and it
ignores the history of how modern racial ideas emerged . Sexton does point
out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the second
paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of study, and

that is not a fair assessment . The main problem is that Sexton argues from conclusion
to evidence, rather than the other way around . That is, he begins with the conclusion that the
multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted. And then he cherry-picks his evidence to fit his

conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as Gregory Stephens and Stephen Talty who have been tangential
to the multiracial literature. When he addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and Kennedy, he carefully selects his quotes to fit
his argument, and misrepresents their positions by doing so. Sexton also makes some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that
people who study multiracial identities are often studying aspects of family life (such as the shaping of a child's identity), and twists that to
charge them with homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is simply not accurate for any of the main writers in the field. The same is true
sometimes
for his argument by innuendo that scholars of multiraciality somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And
Sexton simply resorts to ad hominem attacks on the motives and personal
lives of the writers themselves. It is a pretty tawdry exercise. That is unfortunate, because Sexton appears bright
and might have written a much better book detailing his hesitations about some tendencies in the multiracial movement. He might even
have opened up a new direction for productive study of racial commitment amid complexity. Sexton does make several observations that
are worth thinking about, [End Page 126] and surely this intellectual movement, like any other, needs to think critically about itself. Sadly,
this is not that book.
Alt DA
 Fatalism DA - Marriot
Fatalism DA – reducing blackness to incapacity actively inhibits
the possibility of change and is offensive
Marriot ’12 (David Marriott 12, “Black Cultural Studies”, Years Work Crit Cult Theory (2012) 20 (1): 37-66)
However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (‘The
Structure of Antagonisms’), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of
why ontology cannot understand the being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black
suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures the whole of being : ‘the
essence of being for the White and non-Black position’ is non-niggerness, consequently, ‘[b]eing can thus be thought of, in
the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness’ (p. 37). It is not hard when
reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and
one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic : throughout Red,
White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to have black
lived experience named as the worst , and the politics of such a desire
inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism : for the claim that
‘Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the
black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the
denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to its
endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic , namely, a logic
of non-recuperability —moves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic
resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which Wilderson
persists in calling ‘death’, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion
which remains ever present: ‘White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic
on Black incapacity’ (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or discourses involving ‘violence’, ‘antagonisms’ and
‘parasitism’, Wilderson describes White (or non-Black) film theory and cultural
studies as incapable of understanding the ‘suffering of the Black—the Slave’
(they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which
Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective,
Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one centrally
concerned with exposing ‘the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and
Humans’ (p. 68). Reading seems to stop here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that
Lacan’s notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the
contrast between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of ‘absolute Otherness’ that is the
Black’s relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the ‘structural, or absolute, violence’ of Black life (pp.
74; 75). ‘Whereas Lacan was aware of how language ‘‘precedes and exceeds us’’, he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how
violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks’ (p. 76). The violence of such abjection—or incapacity—is therefore that it
cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence
the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit
Lacan’s notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear
that, according to Wilderson’s own ‘logic’, his description of the Black is
working, via analogy, to Lacan’s notion of the real but, in his insistence on
the Black as an absolute outside Wilderson can only duly reify this void at
the heart of universality . The Black is ‘beyond the limit of contingency’ —but
it is worth saying immediately that this ‘beyond’ is indeed a foreclosure that defines a
violence whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose
nonbeing returns as the theme for Wilderson’s political thinking of a non-
recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and
primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial
metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability between
Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility
of what it means to be Black).
 Fatalism DA – Brown
This logic of social death replicates the violence of the
middle passage – rejection is necessary to honor the dead
Brown 9 – 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,”
But this was not the emphasis of Patterson’s argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his
exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved. Seen as a state
of
being, the concept of social death is ultimately out of place in the political
history of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks and
maneuvers of the enslaved as an important part of that history, scholars
would do better to keep in view the struggle against alienation rather than
alienation itself. To see social death as a productive peril entails a subtle but
significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing
enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their
descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging , mourning,
accounting, and regeneration. In part, the usefulness of social death as a concept depends on what
scholars of slavery seek to explain—black pathology or black politics, resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too
long, debates about whether there were black families took precedence over discussions of how such families were formed;
disputes about whether African culture had “survived” in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of how particular
practices mediated slaves’ attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the documentation of resistance
over the examination of political strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves’ social and
political life grew directly out of the violence and dislocation of Atlantic
slavery, these are false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic
modes of storytelling, for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by
the enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact that although
scholars may never be able to give a satisfactory account of the human experience in slavery, they nevertheless continue to
try. If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery, we might at
least tell richer stories about how the endeavors of the weakest and most
abject have at times reshaped the world. The history of their social and
political lives lies between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their
condition but in their continuous struggles to remake it. Those struggles are
slavery’s bequest to us.

This matters – how we view slave existence shapes politics

Brown 9 – 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,”
But this was not the emphasis of Patterson’s argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his
exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved. Seen as a state of being,
the concept of social death is ultimately out of place in the political history
of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks and maneuvers of the enslaved as an im- portant part
of that history, scholars would do better to keep in view the struggle against
alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a productive
peril entails a subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a
condition to viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved
Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging,
mourning, accounting, and regeneration. In part, the usefulness of social death as a concept
depends on what scholars of slavery seek to explain—black pathology or black politics, resistance or attempts to remake
social life? For too long, debates about whether there were black families took precedence over discussions of how such
families were formed; disputes about whether African culture had “survived” in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of
how particular practices mediated slaves’ attempts to survive; and scholars felt compelled to
prioritize the documentation of resistance over the examination of political
strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves’ social and political life grew directly out of the violence and
dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and romantic
modes of storytelling, for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy confronted by
the enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic fact that although
scholars may never be able to give a satisfactory account of the human experience in slavery, they nevertheless continue to
try. If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved more than the
condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how the
endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world. The history of
their social and political lives lies between resistance and oblivion, not in the nature of their
condition but in their continuous struggles to remake it. Those struggles are slavery’s
bequest to us.
 Objectification DA – Allen
Defense is offense—objectification hurts anti-racist individual
politics
Allen 11 [Jafari S., Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University,
¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba, p. 82-83]

