AC - Weed NC - T med VOCs T reduce PTX 1AR - all 2NR - pTX 2AR - PTX case
Greenhill
3
Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Varad Agarwala
AC - Weed NC - Same NC as Rd 1 except infrastructure 1AR - all 2NR - VOCs DA 2AR - Case DA
Greenhill RR
1
Opponent: Northland Christian LB | Judge: Randall Loofbourrow
1AC - Vaccine NC - Climate Patents T Reduce 1AR - all 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
Loyola
1
Opponent: Strake Jesuit KS | Judge: Truman Le
1AC - Vaccines NC - T CP DA 1AR - All 2NR - T 2AR - T
Loyola
3
Opponent: Ayala AM | Judge: Ben Cortez
AC - Evergreening NC - Withdrawl DA T Medicine Spec 1AR - all 2NR - spec 2AR - spec
Loyola
5
Opponent: Vestavia GJ | Judge: Claudia Ribera
AC - Abject NC - FW K DA 1AR - all 2NR - FWK 2AR - Case FWK
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Cites
Entry
Date
G - Contact Info
Tournament: All | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All Email: harrison.debate.team@gmail.com Number: 9142753584 Messenger: Ali Ahmad (preferred method of contact)
Note 4 Loyola: some of cite boxes are missing because of a glitch
9/4/21
SO - Climate Patents DA
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Northland Christian LB | Judge: Randall Loofbourrow Climate Patents and Innovation high now and solving Warming but COVID waiver sets a dangerous precedent for appropriations - the mere threat is sufficient is enough to kill investment. Brand 5-26, Melissa. “Trips Ip Waiver Could Establish Dangerous Precedent for Climate Change and Other Biotech Sectors.” IPWatchdog.com | Patents and Patent Law, 26 May 2021, www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/05/26/trips-ip-waiver-establish-dangerous-precedent-climate-change-biotech-sectors/id=133964/. sid The biotech industry is making remarkable advances towards climate change solutions, and it is precisely for this reason that it can expect to be in the crosshairs of potential IP waiver discussions. President Biden is correct to refer to climate change as an existential crisis. Yet it does not take too much effort to connect the dots between President Biden’s focus on climate change and his Administration’s recent commitment to waive global IP rights for Covid vaccines (TRIPS IP Waiver). “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.” If an IP waiver is purportedly necessary to solve the COVID-19 global health crisis (and of course we dispute this notion), can we really feel confident that this or some future Administration will not apply the same logic to the climate crisis? And, without the confidence in the underlying IP for such solutions, what does this mean for U.S. innovation and economic growth? United States Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai was subject to questioning along this very line during a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing. And while Ambassador Tai did not affirmatively state that an IP waiver would be in the future for climate change technology, she surely did not assuage the concerns of interested parties. The United States has historically supported robust IP protection. This support is one reason the United States is the center of biotechnology innovation and leading the fight against COVID-19. However, a brief review of the domestic legislation arguably most relevant to this discussion shows just how far the international campaign against IP rights has eroded our normative position. The Clean Air Act, for example, contains a provision allowing for the mandatory licensing of patents covering certain devices for reducing air pollution. Importantly, however, the patent owner is accorded due process and the statute lays out a detailed process regulating the manner in which any such license can be issued, including findings of necessity and that no reasonable alternative method to accomplish the legislated goal exists. Also of critical importance is that the statute requires compensation to the patent holder. Similarly, the Atomic Energy Act contemplates mandatory licensing of patents covering inventions of primary importance in producing or utilizing atomic energy. This statute, too, requires due process, findings of importance to the statutory goals and compensation to the rights holder. A TRIPS IP waiver would operate outside of these types of frameworks. There would be no due process, no particularized findings, no compensation and no recourse. Indeed, the fact that the World Trade Organization (WTO) already has a process under the TRIPS agreement to address public health crises, including the compulsory licensing provisions, with necessary guardrails and compensation, makes quite clear that the waiver would operate as a free for all. Forced Tech Transfer Could Be on The Table When being questioned about the scope of a potential TRIPS IP waiver, Ambassador Tai invoked the proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” While this answer suggests primarily that, in times of famine, the Administration would rather give away other people’s fishing rods than share its own plentiful supply of fish (here: actual COVID-19 vaccine stocks), it is apparent that in Ambassador Tai’s view waiving patent rights alone would not help lower- and middle-income countries produce their own vaccines. Rather, they would need to be taught how to make the vaccines and given the biotech industry’s manufacturing know-how, sensitive cell lines, and proprietary cell culture media in order to do so. In other words, Ambassador Tai acknowledged that the scope of the current TRIPS IP waiver discussions includes the concept of forced tech transfer. In the context of climate change, the idea would be that companies who develop successful methods for producing new seed technologies and sustainable biomass, reducing greenhouse gases in manufacturing and transportation, capturing and sequestering carbon in soil and products, and more, would be required to turn over their proprietary know-how to global competitors. While it is unclear how this concept would work in practice and under the constitutions of certain countries, the suggestion alone could be devastating to voluntary international collaborations. Even if one could assume that the United States could not implement forced tech transfer on its own soil, what about the governments of our international development partners? It is not hard to understand that a U.S.-based company developing climate change technologies would be unenthusiastic about partnering with a company abroad knowing that the foreign country’s government is on track – with the assent of the U.S. government – to change its laws and seize proprietary materials and know-how that had been voluntarily transferred to the local company. Necessary Investment Could Diminish Developing climate change solutions is not an easy endeavor and bad policy positions threaten the likelihood that they will materialize. These products have long lead times from research and development to market introduction, owing not only to a high rate of failure but also rigorous regulatory oversight. Significant investment is required to sustain and drive these challenging and long-enduring endeavors. For example, synthetic biology companies critical to this area of innovation raised over $1 billion in investment in the second quarter of 2019 alone. If investors cannot be confident that IP will be in place to protect important climate change technologies after their long road from bench to market, it is unlikely they will continue to invest at the current and required levels.
Private sector innovation is key to solve climate change – short term politicking and priority shifts means government can’t solve alone. Henry 17, Simon. “Climate Change Cannot Be Solved by Governments Alone. How Can the Private Sector Help?” World Economic Forum, 21 Nov. 2017, www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/governments-alone-cannot-halt-climate-change-what-can-private-sector-do/. Programme Director, International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA) sid Climate leadership is also an opportunity for many organizations, and this was the most popular reason for purchasing carbon credits in Ecosystem Marketplace’s 2016 survey of buyers. Companies are looking to differentiate from their competitors, and build their brand, by taking a leadership role on climate. Offsetting plays an integral role in delivering this climate leadership status, alongside direct emissions reductions. The survey indicated that companies that included offsetting in their carbon management strategy typically spend about 10 times more on emissions reductions activities than the typical company that doesn’t offset. Beyond these direct commercial reasons for companies to take voluntary action, there are many broader, societal motivations at play. Climate change is a global, multidecade challenge that needs solutions and input from all stakeholders. It transcends the short-term nature of politics, which will inevitably experience changes in priorities, personnel and knowledge. Because of this, climate change cannot be solved by governments alone. Instead, it needs significant and long-term investment from the private sector. Companies that take a longer-term outlook recognise this and want to contribute to the solution to help secure the viability of their businesses.
9/16/21
SO - Homogenization K
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 5 | Opponent: Vestavia GJ | Judge: Claudia Ribera Link: They use catch-all terms like “otherness” and “abject” to group anti-Blackness in with other forms of oppression — I’ll quote from the doc: “This semiotic formation is the ideological disposition against otherness that drives antiblack violence.”
