Harrison Berg Neg
| Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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| Apple Valley | 1 | McNeil AG | Iyana, Trotman |
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| Apple Valley | 3 | Saratoga AG | Derek, Ying |
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| Colleyville | 4 | Greenhill NT | Aashir Sanjrani |
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| Colleyville | 4 | Greenhill NT | Aashir Sanjrani |
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| Colleyville | 2 | Clear Springs EG | Blake, Andrews |
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| Colleyville | Octas | Isidore Newman EE | Jason Sykes |
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| Columbia | 2 | Princeton JG | Eric, He |
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| Columbia | 5 | Bronx Science VT | Andrea Reier |
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| Columbia | 4 | Lexington AnMa | Akshay Manglik |
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| Glenbrooks | 1 | Strake Jesuit ZD | Morgan Copeland |
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| Glenbrooks | 4 | Isidore Newman EE | Claudia Ribera |
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| Harvard | 1 | McNeil KJ | Jacob Palmer |
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| Harvard | 4 | Westlake JM | Rafael Li |
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| Newark | 2 | West Windsor Plainsboro HS North EL | Elijah, Smith |
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| Newark | 4 | Lexington AR | Anad, Rao |
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| Princeton | 2 | Lexington EY | Daniel Iskhakov |
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| Upenn | 3 | Fullerton Union AB | Amy Nyberg |
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| Upenn | 2 | All Saints Episcopal RL | David Coates |
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| Yale | 2 | Pittsburgh Central Catholic EF | Altman, Elias |
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| Tournament | Round | Report |
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| Apple Valley | 1 | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: Iyana, Trotman ACFull res econ oppression AFF |
| Apple Valley | 3 | Opponent: Saratoga AG | Judge: Derek, Ying AC Farmers Union AFF |
| Colleyville | 4 | Opponent: Greenhill NT | Judge: Aashir Sanjrani AC Colonialism |
| Colleyville | 4 | Opponent: Greenhill NT | Judge: Aashir Sanjrani AC Colonialism |
| Colleyville | 2 | Opponent: Clear Springs EG | Judge: Blake, Andrews AC- Indigenous AC |
| Colleyville | Octas | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Jason Sykes AC- Larp Asteroids |
| Columbia | 2 | Opponent: Princeton JG | Judge: Eric, He AC - China v Russia Ateroids Keppler Util |
| Columbia | 5 | Opponent: Bronx Science VT | Judge: Andrea Reier AC - Heg asteroids and ressources |
| Columbia | 4 | Opponent: Lexington AnMa | Judge: Akshay Manglik AC - Larp env and war |
| Glenbrooks | 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit ZD | Judge: Morgan Copeland AC Black Time |
| Glenbrooks | 4 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Claudia Ribera AC Hauntology |
| Harvard | 1 | Opponent: McNeil KJ | Judge: Jacob Palmer AC- Extinction asteroids ozone |
| Harvard | 4 | Opponent: Westlake JM | Judge: Rafael Li AC - Nuke War Space asteroids |
| Newark | 2 | Opponent: West Windsor Plainsboro HS North EL | Judge: Elijah, Smith AC- Larp AC |
| Newark | 4 | Opponent: Lexington AR | Judge: Anad, Rao Please email me about this round for outing issues |
| Princeton | 2 | Opponent: Lexington EY | Judge: Daniel Iskhakov AC- UK aff |
| Upenn | 3 | Opponent: Fullerton Union AB | Judge: Amy Nyberg AC- Ozone Layer Space War |
| Upenn | 2 | Opponent: All Saints Episcopal RL | Judge: David Coates AC- Media Spying and War |
| Yale | 2 | Opponent: Pittsburgh Central Catholic EF | Judge: Altman, Elias -Covid AC |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
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1 Contact InfoTournament: Contact Info | Round: Finals | Opponent: | Judge: | 11/6/21 |
A - JanFeb Ban Nukes CPTournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Westlake JM | Judge: Rafael Li Long relegated to the fringes of policy discussions, nuclear disarmament has moved to center stage in the past few years. The continuing deterioration of the nonproliferation regime, the sudden emergence of North Korea as a nuclear weapon state and of Iran as a potential weapon state, concerns about the stability of another new nuclear power, Pakistan, and revelations about nuclear weapon programs in Libya, Syria, and possibly Burma have all raised great concerns. Given the vulnerability of the great powers to terrorist bombings—made clear by the attacks on Moscow in 1999, New York and Washington in 2001, Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005—the prospect of a proliferation cascade and the rising danger of nuclear terrorism have made clear the risks of a business-as-usual approach to nuclear issues. Relying on the severely strained nonproliferation regime and its perennial backstop, ad hoc diplomacy, no longer seems responsible. The alternative of multilateral nuclear disarmament is an idea as old as the bomb itself, but it has rarely been espoused seriously by the great powers—and then mainly as a rhetorical tool to encourage political support for related but less ambitious initiatives. Recent well-publicized conversions of national security leaders to the disarmament cause, however, to say nothing of a new, more serious tone in pronouncements on the subject by many governments, including those of the nuclear-weapon states, suggest that support is growing for the notion that the only permanent solution to nuclear dangers is an agreement that would eliminate all nuclear weapons, verifiably, from all nations. | 2/20/22 |
A - JanFeb Carbon Mapper CPTournament: Columbia | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lexington AnMa | Judge: Akshay Manglik In a first-of-its-kind coalition to accelerate climate change action, and with help from UArizona researchers, a new nonprofit organization called Carbon Mapper is launching a program to improve scientific understanding of global methane and carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon Mapper, a new nonprofit organization partnering with the University of Arizona, today announced a groundbreaking program to help improve understanding of and accelerate reductions in global methane and carbon dioxide emissions. The Carbon Mapper consortium also announced plans to deploy a satellite constellation to pinpoint, quantify and track methane and carbon dioxide emissions. "This decade represents an all-hands-on-deck moment for humanity to make critical progress in addressing climate change," said Riley Duren, research scientist in the UArizona Office of Research, Innovation and Impact and CEO of Carbon Mapper. "Our mission is to help fill gaps in the emerging global ecosystem of methane and CO2 monitoring systems by delivering data that's timely, actionable and accessible for science-based decision making." Current approaches to measuring methane and carbon dioxide emissions at the scale of individual facilities – particularly intermittent activity – present challenges, especially in terms of transparency, accuracy, scalability and cost. Carbon Mapper – which also is partnering with the state of California, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Planet, Arizona State University, High Tide Foundation and RMI – will help overcome these technological barriers and enable accelerated action by making publicly available high emitting methane and carbon dioxide sources quickly and persistently visible at the facility level. The data collected by the Carbon Mapper constellation of satellites will provide more complete, precise and timely measurement of methane and carbon dioxide source level emissions as well as more than 25 other environmental indicators. Through the Carbon Mapper-UArizona partnership, Duren and other UArizona researchers offer scientific leadership of the methane and carbon dioxide emissions data delivery including developing new algorithms and analytic frameworks for testing them with an ongoing research program. "Time is of the essence when it comes to understanding and mitigating methane and CO2 emissions," said Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell. "Partnering with Carbon Mapper will give University of Arizona researchers the tools needed to not only see emissions hot spots, but to understand their causes and develop actionable plans for reducing or eliminating these sources." Carbon Mapper, in collaboration with its public and private partners, is developing the satellite constellation in three phases. The initial study phase, now complete, included two years of preliminary engineering development and manufacturing. The first phase is underway and includes development of the first two satellites by Planet and JPL, scheduled for launch in 2023, accompanying data processing platforms, and ongoing cooperative methane mitigation pilot projects using aircraft in California and other U.S. states. P;’ No matter what causes a nonprofit chooses to support, there are a few base-line rules that every nonprofit organization must follow. In order to qualify as a nonprofit, an organization must meet the following three criteria. The organization must be a private organization separate from the government The organization must be an established, self-governing body The organization must not distribute profit to anything else other than the advancement of the organization. There are countless other legal qualifications required in order to be recognized as a nonprofit organization. However, if your organization does not meet the baseline criteria listed above, there’s no chance of it being recognized as a nonprofit. Flinders University A loss of even one species because of climate change is enough to cause extinction. New research reveals the extinction of plant or animal species from extreme environmental change increases the risk of an 'extinction domino effect' that could annihilate all life on Earth. This would be the worst-case scenario of what scientists call 'co-extinctions', where an organism dies out because it depends on another doomed species, with the findings published today in the journal Scientific Reports. Think of a plant's flower pollinated by only one species of bee -- if the bee becomes extinct, so too will the plant eventually. "Even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive ecosystems to collapse." says lead author Dr Giovanni Strona of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre based in Ispra in northern Italy. Researchers from Italy and Australia simulated 2,000 'virtual earths' linking animal and plant species. Using sophisticated modelling, they subjected the virtual earths to catastrophic environmental changes that ultimately annihilated all life. Examples