For black folks, resistance always takes place in a field already constrained by the lingering question of black abjection
with respect to subjecthood. Frank Wilderson in his fine polemic “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society?” (2003) argues that blacks “impose a radical incoherence” upon the assumptive logic of a subject constructed
through its relation to labor exploitation. Wilderson’s thesis that “the Black subject reveals Marxism’s inability to think
White supremacy as the base” (n.p.) resonated with Cedrick Robinson’s Black Marxism (2000), which carefully details
historical and philosophical (dis)articulations of black(ness and) Marxism. Wilderson points out that if we follow Antonio
Gramsci’s expansion of Marx, depending on civil society as the site of struggle (i.e., “war of position”) we reify racial terror,
since for black subjects civil society is the site of recurrent racial terror. Where I have to depart from
Wilderson is in his contention that the black subject is thus in a position of
“total objectification… in contradistinction to human possibility , however slim,”
required for a war of position (2003: n.p.; emphasis mine). Wilderson finds the black subject in a
“structurally impossible position.” I must argue, following bell hook’s use of Paolo Freire, however,
that “we cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later become subjects ”
(1989: 29). Part of my friendly disagreement with Wilderson is ontological, or, I readily admit, spiritual. Unlike positions
that deny notions of a deep psychic self, I want to affirm the inherence of inalienable innate
human dignity, and what I might gloss here as “spirit,” which is offended not only by force but by any extrinsic
practice that threatens the individual’s sense of personhood. On another score, Wilderson’s “stress on
objective contradictions, ‘impersonal structures’ and processes that work
‘behind men’s backs,’” as Stuart Hall describes the conventional culture and discourses of the left,
“disable[s] us from confronting the subjective dimension in politics in any
coherent way” (Hall, Morley, and Chen 1996: 226). Thus, in some ways Wilderson takes us back
to the “old” Marx that Gramsci, Hall, and others attempted to rethink
apropos of our new times, even as he points out the limits of Gramsci to contend
with these social and historical facts of blackness. This orientation leaves no air for black
transgression or resistance outside of “the final solution.” In the interim,
however, what will condition, reeducate and raise consciousness towards
revolution?
 Political Exclusion DA
The project of the alternative functions to condition black people
to a particular relationship to govrenmentality that has
historically worked to “keep her in her proper place.” this
project of conditioning is linked to a historical revitalization of
white supremacy turning the alt.
Woodson ’33
[1933, Carter G. Woodson is an African American historian and educator; he is the founder and editor of the Journal of
Negro History and the Negro History Bulletin and the founder of the association for the study of Negro life and history.
“The Miseducation of the Negro,” p40]
Not long ago a measure was introduced in a certain State Legislature to have the
Constitution of the United States thus printed in school histories, but when the bill
was about to pass it was killed by someone who made the point that it would
never do to have [African-Americans] Negroes study the Constitution of the United
States. If the Negroes were granted the opportunity to peruse this document,
they might learn to contend for the rights therein guaranteed; and no Negro teacher who gives
attention to such matters of the government is tolerated in those backward districts. The teaching of
government or the lack of such instruction, then, must be made to conform to the
policy of "keeping the Black in his place."
Permutation
 Black Humanity Possible
we should appropriate the concepts and history and lessons
offered to us by slave revolts, marooners, pan-africanism, black
revolutions, critical race theory, and black studies. Black people
are separate from the “slave” and can REALIZE THEIR
HUMANITY, which is the first step to any change.
Charles H. Rowell 73 [Ph.D in English literary studies at The Ohio State University, Charles Henry Rowell, now
Professor of English at Texas A&M University, taught at Southern University (Baton Rouge), University of Kentucky, and
the University of Virginia], "An Interview with Alvin Aubert: The Black Poet in the Afternoon," Black World/Negro Digest
Magazine, Johnson Publishing Company, Vol. 22, No. 10, August 1973
AUBERT: My concept of Black humanism is that Black people should¶ make every possible attempt to become as human
as possible. It
is a matter of Black people realizing their humanity . This has to
do with two different aspects of the Black man’s historical presence in this country.
The Black man [person] has to realize his [her] humanism in terms of having
been denied it for so many years during slavery and after. And then in a more positive sense,
it is only as a “together” human being, individually and collectively, will the Black man, Black
people, be able to move forward progressively. ROWELL: Do you agree with Margaret
Walker‘-3 that Black humanism¶ is one of the main currents or one of the traditions of Black American ¶ literature?
AUBERT: Yes, I would agree wholeheartedly with that. It is true. In a sense, Black humanism, as I conceive it and as I
think the Black writers of today conceive it, has its basis in a kind of Black existentialism . I
think that in a previous conversation we had I said something about the Black man [person]’s being
reduced to a voice when he was brought over here for the purpose of being
made into a slave. Being put into that¶ position and having to recreate one’s
whole self, one’s entire being in¶ the world, in terms of the voice, is an
existential position. At the same time it is a humanistic position. I think that the very basis of the
spirituals, for example, is humanism: the projection of one’s being out onto the
world-out into or onto the environment.¶ ROWELL: What about the slave narrative? Would you classify the slave¶
narrative as a humanist effort on the part of the slave to project his ¶ humanity? Or would you say that slave
narratives are merely the¶ records of the suffering the Black Eople underwent? AUBERT: Yes, I think they are
humanistic documents in that they make an attempt to assert the humanity
of the slave. As we read, for example, Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass we are much¶ aware, very much aware, of the intense humanity of the man
as opposed to the opposite of humanity, the deviltry, or, as Don L. Lee¶ says, the “unpeopleness” of Mr.
Covey, for example, the slave broker whom Douglass finally stands up to and
achieves his manhood, his humanity. You have, I think, in that confrontation a
confrontation of¶ peopleness versus unpeopleness, humanism versus
demonism.¶ ROWELL: Do you consider a single slave narrative to be an individual ¶ document of the experiences of
a particular slave as well as a symbolic, ¶ not in a literary sense, representation of the experiences of a collective ¶ people in
bondage? A¶ AUBERT: Very definitely so. Douglass, as he portrays himself in his ¶ narrative, is a kind of Every Black Man,
a representative Black person.¶ I think it comes through in terms of the Biblical allusions in Douglass’ ¶ narrative where the
conditions of Black people are likened -unto the¶ conditions of the Hebrews in captivity. Douglass’ own
individual de-¶ liverance is a kind of-if not foreshadowing-depiction of the
deliverance that is to come-or needs to come-of all the Black people who¶
remain behind in the South. ROWELL: Could we go back to the idea that Black people were reduced¶ to a
voice and then recreated themselves through words or through ¶ sounds? Could you say some more about that? It is, I
think, one of the¶ most significant points made about Black culture, especially the history¶ of Black American culture and
the Black position in this country. Are¶ we still creating ourselves through voice?¶ AUBERT: I think we still are. Getting
back to the concept of Black humanism-it is not unrelated to the traditional concept of humanism ¶ in the Western world.
Taking John Milton as example-Milton’s posi-¶ tion as a humanist; I think he is a Christian humanist. In order for a ¶ poet
to write a good poem, the poet himself has to become a poem. ¶ I think you get this same thing in Don L. Lee. I think Don
L. Lee¶ himself-if you have ever heard him read his poetry-comes through ¶ as a living poem. He leaves the audience with
the sense that he is¶ “together,” a self-integrated person, and that he is functioning harmo- ¶ niously with himself. The
voice is a very essential aspect of this mode¶ of being in the world, of being self-integrated of being “together.” The ¶ Black
man, having been shom of all his culture, in effect, was reduced¶ to having to create a cultural involvement for himself out
of this very¶ being. The instrument for the creation of this was the voice. He did not ¶ do it through sculpture, to any
appreciable extent, or through paintings ¶ -through the making of artifacts he might have engaged in in Africa ¶ among his
own people. As a matter of fact, this was discouraged. I¶ have this little poem. The poem is called “Black Music.”
 Moten
Wildersons theory of anti-blackness cannot theorize the para-
ontology of black existence. It can only explain blackness as a
theoretical construction but cannot account for the material
lived reality of African bodies. Only the affs ability to remove
military presences provides a tangible improvement to the lives
of Africans in Uganda while keeping the larger structure of
blackness in mind.
Moten 13 [Fred, Prof. English @ Duke & Helen L. Belvington Prof. Modern Poetry, “The Subprime and the
Beautiful,” African Identities Vol. 11 No. 2, p. 240]
In the United States, whoever says ‘subprime debtor’ says black as well, a fact that leads, without too much turning, to the
question of what a program of complete disorder would be. In any case, it is difficult to see how, in the impossibility that
marks its ‘positionality’, the negation that is always already negated would carry out such a program. In conversation with
the equally brilliant Saidiya Hartman, Wilderson takes care to point out that ‘obviously I’m not
saying that in this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We
have tremendous life. But this life is not analogous to those touchstones of
cohesion that hold civil society together’ (Hartman and Wilderson 2003, p. 187). What
remains is some exploration of the nature of this antianalog, which is more accurately
characterized as an ante-analog, an anticipatory project of celebration that
pessimism must always disavow. Of course, celebration of what exceeds any analogy with the
antisocial hostilities that comprise civil society is, by definition, antithetical to any agenda seeking integration in a civil
society that, in any case, will have never survived such integration. On the other hand, precisely in the ongoing,
undercommon instantiation of an already given, already integrated totality,
celebration is an antiontological claim, an anteontological affiliation, a
social and historical paraontology theorized in performance; it gives
criticism breath while also being that to which criticism aspires . If ‘the
tremendous life’ we have is nothing other than intermittent respite in what
Hartman accurately calls the ravages and brutality of the last centuries, then
feeling good about ourselves might very well be obscene. But what if there is
something other than the phantasmatic object-home of inclusionist desire – which is rightly seen
by Hartman simply to be the extension of those ravages and that brutality – to which we can appeal, to
which we have always been appealing, in flight or, deeper still, in movement? Again, the question concerns
the open secret, the kinetic refuge, of the ones who consent not to be a single
being. The corollary question is how to see it and how to enjoy it. This is a question concerning
resistance, which is not only prior to power but also, like power, is
everywhere – as the mutual constitution of a double ubiquity that places
the question of hegemony somewhere beside the point. The dark, mobile
materiality of this ruptural, execonomic generality is a violence in the
archive that only shows up by way of violence to the archive. Because I don’t want to
kill anybody, because I want us to enjoy ourselves past the point of excess, I am violent in the archive. Because I am a
thing seeing things, I am violence in the archive.
BWB
 BWB DA
We’ll impact turn their understanding of racism – A) Anti-
blackness is not paradigmatic of all forms of racial oppression;
understanding racism as operative on multiple axes is necessary
to combat racism
Linda Martín Alcoff, 3-02-2010, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center,
“Latinos Beyond the Binary”
For my purposes racism can be defined as a negative value or set of values projected as an essential or non-contingent
attribute onto a group whose members are defined through genealogical connection—i.e. as sharing some origin—and who
are demarcated on the basis of some visible phenotypic features.7 Antiblack racism is the most
virulent and persistent form of current racisms, and it informs and infects other forms, but I want to
argue that it is not the only form nor is it the model for all forms of racism.
Racism's persistence is due to its flexibility and vitality, thus we need a
typology for the variety of forms racism can take. Racial oppression works
on multiple axes. The axis of color is currently the most pernicious, but
color is neither exhaustive nor paradigmatic of all the forms racial
oppression can take. Consider the most pejorative terms used against Asian Americans and Latinos. Terms
used against Asian Americans often have a physical connotation but without a color connotation—"Chinks," "slant-eyes,"
and for the Vietnamese, "gooks." These terms are racist because they generalize negative values across a whole group and
they highlight in some cases visible features. Thus they parallel the essentializing move of racist discourse by not singling
out a particular set of customs or a specific history but general physical features or, in the case of 'gook,' subhuman status.
The two most pejorative terms widely used against Latinos in this country have been the terms "spic" and "wetback."
There is some controversy over the origin of the term "spic" but most believe it evolved from Anglos who heard people
saying "no spic English" and thus is a term that denigrates a people's language. The term
'wetback' denigrates both where people came from and how they got here:
from Mexico across the Rio Grande. Mexican Americans were also called
"greasers" which connoted the condition of their hair and skin tone , but not their
skin color. Thus, we need to understand that racialization and racism operates through
multiple ways of constructing and then denigrating a variety of physical
attributes. We might think of color as an axis of racism that operates to favor
light over darker skin tones. This axis works independently and sometimes
in tandem with another axis that operates to favor northern European visible,
physical features such as hair type, facial features, height, and bodily morphology. If a given person has light skin
tones but other features that are marked as non-European, they may be subject to racism along the latter axis. There
is also an axis of racism that operates through cultural or geographical
origin, denigrating peoples who come from non-European cultures that are
viewed as pre-modern, primitive, less civilized or restrained, less individualistic, less rational, and so on. Again, it makes
sense to call all of these forms of racism because they operate to project negative values as an
essential or non-contingent attribute onto a group whose members are
demarcated on the basis of some visible, phenotypic features. The
discrimination against Latinos (among others, especially Asian Americans and now Arab and Muslim
Americans) has also operated very strongly on the basis of nativism. We might think of
nativism as a fourth axis of racism that targets immigrants. Nativism is distinct, though often related to, a general
xenophobia, ethnic chauvinism or dislike of foreigners because it adds a racialized construction of
the group in question as inassimilable due to inherent characteristics. Thus,
in the U.S. today there is ethnic chauvinism against numerous groups, but
not all of these experience racialization. Consider the French, who have been the target of a
publicly sanctioned derogation that is not based on attributions of innate inferiority. All immigrant groups are not
racialized in the sense of universalizing negative values onto a group that is demarcated on the basis of visible features,
nor subject to the essentializing of their cultural characteristics as static. Russian and Eastern European immigrants are
not the targets of random identity-based violence or national scapegoating to "explain" economic downturns. European
immigrants are not tagged as inassimilable cultural inferiors nor is their difference racialized in the way that some
Latinos, Arabs, and Asian Americans experience. Thus nativism today takes a decidedly racialized form, different from
earlier periods in U.S. history when, for example, German immigrants were shunned, German street names were changed,
and frankfurters were renamed hot dogs. The target of nativism today is a racialized other
who threatens the imaginary identity of the U.S. nation to an extent no European culture
probably can, given that that imaginary identity is centrally European based. A cultural amalgamation of European and
Latin elements that might occur naturally as Latino numbers in the U.S. rise strikes many people with horror.8
Nativism's racialized attributions encourages people to turn a blind eye to the
injustices that happen to "non-Native" peoples, such as those profiled as
terrorists or those standing on the corner day-labor meat markets or those trying to cross borders.
It puts non-native groups outside the pale of peer group conventions of tolerance, respect
and civil rights. On this view, the problem with Latinos is not just that they are seen as foreign but that their
cultural background makes them ineluctably foreign, both incapable of and unmotivated toward assimilation to the
superior, mainstream, white Anglo culture. Debates over bilingualism thus invoke the specter of a concerted resistance to
assimilation rather than language rights, and the public celebration of nationally specific holidays, such as "Puerto Rican
Day" or Mexican Independence Day, and even the presence of ethnic-specific cuisines can come to signify a threat to the
imagined community of Anglo nationalism. Despite the fact that Mexican-Americans have been living within the current
U.S. borders for longer than most Anglo-Americans, they are all too often seen as squatters on U.S. soil, interlopers who
"belong" elsewhere. This has nothing to do with claims to native inclusion and everything to do with cultural racism.9
Anti-Latino racism mobilizes very specific narratives involving history and
culture as well as accounts of racial hierarchies and the effects of race-
mixing to portray all Latinos negatively. Thus, the color axis is only one of the axes
that need to be understood as pivotal in racist ideologies.