Impact: CAMOUFLAGING — they deny the UNIQUE nature of anti-Black oppression, which is based on the specific negation of Blackness — they make it impossible to confront the PARTICULAR causes of that type of oppression. Warren: Calvin Warren Associate Professor in African American Studies and WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University “Black Care” The liquid blackness journal, 2017. GC/CH We can consider the metaphysical “injury” a laceration and a hieroglyph. What is “stripped” or ruptured leaves a mark—a sign of destruction that is itself a “witness” of the violation. As witness, the sign itself bears a tragic testimony, a recounting of the violence. But what is the sign communicating? The sign, the laceration, becomes a hieroglyph open to a cultural reading and hermeneutical practice. While what it says is not easily interpreted, it can be felt or registered on a different plane of existence. We rely on the affective dimension to translate the ineffable, or more precisely, to provide form for an experience anti-blackness places outside ethics and the “customary lexis of life and culture,” as Hortense Spillers would describe it. Feelings provide a necessary vessel for containing unbearable suffering and a vehicle for communicating this experience when traditional avenues of communication are absent. Put differently, affect is a communicative structure, a testimony, for articulating suffering without end. The affective dimension is just as expansive as it is deep, so expressivity is boundless within this dimension. Affect is an invaluable resource for those enduring a metaphysical holocaust; it is the premier form of expressivity. Spillers presents metaphysical violence as a “laceration or wounding.” The undecipherable signs produced: ...render a kind of hieroglyphic of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color. We might ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually “transfers” from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments?4 What is injured, then, is the “flesh”—the “primary narrative... seared divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.” As a “primary narrative,” the flesh is the metaphysical target of violence. The flesh, then, is the structure of black existence, an ontological grounding of sorts, which anti-blackness incessantly targets. It is the flesh that becomes injured, and this injury leaves a “laceration” or hieroglyph attesting to the brutality. Thus, the laceration is not just a corporeal sign; although the body might bear its marks, it is registered elsewhere. But what is of interest here is that the laceration as hieroglyph might actually “transfer from one generation to the next, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moment.” The laceration speaks through symbolic substitutions across time, across generations. In other words, the laceration is a constitutive feature of black existence in an anti-black world, and it travels; anti- blackness mobilizes it across time (and space). It is indecipherable because it is paradoxical: it is consistent and substitutional, individual and generational, mobile and intransigent. One cannot capture it exactly as it moves across generations, but the metaphysical harm it indexes is felt deeply. Thus, what the teenager in Baltimore experienced was a transferable laceration, one which is flesh-destroying. The injury is much more than humiliation—rather, it is an onto-metaphysical destruction.
Alt: Reject the aff’s grouping of anti-Blackness with generalized abjection, and replace it with Black Marxism, a negation of the negation of a world of racial capitalism. This means we call out the aff’s grouping together of VERY DIFFERENT FORMS OF OPPRESSION as fundamentally anti-Black — it’s a move to ignore the unique nature of anti-Black violence. Robinson: Robinson, Cedric. Professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000 (originally published in 1983). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469663746_robinson GC With each historical moment, however, the rationale and cultural mechanisms of domination became more transparent. Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power. Aristotle, one of the most original aristocratic apologists, had provided the template in Natural Law. In inferiorizing women ("TIhe deliberative faculty of the soul is not present at all in the slave; in a female it is present but ineffective" Politics,i26oaiz), non-Greeks, and all laborers (slaves, artisans, farmers, wage workers, etc.: "Tlhe mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts" Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b20), Aristotle had articulated an uncompromising racial construct. And from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular propagandists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus.14As the Black Radical Tradition was distilled from the racial antagonisms which were arrayed along a continuum from the casual insult to the most ruthless and lethal rules of law; from the objectifications of entries in marine cargo manifests, auction accountancy, plantation records, broadsheets and newspapers; from the loftiness of Christian pulpits and biblical exegesis to the minutia of slave-naming, dress, types of food, and a legion of other significations, the terrible culture of race was revealed. Inevitably, the tradition was transformed into a radical force. And in its most militant manifestation, no longer accustomed to the resolution that flight and withdrawal were sufficient, the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow of the whole race-based structure. In the studies of these struggles, and often through engagement with them, the Black Radical Tradition began to emerge and overtake Marxism in the work of these Black radicals. W. E. B. Du Bois, in the midst of the antilynching movement, C. L. R. James, in the vortex of anticolonialism, and Richard Wright, the sharecropper's son, all brought forth aspects of the militant tradition which had informed successive generations of Black freedom fighters. These predecessors were Africans by origins, predominantly recruited from the same cultural matrices, subjected to similar and interrelated systems of servitude and oppression, and mobilized by identical impulses to recover their dignity. And over the centuries, the liberation projects of these men and women in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas acquired similar emergent collective forms in rebellion and marronage, similar ethical and moral articulations of resistance; increasingly, they merged as a function of what Hegel might have recognized as the negation of the negation in the world system. Hegel's "cunning of history," for one instance, was evident when in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Franco-Haitian slaveowners fled to Louisiana, Virginia, and the Carolinas with as many slaves as they could transport, thereby also transporting the Haitian Revolution. The outrage, courage, and vision of that revolution helped inspire the Pointe Coupee Conspiracy in 1795 in Louisiana, the Gabriel-led rebellion in 1800 in Virginia, and the rebellion organized by Denmark Vesey in 1822 outside of Charleton.'And, in turn, Denmark's movement informed the revolutionary tract, APPEAL in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, penned by David Walker in Boston in 1829.
9/5/21
SO - Med Spec
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Ayala AM | Judge: Ben Cortez Interpretation and Violation: The affirmative debater must specify the type of medicine they defend in a delineated text in the 1AC – they didn’t
Medicine is the core question of the topic and there’s no consensus on normal means so you must spec. Hofmann 21: Hofmann, Bjorn Institute for the Health Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) at Gjøvik, PO Box 1, 2802, Gjøvik, Norway “Vagueness in Medicine: On Disciplinary Indistinctness, Fuzzy Phenomena, Vague Concepts, Uncertain Knowledge, and Fact-Value-Interaction” Springer Link, July 05, 2021 AA https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10516-021-09573-4 This article investigates five kinds of vagueness in medicine: disciplinary, ontological, conceptual, epistemic, and vagueness with respect to descriptive-prescriptive connections. First, medicine is a discipline with unclear borders, as it builds on a wide range of other disciplines and subjects. Second, medicine deals with many indistinct phenomena resulting in borderline cases. Third, medicine uses a variety of vague concepts, making it unclear which situations, conditions, and processes that fall under them. Fourth, medicine is based on and produces uncertain knowledge and evidence. Fifth, vagueness emerges in medicine as a result of a wide range of fact-value-interactions. The various kinds of vagueness in medicine can explain many of the basic challenges of modern medicine, such as overdiagnosis, underdiagnosis, and medicalization. Even more, it illustrates how complex and challenging the field of medicine is, but also how important contributions from the philosophy can be for the practice of medicine. By clarifying and, where possible, reducing or limiting vagueness, philosophy can help improving care. Reducing the various types of vagueness can improve clinical decision-making, informing individuals, and health policy making.
1 Stable Advocacy: 1AR clarification delinks neg positions that prove why specific medicines are bad by saying it isn’t a medicine they defend– wrecks neg ballot access and kills in depth clash – CX doesn’t check since it kills 1NC construction pre-round.
2 Prep Skew: I don’t know what they will be willing to clarify until CX which means I could go 6 minutes planning to read a disad and then get screwed over in CX when they spec a different definition of medicine. This means that CX can’t check because the time in between is when I should be formulating my strat and waiting until then is the abuse. Key fairness because I won’t be able to use the strat I formulated if you skewed my prep and will have a time disadvantage.