of the kinds of catastrophes they simulated included runaway global warming, scenarios of 'nuclear winter' following the detonation of multiple atomic bombs, and a large asteroid impact. "What we were trying to test is whether the variable tolerances to extreme global heating or cooling by different species are enough to explain overall extinction rates," "But because all species are connected in the web of life, our paper demonstrates that even the most tolerant species ultimately succumb to extinction when the less-tolerant species on which they depend disappear." "Failing to take into account these co-extinctions therefore underestimates the rate and magnitude of the loss of entire species from events like climate change by up to 10 times," says co-author Professor Bradshaw of Flinders University in South Australia Professor Bradshaw and Dr Strona say that their virtual scenarios warn humanity not to underestimate the impact of co-extinctions. "Not taking into account this domino effect gives an unrealistic and exceedingly optimistic perspective about the impact of future climate change," warns Professor Bradshaw. It can be hard to imagine how the demise of a small animal or plant matters so much, but the authors argue that tracking species up to total annihilation demonstrates how the loss of one can amplify the effects of environmental change on the remainder. "Another really important discovery was that in the case of global warming in particular, the combination of intolerance to heat combined with co-extinctions mean that 5-6 degrees of average warming globally is enough to wipe out most life on the planet," says Dr Strona. Professor Bradshaw further warns that their work shows how climate warming creates extinction cascades in the worst possible way, when compared to random extinctions or even from the stresses arising from nuclear winter. Flinders University Outweighs on probability: other estimates don’t take into account the co-extinctions that magnify the chance of extinction 10-fold. "Failing to take into account these co-extinctions therefore underestimates the rate and magnitude of the loss of entire species from events like climate change by up to 10 times," says co-author Professor Bradshaw of Flinders University in South Australia Professor Bradshaw and Dr Strona say that their virtual scenarios warn humanity not to underestimate the impact of co-extinctions. "Not taking into account this domino effect gives an unrealistic and exceedingly optimistic perspective about the impact of future climate change," warns Professor Bradshaw. It can be hard to imagine how the demise of a small animal or plant matters so much, but the authors argue that tracking species up to total annihilation demonstrates how the loss of one can amplify the effects of environmental change on the remainder. " | 2/5/22 |
A - JanFeb Get off The Rock DATournament: Newark | Round: 2 | Opponent: West Windsor Plainsboro HS North EL | Judge: Elijah, Smith How billionaires support the space industry Private investment in space has created competition and reduced space launch costs. New space actors began to challenge the government-created monopoly, United Launch Alliance (ULA), for contracts, creating competition and introducing a market for small-medium class reusable launch. SpaceX’s Falcon 9’s average cost is $62 million, while ULA’s Atlas V starts at $110 million per launch. Commercial actors enable the government to have multiple competitive proposals to select from during project development. NASA would pay less money upfront for a service, while private companies can operate and have autonomy over their final product. The government can act as a buyer of commercial services, which allows NASA to be more efficient and cost-effective, as the agency can cut costs by only developing projects it has expertise and funding for. Such competition has dramatically changed space technology. New players that enter the space industry are able to embark on ambitious projects at a greater scale and faster pace. Innovative concepts such as reusable rocket stages has shifted the launch industry into integrating reusability into vehicle design and the proliferation of ridesharing missions has decreased the costs of space launch. This has lowered barriers to enter the space industry, making small satellites rideshare as low as $1 million per mission. Innovations in space launch have further changed the policy environment and streamlined launch and reentry regulations. Billionaires in space are here to stay Investment from wealthy individuals in recent decades have stimulated private markets and paved the way for many startups to enter the industry. As more new players join the commercial space industry, access to space becomes cheaper, resulting in an explosion of proposed satellite constellations and small launch vehicle concepts. Wealthy entrepreneurs have seen an opportunity to take advantage of a lack of government interest in space exploration funding. The high-risk nature of space exploration requires substantial upfront investment that only wealthy individuals can provide before any pay-off. Private investments in space promote competition and innovation. Billionaires providing upfront investments has stimulated the space market and made space more accessible – and profitable. C. Internal Link Odds are you’ve recently seen the news that both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have successfully left our planet temporarily in spacecraft their own companies have built. These two successful trips are just the latest chapter in the “Billionaire Space Race.” The beginnings of this story originate with Peter Diamandis, who helped spur the initiation of the Ansari XPrize. According to the organization’s website, “The $10 million Ansari XPRIZE was designed to lower the risk and cost of going to space by incentivizing the creation of a reliable, reusable, privately financed, crewed spaceship that finally made private space travel commercially viable.” While the XPrize was initiated in the mid-‘90s, the winner was crowned in 2004, with Richard Branson and his company Virgin Galactic coming in to license the technology. Branson wasn’t the only entrepreneur interested in privatized space travel. Four years prior to the awarding of the Ansari X Prize in 2004, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos founded his own space exploration company, Blue Origin. Two years later, after the acquisition of PayPal, Elon Musk founded his company SpaceX. Before diving into why I think the Billionaire Space Race is a good thing, I want to take a minute to look back — all the way back to the 1960s space race. What started with a speech from President Kennedy in 1962 ended with a man on the moon less than seven years later. This space race unified a country, created 400,000 jobs across science, technology and manufacturing and inspired a generation to think ambitiously. The impacts of the original Space Race are still felt today. NASA’s 2019 article highlights some of the Apollo technologies still in use more than 50 years after the moon landing. Their list includes things like digital flight controls, food safety, space blankets, quake-proofing, rechargeable hearing aids and more! Williams Satellites are essential for Earth, and private entities supply them. We need private entities to increase the production of these important satellites. D. Impact Gohd We are RUNNING OUT OF TIME, we will run out of resources on earth in a few hundred years. Earlier in the year, Hawking said that: “We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.” A major concern of Hawking, and others, is that climate change is already causing rapid sea level rise. It is possible that, if this progression isn’t diminished by a cut in emissions, a significant percentage of what is currently land will be under water. (This is, of course, in addition to the other life-threatening effects of climate change.) Additionally, as this continues, populations are set to continue increasing, which could have disastrous consequences. Hawking is confident that within the next few hundred years, Earth will no longer be a habitable option for humans. This hypothetical day when humans will supposedly have to leave Earth has been likened to a “Doomsday.” Hawking has asserted multiple timelines for this eventual moment, but he is certain that, at some point, we will have to find a new home. With ongoing projects by NASA, SpaceX, and both private and government agencies around the globe, it is likely that within the next few decades we will land humans on Mars. And, between proposals to terraform Mars and innovative designs like those from the Mars City Design competitions, it is possible that, if humans must leave earth, the red planet could one day be our alternate home. In addition to efforts to reach Mars, Hawking helped to launch the Breakthrough Initiatives, a series of projects seeking to probe “the big questions of life in the Universe,” including finding and communicating with extraterrestrial life. One of these initiatives is Breakthrough Starshot, which will send nanocraft to Alpha Centauri, our closest star, in an effort to better understand life in the Universe. This technological platform could also allow us to find faster and better ways to travel to other planets. After all, if Hawking is right, the International Space Station (ISS) isn’t big enough to house the billions of people who currently reside on planet Earth. EXTINCTION OUTWEIGHS THEIR IMPACTS, IF SOMETHING IS PREVENTING EXTINCTION IT IS JUST | 1/29/22 |