B) The binary fractures coalitions, isolates black people and

causes nihilism
Elizabeth Martinez, 6-09-2004, writer, activist, educator, teaches Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies in the
California state university system, currently works with Latin@ and multinational youth groups, published five books on
social movements and writer for Z Magazine, Rethinking Schools and other publications on Latin@ issues, “Seeing More
than Black & White”
When Kissinger said years ago "nothing important ever happens in the south," he articulated a contemptuous indifference
toward Latin America, its people and their culture which has long dominated U.S. institutions and attitudes. Mexico may
be great for a vacation and some people like burritos but the usual image of Latin America combines incompetence with
absurdity in loud colors. My parents, both Spanish teachers, endured decades of being told kids were better off learning
French. U.S. political culture is not only Anglo-dominated but also embraces an exceptionally stubborn national self-
centeredness, with no global vision other than relations of domination. The U.S. refuses to see itself as one nation sitting
on a continent with 20 others all speaking languages other than English and having the right not to be dominated. Such
arrogant indifference extends to Latinos within the U.S. The mass media complain, "people can't relate to Hispanics" - or
Asians, they say. Such arrogant indifference has played an important role in invisibilizing La Raza (except where we
become a serious nuisance or a handy scapegoat). It is one reason the U.S. harbors an exclusively white-on-Black concept
of racism. It is one barrier to new thinking about racism which is crucial today. There are others. Good-bye White Majority
In a society as thoroughly and violently racialized as the United States, white-Black relations have defined racism for
centuries. Today the composition and culture of the U.S. are changing rapidly. We need to consider
seriously whether we can afford to maintain an exclusively white/Black model of
racism when the population will be 32 percent Latino, Asian/Pacific American and Native American
- in short, neither Black nor white - by the year 2050. We are challenged to recognize that
multi-colored racism is mushrooming, and then strategize how to resist it. We are challenged to
move beyond a dualism comprised of two white supremacist inventions: Blackness and Whiteness. At stake in those
challenges is building a united anti-racist force strong enough to resist
contemporary racist strategies of divide-and- conquer. Strong enough, in the long run, to
help defeat racism itself. Doesn't an exclusively Black/white model of racism
discourage the perception of common interests among people of color and thus
impede a solidarity that can challenge white supremacy ? Doesn't it
encourage the isolation of African Americans from potential allies? Doesn't it advise
all people of color to spend too much energy understanding our lives in relation to
Whiteness, and thus freeze us in a defensive , often self- destructive mode?
C) The silence bred by the dominance of the black/white binary
allows conservative forces to divide and conquer
Prashad 2 (Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of
International Studies, 2002, “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting,” pp. 40-46
the civil rights movement forced a recalcitrant U.S. government
¶ The moral and political weight of

to offer some rights to disenfranchised sections of the population. There was little hope, in , that the United States government would go
beyond its own minimalist definition of ‘‘human rights’’ (as habeas corpus) given its refusal to endorse the socioeconomic side of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (). When Martin Luther King Jr. and others turned to the
question of poverty (to launch the ‘‘poor people’s movement’’), they made a claim for a maximalist notion of ‘‘human rights’’—not just the right to civil liberties, but also to a home, to a job, to education, and to dignity (articles – of the 

To deal with the

declaration). Instead of taking on this more comprehensive demand, the civil rights movement was offered a modest program for redressal: affirmative action and the franchise.11

theft of labor of people of certain ‘‘races’’ in the form of chattel slavery ( , and also debt

the state proposed to make an effort to produce some

peonage in agriculture, industry, and service),

measure of equality. The state was forced to act on behalf of those for whom
it had rarely acted ; it had to abjure its formal or ceremonial sense of distance from the inequalities of society. Of course, the state is never neutral, since it either absents itself when the powerful exercise
their might or else it acts for them, often seeming to be nothing more than a chamber of commerce. When the Constitution enshrined the right to private property, it made inviolable the basis of social inequality and, in fact, became the protector

Affirmative action
of the propertied classes. , as an unobtrusive gesture, was the compromise afforded by the
propertied to end social unrest .¶ A generation before affirmative action was institutionalized, the United States proposed to rebuild Europe (the Marshall Plan) and Japan (the
occu- pation from –) after World War II, yet there was to be no such provision of funds to African and Asian states who crept out of the harrow of colonialism. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank did not provide
funds to this new ‘‘Third World’’ with the same generosity of spirit as the Marshall Plan had (the reconstruction of Japan was perhaps due to guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki).12 The U.S. attitude to Africa, for instance, was marked, on the one
hand, by the  assassination of the first premier of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and, on the other hand, by the use of new leader Mobuto Sese Seko for U.S. corporate ends. From  to , for example, U.S.
firms invested $ billion in the excavation of raw materials as well as $ million in commercial bank loans toward the creation of infrastructure to facilitate export. Lest one think that this money was for charitable purposes (a kind of

If African Americans did not receive a

international ‘‘affirmative action’’), the U.S. firms expropriated $. billion between  and .13¶

domestic program of reparations for the injustices of history , as well as for the production of a democratic

Africa itself
citizenry, was to be further exploited. The denial of
(and much of Asia and Latin America) the socioeconomic

rights was couched in various arguments about the Third World’s

of the formerly colo- nized peoples

retrogressive cultures
excessive population (neo-Malthusianism), its and lack of democracy (neo-Weberianism), and its unfortunate comparative dis- advantage in economic terms (neoclassical

These are the cognates of the claim that reparations for African
economics).

Americans are ‘‘handouts’’ or ‘‘charity’’ rather than the overdue bill for
centuries of unpaid labor. While domestic affirmative action and international aid became the mild forms of redress offered by the U.S. government, it was not a concession that came
easily. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan used their scholarly credentials and political access to question the policy from its inception. ‘‘Nothing was more dramatic than the rise of this practice [of quotas] on the part of the American
government in the s, at the very moment it was being declared abhorrent and illegal.’’14 The message here was that if a concept is by fiat made illegal, then it disappears: there is no need to act against it, just ignore its impact on history. ‘‘The
nation is by government action increasingly divided into racial and ethnic categories with different origins,’’ Glazer argued. ‘‘New lines of conflict are created by government action. New resentments are created; new turf is to be protected; new
angers arise; and one sees them on both sides of the line.’’15 Rather than seeing these conflicts as the legacy of de jure racism, neo-conservatives like Glazer and Moynihan produced a discourse of de facto racism that blamed the state for
inequities just as it tried to mend, perhaps quixotically, racist socioeconomic relations. Within this line of thought, affirmative action, rather than racism, was to bear the burden of social dysfunction. Thomas Sowell provided an early example of a
logic that has become all too familiar now: those who are assisted by affirmative action are stigmatized by it.16 Racism did not stigmatize people; affirmative action did.¶ If affirmative action and other state social redressal policies came under fire
from the neoconservatives, they drew upon race itself to buttress their arsenal.17 ‘‘Let me be blunt,’’ Daniel Moynihan wrote in , ‘‘if ethnic quotas are to be imposed on American universities and similarly quasi-public institutions, it is the Jew

Reagan
who will be almost driven out.’’18 The role played by the figure of the Jew in the s was to be farcically adopted by the Asian American from the s onward. And we heard it spectacularly from Ronald , who

called Asians ‘‘our exemplars of hope and inspiration’’ (the compliment was returned by an Asian, Dinesh D’Souza, who extolled the rise of Reagan from an

The ‘‘Jew’’ and the ‘‘Asian American’’ provide a singularly

‘‘ordinary man’’ into an ‘‘extraordinary leader’’).19

useful way to attack the problem of equity. Phrased in terms of ‘‘overrepresentation’’ and

merit these minorities

‘‘ ,’’ would be hurt by social engineering since they, it is argued by some,

are already overrepresented

() and would face quotas in the professions () they that would impinge on their meritier. During a

he used Asians as ‘‘a vehicle to

Heritage Foundation event on affirmative action in the s, Representative Dana Rohrabacker (Rep-CA) had the bad taste to say that

show that America has made a mistake on affirmative action Asians are .’’20

used as a weapon against

in this instance, then, redistribution devised by the state. the most modest form of ¶ In
the international arena, the proponents of neoliberal economic policies use the sometime success of the so-called East Asian tigers to undermine the African, Latin American, and other Asian states’ claims to reassess the terms of trade and debt
policies (much of this enunciated in the now defunct UN Commission on Trade and Development under the guidance of the Argentine economist Rau ́l Prebisch). A global amnesia forgets that the success of the ‘‘tigers’’ was short-lived, produced
in relatively small states (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore), and created not so much by deregulation and the ‘‘free market,’’ but by strong state redistribution of land and of price controls.21 Despite this well-documented history,
there is a tendency to assess the ‘‘tragedy of Africa’’ through the lens of helplessness (at worst) and charity (at best), especially when compared to the ‘‘miracles of East Asia.’’ The parallels with the domestic ‘‘model minority’’ stereotype are clear.

Fukuyama offers Asian Americans

In his Foreign Affairs essay ‘‘Social Capital and the Global Economy,’’ for example, State Department social theorist Francis and Asia

as models of civic values. He berates African Americans whose problems he

believes are created by ‘‘single-parent families’’ and weak ‘‘larger social groups’’ and Africa for its deficiency of ‘‘voluntary associations

These are
outside kinship.’’22 inaccurate tropes both of Africa and of African
standard and

Americans. Fukuyama’s view is not unusual, for the popular press tells us that Asian Americans succeed ‘‘essentially without the benefit of affirmative action.’’23 Most of us are familiar with the idea of the ‘‘model

this stereotype is used not just to uplift

minority,’’ and indeed there are several strong denunciations of the myth. What is not so clear is the means by which

Asians, but to demean blacks and Latinos

pointedly .24 ‘‘The black leadership has dominated the discussion [on civil rights],’’ Ed Koch noted a few years