9/4/21
SO - PTX DA
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Southlake EP | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo Bipartisan antitrust bills passing now but continued PC needed to pacify republicans. Perlman 9/3 Matthew; 9/3/21; “Interest Groups Back Big Tech Antitrust Bills In House,” LAW360, https://www.law360.com/competition/articles/1418789/interest-groups-back-big-tech-antitrust-bills-in-house Justin Law360 (September 3, 2021, 7:25 PM EDT) -- A contingent of public interest groups are urging leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives to advance a package of legislation aimed at reining in Big Tech companies through updates and changes to antitrust law, though free market advocates have been jeering many of the bills. A total of 58 public interest and consumer advocacy groups signed on to a letter Thursday asking House leaders to swiftly pass the package of six antitrust bills that the Judiciary Committee approved in late June after a marathon markup session. The proposals include legislation prohibiting large platform companies from acquiring competitive threats, preferencing their own services and using their control of multiple business lines to disadvantage competitors in other ways. The proposals would also impose interoperability and data portability requirements on large tech platforms, increase merger filing fees and boost enforcement by state attorneys general. Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director for Public Knowledge, which signed on to the letter, said in a statement Thursday that the package charts a path toward putting "people back in control of the digital economy." "The broad range of groups supporting this package shows just how widespread the problem of Big Tech dominance is, and that these bills deserve a full vote in the House imminently," Slaiman said. The letter contends that America has a monopoly problem that is resulting in lower wages, reduced innovation and increased inequality, while also undermining the free press and perpetuating "racial, gender and class dominance." "Big Tech monopolies are at the center of many of these problems," the letter said. "Reining in these companies is an essential first step to reverse the damage of concentrated corporate power throughout our economy." The proposals followed a 16-month investigation by the House antitrust subcommittee into Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google that resulted in a sprawling report from Democratic members calling for a range of reform measures to rein in the dominance of the companies. While consumer advocacy groups have largely supported the measures, the tech companies themselves and other interest groups have been highly critical, including a coalition of more than 25 right-leaning groups that sent a letter to Congress ahead of the markup hearing. The letter called the bills a "Trojan horse package" aimed at cynically using conservative anger over Big Tech, particularly at perceived censorship by social media platforms, to seek bipartisan support for "European-style over-regulation." For its part, Facebook has called the proposals a "poison pill for America's tech industry at a time our economy can least afford it" and said the bills underestimate the fierce competition the U.S. companies face from abroad. Apple and Google also raised concerns about the impact the bills would have on innovation, as well as on privacy and security. And Amazon has warned about the potential consequences of the proposals for both small businesses that sell on its platform and the consumers who use it to shop. Ending Platform Monopolies Act Thursday's letter said that the Ending Platform Monopolies Act would address "the most problematic aspects of the Big Tech companies" by allowing enforcers to break-up or separate pieces of the businesses when they create conflicts of interest that give the platforms an advantage over potential competitors and business users. A fact sheet from Public Knowledge accompanying the letter said that the bill is an important tool to help the antitrust agencies "protect consumers from mammoth platforms and to ensure compliance with other parts of the package." But during the markup hearing, ranking Republican committee member Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio blasted the bill as a regulatory overreach, calling it "quite literally central planning" and arguing that it has significant ambiguities, which is bad for business. The Competitive Enterprise Institute argued in a June statement that the bill "kills the goose that lays the golden egg," and would actually result in small businesses being unable to access the large platforms, which in turn would focus on their own offerings instead. The Chamber of Progress has warned that the proposal could bar Amazon from offering its Prime services and its Amazon Basics private label products, since they would compete against other sellers on the platform. Other groups have also warned it could also force tech companies to divest popular apps, including Google's Maps and YouTube, Facebook's WhatsApp and Instagram and Apple's iMessage and FaceTime. American Innovation and Choice Online Act The American Innovation and Choice Online Act is aimed at barring the platform companies from preferencing their own products and services over those of rival businesses and from excluding or discriminating against rivals. Thursday's letter said this proposal would "promote innovation and competition" by preventing the platforms from protecting their monopolies. The right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute and others have argued that the bill could prevent Apple from pre-installing certain apps on its mobile phones, since that would advantage it over competing app developers. It could also prevent Google from integrating maps or customer reviews into search results, among other things. "At a minimum, the act would significantly disrupt these platforms' business models in ways that undermine consumer value," Daniel Lyons, a senior fellow for the group wrote in a blog post in June. Platform Competition and Opportunity Act The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act is aimed at preventing platform companies from acquiring potential or nascent competitors and its supporters argued in Thursday's letter that it would prevent the tech giants from enhancing or maintaining their market power. The bill would presumably have blocked Facebook's purchases of WhatsApp, Instagram and other services it has acquired, as well as a slew of deals by Google over the past two decades. Detractors have contended that this bill would limit investments in startups because it restricts their ability to be acquired by the larger technology firms, which they say is a key way for founders to benefit from their success. An American Enterprise Institute blog post from June argues that "opportunities for acquisition have been important drivers of innovation in tech" and also said the bill would prevent the tech companies from entering new areas of business to compete with each other. ACCESS Act The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching, or ACCESS Act, imposes requirements for the tech companies to make user data portable and able to be used by competing services. The bill's supporters argued in Thursday's letter that this prevents the tech giants from locking users into their services, since users can take their data with them and use it on other networks. Privacy and security implications have been flagged as potential problems for the proposal, with the Competitive Enterprise Institute saying in a statement in June that it's an "anti-privacy bill" that forces companies to turn over private user information to others. The group also said the bill would try to micromanage "complex, dynamic, and highly competitive markets" that are beyond understanding for most politicians and regulators. The American Enterprise Institute has also contended that the requirements would actually make rivals even more dependent on the incumbent platforms. Filing fees and state enforcement Of the antitrust bills approved by the House Judiciary Committee, the ones with the most bipartisan support appear to be the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act and the State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act, though it took a day of debate before the committee passed them. A Senate version of the filing fee bill passed that chamber in June as part of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. It would raise the fees merging parties pay when reporting large transactions, while lowering fees for smaller deals, in order to raise more resources for the antitrust agencies. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argued in an August blog post that the legislation does not give Congress enough oversight over how the agencies will use the funds that it raises and called for the bill to include provisions requiring the money be used to hire more staff dedicated to antitrust enforcement. The Competitive Enterprise Institute also raised concerns about congressional oversight and contended that the bill would increase the cost of doing business at a time when the economy is sputtering. "U.S. consumers need innovative services and affordable products, not higher prices passed onto them by businesses avoiding new, unnecessary regulatory compliance costs," the group said in a June blog post. The state enforcement bill would prevent antitrust cases brought by state attorneys general from being transferred to a different venue by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, similar to protections afforded to federal enforcers. The bill is intended to prevent companies targeted by state-led enforcement actions from trying to move the cases to more favorable venues, and it also has an analog in the Senate. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation acknowledged in their August post that having cases included in multidistrict litigation can handicap state enforcers, but contended the changes should only apply to criminal matters and that the current version is wrong to block transfers of civil cases too. Thursday's letter from supporters of the bills said the proposals were carefully crafted to address the abusive practices of Big Tech, informed by the House antitrust subcommitee's sprawling investigation and "historic" 450-page report. "We believe that these bills will bring urgently needed change and accountability to these companies and an industry that most Americans agree is already doing great harm to our democracy," the letter said.
The plan pisses off Republicans– they hate decriminalization and people accessing accessible weed. Enten 7/17: Enten, Harry a Senior Writer and Analyst for CNN Politics, where he specializes in data-driven journalism, covering politics with a focus on poll numbers and electoral trends “Republican lawmakers aren't with the public on marijuana,” CNN, July 17, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/17/politics/republican-marijuana-public-opinion-analysis/index.html AA The age gap is important because it may make Republican senators either believe marijuana legalization is less popular than it is or at the very least make them more likely to think that marijuana should not be legal. That's because Democratic and Republican senators are disproportionately old. A majority (27 of 50) of Republican senators are 65 or older. Another two are 64 years old. In fact, just four Republican senators are from an age bracket (under age 50) where a majority of Republican respondents in the Pew poll were for recreational marijuana legalization. The large age split on the issue could explain, too, why President Joe Biden isn't for legalizing marijuana. (He is for decriminalizing.) Just 32 of Americans who are 75 or older in the Pew survey want marijuana legalized. The other factor at play could be an ideological one. In that same Pew poll, moderate and liberal Republicans (60) were far more likely to want recreational marijuana to be legal than conservative Republicans (39). The ideological split within the GOP ranks is important because politically engaged Republicans are far more likely to be conservative than politically less engaged Republicans. This means that they are likely overrepresented in Congress compared with the Republican electorate at large. Additionally, Republican lawmakers are likely hearing disproportionately more from the types of Republican voters (politically engaged) who are opposed to marijuana legalization than for it.