A - JanFeb Ownership NCTournament: Columbia | Round: 5 | Opponent: Bronx Science VT | Judge: Andrea Reier Framework Value I negate and value Justice, meaning policies that respect people’s due. All of the standard objections to the idea of equal freedom conceive of freedom as a person’s ability to achieve his or her purposes unhindered by others. This understanding of freedom, described as “negative liberty” in Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” characterizes any intentional actions or regulations that prevent a person from achieving his or her purposes as hindrances to freedom. Some critics have questioned the special significance of the actions of others in limiting freedom on this account – lack of resources, or internal obstacles may frustrate your purposes just as much as my deliberate actions. The difficulty for the idea of equal freedom is different. It comes from the role of successful attainment of your purposes in this conception of freedom. If our purposes come into conflict, so too must our freedom. Any purpose, whether my private purpose of crossing your yard, or that state’s public purpose of coordinating traffic flow, can come in to conflict with some person’s ability to get what he or she wants. The closest such a conception of freedom can come to an idea of equal freedom is some distributive system that would be likely to equalize people’s chances of success.23 The sovereignty principle conceives of freedom differently, in terms of the mutual independence of persons from each other. Such freedom cannot be defined, let alone secured, if it depends on the particular purposes that different people happen to have, because part of the reason freedom is important is that it allows each person to decide what purposes to pursue. Instead, equal freedom is understood as each person’s ability to set and pursue his or her own purposes, consistent with the freedom of others to do the same. Each person's entitlement to decide how their powers will be used precludes prohibiting many of the setbacks people suffer as effects of other people’s non- dominating conduct. People always exercise their powers in a particular context, but that context is normally the result of other people's exercises of their own freedom. To protect me against the harms that I suffer as you go about your legitimate business, perhaps because you set a bad example for others, or deprive me of their custom, would be inconsistent with your freedom, because it would require you to use your powers in the way that most suited my wishes or vulnerabilities. You do not dominate me if you fail to provide me with a suitable context in which to pursue my favoured purposes. To the contrary, I would dominate you if I could call upon the law to force you to provide me with my preferred context for those purposes. That would just be requiring you to act on my behalf, to advance purposes I had set. That is, it would empower me to use force to turn you into my means. Refusing to provide me with a favourable context to exercise my powers is an exercise of your freedom, not a violation of mine, however mean spirited you may be about that refusal.31 He adds: Criterion My criterion is Protecting a System of Equal Freedom. Protecting a System of Equal Freedom means giving all people the ability to pursue their own ends. In other words, my right to swing my fist ends when it hits someone else’s face. Under this standard, the negative burden is to show that private space appropriation alone does not violate equal freedom. Conversely, the affirmative burden is to show that private space appropriation alone violates equal freedom. Thesis My thesis and sole contention is that since asserting ownership over something does not, by itself, harm others, the process of appropriation can’t be considered unjust. Forty years ago, John Lennon sang, “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can”. The concept of possession itself is interesting to consider, and investigate, and debate (Curchin, 2007). A recent report explained happiness and well-being as agential flourishing (Raibley, 2012). Possession (ownership) and taking action are concepts that contrast with each other, since the former represents stasis or little movement, and the latter is dynamic and movement itself. Thus, we have arrived at a significant question, psychologically and philosophically: Which is more important to achieve happiness, ownership (possession) or taking action? There is little research about the preference for ownership or taking action in relation to happiness. In this paper, we examine the happiness that people feel from possession or ownership in comparison to the happiness they achieve as a result of taking action. The purpose of this paper is to investigate Japanese people’s preference for ownership (possession) or taking action, to evaluate the correlations of this preference with gender, age, level of education, and annual income, and to discuss reasons for people’s preference. They add: On the other hand, there is little research about the preference for ownership (possession) or taking action in relation to happiness. One reason could be the difficulty in differentiating the terms “taking action”, and “experience”. One possible difference between the terms action and experience might be that people valued taking action for its achievement value, in addition to its experiential value (Nozick, 1974) . According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, action is the doing of something and/or state of being in motion or of working, whereas experience is the act of living through an event or events; personal involvement in or observation of events as they occur. These meanings are similar in Japanese. Taking action might have broader meaning beyond its experiential value (i.e., experiencing an event or events), such as work or achievement of value, and/or volunteering and making charitable contributions. Moreover, happiness from taking action is to some extent different from happiness from experience or experiential purchase, in accordance with the distinction between episodic happiness and well-being (Raibley, 2012) , since experience or experiential purchase is related or connected to an episode, an event, or events. We investigated the preference for ownership (possession) or taking action, in relation to hap- piness, considering that the term taking action included the term experience. We think that ownership is not only related to purchasing behavior, but also related to the monopolization of materials, which is close to being selfish. Psychological study of monopolization materials (Why do some people like to monopolize materials instead of freely transferring them to others?) is a very important and useful topic for the psychology of happiness and/or peace. When we look deeply into the question of ownership, we can find very broad and meaningful aspects in ownership, as like as in taking action. We think that taking action and ownership are also comparable in their broad meanings. Then, we carried out the research about the preference for ownership (possession) or taking action in relation to happiness. Nelson and Block And private property appropriation respects a system of equal freedom. In sharp contrast, each and every transaction that occurs under laissezfaire capitalism can boast volunteerism. When A purchases a pen from B for $1, they both agreed to the transaction. It was unanimous. And the same goes for all other commercial interactions, whether buying or selling, trading or bartering, lending or borrowing, or saving and investing. Thus, if property remains in the private sector, there is no violation of any just law as there is with public property. How can property rights be established? From the libertarian perspective, this is accomplished through homesteading. How does this work? The general rule is simple.8 One mixes his labor with the land, by planting a field or harvesting trees; a man captures and domesticates an animal, or kills one for food. Then, he becomes the owner of the resource owners establishes just title. So, if one man grows corn, and another milks a cow, and then they barter, the farmer owns the milk, even though he did not produce it, as does the rancher the corn, ditto. But, both can trace titles to what they now own to initial homesteading and voluntary interaction. The problem with so-called government ownership is that no politician, no bureaucrat, ever homesteaded or freely traded anything.9 Instead, the king, or the congress, simply declared control over certain territories. But this is on a par with everything else done by this institution. There is no justification, merely the fraudulent claim: “Might makes right.” We therefore conclude that private property, the very basis of the free enterprise system, is justified. Commons What of unowned property not controlled by either government or private individuals? The ethical status of the commons depends upon exactly how and why this occurs. The short answer is, if property is unowned because it is sub-marginal, then all is well. If, on the other hand, this status arises because the state refuses to allow private parties to homestead virgin territory and take ownership over it, then this is contrary to the libertarian ethos. The unowned property itself, of course, is not to blame; it is inanimate. The fault lies with the institution that refuses to allow homesteading and settlement on it. Why is some land sub-marginal? This is because it does not pay to settle on it. The terrain is too rough, or too far away from civilization to be economical, or too dangerous, or for any other reason unsuitable for habitation by any but the heartiest and most adventurous persons and even then, only temporarily. Since affirming denies rights without any wrongdoing from private entities, it violates the criterion and justice. | 2/4/22 |
A - JanFeb Trad NCTournament: Upenn | Round: 2 | Opponent: All Saints Episcopal RL | Judge: David Coates Value I negate and value Justice, meaning actions that treat people as they deserve. Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social justice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. Standard Thus, the criterion is Promoting Global Equality. Promoting global equality means acknowledging that all people have a role in benefiting the least well-off, since no one deserves mistreatment. Thesis My thesis is that when making global decisions, all means all. By expanding opportunities for low-income states, negating promotes equality and justice. C1: Who Appropriates C1 My first contention is that by giving low-income states a chance to appropriate space, negating justly equalizes the playing field. NASA has recognized the success of these commercial private space endeavors and joined the party, introducing its Centennial Challenges.43 However, the challenges sponsored by NASA are relatively modest, generally featuring prizes under one million dollars." The major limitation on the size of the prizes is government funding.4 5 Private commercial space enterprise is a more egalitarian model than national space agencies for exploring and developing space too. Private commerce has enabled undeveloped countries to compete with the major space-faring nations rather than depend on them. Also, while national space agencies serve the interests of their own citizenry, private commercial space enterprise can serve their shareholders, regardless of citizenry. Thus, an undeveloped nation may employ an international space enterprise whose shareholders are in part or in whole drawn from the citizenry of the nation. For example, consider Chile, which established the Chilean Space Agency ("CSA") in 2001. As recently as 2007, the CSA began entertaining bids from international space companies regarding an Earth observation satellite project. 46 Normally, the CSA would have to politely request and dutifully pay a space-faring State like the United States or Russia to develop and launch a satellite into orbit. In addition to offending state independence and sovereignty, those payments go into the pockets of the taxpayers of the space-faring State. However, the CSA's use of an international space company to implement its own space activities highlights how a robust commercial regime could bolster participation in space independent of the most developed space-faring States. Chile need not request a space-faring State to implement their own space activities if it can turn to a space company, and the payments to the space company could ostensibly be enjoyed by Chilean citizens that are shareholders in the international space company. Despite the lucrative and beneficial reasons for further developing outer space, and the demonstrated ability of the private sector to do so, several hurdles face private commercial space enterprise-none insurmountable. One potentially high hurdle is the legal structure governing outer space. He adds: Meyer, Zachary J. Partner, Varnum Attorneys at Law; member of the Business and Corporate Services Practice Team “Private Commercialization of Space in an International Regime: A Proposal for a Space District.” Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business, Vol. 30, Issue 1, Winter 2010. https://tinyurl.com/3yhyd26d CH Collectively, the Outer Space Treaty and Moon Treaty promote a legal regime seemingly inhospitable to the commercialization of outer space. However, the two treaties do not prohibit the commercialization of outer space outright. Rather, the two treaties resist private ownership and appropriation, and even that resistance is not absolute. Ultimately, as will soon become apparent, the two treaties do permit the private ownership and appropriation necessary to commercialize space so long as international interests are given their due consideration. As a general observation, the Outer Space Treaty is steeped in the rhetoric of a "common interest of all mankind," especially expressing the concern that one part of "all mankind"-the less-developed States – will be left out of the exploration and use of outer space while the other part of "all mankind" the developed States – will reap all the rewards of exploiting outer space.55 Specifically, it declares that the exploration and use of outer space is to be conducted "for the benefit and in the interests of all countries ... and shall be the province of all mankind." 56 To that end, outer space is to "be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies."s? Given the notion of "free access," it is little surprise that neither outer space nor celestial bodies are "subject to national appropriation."58 However, this does not directly address non-national appropriations, i.e., supra-national activities by the international community or sub-national activities by individuals. As to sub-national activities, the signatory States are required to "bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space" and on celestial bodies, which includes activities conducted by governmental entities, non-governmental entities, or both.59 If the activities are conducted by non-governmental entities, then the apropriate State must authorize and continuously supervise such activities. However, beyond authorization and supervision, there is no indication as to what this "responsibility" means for the extent of permitted sub-national appropriation. By expanding economic opportunities to more than just a few states, negating promotes equality and justice. C2: What Gets Appropriated C2 My second contention is that by making essential goods and services cheaper, negating promotes equality and justice. A. Why Explore and Develop: Advancement, Profit, and Benefit There are many reasons to explore and develop space, including that to do so is a challenge sure to bring out both creativity and dedication in its pioneers. Beyond adventure and futurism, other concrete and more immediate reasons exist: scientific and industrial advancement, commercial profit, and social benefit. The vacuum of space, the absence or reduction of gravity, and the extremes in temperature provide an ideal environment for the material processing necessary in many manufacturing industries, including metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, genetic engineering, and molecular electronics.13 The vacuum that exists in space permits enhanced or perfect crystallization of certain substances.14 Therefore, in space, the production of these substances can be accomplished much more efficiently than on Earth – seven hundred times more efficiently and four times more purely." These conditions make possible substantial scientific advances in the areas of medicine 6 and pharmacology, 7 and industrial advances in electronics," glass,' 9 and metallurgy.2 Commercial profit is sure to attach to the above scientific and industrial advances as well. Cheaper drugs, electronic components, and building materials mean higher profits for those companies willing to invest in space. Furthermore, the construction of a space infrastructure would stimulate all levels of the economy. 2' In fact, space exploration and development has already birthed a multi-billion dollar industry.2 2 Last decade's telecommunications boom spurred the initial development of a commercial space infrastructure: the building, launching, and maintaining of communications satellites.23 And now the infrastructure is rapidly evolving to accommodate the newest visitors to space: tourists. 2 4 "More space activity" translates into "more necessary infrastructure" and "more economic stimulus." The potential for future commercial profit from developing space infrastructure will also depend on another imminent space activity-space mining. The minable resources located on the Moon and in near-Earth asteroids are both immense and valuable.25 These extra-terrestrial resources are probably necessary to build a comprehensive space infrastructure: it simply costs too much to blast industrial materials in mass out of Earth's 26 gravity. Odds are you’ve recently seen the news that both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have successfully left our planet temporarily in spacecraft their own companies have built. These two successful trips are just the latest chapter in the “Billionaire Space Race.” The beginnings of this story originate with Peter Diamandis, who helped spur the initiation of the Ansari XPrize. According to the organization’s website, “The $10 million Ansari XPRIZE was designed to lower the risk and cost of going to space by incentivizing the creation of a reliable, reusable, privately financed, crewed spaceship that finally made private space travel commercially viable.” While the XPrize was initiated in the mid-‘90s, the winner was crowned in 2004, with Richard Branson and his company Virgin Galactic coming in to license the technology. Branson wasn’t the only entrepreneur interested in privatized space travel. Four years prior to the awarding of the Ansari X Prize in 2004, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos founded his own space exploration company, Blue Origin. Two years later, after the acquisition of PayPal, Elon Musk founded his company SpaceX. Before diving into why I think the Billionaire Space Race is a good thing, I want to take a minute to look back — all the way back to the 1960s space race. What started with a speech from President Kennedy in 1962 ended with a man on the moon less than seven years later. This space race unified a country, created 400,000 jobs across science, technology and manufacturing and inspired a generation to think ambitiously. The impacts of the original Space Race are still felt today. NASA’s 2019 article highlights some of the Apollo technologies still in use more than 50 years after the moon landing. Their list includes things like digital flight controls, food safety, space blankets, quake-proofing, rechargeable hearing aids and more! By expanding access to basic needs, negating helps the least well-off, promoting equality and justice. Thus, I negate, and now move on to my opponent’s case. | 2/12/22 |
A - JanFeb You Can Do More K EF KTournament: Colleyville | Round: 4 | Opponent: Greenhill NT | Judge: Aashir Sanjrani ROJ and Giroux CORPORATIONS ARE TAKING OVER EDUCATION – we desperately need critical pedagogy to resist that. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Thinking, which means helping students develop the skills to question the squo. Thus, I would propose interpreting “one-dimensional” as conforming to existing thought and behavior and lacking a critical dimension and a dimension of potentialities that transcend the existing society. In Marcuse's usage the adjective “one-dimensional” describes practices that conform to pre-existing structures, norms, and behavior, in contrast to multidimensional discourse, which focuses on possibilities that transcend the established state of affairs. This epistemological distinction presupposes antagonism between subject and object so that the subject is free to perceive possibilities in the world that do not yet exist but which can be realized. In the one-dimensional society, the subject is assimilated into the object and follows the dictates of external, objective norms and structures, thus losing the ability to discover more liberating possibilities and to engage in transformative practice to realize them. Marcuse's theory presupposes the existence of a human subject with freedom, creativity, and self-determination who stands in opposition to an object-world, perceived as substance, which contains possibilities to be realized and secondary qualities like values, aesthetic traits, and aspirations, which can be cultivated to enhance human life. He adds: In his early works, Marcuse himself attempted to synthesize Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism with Marxism, and in One-Dimensional Man one recognizes Husserl and Heideggerian motifs in Marcuse's critiques of scientific civilization and modes of thought. In particular, Marcuse develops a conception of a technological world, similar in some respects to that developed by Heidegger, and, like Husserl and Heidegger, sees technological rationality colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing techno- logical imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior. Marcuse thought that dialectical philosophy could promote critical thinking. One-Dimensional Man is perhaps Marcuse's most sustained attempt to present and develop the categories of the dialectical philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx. For Marcuse, dialectical thinking involved the ability to abstract one's perception and thought from existing forms in order to form more general concepts. This conception helps explain the difficulty of One-Dimensional Man and the demands that it imposes upon its reader. For Marcuse abstracts from the complexity and multiplicity of the existing society its fundamental tendencies and constituents, as well as those categories which constitute for him the forms of critical thinking. This demands that the reader also abstract from existing ways of looking at society and modes of thinking and attempt to perceive and think in a new way. Uncritical thinking derives its beliefs, norms, and values from existing thought and social practices, while critical thought seeks alternative modes of thought and behavior from which it creates a standpoint of critique. Such a critical standpoint requires developing what Marcuse calls “negative thinking,” which “negates” existing forms of thought and reality from the perspective of higher possibilities. This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals' full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one's own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. Philosophy was thus to supply the norms for social criticism and the ideal of liberation which would guide social change and individual self- transformation. Thus, the Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Rejection of One-Dimensional Thought. This means distancing ourselves from essentializing modes of thinking – e.g., the notion that value can only come from money. We measure the standard based on whether we remain open to multiple ways of knowing or approaching problems; the more restrictive the approach, the less we adhere to the framework. | 2/5/22 |