The implication is that blacks want

ago. ‘‘The Asian Americans, because all they ask for is to be treated equally, have not played a part in the discussion.’’25

special treatment and believe themselves to be entitled to something more

than other Americans. This special and unfair treatment does not go without a victim, we are told; Jerry Reynolds of the Center for Equal Opportunity argues that ‘‘any time racial preferences are
used, there’s a victim. And in California, the victim often has an Asian face.’’26 Stephen Nakashima, the Asian community’s Ward Connerly, argued along this grain that ‘‘discrimination in any form inflicts unjust injury upon its victims; the injury
is no less because the person who, or the institution which, inflicts it purports to act with good intention.’’27 The argument was made most spectacularly, if rather wantingly, by Bob Dole during his run for the presidency. On March , , Dole
gave a speech at the Little Saigon Shopping Mall in Orange County to a mainly Republican Vietnamese audience. ‘‘We ought to do away with preferences,’’ he said in his noncommittal style. ‘‘It ought to be based on merit. This is America and it
ought to be based on merit.’’28 Following up on the lines of Dole and others, we then heard from Susan Au Allen (head of the Pan-Asian American Chamber of Commerce, whose most famous act was to help scuttle the nomination of Bill Lam Lee
to the Clinton justice department). In a profile of her she claimed that¶ We are not asking for privileges. We don’t ask ourselves what this or that bit of civil rights legislation will do for us. All we want is the chance to work hard for our families,

the argument is that Asians

keep more of what we earn, and not have our children kept out of good schools when their grades and test scores show they should get in.29 Essentially

are good citizens and hardworking; they do not need state assistance. Blacks
need state assistance; they must be bad citizens and lazy. This is the chain of reason for the color blind.¶ There are many
reasons why the argument of the color blind appeals to some Asians.30 Beyond the idiosyncrasies of national origins, there are class reasons for making common cause with the Right: the ‘‘leaders’’ of the community come from professional and
merchant fractions of the elite and not from the working-class segment. Therefore, while most Asian Americans powerful enough to have their voices heard supported the end of affirmative action in California,  percent of Asians voted to save
it.31 For Asians who enter the United States under the good graces of the  Immigration Act, few have a sufficient grasp of the civil rights struggle and its legacy. We have eaten the fruits of the struggle, of the educational systems set in place in
our socialized societies (India, China, Vietnam, and Japan), and of the scrupulous screening of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The process of state-selection endows us with arrogance about ‘‘merit’’ and ability without any
historical acknowledgment of the forces that produced us. ‘‘Asian Americans are inconvenienced, perhaps, but not hurt,’’ Emil Guillermo puts it nicely. ‘‘If anything Asian Americans should be proud that the system works, and that we more often

to combat the idea of the color-

than not can compete on merit. We shouldn’t be dragged into the racially charged political debate as ‘victimized overachievers.’’’32 In order

blind state policy it’s important to offer an account of the

, itself a divisive instrument cloaked as unifying one,

affirmative privilege obscured by the current arguments. Asian Americans are in the spotlight in the battle over

The Asian American is used as

state-funded public schools. The mission of public education is to alleviate gross inequities by the production of skills in the general population.

an instrument to show how these schools discriminate against Asian

Americans in favor of blacks and Latinos, that Asian American merit is
squandered on behalf of the process of equity. In private schools, however, where Asian Americans are discriminated against in favor of whites,
there is no talk of the Asian American. In fact, there is silence on the problem of affirmative privilege and the disregard to merit when it comes to children of alumni (or legacy admissions) and other such markers of privilege. If the merit

the Asian American is used to tear down

argument is to have any credence, then we should take it all the way and raze the edifice of privilege. Instead,

public institutions, while the discrimination of the private sector keeps affirmative

privilege intact. This is part of the overall attempt to dismantle state institutions and shift state funds from mass education to private education (vouchers, and so forth).¶ Consistent struggle has raised the
problem of discrimination on to the U.S. agenda. In the s, for example, the problem of quotas in private schools did make a brief appearance. At Harvard University, for instance, Asian Americans applicants had to get forty points more on
the SATs than white applicants got. Of those Asians who applied to Harvard, the college accepted . percent; of white applicants, the college welcomed  percent.33 Some of this is because of the legacy system, by which  percent of Harvard’s
incoming class are children of alumni. Legacy, a system set up in the s to stem Jewish admissions into Ivy League colleges, allows colleges to affirm privilege and to maintain the status quo. In , Harvard admitted more legacy students
than black, Chicano, Native American, and Puerto Rican students combined.34 When the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Hopwood v. State of Texas in  to end affirmative action in Texas, Representative Lon
Burham put forward a quixotic bill in the Texas legislature to outlaw legacy admissions. ‘‘There has been racially and classbased discrimination that benefits upper-income white kids,’’ he said. ‘‘It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out this
is what the schools are doing.’’35 If racism secured certain preferences for whites in the past, then these unjustly acquired benefits are preserved into the present through such programs as legacy admissions (and then held in trust as these
children secure admission for their children, regardless of merit).36¶ Education is only one avenue to gauge affirmative privilege. J. Morgan Kousser’s comprehensive book shows us how the arena of voting rights is also encumbered by privileges
of the past.37 The theft of the  elections in Florida confirms Kousser’s analysis, and should give us pause on the question of a just franchise. George Lipsitz’s summary on the ‘‘possessive investment in whiteness’’ traces how housing
discrimination (and the creation of equity), transportation subsidies, corporate welfare, and other such parts of the system of affirmative privilege act against people of color.38 When the U.S. House Progressive Caucus put forward HR :
Corporate Welfare Reduction Act in , it called for the elimination of $ billion in tax subsidies to corporations.39 ‘‘At a time when the poor, the children, the elderly and veterans are being asked to make sacrifices to help balance the federal
budget,’’ Representative Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vermont) argued, ‘‘those who are most able to be self-sufficient should be the first in line. Americans can no longer afford to provide tens of billions of dollars in wealthfare to augment the quite
adequate resources of corporations and wealthy individuals.’’ The bill failed.¶ The rollback of social services within the United States is the domestic variant of ‘‘neoliberalism,’’ the recomposition of capital to the interests of large transnational
firms and to those elites who live their lives by the logic of the Dow Jones. There is little discussion of the expropriation of immense values during the period of direct colonial rule nor is there any concern for the sustained impoverishment of
most of the world through the policy of indebtedness. The collapse of so many national economies is not the result of an inevitable process now known as globalization. Rather, it is partially caused by a project that seeks to maintain certain

Public institutions that seek

regions of the world as producers of less-valorized goods and services while others retain control over advanced technology and financial markets.40