General bipartisanship could spark compromise but the plan’s partisan nature tanks any shot Montanari 21 “Biden’s Undermining Of U.S. Intellectual Property Rights Is Dangerous And Will Hurt Pandemic Response,” Lorenzo Montanari executive director of Property Rights Alliance, an advocacy policy group in charge of publishing the International Property Rights Index, May 12, 2021 https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenzomontanari/2021/05/12/bidens-undermining-of-us-intellectual-property-rights-is-dangerous-and-will-hurt-pandemic-response/?sh=4a74c5004890 SM Republican Congressman Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) is working on a new piece of legislation titled "Preventing Foreign Attempts to Erode Healthcare Innovation Act” to block the White House IP waiver position and to "prevent the Biden Administration from senselessly giving away America's intellectual property to countries like China”. IP rights are enshrined in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution of 1787, “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” As a central pillar to American history and constitutionalism for 244 years, IP converges tradition and progress to enrich the lives of citizens and society. Waiving IP rights not only goes directly against America’s core values and threatens public health but wanes potential for bipartisan efforts. “Congress has spent decades wrangling over the contours of patent protections,” WSJ’s Kimberley A. Strassel says, “producing bipartisan legislation from the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984 to the Leahy-Smith Act of 2011.” All these bipartisan efforts to defend American inventors with a strong and fair IP system risk being seriously damaged with this Biden move. Antitrust is key to the DIB – brink is now. Sitaraman 20 Ganesh; Vanderbilt University Law School; “The National Security Case for Breaking Up Big Tech,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia; 3/12/20; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3537870 brett Re-Cut Justin Concentration in the tech sector also threatens the defense industrial base due to higher costs, lower quality, less innovation, and even corruption and fraud.71 Each of these dynamics has already been a problem for America’s over-consolidated defense industrial base. As technology becomes more and more central to defense and national security, it is likely that these same dynamics will replicate themselves with big tech companies. This will become a national security threat, both directly, in terms of the quality and speed of procurement, and indirectly, by reducing innovation and functionally redirecting defense budgets from research spending to higher monopoly profits.72 Conventional economic theory suggests that monopolists have the ability to increase prices and reduce quality because consumers are captive.73 When it comes to defense spending, the Government Accountability Office commented in 2019 that “competition is the cornerstone of a sound acquisition process and a critical tool for achieving the best return on investment for taxpayers.”74 At the same time, the GAO observed that “portfolio-wide cost growth has occurred in an environment where awards are often made without full and open competition.”75 Indeed, it found that 67 percent of 183 major weapons systems contracts had no competition and almost half of contracts went to a handful of firms. Of course, consolidation also means that the Defense Department is in a symbiotic relationship with these big contractors. Some startup executives wanting to sell to the government thus see the Pentagon as “a bad customer, one that is heavily skewed in favor of larger, traditional players,” and they don’t feel like they can break into the sector.76 Standard stories about political economy and capture also suggest that these firms will have outsized power over government.77 As Frank Kendall, the former head of acquisitions at the Pentagon, has said, “With size comes power, and the department’s experience with large defense contractors is that they are not hesitant to use this power for corporate advantage.”78 In the defense context, that means monopolists retain power (and profits), even if they overcharge taxpayers and risk the safety of military personnel in the field. In an important article in The American Conservative on concentration in the defense sector, researchers Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce argue that contractors with de facto monopoly at the heart of their business models threaten national security. They write that one such contractor, TransDigm, buys up companies that supply the government with rare but essential airline parts and then hike up the prices, effectively holding the government “hostage.”79 They also point to L3, a defense contractor that had ambitions to be a “Home Depot” for the Pentagon, as its former CEO put it. L3’s de facto monopoly over certain products, according to Stoller and Kunce, means that it continues to receive lucrative government contracts, even after admitting in 2015 that it knowingly supplied defective weapons sights to U.S. forces.80 Consolidation also threatens U.S. defense capacity. The decline of competition, according to a 2019 Pentagon report, leaves the military vulnerable to “sole source suppliers, capacity shortfalls, a lack of competition, a lack of workforce skills, and unstable demand.”81 With a limited number of producers, there is less talent and knowhow available in the country if there is a need to build capacity rapidly.82 In 2018, the Defense Department released a report on vulnerable items in the military supply chain, including numerous items in which only one or two domestic companies (and, in some cases, zero domestic companies) produced the essential goods.83 How did the United States lose so much of its industrial base? The combination of consolidation and global integration is part of the story. As Stoller and Kunce argue, companies consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s while shifting emphasis from production and RandD to Wall Street-demanded profits. Globalization then allowed them to shift production overseas at a lower cost. The result was to gut America’s domestic industrial base—and, in many cases, to shift it to China, which engaged in a decades-long strategic plan to develop its own industrial base. The result, in the words of the 2018 Defense Department report, is that “China is the single or sole supplier for a number of specialty chemicals used in munitions and missiles.” In other areas too, the risks of losing access to critical resources are real. Describing the problem of limited carbon fiber sources, the same Pentagon report notes, “a sudden and catastrophic loss of supply would disrupt DoD missile, satellite, space launch, and other defense manufacturing programs. In many cases, there are no substitutes readily available.”84 As technology becomes more integral to the future of national security, it is hard to see how big tech will not simply go the way of the big defense contractors. Corporate mottos not to “be evil” are long gone,85 and big tech companies spend millions on conventional Washington, D.C., lobbying efforts.86 Over time, as contracts move to tech behemoths, there will no longer be competitive alternatives, and the Pentagon will likely be locked into relationships with big tech companies—just as they currently are with big defense contractors.87 Some commentators suggest that robust antitrust policies are a problem because only a small number of tech companies can contract for defense projects.88 But there is another way to look at it: The goal should be to encourage competition in the tech sector so that there are multiple contractors available. As former secretary of homeland security Michael Chertoff has said, defending the antitrust case against Qualcomm, “a single-source national champion creates an unacceptable risk to American security—artificially concentrating vulnerability in a single point. ... We need competition and multiple providers, not a potentially vulnerable technological monoculture.”89 The consequence of consolidation in tech is that taxpayers will likely see higher bills even as innovation slows due to reduced competition. Worse still, every taxpayer dollar that goes to monopoly profits—whether in the form of higher prices or fraud and corruption—is a dollar that is not going toward innovation for the future. A concentrated defense sector means not only less innovation due to the lack of competition in the sector; it means that funding that could have been available for innovation instead gets redirected via monopoly profits to the pockets of big tech executives and shareholders.