A - JanFeb You Can Do More K EF KTournament: Colleyville | Round: 4 | Opponent: Greenhill NT | Judge: Aashir Sanjrani ROJ and Giroux CORPORATIONS ARE TAKING OVER EDUCATION – we desperately need critical pedagogy to resist that. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Thinking, which means helping students develop the skills to question the squo. Thus, I would propose interpreting “one-dimensional” as conforming to existing thought and behavior and lacking a critical dimension and a dimension of potentialities that transcend the existing society. In Marcuse's usage the adjective “one-dimensional” describes practices that conform to pre-existing structures, norms, and behavior, in contrast to multidimensional discourse, which focuses on possibilities that transcend the established state of affairs. This epistemological distinction presupposes antagonism between subject and object so that the subject is free to perceive possibilities in the world that do not yet exist but which can be realized. In the one-dimensional society, the subject is assimilated into the object and follows the dictates of external, objective norms and structures, thus losing the ability to discover more liberating possibilities and to engage in transformative practice to realize them. Marcuse's theory presupposes the existence of a human subject with freedom, creativity, and self-determination who stands in opposition to an object-world, perceived as substance, which contains possibilities to be realized and secondary qualities like values, aesthetic traits, and aspirations, which can be cultivated to enhance human life. He adds: In his early works, Marcuse himself attempted to synthesize Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism with Marxism, and in One-Dimensional Man one recognizes Husserl and Heideggerian motifs in Marcuse's critiques of scientific civilization and modes of thought. In particular, Marcuse develops a conception of a technological world, similar in some respects to that developed by Heidegger, and, like Husserl and Heidegger, sees technological rationality colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing techno- logical imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior. Marcuse thought that dialectical philosophy could promote critical thinking. One-Dimensional Man is perhaps Marcuse's most sustained attempt to present and develop the categories of the dialectical philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx. For Marcuse, dialectical thinking involved the ability to abstract one's perception and thought from existing forms in order to form more general concepts. This conception helps explain the difficulty of One-Dimensional Man and the demands that it imposes upon its reader. For Marcuse abstracts from the complexity and multiplicity of the existing society its fundamental tendencies and constituents, as well as those categories which constitute for him the forms of critical thinking. This demands that the reader also abstract from existing ways of looking at society and modes of thinking and attempt to perceive and think in a new way. Uncritical thinking derives its beliefs, norms, and values from existing thought and social practices, while critical thought seeks alternative modes of thought and behavior from which it creates a standpoint of critique. Such a critical standpoint requires developing what Marcuse calls “negative thinking,” which “negates” existing forms of thought and reality from the perspective of higher possibilities. This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals' full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one's own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. Philosophy was thus to supply the norms for social criticism and the ideal of liberation which would guide social change and individual self- transformation. Thus, the Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Rejection of One-Dimensional Thought. This means distancing ourselves from essentializing modes of thinking – e.g., the notion that value can only come from money. We measure the standard based on whether we remain open to multiple ways of knowing or approaching problems; the more restrictive the approach, the less we adhere to the framework. | 2/5/22 |
A - NovDec Curry K V1Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: Iyana, Trotman
B. Impacts Thus, they can’t redefine the notion of “just governments” even if they try to reconceptualize the living wage: Black people must still appeal to white people for such claims to be recognized. Curry 2 Second, affirming an “ought” statement with respect to Blackness naïvely places faith in a future that will never come, entrenching oppression. Thus, C. Alternative AND NO PERMS – they already committed to an orientation that lets governments try to solve racism under the guise of “justice” – their reliance on neoliberal models is FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPATIBLE with the alt. | 11/6/21 |
A - NovDec Curry K V2Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Claudia Ribera ROJ I reject the illusions of false hope, so I negate. The Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Education, which means they must enhance our potential to uncover biases and oppression in dominant thinking. The search for a new politics and a new critical language that crosses the critical theory/postmodern divide must reinvigorate the relationship between democracy, ethics, and political agency by expanding both the meaning of the pedagogical as a political practice while at the same time making the political more pedagogical. In the first instance, it is crucial to recognize that Pedagogy has less to do with the language of technique and methodology than it does with issues of politics and power. Pedagogy is amoral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations and must be understood as a cultural politics that offers both a particular version and vision of civic life, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. As Roger Simon (1987) observes: As an introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life, education always presupposes a vision of the future. In this respect a curriculum and its supporting pedagogy are a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and out communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone’s dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension. It is in this respect that Any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a form of cultural politics, as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth, and above all value is informed by practices which organize knowledge and meaning. (p. 372) An oppositional cultural politics can take many forms, but Given the current assault by neoliberalism on all aspects of democratic public life, it seems imperative that educators must revitalise the struggles to create conditions that link in which learning would be linked to social change in a wide various of social sites, and pedagogy to would take on the task of regenerating both a renewed sense of social and political agency and a critical subversion of dominant power itself. Under such circumstances, agency becomes the site through which power is not transcended but reworked, replayed, and restaged in productive ways. Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about power, but it also, as Cornelius Castoriadis (1996) points out, “has to do with political judgements and value choices” (p.8), indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. In this instance, Critical pedagogy emphasizes critical reflexivity, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history. However, among many educators and social theorists, there is a widespread refusal to recognize that this form of education is not only the foundation for expanding and enabling political agency, but it also takes place across a wide variety of public spheres mediated through the very force of culture itself. One of the central tasks of any viable critical pedagogy would be to make visible alternative models of radical democratic relations in a wide variety of sites. These spaces can make the pedagogical more political by raising fundamental questions such as: What is the relationship between social justice and the distribution of public resources and goods? What are the conditions, knowledge and skills that are a prerequisite for political agency and social change? At the very least, such a project involves understanding and critically engaging dominant public transcripts and values within a broader set of historical and institutional contexts. Making the political more pedagogical in this instance This suggests producing modes of knowledge and social practices that not only affirms oppositional cultural work, but and offers opportunities to mobilize instances of collective outrage, if not collective action. Such mobilisation opposes glaring material inequities and the growing cynical belief that today’s culture of investment and finance makes it impossible to address many of the major social problems facing both the U.S. and the larger world. Most importantly, such work points to the link between civic education, critical pedagogy, and modes of oppositional political agency that are pivotal to elucidating a politics that promotes autonomy and social change. At the very least, critical pedagogy proposes that education is a form of political intervention in the world that is capable of creating the possibilities for social transformation. Rather than viewing teaching as technical practice, radical pedagogy in the broadest terms is a moral and political: practice premised on the assumption that learning is not about processing received knowledge but actually transforming it as part of a more expansive struggle for individual rights and social justice. This implies that Any viable notion of pedagogy and resistance should illustrate how knowledge, values, desire, and social relations are always implicated in relations of power. and how such an understanding can be used pedagogically and politically by students to further expand and deepen the imperatives of economic and political democracy. The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of neoliberalism is to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. Central to such a challenge is providing students with the skills, knowledge, and authority they need to inquire and act upon what it