to redress inequality are to be downsized in favor of private institutions

committed to the extraction of profit. The logical chain runs from the attack on public education in the United States to the provision of agricultural subsidies in
India. However, the attack on the ‘‘public’’ is not consistent, since the U.S. and German governments remain pledged to the provision of domestic agrarian subsidies, just as they fight to end the same subsidies in the Third World. If there is no
policy consistency, there is a remarkable coherence of interest—what enables the dollar and euro to maintain their fiscal prominence seems to become ‘‘international’’ policy; the rupee and the bhat are irrelevant.41 Color blindness as an
international ideology neglects, in bad faith, the production of inequality in our world by the manipulation of the finance markets to benefit those who already have wealth. After all, it is an axiom that those with wealth want to, at least, maintain,
at best, enlarge, their holdings: given this conservative approach to the world’s assets it should be apparent why those with a large hold on the pie commit themselves to the political philosophy of the color blind. We are perhaps further from
King’s ‘‘content of their character’’ message than we suspect.
 1AR – BWB
polyculturalism is a better strategy
Prashad 2 (Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of
International Studies, 2002, “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting,” pp. 64-69
¶Disenfranchised by white supremacy, many people of color lean on narrow
nationalist frameworks to make claims upon the state. The most obvious strategy is to ask
for resources based on authenticity (‘‘we need to be represented by our own, or else we need money for our community’’).
The demand is unimpeachable, principally because it calls for a redress of
past history. When the  U.S. census allowed people to tick one or more boxes for race, the NAACP and other
civil rights organizations took umbrage. Hilary Shelton of the NAACP noted, ‘‘Census statistics are used for the allocation
of programmatic dollars—everything from education and health care to transportation’’ and that the tabulation of race
numbers allows for civil rights groups to ‘‘most fully and consistently enforce our existing civil rights laws.’’118 Without
the numbers of people of color it is hard to argue against job discrimination or other such acts of affirmative
disenfranchisement. On college campuses, progressive faculty adopt the language of authenticity to argue for more faculty
of color and for a further diversification of the curriculum. The Asian American students need Asian American faculty
members and Asian American studies. Race is used here in light of historically considered categories that have been the
basis of racism in the past, and therefore that have functioned to exclude certain people from political, economic, and
social power. To gain redress, race has to be quite central, since it was on the
basis of race that disenfranchisement took place . The strategy of redress,
however, is limited by its entrapment in the framework of bourgeois law. A
person (or institution) has to prove that another person (or institution) has done
substantial harm to himself or herself for the case to be taken seriously both before
the court of law and bourgeois public opinion. Harm to a community in the past provokes the
problem of remedy: Who should pay for which crimes , and who must collect
the redemption? Angry white students sometimes say that they are tired of the
implication that they are culpable for the acts of their ancestors or of their race.
The onus is placed on those who have been historically oppressed to settle
the problem of a remedy, and the experience of Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust and of interned Japanese Americans shows us that the standard
for redress is posed rather high (an apparently insurmountable problem for
the reparations claim of descendants of enslaved Africans). To counter the
injudiciously high standards, many of us turn to questions of cultural
authenticity and of demography to make our case. On college campuses, for instance, we ask for representation
based on our numbers and on the need to have cultural presence of certain groups based on these numbers. The
limits of multiculturalism—notably the assumption that culture is definable and discrete—badger
this strategy. The call for amends on the multiculturalist platform leads, in many cases, to a Hobbesian war of one
against all among the oppressed: the divide-and-rule strategy comes to pass. Besides, demographically
insignificant groups, such as Amerindians, do not have access to this political
strategy, and furthermore, the appeal often transforms the student into a
customer who makes a market-based demand that is quite opposed to the
moral struggle for social justice. The cry for cultural authenticity is a
defensive gesture against a recalcitrant, white supremacist set of
institutions: we must recognize it for what it is and seek more creative ways
to transform the structures from whom we seem to be simply asking for
some spoils. This brings me, finally, to the idea of the polycultural.119 In an article for ColorLines Magazine in
, historian and cultural critic Robin Kelley dismissed the idea of the purity of our bloodlines, finding the world of
cultural purity and authenticity equally unpleasant too. Kelley argued that ‘‘ so called ‘mixed-race’
children are not the only ones with a claim to multiple heritages. All of us, and I
mean ALL of us, are the inheritors of European, African, Native American, and
even Asian pasts, even if we can’t exactly trace our bloodlines to all of these
continents.’’120 Rejecting the posture of a ‘‘racism with a distance,’’ Kelley argued that our various
cultures ‘‘have never been easily identifiable, secure in their boundaries, or
clear to all people who live in or outside our skin. We were multi-ethnic and polycultural from the
get-go.’’ The theory of the polycultural does not mean that we reinvent humanism
without ethnicity, but that we acknowledge that our notion of cultural community should
not be built inside the high walls of parochialism and ethno-nationalism. The framework of
polyculturalism uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that
of culture. Culture is a process (that may sometimes be seen as an object) with no
identifiable origin. Therefore, no cultural actor can, in good faith, claim proprietary interest in what is claimed
to be his or her authentic culture. ‘‘All the culture to be had is culture in the making,’’ notes anthropologist Gerd Baumann.
‘‘All cultural differences are acts of differentiation, and all cultural identities are acts of cultural identification.’’121 ¶
Kelley’s idea of polyculturalism draws from the idea of polyrhythms— many different rhythms operating together to
produce a whole song, rather than different drummers doing their own thing. People and cultures, from the
outset, then, are
seen to be at the confluence of multiple heritages and ‘‘living
cultures, not dead ones . . . [that] live in and through us everyday, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy
or meaning.’’ Even though people form what appear to be relatively discrete groups (South Asians, African Americans,
Latino Americans), most of us live with the knowledge that the boundaries of our communities are
fairly porous and that we do not think of all those within our ‘‘group’’ as of a cohesive piece. We forge group solidarity
even, or especially, when we are thrown together by imputed solidarities. Furthermore, multiculturalism
tends toward a static view of history, with cultures already forged and with
people enjoined to respect and tolerate each cultural world. Polyculturalism ,
on the other hand, offers a dynamic view of history, mainly because it argues for
cultural complexity.¶ The history of Garveyism is, in fact, illustrative of polyculturalism. The Garvey
movement has been the largest mobilizer of black people in the world. Despite the fact that the Universal Negro
Improvement Association restricted membership to those who claimed African descent, Garvey was close to the Indian
nationalist exile Lajpat Rai (who again also courted Booker T. Washington), and he hired as the editor of Negro World the
Indian writer Hucheshwar G. Mugdal. The Negro World, under Mugdal, opened itself to the international struggles
against white supremacy. In early , the paper published a letter from an Indian man, Ganesh Rao: ¶ I am one of those
millions that are being oppressed by the imperialistic English government. My interest, my responsibility, my duty, has
thus impelled me to study the tragic tales of other oppressed peoples, e.g. the Negro, and his future. From my humble
study so far I have confidently felt that the UNIA is doing the real work for the uplift of the Negro, and the U stands for, in
word as in action—Universal . . . India is in her birth-throes; she soon shall be free. Ethiopia, self conscious, is working for
her indepen-¶ ¶ dent and unhindered progress. Peace shall not dawn on this world until Asia
and Africa and their ancient peoples are free and enjoy all human rights.
Oppressed people of the world unite. Lose no time! Mugdal simply continued an internationalist
strain long evident in Garvey’s biography. In New York Garvey took the counsel of the Indian liberal Haridas T.
Muzumdar and his strong anticolonial rhetoric attracted a young Ho Chi Minh to his Harlem meetings.123 This
interchange, at a late stage, is a continuation of the history of interaction between Africans and Asians across the Indian
Ocean. There can be no history of Gujarati peoples , as we saw in the previous chapter,
without consideration of Zanzibar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Muscat. A
polyculturalist sees the world constituted by the interchange of cultural
forms, while multiculturalism (in most incarnations) sees the world as already
constituted by different (and discrete) cultures that we can place into
categories and study with respect (and thereby retain s relativism and pluralism in a new guise). What would
history look like from a polycultural perspective? Well, rather than see Hong Kong business exclusively as a hybrid of an
ancient Confucianism and a modern capitalism, as in the work of Tu Wei-Ming, we might take heed of the Jesuit role in
the making of early modern ‘‘Confucianism,’’ as in the fine work of Lionel Jensen.124 Rather than evince surprise at
English education in India, we might recognize, along with Gauri Viswanathan and Kumkum Sangari, that ‘‘English’’ as a
discipline emerges in the East India Company colony of lower Bengal.125 Rather than treat Indian students at Yale as
aliens, we might consider that the university received seed money from Elihu Yale, onetime governor of Madras, whose
wealth came from the expropriated labor of Indian peasants.126 ¶ These examples are not random, for they enable us to
indulge in one of the traits of the polycultural approach—to snub the pretensions of Europe and the United States, which
arrogates certain parts of world knowledge to itself, thereby placing its ideas at the top of a cultural hierarchy leaving the
rest of us to fend off both the legacy of colonial knowledge and violence with our meager economic and cultural resources.
Several historians of Europe these days recognize the interlocking heritage of the Eurasian landmass, as well as the
substantial links between Africa and Europe.127 The interchange between the continents produced what is today so
cavalierly called ‘‘Western rationality,’’ ‘‘Western science,’’ and ‘‘Western liberalism’’: this erases the influence of those
Arab and Jewish scholars who extended Aristotle’s insights, those Indian wizards who made mathematics possible with
their discovery of the zero, those Iroquois whose experiments with federalism helped frame some of the concepts for the
U.S. Constitution.128 Instead of laying claim to the complex heritage of these modern phenomena, chauvinists of color
argue for such traditions as ‘‘Hindu Economics’’ and ‘‘Islamic Science,’’ as well as cede the terrain of democracy to
Europe.129 Polyculturalism refuses to allow the ‘‘West’’ to arrogate these combined and
uneven developments of so many sociocultural formations , since it scrupulously
investigates the connections that dynamically generate them. ¶ The polyculturalist outlook says to
the proponents of the color blind that their position is in a bad faith, since it
acts to perpetuate the racist status quo. To the primordialists it says that to deny
internal differentiation and intermixture of cultural forms may allow it to
leverage power over those whom it treats as part of its group, but it does not
provide an adequate agenda to dismantle the status quo kept in place by the color blind.
Instead, the posture of authenticity occludes its privilege. Antiracists sometimes argue that authenticity is one of the few
avenues to make claims on institutions. Polyculturalism offers some solace but implicit within it is the understanding that
this defensiveness is a trap that is able only to garner crumbs from the racist table—and these days few of them. Should
the antiracists accept the idea of authenticity to build a black studies or Asian American studies department (staffed
respectively by blacks and Asian Americans) or should we make wide claims on the resources of the entire educational
ensemble, to train people of color to be mathematicians, geographers, philosophers, historians of France?130 In ,
David Hilliard, speaking to the students at San Francisco State College, enunciated the Black Panther Party position
against ‘‘an autonomous Black studies program that excludes other individuals.’’ Hilliard understood the need to claim
resources, but he was wary of the claim for it being made on the grounds of exclusions and of a hidebound notion of
cultural autonomy. He said,¶ We recognize nationalism because we know that our struggle is one of national salvation. But
this doesn’t hinder our struggle, to make alliance with other people that’s moving in a common direction, but rather it
strengthens our struggle. Because it gives us more energy, it gives us a more powerful force to move and to withstand the
repression that’s being meted out against us.131 ¶ Within this framework, concern for the obliteration of cultural forms is
met not by an encirclement of the false cultural wagons, but by the generous embrace of all the energy that is ready for a
genuine antiracist struggle. Hilliard did not argue against cultural nationalism simply on the expedient ground ¶ ¶ that the
black liberation struggle required allies for demographic strength. On the contrary, talk of ‘‘energy’’ seemed to indicate
that the entry of all manner of antiracists would qualitatively strengthen the movement, give it a kind of dynamism.
Difference may yet be valued, for, as legal scholar Leti Volpp holds, to retain an idea of cultural difference (notably of
forms of social life) is not the same as to abdicate the right to adjudicate between different practices in struggle.132 ¶ A
broad antiracist platform would not (like liberal multiculturalism) invest itself in the
management of difference, but it would (like a socialist polyculturalism) struggle to
dismantle and redistribute unequal resources and racist structures.
Furthermore, polyculturalism, as a political philosophy, does not see difference ‘‘as
evidence of some cognitive confusion or as a moral anomaly’’ (as liberal multiculturalism is wont to do),
but it sees those features of difference with which it disagrees as ‘‘the expression of a morality you
despise, that is, as what your enemy (not the universal enemy) says.’’133 The advantage of this reaction is that it
explores the politics of various positions which are then measured on the
basis of the ethico-political agenda forged in struggle (not as some universal, ahistorical
verities). For example, the liberal chauvinist may argue that immigrants should assimilate into the U.S. core culture,
taking for granted that there is such a thing as a core in the first place. The word assimilate is used as a universal value, so
that few of us can reply that we don’t want to assimilate, we want to remain separate (‘‘Then why did you come here?’’ is
the response). If we reframe the problem not as assimilation but as conformity, we have a political leg to stand upon (‘‘my
being here is already assimilation, but I refuse to conform to some of your mores’’). The answer to American
ideology, then, comes against a language of ‘‘skin,’’ but not in a color-blind
fashion. Polyculturalism does not posit an undifferentiated ‘‘human’’ who is
inherently equal as the ground for its critique of the world , one that says something
like ‘‘we are all human after all,’’ but seems to offer only the smallest palliatives against racist structures. Instead it
concentrates on the project of creating our humanity. ‘‘Human’’ is an ‘‘unfinished
product,’’ one divided by social forces that must be overcome for ‘‘human’’ to be made manifest.135 In the nineteenth
century near Delhi, Akbar Illahabadi intoned that we are born people, but with great difficulty we become human (aadmi
tha, bari muskil se insan hua). A polycultural humanism, for this tradition, is a ‘‘practical index’’ that sets in motion the
processes that might in time produce a humanity that is indeed in some way equal.136
 Psychoanalysis Answers
Psychoanalysis is factually inaccurate—the model of the dynamic
unconscious it is modeled on is factually inaccurate
O’Brien & Jureidini, 2002 [Gerard & Jon, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Adelaide & PhD (Flinders) is a child psychiatrist who has completed a doctorate in philosophy of mind,
“Dispensing With the Dynamic Unconscious,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2, project muse]
IT IS THE PRIMARY TENET of psychoanalysis that there is a subterranean
region of our minds inhabited by mental entities—such as thoughts, feelings, and motives—
that are actively prevented from entering consciousness because of their painful or
otherwise unacceptable content. These mental entities, in spite of being consciously
inaccessible, are assumed to have a profound impact on our conscious
mental life and behavior, and in so doing are thought to be responsible for many of the psychopathologies, both
major and minor, to which we are subject. This conjectured subterranean region of our minds is
nowadays known as the dynamic unconscious , and there is no more important explanatory
concept in all of psychoanalytic theory. Yet, despite its importance to psychoanalytic thought and practice,
and despite almost a century of research effort since its first systematic articulation, the
dynamic unconscious is in deep trouble. The methodologic difficulties
associated with theorizing about this putative mental underworld are
legion (Grunbaum 1984), and recent years have seen a growing skepticism about
the very notion of a dynamic unconscious and with it the whole apparatus of psychoanalysis (see, for example,
Crews 1996). In the face of these difficulties, a number of proponents of psychoanalysis have turned to contemporary
cognitive science for assistance (see, for example, Epstein 1994; Erdelyi 1985; Shevrin 1992; and Westen 1998). Their aim
has been to show that psychoanalytic conjectures about the dynamic unconscious receive a great deal of support from the
empirical evidence in favor of the cognitive unconscious. By variously integrating the dynamic unconscious with the
cognitive unconscious (Epstein 1994) or extending the cognitive unconscious to cover psychical entities and processes
traditionally associated with the dynamic [End Page 141] unconscious (Westen 1998), the hope is that the struggling
psychoanalytic concept will be buttressed by its healthier counterpart in cognitive science. It is our contention, however,
that this hope is misplaced. Far from supporting the dynamic unconscious,
recent work in the cognitive science suggests that the time has come to
dispense with this concept altogether. We will defend this claim in two ways. First, we will
argue that any
attempt to shore up the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive
unconscious is bound to fail, simply because the latter, as it is understood in
contemporary cognitive science, is incompatible with the former as it is
traditionally conceived by psychoanalytic theory. Second, we will show how psychological
phenomena traditionally cited as evidence for the operation of a dynamic
unconscious can be accommodated more parsimoniously by other means. But
before we do either of these things, and to set the scene for our subsequent discussion, we will offer a very brief
recapitulation of the dynamic unconscious, especially as it was originally conceived by Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalysis is non-testable and should be rejected
Gordon 1 [Paul Gordon, psychotherapist who has not drunk the kool-aid, “Psychoanalysis and Racism: The
Politics of Defeat,” RACE & CLASS v. 42 n. 4, 2001, pp. 17-34.]