That solves extinction through great power war. Marks 19 Michael; Former Senior Policy Advisor to the Under Secretary for Security Assistance, Science and Technology at the U.S. Department of State; "Strengthen US Industry To Counter National Security Challenges," American Military News; 10/10/19; https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/10/strengthen-us-industry-to-counter-national-security-challenges/ Justin While U.S. defense budgets have recently been on the rise, it is likely that we will see a spending decline in the coming years as competition for non-defense federal budget dollars increases and deficits grow. The United States, therefore, must take action to ensure that we maintain our technological edge against our adversaries by empowering the private sector to provide cost-effective innovation for America’s defense. Since the end of the Second World War the U.S. has relied on qualitative superiority over its potential adversaries, especially those like the Soviet Union/Russia and China, who enjoyed comparative quantitative advantages. These qualitative advantages were vital to maintaining global stability and helped enable our nation to become the preeminent global economy, but they have been eroded over the last few decades. In 1960, the U.S. share of global research and development (RandD) spending stood at 69. U.S. defense-related RandD alone accounted for 36 of total global expenditures. Soon thereafter other nations recognized the need to increase their RandD expenditures and build their own defense industrial bases to compete with the United States. From 2000-2016, China’s share of global RandD rose from 4.9 to 25.1 while the U.S. share of global RandD dropped to 28. U.S. defense-related RandD meanwhile now makes up a mere 4 of global RandD spending. There can be no doubt that Russia and China are determined to challenge America’s qualitative advantage. From the rebirth of Russian military power under Vladimir Putin to the ever-growing Chinese military prowess across the board, their efforts show no sign of slowing down. Russia has been and continues to undergo a major modernization of its armed forces. For example, they are in the midst of a ten-year program to build hundreds of new nuclear missiles and have set a goal of modernizing 70 of the Russian Ground Force’s equipment by 2020. One of the most frightening examples of Russia’s resurgence is its development of a hypersonic missile that could be ready for combat as early as 2020. Worryingly, the US is currently unable to defend against this type of missile. To accompany these developments came the emergence in 2017 of Russia as the world’s second-largest arms producer, ready and able to support nations hostile to US interests. China, on the other hand, used to be a country that only manufactured cheap products and knockoffs, but that is no longer true. Technology development and innovation figure prominently in all of China’s national planning goals, with plans to make the country the global leader in science and innovation and the preeminent technological and manufacturing power by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Chinese communist revolution. This, of course, has huge implications for China’s military capability. The country now has the second-largest national defense budget behind the U.S. and wants to be Asia’s preeminent military power. Beijing is developing next-generation fighter jets, ICBMs and shorter-range ballistic missiles, as well as advanced naval vessels. The People’s Liberation Army has reached a critical point of confidence and now feel they can match competitors like the United States in combat. This has implications for the security of Taiwan, Japan, other US allies in the region as well as to America itself. To make matters worse, there are a growing number of experts that see China developing asymmetric technologies, combined with conventional and nuclear systems that could create an existential threat to the U.S. pacific based assets. It is in the wake of these growing threats to our national security American industry will likely be expected to shoulder an even larger responsibility concerning investment in defense-related RandD. One of the ways we can empower companies to make these additional investments and lead next-generation defense innovation is to allow commonsense mergers between important defense and aerospace companies. Horizontal consolidation eliminates the redundancy of enormous fixed costs, leading to savings passed down to customers. Mergers can also create economies of scale and existing synergies that help the combined company realize access to larger numbers of engineers and innovators, while keeping costs low and improving the timeline for taking a product from concept to development. FA recent example of how this can work is the proposed Raytheon and United Technologies merger. The two parties project that the new combined company will employ more than 60,000 engineers, hold over 38,000 patents and invest approximately $8 billion per year in research and development. This will allow the development of new, critical technologies more quickly and efficiently than either company could on its own. Such private sector investments in innovation will be critical in the face of the growing challenges to American military dominance. America’s RandD advantage, crucial to maintaining military superiority, is increasingly at risk. As China and Russia continue to challenge America’s military dominance and pressures on the defense budget continue to mount, the federal government will likely turn more and more to contractors and commercial companies to develop next-generation defense capabilities. Strengthening U.S. industry, therefore, will be critical to countering our national security challenges.
9/18/21
SO - Production CP
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit KS | Judge: Truman Le Text: The United States federal government should: - substantially increase production and global distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, specifically providing all necessary vaccines to India and South Africa, and - cooperate with allies to achieve increased production and global distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Solves better – IP rights don’t hinder vaccine cooperation, but manufacturing capacity is the current constraint. Sauer 6-17: Sauer, Hans Deputy General Counsel, Biotechnology Industry Organization. “Web event — Confronting Joe Biden’s proposed TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments” https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/210617-Confronting-Joe-Bidens-proposed-TRIPS-waiver.pdf?x91208andx91208 But contrary to what Lori said, there are genuine real problems in the supply chain that are not caused by patents, that are simply caused by the unavailability and the constraints on existing capacity. There is in this world such a thing as maxed-out capacity that just can’t be increased on a dime. It’s not all due to intellectual property. This is true for existing vaccines as well as for vaccine raw materials. There are trade barriers. There are export restrictions that we should all be aware of and that we need to work on. And there are very real political, I think, interests in finding an explanation for how we got to this place that absolve governments around the world from their own policy decisions that they made in the past. In the United States, again, it was the declared policy of the previous administration, as well as this one, that we would vaccinate healthy college kids and go all down the line and offer a vaccine to everybody who wants it before we start sharing any with grandmothers in Burkina Faso. That was the policy. You can agree with it or disagree with it, but that was policy. We had export restrictions in place before a lot of other countries did. And that, too, contributed to unequal access of vaccines around the world. Another thing that was predictable was that politicians and governments around the world who want to be seen as proactive, on the ball, in control, for a long time were actually very indecisive, very unsure about how to address the COVID problem, which has so many dimensions. Vaccines are only one of those. But with respect to vaccines, not many governments took decisive action, put money on the table, put bets on multiple horses, before we knew whether these vaccines would work, would be approved. And it was governments in middle-income countries who now, I think, justifiably are concerned that they’re not getting fast enough access, who didn’t have the means and who didn’t have the decision-making structure to place the same bets on multiple horses, if you will, that were placed in the relatively more wealthy, global North and global West. But there is, I think, a really good and, with hindsight, predictable explanation of how we got to this place, and I think it teaches us something about how to fix the problem going forward. So why will the waiver not work? Well, first of all, with complex technology like vaccines, Lori touched on it, reverse engineering, like you would for a small molecule drug, is much more difficult if not impossible. But it depends very much more than small molecule drugs on cooperation, on voluntary transfer of technology, and on mutual assistance. We have seen as part of the pandemic response an unprecedented level of collaborations and cooperation and no indication that IP has stood in the way of the pandemic response. The waiver proponents have found zero credible examples of where IP has actually been an obstacle, where somebody has tried to block somebody else from developing a COVID vaccine or other COVID countermeasure, right? It’s not there. Second, the myth of this vast global capacity to manufacture COVID vaccines that somehow exists out there is unsubstantiated and frankly, in my opinion, untrue. But there is no such thing as vast untapped, idle capacity that could be turned around on a dime to start making COVID vaccines within weeks or even months. This capacity needs to be built; it needs to be established. And at a time when time is of the essence to beat this pandemic, starting capacity-building discussions is helpful, but it won’t be the answer to beat this pandemic. It will be the answer if we do everything right to beating the next pandemic. And if we learn any lesson of this, and then I will stop, is that the COVID waiver as well as the situation in which we find ourselves — if anything, it’s a reminder that we definitely have to take global capacity-building more seriously than we did in the past. That is true for the global North, as well as for middle-income countries — all of whom have to dedicate themselves much more determinedly to pandemic preparedness. And there’s a need to invest both in preparedness and in public health systems that hasn’t happened in the wake of past pandemic threats. This is what we will need to do. We will need to reduce export restrictions, and we will need to rededicate ourselves to preparing for the next pandemic. As far as this pandemic goes, there are 11 vaccines around the world that are already being shot into arms, only four of which come from the global North. How many more vaccines do we want? I don’t know, maybe 11 is enough if we start making more of them. But there are manufacturers around the world who know how to do this — including in China, including in India, and including in Russia. All developed their homegrown vaccines, apparently without interference by IP rights, right? So let’s make more of those. I think that’s going to be the more practical and realistic answer to solving the problem. And we need to lean on governments to stop export controls and to dedicate themselves to more global equity.