means to live in a substantive democracy, to recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and to fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial, and gendered inequalities. ROB and Giroux 2 The Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Position that Fosters Solutions to Social Oppression. Fostering solutions to social oppression means identifying and trying to redress inequality, rather than theorizing without realizing. Critical pedagogy locates discursive practices in a broader set of interrelations, but it also analyzes and gives meaning to such relations by defining them within particular contexts constructed through the operations of power as articulated through the interaction among texts, teachers, and students. Questions of articulation and context need to be fore grounded as both a matter of ethics and politics. Ethically, critical pedagogy requires an ongoing indictment “of those forms of truth-seeking which imagined themselves to be eternally and placelessly valid” (Gilroy, 2000, p.69). Simply put, Educators need to must cast a critical eye on those forms of knowledge and social relations that define themselves through a conceptual purity and political innocence that cloud not only how they come into being but also ignore that their alleged neutrality on which they stand is already grounded in ethico-political choices. Thomas Keenan (1997) rightly argues that Ethics on the pedagogical front demands an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a ‘politics of possibility’ through a continual critical engagement. with texts, images, events, and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into public pedagogies (p. 2). One consequence of linking pedagogy to the specificity of place is that it foregrounds the need for educators to rethink the cultural and political baggage they bring to each educational encounter; it also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically and politically accountable for the stories they produce, the claims they make upon public memory, and the images of the future they deem legitimate. Pedagogy is never innocent and if it is to be understood and problematized as a form of academic labor, Educators must not only critically question and register their own subjective involvement in how and what they teach, they must also resist all calls to depoliticize pedagogy through appeals to either scientific objectivity or ideological dogmatism. Far from being disinterested or ideologically frozen, Critical pedagogy is concerned about the articulation of knowledge to social effects and succeeds to the degree in which when educators encourage critical reflection and moral and civic agency rather than simply mold it. Crucial to this position is the necessity for critical educators to be attentive to the ethical dimensions of their own practice. Running a standard like “util” or “maximizing expected well-being” links them directly into the K. Assuming that people have identical interests, or that there’s some value-neutral “well-being” we all share, is exactly the problem. A. Links
Curry 1 First, the very notion of “just governments” appeals to a White-centered ethic that itself oppresses black people. Traditionally we have taken ethics to be, as Henry Sidgwick’s claims, "any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings 'ought'—or what is right for them—or to seek to realize by voluntary action.”vii This rational procedure is however at odds with the empirical reality the ethical deliberation must concern itself with. To argue, as is often done, that the government, its citizens, or white people should act justly, assumes that the possibility of how they could act defines their moral disposition. If a white person could possibly not be racist, it does not mean that the possibility of not being racist, can be taken to mean that they are not racist. In ethical deliberations dealing with the problem of racism, it is common practice to attribute to historically racist institutions, and individuals universal moral qualities that have yet to be demonstrated. This abstraction from reality is what frames our ethical norms and allows us to maintain, despite history or evidence, that racist entities will act justly given the choice. Under such complexities, The only ethical deliberation concerning racism must be anti-ethical, or a judgment refusing to write morality onto immoral entities. In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the dominant illusion is that discourse itself, an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as “similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such Discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual., who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined, not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch. Thus, they can’t redefine the notion of “just governments” even if they try to reconceptualize the living wage: Black people must still appeal to white people for such claims to be recognized. Ought implies a projected (futural) act. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive,. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, they can ideally imagine an ‘if condition,’ whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: ‘if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors.’ Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and 4 hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action., hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics. Thus, C. Alternative: Robinson Reject the aff’s notion of “just governments” 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 framing of just governments as fundamentally racist – it’s not a question of policy, but of orientation. To clarify, we interrogate the anti-Black underpinnings of neoliberal institutions like governments as a prerequisite to any policy action. 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. AND NO PERMS – they already committed to an orientation that lets governments try to solve racism under the guise of “justice” – their reliance on neoliberal models is FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPATIBLE with the alt. | 12/4/21 |
A- Jan Feb Non Profit DATournament: Colleyville | Round: 2 | Opponent: Clear Springs EG | Judge: Blake, Andrews In a first-of-its-kind coalition to accelerate climate change action, and with help from UArizona researchers, a new nonprofit organization called Carbon Mapper is launching a program to improve scientific understanding of global methane and carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon Mapper, a new nonprofit organization partnering with the University of Arizona, today announced a groundbreaking program to help improve understanding of and accelerate reductions in global methane and carbon dioxide emissions. The Carbon Mapper consortium also announced plans to deploy a satellite constellation to pinpoint, quantify and track methane and carbon dioxide emissions. "This decade represents an all-hands-on-deck moment for humanity to make critical progress in addressing climate change," said Riley Duren, research scientist in the UArizona Office of Research, Innovation and Impact and CEO of Carbon Mapper. "Our mission is to help fill gaps in the emerging global ecosystem of methane and CO2 monitoring systems by delivering data that's timely, actionable and accessible for science-based decision making." Current approaches to measuring methane and carbon dioxide emissions at the scale of individual facilities – particularly intermittent activity – present challenges, especially in terms of transparency, accuracy, scalability and cost. Carbon Mapper – which also is partnering with the state of California, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Planet, Arizona State University, High Tide Foundation and RMI – will help overcome these technological barriers and enable accelerated action by making publicly available high emitting methane and carbon dioxide sources quickly and persistently visible at the facility level. The data collected by the Carbon Mapper constellation of satellites will provide more complete, precise and timely measurement of methane and carbon dioxide source level emissions as well as more than 25 other environmental indicators. Through the Carbon Mapper-UArizona partnership, Duren and other UArizona researchers offer scientific leadership of the methane and carbon dioxide emissions data delivery including developing new algorithms and analytic frameworks for testing them with an ongoing research program. "Time is of the essence when it comes to understanding and mitigating methane and CO2 emissions," said Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell. "Partnering with Carbon Mapper will give University of Arizona researchers the tools needed to not only see emissions hot spots, but to understand their causes and develop actionable plans for reducing or eliminating these sources." Carbon Mapper, in collaboration with its public and private partners, is developing the satellite constellation in three phases. The initial study phase, now complete, included two years of preliminary engineering development and manufacturing. The first phase is underway and includes development of the first two satellites by Planet and JPL, scheduled for launch in 2023, accompanying data processing platforms, and ongoing cooperative methane mitigation pilot projects using aircraft in California and other U.S. states. P;’ | 2/11/22 |
B - NovDec Marcuse K V1 read as a DATournament: Apple Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: Iyana, Trotman Andrew Worker’s investment and management of the industry further entrenches capitalism. B. Impacts Marcuse 2 This is the construction of liberties under inequality and unfreedom. | 11/6/21 |