But in the thirty years since Kovel wrote, that attempt to relate mind and society has been fractured by the advent of
postmodernism, with its subsumption of the material/historical, of notions of cause and effect, to what is transitory,
contingent, free-¯oating, evanescent. Psychoanalysis, by stepping into the vacuum left by the abandonment of all
metanarrative, has tended to put mind over society. This is particularly noticeable in the work of the Centre
for New Ethnicities Research at the University of East London, which purports to straddle the worlds of the academy and
action by developing projects for the local community and within education generally.28 But, in marrying
psychoanalysis and postmodernism , on the basis of claiming to be both scholarly and action
oriented, it degrades scholarship and under- mines action , and ends in discourse
analysis a language in which meta- phor passes for reality. Cohen's work unavoidably
raises the question of the status of psycho- analysis as a social or political theory, as distinct from a clinical one. Can
psychoanalysis, in other words, apply to the social world of groups , institutions, nations,
states and cultures in the way that it does, or at least may do, to individuals? Certainly there is now a considerable body of
literature and a plethora of academic courses, and so on, claim- ing that psychoanalysis is a social theory. And, of course,
in popular discourse, it is now a commonplace to hear of nations and societies spoken of in personalised ways. Thus `truth
commissions' and the like, which have become so common in the past decade in countries which have undergone
turbulent change, are seen as forms of national therapy or catharsis, even if this is far from being their purpose. Never-
theless, the question remains: does it make sense, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, to speak of nations
having psyches the way that individuals do? `Can a nation's past make people ill as we know
repressed memories sometimes make individuals ill? . . . Can we speak of nations ``working through'' a civil war or an
atrocity as we speak of individuals working through a traumatic memory or event?' 47 The problem with the
application of psychoanalysis to social institutions is that there can be no
testing of the claims made. If someone says, for instance, that nationalism is a form of
looking for and seeking to replace the body of the mother one has lost, or that the
popular appeal of a particular kind of story echoes the pattern of our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how
can this be proved? The pioneers of psychoanalysis, from Freud onwards, all derived
their ideas in the context of their work with individual patients and their
ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory of the therapeutic
encounter where the validity of an interpretation, for example, is a matter for dialogue between therapist and
patient. Outside of the con- sulting room, there can be no such verification
process, and the further one moves from the individual patient, the less
purchase psycho- analytic ideas can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything
and everything can be true, psychoanalytically speaking. But if every- thing
is true, then nothing can be false and therefore nothing can be true. An example
of Cohen's method is to be found in his 1993 working paper, `Home rules', subtitled `Some re¯ections on racism and
nation- alism in everyday life'. Here Cohen talks about taking a `particular line of thought for a walk'. While there is
nothing wrong with taking a line of thought for a walk, such an exercise is not necessarily the same as thinking. One of the
problems with Cohen's approach is that a kind of free association, mixed with deconstruction, leads not to analysis, not
even to psychoanalysis, but to . . . well, just more free association, an endless, indeed one might say pointless, play on
words. This approach may well throw up some interesting associations along the
way, connections one had never thought of but it is not to be confused with political analysis.
In `Home rules', anything and everything to do with `home' can and does ®nd a place here and, as I indicated above,
even the popular ®lm Home Alone is pressed into service as a story about `racial' invasion.
2AC Queer Theory
Queerness K
 2AC Reprodutive Futurism
The negative’s assumption that the same sex couples cannot
have children is devastating to the movement.
Latham 05 [Latham, Heather Fann, University of Alabama. “Desperately Clinging to the Cleavers: What Family
Law Courts Are Doing about Homosexual Parents, and What Some Are Refusing to See.” 29 Law & Psychol. Rev. 223
(2005) pp. 223 to 242. Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline (http://heinonline.org) Sat Oct 26 19:33:27 2013
SW]

Parents. They're here. Many of them are queer.2 But American court systems are certainly not
yet getting used to it. According to the 2000 Census, over 150,000 same-sex couples
in America are raising one or more children in their homes. 3 Somewhere
between one and nine million children have gay parents. 4 A culture that
once separated itself from the pack by calling the pack "breeders, 5 has
begun finding ways to "breed" on its own, and as a result finds itself facing
the same parenting issues as its heterosexual counterparts -except without
the dual protections of marriage and biology.6Although one might imagine family law courts
racing to catch up with this changing American family, the reality remains, ironically, fixed on
the fiction of a family that exists only as a relative anomaly in this country: a
married heterosexual couple living with their biological children. Custody cases
involving gay parents, although ever-increasing in number, continue to be

treated as special cases outside the norm, and viewed skeptically by courts
as if the world outside their walls would cease turning so long as the law
lingered behind. More tragically, children, and perhaps potential children,
of gay parents are paying the psychological price.

Apocalypticism does not preclude a metaphor of the queer child.

Lippert - University Assistant in English and American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008 (Leopold, Utopian
Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. [PDF Online @] othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-
26_0303723.pdf) Accessed Accessed 07.02.11 jfs
In an article published in the aforementioned volume, The Futures of American Studies, José Muñoz argues for “the
enactment of what I call, following C. L. R. James, a future in the present” (“Future”, 93).
Acknowledging the teleological futurism of heteronormative America , Muñoz
asks, “[c]an the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction ?”
(“Future”, 93). He then purports to analyze performances that contain an “anticipatory
illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually existing queer reality,
[and] a kernel of political possibility” (“Future”, 93). For Muñoz, the contemporary of
performance points towards another future, a time that neither reproduces
heterosexuality nor justifies itself solely on the grounds of a mythical child .
The contemporary, as a temporality in which utopian contemporaries can thrive, rather, represents a
“coterminous time where we witness new formations within the present and
the future” (Muñoz, “Future”, 100), and where we jubilantly welcome the discursive
multiplication of the social. Through the conflation of the future and the
present, then, I believe that we can approximate the utopian anticipatory
illumination that, as Muñoz
 Alt Fails
Queer Theory fails to address gender and fails as political
advocacy
Goodloe 09, Amy. "Lesbian-Feminism and Queer Theory: Another "Battle of the Sexes"?"Lesbian-Feminism
and Queer Theory: Another "Battle of the Sexes"? N.p., 2009. Web. 16 May 2013.
Towards the late eighties, Stein observes, lesbian feminism and lesbian politics in general were separate entities, often
with contradictory assumptions and political aims. While the lesbian feminist analysis of oppression assumed an inherent
link between sex and gender — arguing, in the words of Suzanne Pharr, that “homophobia is a weapon of sexism” [5] —
other kinds of lesbian analysis (some of which also insisted on being considered feminist) argued for the “relative
autonomy of gender and sexuality, sexism and heterosexism” (50). This latter position more closely resembles that taken
by many queer (male) activists in the late eighties and early nineties, with whom these lesbians would come to identify as a
way of marking their difference from “traditional” lesbian feminism. “ Queerness,” for these gay men and lesbians,
is understood as “a non-normative sexuality which transcends the binary
distinction homosexual/heterosexual to include all who feel disenfranchised
by dominant sexual norms” (50). Stein’s primary critique of this newly emerging “queer”
theory is that it fails to adequately “ compensate for real, persistent structural
differences in style, ideology, and access to resources among men and
women” (50). In other words, it privileges sexuality, in both political analysis and cultural expression,
over gender, and thereby threatens to erase or reduce the gender-bound
experience of lesbians as women. While feminism may have failed to adequately address the multiplicity of sexual
difference in its analysis of the sex/gender system, she argues, the new “ queer theory” fails to address
gender at all, which makes it an arguably less effective political philosophy
for many lesbians.
 Squo Up
Hetero-normativity is getting better now
Nagourney 12 (Adam, May, “A Watershed Move, Both Risky and Inevitable”, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/us/politics/obamas-watershed-move-
on-gay-marriage.html, ZBurdette)
President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage on Wednesday was by any measure a

watershed. A sitting United States president took sides in what many people
consider the last civil rights movement, providing the most powerful
evidence to date of how rapidly views are moving on an issue that was
politically toxic just five years ago. Mr. Obama faces considerable risk in jumping into this debate, reluctantly or not, in the
heat of what is expected to be a close election. The day before he announced his position, voters in North Carolina — a critical state for Mr. Obama and the site of
the Democratic convention this summer — approved by a 20-point margin a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. It was the 31st state to pass
such an amendment. As George W. Bush demonstrated in 2004, when his campaign engineered initiatives against gay marriage in a series of swing states,
opponents are far more likely to vote on these issues than supporters. Mitt Romney, the probable Republican presidential candidate, was quick to proclaim his
opposition to gay marriage after Mr. Obama spoke. And however much national attitudes may be shifting, the issue remains highly contentious among black and
Latino voters, two groups central to Mr. Obama’s success. Yet as Mr. Obama has clearly come to recognize, the forces of history appear to be
changing . a large number of
The president was at risk of seeming politically timid and calculating, standing at the sidelines while

Americans — including members of both parties — embraced gay marriage.