9/4/21
SO - Resilience DA
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 5 | Opponent: Vestavia GJ | Judge: Claudia Ribera The aff’s appeals to “transgression” endorse the politics of capitalistic RESILIENCE – their PERFORMANCE is packaged as a 6-minute, consumable product that endorses counteract abject. James 1: James, Robin. Associate Professor of Philosophy, UNC Charlotte “Incandescence, Melancholy, and Feminist Bad Vibes: A Response to Ziarek’s Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism.” Differences 25 (2), 2016. CH Neoliberalism co-opts this incandescence (or at least the most visible, legible part of its spectrum), domesticating its critical force into the means of producing aesthetic pleasure and reproducing social normativity. Potentiality has been “upgraded” into resilience.9 In resilient art, formal experimentation cultivates, or incites (to use a more Foucaultian term), shocks and feeds the resultant shockwaves back into the system.10 This feedback supports rather than destabilizes hegemonic institutions. The aesthetic damage through which modernist art established its heteronomous/ autonomous position of critique—stuttering, fragmented, degraded, aleatory, dissonant—is now the very medium of normalization.11 Neoliberal resilience, in other words, is a method or process of recycling modernist damage. For example, if modernist art invested aesthetic pleasure in the objectification of women (what Laura Mulvey famously calls scopophilia), neoliberal art invests aesthetic pleasure in women’s spectacular assumption of subjectivity—what Ziarek calls incandescence. If in modernity we liked doing damage to women, we now like to see women overcome that damage.12 This means that we expect women to perform their damage as a baseline from which “good” women then progress. That damage is the fuel for incandescent fires, so it must be constantly incited and invoked so that there’s something for incandescent women to ignite. In this way, resilience discourse normalizes traditional patriarchal damage (e.g., the damage of exclusion and objectification) as a systemic or background condition that individual women are then responsible for overcoming. “Undoing . . . feminism while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a wellinformed and even well-intended response to feminism” (McRobbie 1), resilient incandescence is quintessentially postfeminist. We, the audience, use our identification with the resilient heroine as a way to disidentify with and (supposedly) transgress the imperatives of modernist patriarchy. This is why, as Ziarek explains, audiences have a “sympathetic identification with subversive femininity, with the mother avenging the murderous sacrifice of her daughter for political ends, rather than with the murderous father/king” (104). We enjoy women’s spectacular subjectivization (i.e., their overcoming of scopophilic objectification) because this distances us from unfashionable patriarchal formations and tastes (i.e., this latter scopophilia). In postfeminist neoliberalism, “bearing witness to both the destruction of women’s artistic capacities and women’s revolutionary aspirations” (5) becomes a source of aesthetic pleasure not because it’s revolutionary, but because it’s normative. To use Jack Halberstam’s term, we like our women to “go gaga” because this incandescence, this “unpredictable feminine” (114) methodology allows us to eke even more light out of otherwise exhausted enlightenment modernity. If we’ve reached, as Ziarek discusses, the so-called end of art and the end of history (and the end of tonality and the end of representation and, well, the end of modernity), then the only way to find more resources is, like Pixar’s wall-e, by sifting through our vast piles of waste. And in that waste heap is abject femininity (what musicologist Susan Cook calls the feminized “abject popular”). Femininity is abject because its exclusion from patriarchy is what constitutes patriarchy as a coherent system. In both Ziarek’s aesthetics of potentiality and in resilience discourse, women artists do the cultural work of remaking abjection or constitutive exclusion into ecstatic radiance.13 In the former case, that work is revolutionary; in the latter case, that work normalizes. Resilience discourse transposes feminist revolution into a nationalist, patriarchal, white supremacist practice. Take, for example, Katy Perry’s “Firework,” in which the lyrics trace the affective journey from dejection to radiant exceptionality. The song begins by asking listeners to identify with feelings of irrelevance, weakness, loneliness, and hopelessness; it posits and affirms damage, suffering, and pain. But then Perry’s narrator argues that in spite and perhaps because of this damage, the listener has precisely the means to connect to others, to make a difference, to have hope: “There’s a spark in you / You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine.” She uses the metaphor of fireworks (and their association with u.s. Independence Day celebrations) to describe the listener’s self-transformation from black dust to shining light: you may feel like trash, but if you can just light yourself on fire, that trash will burn with a dazzling radiance that lights up the sky, just as it lights up audiences’ faces. Here, Perry transforms abjection—feeling like trash, unmoored, socially dead—into incandescent triumph. In the song, the addressee’s personal triumph evokes u.s. nationalist narratives of overcoming colonization (i.e., the Declaration of Independence, celebrated on the Fourth of July). Feminine incandescence—the transformation of waste and melancholy into glowing potential—is no longer revolutionary. Not only parallel to u.s. nationalism, it is the very means for reproducing normativity.
Turns case: their narrative of “overcoming” PERPETUATES CYCLES OF OBJECTIFICATION, requiring a public performance for a spectator’s benefit. James 2: James, Robin. Associate Professor of Philosophy, UNC Charlotte Resiliency and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. Zero Books: Winchester, 2015. CH (d) “Look, I Overcame!” Resilience must be performed explicitly, legibly, and spectacularly. Overcoming is necessary, but insufficient; to count and function as resilience, this overcoming must be accomplished in a visible or otherwise legible and consumable manner. Overcoming is a type of “affective labor” which, as Steven Shaviro puts it, “is productive only to the extent that it is a public performance. It cannot unfold in the hidden depths; it must be visible and audible” (PCA 49n33). In order to tune into feminine resilience and feed it back into its power supply, MRWaSP has to perceive it as such. “Look, I Overcame!” is the resilient subject’s maxim or mantra. Gender and race have always been “visible identities,” to use philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff’s term, identities strongly tied to one’s outward physical appearance. However, gendered/ racialized resilience isn’t visible in the same way that conventional gender and racial identities are visible. To clarify these differences, it’s helpful to think of resilience in terms of a “Look, I Overcame!” imperative. “Look, I Overcame!” is easy to juxtapose to Frantz Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!”, which is the touchstone for his analysis of gendered racialization in “The Fact of Blackness.” In both cases, looking is a means of crafting race/gender identities and distributing white patriarchal privilege. But, in the same way that resilience discourse “upgrades” traditional methods for crafting identities and distributing privilege, the “looking” in “Look, I Overcame!” is an upgrade on the “looking” in “Look, a black person! Negro!” According to Fanon, the exclamation “Look, a Negro!” racializes him as a black man. To be “a Negro” a black person is to be objectified by the white supremacist gaze. This gaze fixes him as an object, rather than an ambiguous transcendence (which is a more nuanced way of describing the existentialist concept of subjectivity). “The black man,” as Fanon argues, “has no ontological resistance for the white man” (BSWM 110) because, as an object and not a mutually-recognized subject, he cannot return the white man’s gaze (“The Look” that is so important to Sartre’s theory of subjectivity in Being and Nothingness). The LIO narrative differs from Fanon’s account in the same way it differs from Iris Young’s account of feminine body comportment: in resilience discourse, objectification isn’t an end but a means. any impediment posed by the damage wrought by the white/male gaze is a necessary prerequisite for subjectivity, agency, and mutual recognition. In other words, being looked at isn’t an impediment, but a resource. Resilience discourse turns objectification (being looked at) into a means of subjectification (overcoming). It also makes looking even more efficient and profitable than simple objectification could ever be. Recognizing and affirming the affective labor of the resilient performer, the spectator feeds the performer’s individual overcoming into a second-order therapeutic narrative: our approbation of her overcoming is evidence of our own overcoming of our past prejudices. This spectator wants to be seen by a wider audience as someone who answers the resilient feminine subject’s hail, “Look, I Overcame!”. Just as individual feminine subjects use their resilience as proof of their own goodness, MRWaSP uses the resilience of its “good girls” as proof that they’re the “good guys”—that its social and ethical practices are truly just, and that we really mean it this time when we say everyone is equal. For example, the “resilience” of “our” women is often contrasted with the supposed “fragility” of ThirdWorld women of color.