B - NovDec Marcuse K V2Tournament: Princeton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington EY | Judge: Daniel Iskhakov ROB and Giroux I negate. Since education exists to train real world activists, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Thinking, meaning helping students develop the skills to question the squo. Thus, I would propose interpreting “one-dimensional” as conforming to existing thought and behavior and lacking a critical dimension and a dimension of potentialities that transcend the existing society. In Marcuse's usage the adjective “one-dimensional” describes practices that conform to pre-existing structures, norms, and behavior, in contrast to multidimensional discourse, which focuses on possibilities that transcend the established state of affairs. This epistemological distinction presupposes antagonism between subject and object so that the subject is free to perceive possibilities in the world that do not yet exist but which can be realized. In the one-dimensional society, the subject is assimilated into the object and follows the dictates of external, objective norms and structures, thus losing the ability to discover more liberating possibilities and to engage in transformative practice to realize them. Marcuse's theory presupposes the existence of a human subject with freedom, creativity, and self-determination who stands in opposition to an object-world, perceived as substance, which contains possibilities to be realized and secondary qualities like values, aesthetic traits, and aspirations, which can be cultivated to enhance human life. He adds: In his early works, Marcuse himself attempted to synthesize Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism with Marxism, and in One-Dimensional Man one recognizes Husserl and Heideggerian motifs in Marcuse's critiques of scientific civilization and modes of thought. In particular, Marcuse develops a conception of a technological world, similar in some respects to that developed by Heidegger, and, like Husserl and Heidegger, sees technological rationality colonizing everyday life, robbing individuals of freedom and individuality by imposing techno- logical imperatives, rules, and structures upon their thought and behavior. Marcuse thought that dialectical philosophy could promote critical thinking. One-Dimensional Man is perhaps Marcuse's most sustained attempt to present and develop the categories of the dialectical philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx. For Marcuse, dialectical thinking involved the ability to abstract one's perception and thought from existing forms in order to form more general concepts. This conception helps explain the difficulty of One-Dimensional Man and the demands that it imposes upon its reader. For Marcuse abstracts from the complexity and multiplicity of the existing society its fundamental tendencies and constituents, as well as those categories which constitute for him the forms of critical thinking. This demands that the reader also abstract from existing ways of looking at society and modes of thinking and attempt to perceive and think in a new way. Uncritical thinking derives its beliefs, norms, and values from existing thought and social practices, while critical thought seeks alternative modes of thought and behavior from which it creates a standpoint of critique. Such a critical standpoint requires developing what Marcuse calls “negative thinking,” which “negates” existing forms of thought and reality from the perspective of higher possibilities. This practice presupposes the ability to make a distinction between existence and essence, fact and potentiality, and appearance and reality. Mere existence would be negated in favor of realizing higher potentialities while norms discovered by reason would be used to criticize and overcome lower forms of thought and social organization. Thus grasping potentialities for freedom and happiness would make possible the negation of conditions that inhibited individuals' full development and realization. In other words, perceiving the possibility of self-determination and constructing one's own needs and values could enable individuals to break with the existing world of thought and behavior. Philosophy was thus to supply the norms for social criticism and the ideal of liberation which would guide social change and individual self- transformation. A. Link Eidlin Strikes put a band-aid on a broken leg – they do nothing to transform the employer-employee relationship. Labor unions have long occupied a paradoxical position within Marxist theory. They are an essential expression of the working class taking shape as a collective actor and an essential vehicle for working-class action. When we speak of “the working class” or “working-class activity,” we are often analyzing the actions of workers either organized into unions or trying to organize themselves into unions. At the same time, unions are an imperfect and incomplete vehicle for the working class to achieve one of Marxist theory’s central goals: overthrowing capitalism. Unions by their very existence affirm and reinforce capitalist class society. As organizations which primarily negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions with employers, unions only exist in relation to capitalists. This makes them almost by definition reformist institutions, designed to mitigate and manage the employment relationship, not transform it. Many unions have adapted to this conservative, managerial role. Others have played key roles in challenging capital’s power. Some have even played insurgent roles at one moment and managerial roles at others. When unions have organized workplace insurgencies, this has sometimes translated into political pressure that expanded democracy and led to large-scale policy reforms. In the few revolutionary historical moments that we can identify, worker organization, whether called unions or something else, has been essential. Thus, labor unions and movements have long been a central focus of Marxist debate. At its core, the debate centers around the role of unions in class formation, the creation of the revolutionary working-class agent. The debate focuses on four key questions. First, to what degree do unions simply reflect existing relations of production and class struggle, or actively shape those relations? Second, if unions actively shape class struggle, why and under what conditions do they enhance or inhibit it? Third, how do unions shape class identities, and how does this affect unions’ scope of action? Fourth, what is the relation between unions and politics? This question is comprised of two sub-questions: to what degree do unions help or hinder struggles in the workplace becoming broader political struggles? And how should unions relate to political parties, the more conventional vehicle for advancing political demands? The following is a chapter from The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx (Oxford University Press, 2019). It assesses Marxist debates surrounding trade unions, oriented by the four questions mentioned previously. It proceeds historically, first examining how Marx and Engels conceived of the roles and limitations of trade unions, then tracing how others within Marxism have pursued these debates as class relations and politics have changed over time. While the chapter includes some history of labor unions and movements themselves, the central focus is on how Marxist theorists thought of and related to those movements. Marx and Engels wrote extensively about the unions of their time, although never systematically. The majority of their writings on unions responded to concrete labor struggles of their time. From their earliest works, they grasped unions’ necessity and limitations in creating a working-class agent capable of advancing class struggle against the bourgeoisie. This departed from previous variants of socialism, often based in idealized views of rebuilding a rapidly eroding community of artisanal producers, which did not emphasize class organization or class struggle. Writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England about emerging forms of unionism, Engels observed that even though workers’ primary struggles were over material issues such as wages, they pointed to a deeper social and political conflict: What gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. They im¬ ply the recognition of the fact that the supremacy of the bourgeoisie is based wholly upon the competition of the workers among themselves; i.e., upon their want of cohesion. And precisely because the Unions direct themselves against the vital nerve of the present social order, however one-sidedly, in however narrow a way, are they so dangerous to this social order. At the same time, Engels saw that, even as union struggles “kept alive the opposition of the workers to the … omnipotence of the bourgeoisie,” so too did they “compel the admission that something more is needed than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class.” Here Engels articulates the crux of the problem. First, unions are essential for working-class formation, creating a collective actor both opposed to the bourgeoisie and capable of challenging it for power. Marcuse is not concerned with "basic" transformations in society; he is not interested in the technical innovations that would make mechanized labour less mechanical: nor does he deal with reorganization of unions nor with workers' participation in industry. Rather, after his violent denunciation of capitalism, in the rather limp conclusion to One-Dimensional Man, he advocates an extension of the welfare state, the elimination of the spurious needs created by ad- vertising, an extension of birth control programs, an increase in privacy so as not to compel the sensitive to be inflicted with the "sounds, sights and smells" of the mass, the prevention of the pollution of air and water, the creation of parks and gardens, and the better treatment of animal life.25 Many of these programs may be worthy objectives, but it is less clear that they would consti- tute basic changes in our economical system, changes which are fundamental to a socialist revolution. The reason that Marcuse does not advocate radical alteration in the economic base of society is because he perceives that capitalist modes of production are well on their way to becoming automated. Automation is "the very base of all forms of human freedom."26 While men have to work, they cannot be free. Hence there is no point in the creation of machinery designed to actualize the human potential in work as human fulfilment can only be found outside the work process. Nor is there any value in substantial alterations in the relations of production, alterations aimed at transferring the power of making technical and policy decisions (including control of training schools and institutes of education) from management to the unions. Radical alterations in the means and relations of production would only be palliatives; complete freedom, the aim of socialism, is only possible through the complete substitution of human labour by machines. Moreover Marcuse sees the workers in modern societies to be so conditioned and manipulated by the ruling class that they are not capable of revolutionary action or industrial self-management. The conservative character of modern workers militates "against the notion that the replacement of the prevailing control over the productive process by 'control from below' would mean the advent of qualitative change.""27 Marcuse opposes the aim of "autogestion" (workers' control or management of industry) which is advocated by French and Italian unionists. This strategy cannot lead to ever-increasing power of the workers and a basis for a transition to socialism. Workers' control of industrial processes and policy would lead to the creation of vested interests of labour within the capitalist system, interests which would further entrench and solidify capitalism.28 If you are part of a union that goes on strike, you may hope that it comes to an end quickly and with optimal results. After all, a strike can have a deep economic impact on your personal budget. However, once it is over and it's time to get back to work, there is more to consider than leaving your signs at the picket line and returning to your station. Check With Union Reps Make sure that the