That is a particularly discordant image, many Democrats said, for the man who was the nation’s first black president. Mr. Obama’s declaration may have been
belated and unplanned, forced out after his vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., during a television interview on Sunday declared his support for same-sex
it is a huge voice added to a chorus that has become increasingly
marriage. Still,

robust, a reminder that a view that had once been relegated to the dark
sidelines of political debate has become mainstream. The very riskiness of
what Mr. Obama did — some commentators were invoking Lyndon B.
Johnson’s embrace of civil rights in 1964, with all the attendant political perils — made it hard to
understate the historic significance of what took place at the White House on Wednesday. “If you are one of those who care
about this issue, you will not forget where you were when you saw the president deliver those remarks,” said Chad Griffin, the incoming president of the Human
it’s the first time you have ever seen a
Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group. “Regardless of how old you are,

president of the United States look into a camera and say that a gay person should be
treated equally under the law. The message that that sends, to a young gay or transgender person
struggling to come out, is life changing.” It also was a reminder of just how quickly public

and political attitudes are changing. The first organizers of the modern gay-rights movement, after the June 1969 raid on
the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York City, considered themselves bold in hoping they could pass nondiscrimination acts. They did not seriously
Clinton — the second Democratic
contemplate a day when members of the same sex would be permitted to marry. It has been only 16 years since Bill

presidential candidate to campaign before a gay audience at an event open to the news media — signed the Defense of Marriage
Act, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman, permitting states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages conducted in other states. Mr.
Clinton advocated the bill in the midst of a re-election campaign after his aides concluded that opposing it might be risky. Mr. Clinton has since said he regrets that
Obama instructed his Justice Department not to defend the act. In
decision; Mr.

some ways, Mr. Obama is late to the party. Mr. Biden was just the latest
prominent Democrat to announce his support , and many now say that it seems
unthinkable that by 2016 any serious Democratic presidential candidate
would oppose gay marriage. A series of significant Republican figures — Ken
Mehlman, the former Republican Party chairman, Theodore Olson, who was solicitor general under Mr.
Bush — have also been active in pushing gay marriage. The North Carolina vote in some ways distracts from

what polling shows to be a steady increase in the percentage of Americans who say

they support gay marriage or domestic partnerships; it is now a majority. The numbers are
particularly high among younger Americans, suggesting that this is a wave
likelier to grow than to recede.

Homophobia is on its deathbed—despite outliers, the overall

trend is unquestionably towards equality
Becker 6 (Susan, Professor of Law, Cleveland State University, 14 Am. U.J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 177, American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy &
the Law).

The crusade against sexual minorities3 currently being executed by militant conservatives in the United States4 provides renewed meaning for this scripture. Like
the king in the parable, some conservatives5 advocate that any person not properly attired in the robe of heteronormativity6 should be banished not only from
wedding celebrations (especially their own), but from any meaningful participation in U.S. society.7 According to some media reports, conservatives are winning
this cultural battle.8 As demonstrated in this article, however, reports of the demise of the sexual minority
civil rights movement are premature. Rather, it is legally sanctioned discrimination
against sexual minorities that is on its deathbed. While this country’s historically chilly reception to lesbian, gay
and bisexual persons cannot be denied, contemporary evidence of warming trends abound . The six

developments summarized immediately below and more fully articulated throughout this article represent some of those trends. First, decades of

momentum garnered by the civil rights movements for sexual minorities,

paired with the movement’s proven ability to weather setbacks and adversity, suggest
that contemporary challenges will not deter the movement.10 Second, while the political clout
of Christian and secular conservatives should not be underestimated, it is nothing new. More
importantly, emerging Christian voices now advocate greater acceptance of
sexual minorities within denominations and throughout society .11 Third, medical
researchers and social scientists continue to build an impressive body of
empirical data that confronts the tradition of reserving “normalcy” solely
for heterosexuals who fit the classic malefemale dichotomy. These scientific
discoveries directly influence courts and legislatures faced with issues
related to biological sex, gender roles and sexual identity, and affect the
public’s perception of sexual minorities.12 Fourth, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
people have become highly visible within their own families and in political,
academic, workplace, community and multi-media venues . This openness
and exposure, in turn, destroys stereotypes and facilitates positive perceptions of
sexual minorities as ordinary and generative members of society. 13 Fifth,
globalization has moved from the realm of political theory to fact . The
extension of rights to sexual minorities in other countries will continue to
influence social and legal trends in this country.15 Finally, all of these factors are
coalescing to create a climate that encourages transformative learning, a
cognitive process that inspires adults to reassess individual beliefs in a
manner that ultimately effectuates social change.16 Medical and social scientists have
experienced significant transformation of thought about sexual minorities17
while Christianity is just starting this process.18 The transformative growth originating in these areas is percolating

into the general populace in a way that will eventually instigate changes to
laws, regulations and policies that treat sexual minorities inequitably. I more fully
support my assertions that legally sanctioned discrimination against sexual minorities is

on its deathbed, and that transformative learning is hastening its demise, as

follows. Following this introduction, I compare in Part I the current status of sexual minorities in the United States to their standing in the late 1970s. I then
juxtapose these advancements with the many challenges the movement has encountered. In Part II, I explain the mechanics conservatives employ to
fictionalize the lives of sexual minorities, a process I name “behavior-identity compression,” and I also expose its many flaws. I then enlist transformative learning
theory to explain how and why adults are willing to revise and sometimes reverse longheld, negative views about sexual minorities. In Part III, I more closely
this transformative learning process:
examine three societal instruments that are both experiencing and facilitating

(a) increased visibility of sexual minorities; (b) an emerging tradition in

Christianity that embraces sexual minorities; and (c) scientific
developments that reject the traditional heterosexual, binary norm in favor
of much broader definitions of normalcy related to sex, sexuality and sexual
identity.
 A2 Edelman
Edelman is wrong about social change—Democratic politics can
transform social relations without reaffirming homophobia
Brenkman 2002 (John, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate School,
“Politics, Mortal and Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder,” Narrative 10:2,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/v010/10.2brenkman02.html, p. 187-8,

In my view, Edelman effaces this difference between democracy and totalitarianism . He attributes to democracy the
workings of totalitarianism: he makes no distinction between civil society and the state, equates "the social order"
with politics as such, and equates both with the symbolic order. This misconception of democratic politics is what
anchors his call for "a true oppositional politics" whose meaning-dissolving, identity-dissolving ironies would come from "the space
outside the frame within which 'politics' appears" ("Post-Partum" 181). The democratic state, as opposed to the totalitarian, does
not rule civil society but secures its possibility and flourishing; conversely, civil society is the nonpolitical
realm from which emerge those initiatives that transform, moderately or radically, the political realm of laws and rights. For
that very reason, the political frame of laws and rights, and of debate and decision, is intrinsically inadequate to the plurality of projects and the social
divisions within society—there
is always a gap in its political representation of the "real" of the social— and for that very reason the
political realm itself is open to change and innovation. Innovation is a crucial concept for understanding the gay and lesbian
movement, which emerged from within civil society as citizens who were stigmatized and often criminalized for their sexual lives created new forms of
association, transformed their own lifeworld, and organized a political offensive on behalf of political and social reforms. There was an innovation of
rights and freedoms, and what I have called innovations in sociality. Contrary to the liberal interpretation of liberal rights and freedoms, I do not think
that gays and lesbians have merely sought their place at the table. Their struggle has radically altered the scope and meaning of the liberal rights and
freedoms they sought, first and foremost by making them include sexuality, sexual practices, and the shape of household and family. Where the
movement has succeeded in changing the laws of the state, it has also opened up new possibilities within civil society. To take an obvious example,
wherever it becomes unlawful to deny housing to individuals because they are gay, there is set in motion a
transformation of the everyday life of neighborhoods, including the lives of heterosexuals and their children. Within civil society, this is a work of
enlightenment, however uneven and fraught and frequently dangerous. It is not a reaffirmation of the symbolic and structural
underpinnings of homophobia; on the contrary, it is a challenge to homophobia and a volatilizing of social
relations within the nonpolitical realm.
 A2 Reproduction = Immortality
The desire for immortality isn’t a product of the reproductive
imaginary
Feit 5 (Mario, “ (S)Extinction anxieties: same-sex marriage and modes of citizenship” theory and event, 8:3, projectmuse)
Warner is thus concerned with the purity of the queer alternative, which he
sees under attack by virtue of the persistence of the reproductive narrative's
extension to non-biological reproduction .101 Those "extrafamilial intimate cultures" should not be understood in
the terms of that which they replace, namely biological reproduction. Those alternative spaces are to be pried

loose from biological reproduction; their representations should also be

freed from the metaphors of reproduction. Warner's demand for purity
goes further -- he hopes for a culture cleansed from the reproductive
imaginary altogether. The reproductive narrative would become archaic. It
would no longer be used to conceive of relations to mortality , cultural production and the
building of a future. In other words, lesbians and gay men must not appropriate

reproductive metaphors for their own relation to mortality, sexuality and

world-making. Same-sex marriage must be avoided.102 It would link queer life to the kinship system's
relation to mortality and immortality . It turns out to be, at least for Warner, a misguided response to

mortality. Warner takes the heteronormative promise of immortality via

reproduction too seriously -- too seriously in the sense that he thinks that by
resisting reproductive imaginations one resists fantasies of immortality.
However, Bauman's point about strategies of immortality is precisely that all aspects of

human culture are concerned with immortality . Indeed, Bauman's argument focuses on cultural production
in the widest sense, whereas he considers sexual reproduction "unfit for the role of the

vehicle of individual transcendence of death" because procreation secures

species "immortality at the expense of the mortality of its individual
members."103 In other words, fantasies of immortality may exist outside the
reproductive paradigm -- and Irving's attempt to find vicarious immortality
may not be reducible to a heteronormative strategy of consolation . These
juxtapositions of Bauman and Warner complicate the latter's sense that any attempt to imagine a future by definition implicates one in heteronormativity. Put
more succinctly, giving up on reproductive relations to the future does not constitute
the break with fantasies of immortality Warner makes it out to be. Indeed, there are other ways
-- nonheteronormative ways -- in which we equate world-making, i.e.
citizenship, with vicarious immortality. The queer dream of immortality may
not rely on reproduction. But it, too, is a way of coping with mortality by
leaving a mark on the world, by leaving something behind that transcends
generations. In Warner's and Butler's critiques of marriage it is quite clear that a culture
that they are invested in, that they helped to build, is one that they want to
see continue. They take same-sex marriage so personally, because queer
culture is so personally meaningful. If my argument is correct, this personal meaningfulness
exceeds the meaning that Butler and Warner consciously attribute to it. That neither of them argues that the
preservation of queer culture is about vicarious immortality is beside the point. As Zygmunt Bauman emphasizes, the immortalizing

function of culture is highly successful insofar it remains opaque to those

participating in the making of this culture .104 In raising the question of how much queer critics of marriage are
themselves invested in strategies of immortality, of a nonheteronormative kind, I thus hope to contribute to a reflection on the anxieties driving the queer critique
Attending to anxieties about mortality, I believe, will help move the
of marriage.