9/5/21
SO - T - Medicine
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Southlake EP | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo Interpretation: Medicines are used for diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. Biggers 18, Alana Dr. Alana Biggers is an internal medicine physician. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, where she specializes in internal medicine. She also has a Master of Public Health in chronic disease epidemiology. “What is Medicine?” Medical News Today, November 16, 2018, AA Medicine is the field of health and healing. It includes nurses, doctors, and various specialists. It covers diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, medical research, and many other aspects of health. Violation: Cannabis is not a medicine. CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention “Is Marijuana Medicine?” https://www.cdc.gov/marijuana/faqs/is-marijuana-medicine.html AA Also, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not recognized or approved the marijuana plant as medicine. Because marijuana is often smoked, it can damage your lungs and cardiovascular system (e.g., heart and blood vessels). Vote negative for predictable limits: allowing non-medicines open the door to infinite number of affs. It means they can defend anything that has patent protections. At best, the plan is extra-T because not all cannabis is medicinal which is equally as bad because they can use extra-T portions of the aff to solve DAs.
9/18/21
SO - T Reduce
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit KS | Judge: Truman Le Interpretation: Affirmatives must reduce intellectual property protections for medicines unconditionally and permanently. Reynolds 59: Judge (In the Matter of Doris A. Montesani, Petitioner, v. Arthur Levitt, as Comptroller of the State of New York, et al., Respondents NO NUMBER IN ORIGINAL Supreme Court of New York, Appellate Division, Third Department 9 A.D.2d 51; 189 N.Y.S.2d 695; 1959 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 7391 August 13, 1959, lexis) Section 83's counterpart with regard to nondisability pensioners, section 84, prescribes a reduction only if the pensioner should again take a public job. The disability pensioner is penalized if he takes any type of employment. The reason for the difference, of course, is that in one case the only reason pension benefits are available is because the pensioner is considered incapable of gainful employment, while in the other he has fully completed his "tour" and is considered as having earned his reward with almost no strings attached. It would be manifestly unfair to the ordinary retiree to accord the disability retiree the benefits of the System to which they both belong when the latter is otherwise capable of earning a living and had not fulfilled his service obligation. If it were to be held that withholdings under section 83 were payable whenever the pensioner died or stopped his other employment the whole purpose of the provision would be defeated, i.e., the System might just as well have continued payments during the other employment since it must later pay it anyway. *13 The section says "reduced", does not say that monthly payments shall be temporarily suspended; it says that the pension itself shall be reduced. The plain dictionary meaning of the word is to diminish, lower or degrade. The word "reduce" seems adequately to indicate permanency. Violation: The waiver is temporary. Gupta and Namboodiri 21: Gupta, Vineeta a maternal and child health physician, human rights advocate, and a passionate activist for health equity. As director, she leads the ACTION Global Health Advocacy Partnership as well as a volunteer-based policy advocacy organization that unites the Indian diaspora to mount a prompt, global response to the COVID-19 crisis in India. Dr. Gupta has more than 20 years of tri-sector experience in leading and supporting projects in more than 25 countries. In addition to conducting organization development, diversity, inclusion, equity, and global health equity workshops, Gupta has designed and facilitated partnership projects to achieve agreements and results on complex issues. She has been invited to speak in more than 60 universities in the US and Europe. Namboodiri, Sreenath LLM, LLB, is assistant professor at the School of Ethics, Governance, Culture and Social Systems at Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth and a post-graduate on law of intellectual property rights (IPR) from Inter University Centre for IPR Studies, CUSAT, Kochi. His areas of interest are in intellectual property rights vis-à-vis health systems, sustainable development and innovation, pharmaceutical patents, knowledge governance, and technology and law. He is an honorary fellow of the Centre for Economy, Development, and Law since 2013. Namboodiri is part of the editorial team of Elenchus Law Review, a biannual peer-reviewed journal from the Centre (CEDandL). He has also worked as a guest lecturer in Inter University Centre for IPR Studies, CUSAT, Kochi, where he provided courses on access to medicine and IP, and patents and biotechnology “America And The TRIPS Waiver: You Can Talk The Talk, But Will You Walk The Walk?,” July 13, 2021 AA In October 2020, the governments of India and South Africa, with the support of 62 WTO member states, proposed a TRIPS Agreement waiver proposal that would temporarily waive intellectual property rights protections for technologies needed to prevent, contain, or treat COVID-19, including vaccines and vaccine-related technologies. More than 100 low-income countries support this proposal, but it is receiving much opposition from many high-income countries, including some European Union (EU) member states, the UK, Japan, Canada, and Australia. On May 5, 2021, the Biden administration announced support for negotiating this waiver, intensifying debate in the US and the EU—but so far the US has not gone further than its announcement of support. No plan text in a vacuum – the offense defines what the plan looks like. Worst case scenario, you vote neg on presumption because all their solvency evidence is about a waiver.
Prefer my interpretation: 1 Limits: they open the door to an infinite number of affs – from any condition to any time restriction. Each one becomes its own new aff. 2 Ground: condition and delay counterplans are all ground we are entitled to because they disprove the idea of passing the plan right now. 3 Topic lit: authors aren’t writing about a reduction that happens a few years or now or under a specific condition. 4 Semantics: not defending the text of the resolution justifies the affirmative doing away with random words in the resolution which destroys predictability because they are no longer bounded by the resolution.
9/4/21
SO - T Reduce v2
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Ayala AM | Judge: Ben Cortez Interpretation: Affirmatives must defend only current intellectual property protections for medicines. Reduce means current-~--not preventing future action Naporn Popattanachai 18. This thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement of Nottingham Trent University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Law. “Regional Cooperation Addressing Marine Pollution from Land-Based Activities: an Interpretation of Article 207 of The Law OF THE SEA CONVENTION FOCUSING on Monitoring, Assessement, and Surveillance of the Pollution” http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/33374/1/Naporn20Popattanachai202018.pdf For the second question, the provision demonstrates that the goal of adoption of such laws and regulations must be to ‘prevent, reduce, and control’ MPLA. In so doing, the LOSC obliges States to ‘taking into account internationally agreed rules, standards, and recommended practices and procedures’.480 Having considered the ordinary meanings of the term ‘prevent, reduce, and control’, ‘prevent’ means ‘to stop something from happening or someone from doing something.’481 The word ‘reduce’ means ‘to make something smaller in size, amount, degree, importance etc.’482 and the word ‘control’ means ‘to order, limit, or rule something or someone's actions or behaviour.’ 483 From the meanings, the term ‘prevent’ suggests an action to stop the future occurrence of something, whereas the terms ‘reduce’ and ‘control’, noting their difference, point to an action dealing with something that has already happened and continues to occur, but needs to be made smaller, limited or regulated. Also, control also applies to future pollution in the sense that it limits the future pollution to be created or emitted not to exceed the specified level. Therefore, the preliminary reading of these terms suggests that laws and regulations adopted to deal with MPLA must yield the result that conforms with these terms. In so doing, the adoption of laws and regulations to prevent, reduce, and control MPLA can be done by legislating primary or secondary regulations with the use of various legal techniques and procedures and are underpinned by some rules and principles of international law discussed in the previous chapter. These legal techniques and procedures can be used to achieve the prevention, reduction and control of MPLA depending on the design and use of them. Noting that the measures outlined below are not exhaustive and not exclusively limited to implement any specific obligation, these are typical legal techniques and procedures used to prevent, reduce, and control pollution and therefore protect the environment. They can be categorised into two groups, that is, (1) substantive and (2) procedural legal techniques and measures. They can be discussed hereunder. Violation: CX proves the plan prevents future intellectual property protections. Vote Neg: 1 Limits – they explode the topic to an infinite number of medicines because any medicines that can exist after the aff. Only my interpretation solves because it limits the topic to IPPs that currently exist. At best, the aff’s extra-T still links to all our offense since they can get extra-T advantages to solve disads and defend whatever they want, magnifying limits. 2 Semantics – not defending the text of the resolution justifies the affirmative doing away with random words in the resolution which destroys predictability because they are no longer bounded by the resolution.
9/4/21
SO - T-Framework
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 5 | Opponent: Vestavia GJ | Judge: Claudia Ribera Interp and Violation: The affirmative must only defend the member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines– they don’t.
a legal or official determination especially: a legislative declaration
The WTO refers to a legislative body. WTO: “What is the World Trade Organization” wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/whatis_e.htm No Date AA The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business.
Vote neg for predictable limits—post-facto topic adjustment structurally favors the aff by manipulating the balance of prep which is anchored around the resolution as a stasis point. Not debating the topic allows someone to specialize in one area of the library for 4 years giving them a huge edge over people who switch research focus every 2 months, which means their arguments are presumptively false because they haven’t been subject to well-researched scrutiny. Two Impacts –
Fairness—debate is fundamentally a game which requires both sides to have a relatively equal shot at winning and is necessary for any benefit to the activity. That outweighs: A decision-making: every argument concedes to the validity of fairness i.e. that the judge will make a fair decision based on the arguments presented. This means if they win fairness bad vote neg on presumption because you have no obligation to fairly evaluate their arguments. B probability: voting aff can’t solve any of their impacts but it can solve ours. All the ballot does is tell tab who won which can’t stop any violence or resolve subjectivity claims but can resolve the fairness imbalance in this debate.
2. Testing – a clear stasis point of the rez allows for clash over a topic that is pre-decided, engagement with arguments and clash are the reason why we are in the activity. This fundamentally turns the affirmative because you prevent us from engaging in the affirmative - we don’t solve real world harms in this round so we should endorse the best strategy and model to engage.
TVA solves – read the racial cap aff on this topic – it talks about the racialized impact of COVID, and how vaccines check back for that. You should also evaluate their answers to T through a lens of switch side – their ability to read this affirmative on the negative solves all their offense so vote negative on preserving some form of competitive equity within debate.
Use competing interps – topicality is question of models of debate which they should have to proactively justify, and we’ll win reasonability links to our offense.
Drop the debater - dropping the arg is severance which moots 7 minutes of 1nc offense.
No RVI’s – it’s illogical because your expected to be topical/fair.
9/5/21
SO - VOCs DA
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Southlake EP | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo Increasing marijuana plants is bad for the environment. Shields 19, (Jesslyn Shields; a freelance science writer working out of Athens, Georgia. She writes about brand new research for HowStuffWorks., 2-6-2019, "How a Booming Legal Marijuana Industry Could Harm Air Quality," HowStuffWorks, https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/how-booming-legal-marijuana-industry-could-harm-air-quality.htm/printable, accessed 7-9-2020) Zim (JZ) As more states legalize marijuana for medicinal and recreational use (as of 2018, 33 states and Washington D.C. have decriminalized the drug in some form or fashion), studies suggest marijuana farming impacts the environment in a variety of ways, from wildlife habitat fragmentation to its extreme energy and water requirements. But until Vizuete and a Ph.D. student went to Denver and bought and monitored 12 marijuana plants — three specimens of four popular cannabis varieties — in a garage, nobody had ever figured out the toll cannabis farming could be having on air quality. "I was collaborating with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but I couldn't grow plants in North Carolina where I live — I couldn't even bring them into a federal facility in Colorado," says Vizuete. "In Colorado, you can legally buy the plants and bring them home to your private residence and grow them, so we did that. We set up shop in the garage and took measurements using the techniques and methods we use for every other plant." Gas Emissions Vizuete's research, published October 30, 2018 in the journal Atmospheric Environment, set out to discover the composition and the rate at which marijuana plants emit gases called terpenes. There are many different kinds of terpenes — an oak tree makes a lot of one called isoprene, and when you're walking through a pine forest, it's a terpene called alpha-pinene that you're smelling in the air. Terpenes like eucalyptol are what give marijuana plants their distinctive aroma, but these compounds also affect the atmosphere: "The Appalachian Mountains are called the Smoky Mountains because of that white haze you see there," says Vizuete. "This happens because particles are formed when these terpenes react in the atmosphere, forming aerosol and causing that mist." Vizuete and his team found marijuana plants to be pretty average emitters of terpenes, and that the composition of and rate at which the terpene gases are emitted by the plants depend on the strain of the marijuana plant. But what does all this have to do with air quality? Terpenes and VOCs Terpenes are a type of chemical called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are released into the atmosphere and contribute to the chemistry that produces air pollution. Scientists realized this about 40 years ago, and the rest of us discovered it in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan famously claimed that "trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." He was partly right — in a city like Atlanta, Georgia, it's hard to get the air quality models right without taking into consideration the colossal numbers of oak trees in the southeast United States. It works like this: In the presence of sunlight, VOCs like terpenes react with another type of compound called nitrogen oxides (NOx), which come from combustion sources: power plants, automobiles, any industry that makes a flame. When you have the right amount of NOx and VOC in the presence of sunlight, you get particulate matter and ozone — both air pollutants.
VOCs cause pollution and global warming Shareefdeen 19, (Zarook, professional engineer. Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from NJIT. Research areas include biofiltration, bioreactor modeling, waste management and pollution control.; 5/2/2019, " Selection of sustainable technologies for reducing emission of volatile organic compounds and greenhouse gases" Journal of Ocean and Climate, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2516019219852603, accessed 7-13-2020) Zim (JZ) Nearly most manufacturing processes, paint shops, contaminated soil sites, and industrial wastewater treatment plants emit waste gases containing abundant of toxic and carcinogenic volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The presence of VOCs in the air even in trace quantities is an environmental and health hazard¬. Because of the reactivity as precursors to ozone, VOC control has become the target of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA). Greenhouse gases (GHGs), principally carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), from the combustion of fossil fuels are viewed as contributing to human-induced global climate change, which is one of the most challenging environmental issues facing the world today (Zhao et al., 2019). The GHGs act as a blanket that increases the temperature of the earth. CO2 has been identified as the major GHG because of its abundance in the atmosphere (Davis and Cornwell, 2013). Effects of global warming include sea-level rise, polar ice melting, flooding, damage to structures, and effects on ecosystems (Field et al., 2014). Scientists, researchers, academicians, and politicians, irrespective of their professional and partisan interest, agree that reduction of GHG emission is critically important for saving the people from destructive climate change. The Kyoto protocol identifies fuel combustion as one of the major sources of GHG emissions and sets targets for industrialized countries to reduce GHG emissions, and the protocol was ratified by 192 countries (European Environment Agency (EEA), 2012). Integration of innovative biotechnological processes in industrial systems can significantly reduce GHG emissions while removing toxic VOCs.
Warming causes extinction Specktor 19 Brandon writes about the science of everyday life for Live Science, and previously for Reader's Digest magazine, where he served as an editor for five years 6-4-2019, "Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims," livescience, https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html Justin The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have ever dealt with before. General climate models — like the one that the United Nations' Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk — fail to account for the sheer complexity of Earth's many interlinked geological processes; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any models can fathom. How the world ends What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet's climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments "politely ignoring" the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world's ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions. "Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability," the authors hypothesized. Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world's land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet's coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world's tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region's agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees. This mass movement of refugees — coupled with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in food and water availability — begin to stress the fabric of the world's largest nations, including the United States. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps culminating in nuclear war, are likely. The result, according to the new paper, is "outright chaos" and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."