same-sex marriage debate among queer theorists away from concerns with
transcending death and towards a more complex awareness of the
challenges of political strategies for plural queer communities.
 Legal Change Key
They reject attempts at productive political solutions --- that
locks in the status quo --- only our framework provides the
political skills necessary to actualize a future without
heteronormativity
HALL 6 PF ENGLISH – WEST VIRGINIA, 9/15/2006
[DONALD E., CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, “IMAGINING QUEER STUDIES OUT OF THE DOLDRUMS”]
much of the early energy in queer studies generally derived from the
Indeed,

sense of being asked, and being willing, to commit one's self to an

important, realizable, and exhilarating cause. Unfortunately some recent
theoretical work is not helpful. Especially deflating is Lee Edelman's much-
discussed antipolitical polemic from 2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive, which is actually a symptom and reinforcement of the very
problem of general political passivity that I'm discussing here. Edelman uses
Lacanian theory to argue that queers should repudiate the "oppressively
political" and abandon any claim to a "viable political future."¶ But the
question remains as to how best to rekindle not only intellectual intensity in
the classroom, but also an excitement about a dramatically different
future that might even motivate students to engage in the hard work of
collective action and sustained response long after they leave the
university. Fundamental not only to "identity politics," but to all critical-
thinking-based pedagogy is the belief that students, whatever their
political orientation, should become engaged citizens in the world, not
passive consumers who simply accept the status quo.¶ And what I have found
works best in that regard is a return to an older model of consciousness-
raising, based on dialogue and a sharing of lived experiences (there are always students
in class who have endured terrible hardships about which they are willing to speak), followed by exercises that ask

students to imagine certain futures -- utopias, even -- that they would find worthy
of fighting for . The diversity of what they come up with (Is sex work
legalized? Does marriage become a wholly passé concept? What role does
spirituality or religion play?) can lead to very dynamic conversations. ¶
Indeed, discussing their utopias allows them to begin to delineate the
steps necessary to reach those states, looking backward in time to the
successes of past social movements and forward to ones in which they
might invest. It encourages students to think critically about how social
change occurs, rather than to imagine vaguely that injustice somehow
dissipates magically without the hard work of individuals and groups'
organizing. It urges them to juxtapose the present situation -- and
whatever fuzzy sense they have of its basic acceptability -- with a concrete
visualization of what they would prefer as a reigning paradigm (or variety of
paradigms).¶ Some, such as Edelman, would argue that such exercises lock us into

variations of the "norm" as it currently stands (whatever we project will

simply be a version of what already is), but consensus about a single
place-holding utopia is never the goal. The wide variety of possible
utopias, as they sometimes clash with and sometimes complement each
other, leads to intellectual excitement, critical attachment, and even
productive anger. I will take that energy any day over the stasis produced
by a cynical refusal even to imagine or invest in a future.¶ Queer studies will never be what

However, the
it was in the early 1990s. Today's context of ongoing oppression but token media and marketplace acceptance is very different.

doldrums of the queer-studies classroom and queer studies as a field can be challenged and the
energy reignited. This means resisting the all-too-easy acceptance by
students of the status quo ; it means reminding them of the rhetorical
and physical violence that continues to exist (but that is also uncomfortable to acknowledge and much
easier simply to ignore or downplay); it means (for those of us working in queer studies) disrupting our own complacency that can result from being tenured,
Queer studies will
having successful writing and lecturing careers, and being able to afford a few comfortable lifestyle components.

have a future only if it does the hard work of imagining possible futures
and articulating ways to actually get us there.
 AT: Queerness K – State Good
They cede politics to the right and reinscribes gender roles
Martha McCluskey 8, Professor of Law and William J. Magavern Faculty Scholar @ SUNY Buffalo Law, How
Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy, Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2008-15
Queer theory's anti-moralism works together with its anti-statism to
advance not simply "politics," but a specific vision of good "politics" seemingly defined
in opposition to progressive law and morality. This anti-statist focus distinguishes queer theory from
other critical legal theories that bring questions of power to bear on moral ideals of justice. Kendall Thomas (2002), for example, articulates
a critical political model that
sees justice as a problem of "power, antagonism, and
interest," (p. 86) involving questions of how to constitute and support individuals as citizens with interests and actions that count as
alternative visions of the public. Thomas contrasts this political model of justice with a moral justice aimed at discovering principles of
fairness or institutional processes based in rational consensus and on personal feelings of respect and dignity. Rather than evaluating the
moral costs and benefits of a particular policy by analyzing its impact in terms of harm or pleasure, Thomas suggests that a political vision
of justice would focus on analyzing how policies produce and enhance the collective power of particular "publics" and "counterpublics" (pp.
91—5). From this political perspective of justice, neoliberal economic ideology
is distinctly moral, even though it appears to be anti-moralist and to reduce moral principles to competition between self-
interested power. Free-market economics rejects a political vision of justice , in this sense, in
part because of its expressed anti-statism : it turns contested normative
questions of public power into objective rational calculations of private
individual sensibilities. Queer theory's similar tendency to romanticize power
as the pursuit of individualistic pleasure free from public control risks
disengaging from and disdaining the collective efforts to build and advance
normative visions of the state that arguably define effective politics. Brown
and Halley (2002), for instance, cite
the Montgomery bus boycott as a classic example of the
left's problematic march into legalistic and moralistic identity politics. In contrast, Thomas
(2002) analyzes the Montgomery bus boycott as a positive example of a political effort to constitute a black civic public, even though the
boycott campaign relied on moral language to advance its cause, because it also emphasized and challenged normative ideas of citizenship
(p. 100, note 14). By glorifying rather than deconstructing the neoliberal dichotomy
between public and private, between individual interest and group identity ,
and between demands for power and demands for protection, queer
theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism plays into a right-wing double bind .
In the current conservative political context, the left appears weak both
because its efforts to use state power get constructed as excessively
moralistic (the feminist thought police, or the naively paternalistic welfare state) and also because its efforts to
resist state power get constructed as excessively relativist (promoting elitism
and materialism instead of family values and community well-being ). The
right, on the other hand, has it both ways, asserting its moralism as inherent private
authority transcending human subjectivity (as efficient market forces, the
sacred family, or divine will) and defending its cultivation of self-interested
power as the ideally virtuous state and market (bringing freedom, democracy, equality
to the world by exercising economic and military authoritarianism). From Egalitarian Politics to Renewed
Conservative Identity Queer theory's anti-statism and anti-moralism risks not only

reinforcing right-wing ideology, but also infusing that ideology with energy
from renewed identity politics . Susan Fraiman (2003) analyzes how queer theory (along with other
prominent developments in left academics and culture) tends to construct left resistance as a radical
individualism modeled on the male "teen rebel , defined above all by his strenuous alienation from
the maternal" (p. xii). Fraiman observes that this left vision relies on "a posture of flamboyant

unconventionality [that] coexists with highly conventional views of gender

 [and] is , indeed, articulated through them " (p. xiii). Fraiman links recent left
contempt for feminism to a romantic vision of "coolness ... epitomized by the modem
adolescent boy in his anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will to separate from the
mother" who is by definition uncool—controlling, moralistic, sentimental
and not sexy. (p. xii). Even though queer theory distinguishes itself from
feminism by repudiating dualistic ideas of gender, its anti-foundationalism
covertly promotes an essentialist "binary that puts femininity,
reproduction, and normativity on the one hand, and masculinity, sexuality,
and queer resistance on the other" (p. 147). This binary permeates queer
theory's condemnation of "governance feminism." (Brown and Halley, 2002; Wiegman, 2004) a
vague category mobilizing images of the frumpy, overbearing, unexciting, unfunny, and not-so-
smart "schoolmarm" (Halley, 2002) whose authority will naturally be undermined
when real "men" appear on the scene. Suggesting the importance of gender conventions to the term's power,
similar phrases do not seem to have gained comparable academic currency as a way to deride the complex regulatory impact of other
specific uses of state authority -for instance postmodernists do not seem to widely denounce "governance anti-racism," "governance
socialism," "governance populism," "governance environmentalism" or "governance masculinism" (though Brown and Halley do criticize
progressive law reform more generally with the term "governance legalism" (p. 11)). Queer
attraction to an
adolescent masculinist idea of the "cool' dovetails smoothly with the identity
politics of the right. Right-wing politics and culture similarly condemn
progressive and feminist policies with the term "nanny state" (McCluskey, 2000;
2005a). The "nanny state" epithet enlists femaleness or femininity as shorthand to make some government authority feel bad
to those comfortable with or excited by a masculinist moral order, it adds to this sentimental power by coding the maternal authority to be
resisted as a "nanny" (rather than simply a "mommy"), enlisting identities of class, age—and perhaps race and nationality—to enhance
uncritical suspicions of disorder and illegitimacy. Th e
"nanny state" slur tells us that a rougher and
tougher neoliberal state, market, and family will bring the grown-up
pleasures, freedom, and power that are the mark and privilege of ideal
manhood. The "nanny state" is not an isolated example of the use of gender identity to
disparage progressive or even centrist policies that are not explicitly
identified as feminist or gender-related. For example, "girlie-man" gained currency in the 2004
presidential election to disparage opposition to George W. Bush's right-wing economic and national security policies (Grossman and
McClain, 2004), and and in 2008 critics of presidential candidate Barack Obama similarly linked him to disparaging images of femininity
(Campanile 2008; Faludi 2008). These
terms open a window into the connections between
economic libertarianism and moral fundamentalism. Libertarianism's anti-statism and anti-
moralism requires sharp distinctions between public and private, morality and power, individual freedom and social coercion. The problem,
if we assume these distinctions are not self-evident facts, is that libertarianism must refer covertly to some external value system to draw its
lines. Identity conventions have long helped to do this work , albeit in complex and sometimes
contradictory ways. Power appears weak, deceptive, illegitimate, manipulative, controlling, undisciplined, oppressive, exceptional, or naive
if it is feminized; but strong, self-satisfying, public-serving, protective, orderly, rational, and a normal exercise of individual freedom if it is
masculinized. Conventional political theory and culture identifies legitimate
authority with an idea of a masculine power aimed at policing supposedly weaker or
subordinate others. A state that publicly depends on and promotes such power
enhances rather than usurps private freedom and security in citizenship, market, and
family, according to the traditional theory of the patriarchal household as
model for the state (see Dubber, 2005). Queer theory updates this pre-modern
political ideology into smart postmodernism and transgressive politics by
re-casting its idealized masculine power in the image of a youthful and sexy
disdain for feminized concerns about social, bodily, or material limits and
support . In her challenge to this queer romanticization of "coolness," Fraiman (2003) instead urges a feminism that will "question a
masculinity overinvested in youth, fearful of the mutable flesh, and on the run from intimacy ... [to] claim, in its place, the jouissance of a
body that is aging, pulpy, no longer intact... a subject who is tender-hearted ... who is neither too hard nor too fluid for attachment; who
does the banal, scarcely narratable, but helpful things that moms' do" (p. 158). Feminist legal theory concerned with economic politics adds
to this alternative vision an ideal that advances and rewards the pleasure, power, and public value of the things done by some of those
moms' nannies (McCluskey, 2005a)—or by the many others engaged in the work (both paid and unpaid) that sustains and enhances others'
pleasure and power in and out of the home (McCluskey, 2003a; Young, 2001). One means toward that end would be to make the domestic
work (and its play and pleasure) conventionally treated as both banal or spiritual (see Roberts, 1997b) deserving of a greater share of state
and market material rewards and resources on a more egalitarian basis, as Fineman's (2004) vision would do.