strike is indeed over and that it is OK for you to return to work. If you cross the picket line, thinking the strike is over when it's not, you may incur fines -- and worse, harassment by other strikers -- for doing so. In most instances, union leaders will circulate a letter or email signalling the end of the strike, so you have written confirmation that you may return to work. Reach Out to Non-Striking Employees Hopefully, you've kept up with non-striking employees during the strike, simply to keep abreast of what's going on in the office. However, if you haven't, reach out to non-striking employees before returning to work so you know what kind of climate to expect. Find out how the work has been distributed, what the environment of the office has been like and how some of other employees who stayed throughout the strike are feeling. Refrain From Discussing the Strike When you do return to work, don't discuss the strike openly with other employees. Chances are, company brass is less than pleased by the strike and don't want to hear it being discussed around the office. If you are going to discuss the strike with others, then do so outside of work and don't discuss management or specific people in a negative way. Focus On Your Work When you get back to work, focus on your responsibilities and specific tasks associated with your job. Chances are, if your job was held -- and especially if no one was doing it while you were striking --- you have a mountain of work to complete. Get back to work and do the best job possible, without allowing company politics to interfere in the process. In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer. As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own. By the same token, however, no tribunal can justly arrogate to itself the right to decide which needs should be developed and satisfied. Any such tribunal is reprehensible, although our revulsion does not do away with the question: how can the people who have been the object of effective and productive domination by themselves create the conditions of 2 freedom? The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more unimaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation. To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea-although one might dispute the righteousness of a society which ridicules this idea while making its own population into objects of total administration. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the pre- dominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. The process always replaces one system of preconditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction. B. Impacts Marcuse 1 THIS MAKES CAP STRONGER – people won’t fight against it if the conditions are better. Now it is precisely this new consciousness, this "space within," the space for the transcending historical practice, which is being barred by a society in which subjects as well as objects constitute instrumentalities in a whole that has its raison d'etre in the accomplishments of its overpowering productivity. Its supreme promise is an ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action, for the capacity to contain and manipulate subversive imagination and effort is an integral part of the given society. Those whose life is the hell of the Affluent Society are kept in line by a brutality which revives medieval and early modern practices. For the other, less underprivileged people, society takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable, and it accomplishes this fact in the process of production itself. Under its impact, the laboring classes in the advanced areas of industrial civilization are undergoing a decisive transformation, which has become the subject of a vast sociological research. I shall enumerate the main factors of this transformation: This kind of masterly enslavement is not essentially different from that of the typist, the bank teller, the high-pressure sales- man or saleswoman, and the television announcer. Standardization and the routine assimilate productive and non-productive jobs. The proletarian of the previous stages of capitalism was indeed the beast of burden, by the labor of his body procuring the necessities and luxuries of life while living in filth and poverty. Thus he was the living denial of his society. organized worker in the advanced areas of the technological society lives this denial less conspicuously and, like the other human objects of the social division of labor, he is being incorporated into the technological community of the administered population. Moreover, in the most successful areas of automation, some sort of technological community seems to integrate the human atoms at work. The machine seems to instill some drugging rhythm in the operators: "It is generally agreed that interdependent motions performed by a group of persons which follow a rhythmic pattern yield satisfaction-quite apart from what is being accomplished by the motions"; Indeed, in the most highly developed areas of contemporary society, the transplantation of social into individual needs is so effective that the difference between them seems to be purely theoretical. Can one really distinguish between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as agents of manipulation and indoctrination? Between the automobile as nuisance and as convenience? Between the horrors and the com- forts of functional architecture? Between the work for national defense and the work for corporate gain? Between the private pleasure and the commercial and political utility involved in increasing the birth rate? We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civiliza- tion transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation question- able. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced. The prevailing forms of social control are technological in a new sense. To be sure, the technical structure and efficacy of the productive and destructive apparatus has been a major instru- mentality for subjecting the population to the established social division oflabor throughout the modern period. Moreover, such integration has always been accompanied by more obvious forms of compulsion: loss of livelihood, the administration of justice, the police, the armed forces. It still is. But in the con- temporary period, the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests-to such an extent that all contradiction seems irrational and all counteraction impossible. No wonder then that, in the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intel- lectual and emotional refusal "to go along" appears neurotic and impotent. This is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of new forms of existence. But the term "introjection" perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the "outer" into the "inner." Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies-an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of "inner freedom" here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may become and remain "himself." Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. Each major episode of crisis in the world capitalist system has presented the potential for systemic change. Each has involved the breakdown of state legitimacy, escalating class and social struggles, and military conflicts, leading to a restructuring of the system, including new institutional arrangements, class relations, and accumulation activities that eventually result in a restabilization of the system and renewed capitalist expansion. The current crisis shares aspects of earlier system-wide structural crises, such as of the 1880s, the 1930s or the 1970s. But there are six interrelated dimensions to the current crisis that I believe sets it apart from these earlier ones and suggests that a simple restructuring of the system will not lead to its restabilization – that is, our very survival now requires a revolution against global capitalism (Robinson, 2014). These six dimensions, in broad strokes, present a “big picture” context in which a global police state is emerging. First, the system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. We have already passed tipping points in climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and diversity loss. For the first time ever, human conduct is intersecting with and fundamentally altering the earth system in such a way that threatens to bring about a sixth mass extinction (see, e.g., Foster et al., 2011; Moore, 2015). These ecological dimensions of global crisis have been brought to the forefront of the global agenda by the worldwide environmental justice movement. Communities around the world have come under escalating repression as they face off against transnational corporate plunder of their environment. While capitalism cannot be held solely responsible for the ecological crisis, it is difficult to imagine that the environmental catastrophe can be resolved within the capitalist system given capital’s implacable impulse to accumulate and its accelerated commodification of nature. Second, the level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented. The richest one percent of humanity in 2016 controlled over half of the world’s wealth and 20 percent controlled 95 percent of that wealth, while the remaining 80 percent had to make do with just five percent (Oxfam, 2017). These escalating inequalities fuel capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation: the TCC cannot find productive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated, leading to chronic stagnation in the world economy (see next section). Such extreme levels of social polarization present a challenge of social control to dominant groups. As Trumpism in the United States as well as the rise of far-right and neo-fascist movements in Europe so well illustrate, cooptation also involves the manipulation of fear and insecurity among the downwardly mobile so that social anxiety is channeled towards scapegoated communities. This psychosocial mechanism of displacing mass anxieties is not new, but it appears to be increasing around the world in the face of the structural destabilization of capitalist globalization. Extreme inequality requires extreme violence and repression that lend themselves to projects of 21st century fascism. C. Alternative Whitfield The alt is to embrace intentional communities using democratic processes WITHOUT democratic governance already exist – this is a shift away from existing institutions and a rebuild the state. There are already existing communities that are very much like the liberated zones I describe here. There are intentional communities that combine collective living arrangements with productive opportunities, often including or even centered around food production. Some of them are arranged as egalitarian communities where everything is shared, and intense democratic processes draw all of the community members into collective decision making on all of the community’s affairs, including how the necessary tasks for the community are shared. There is a long history of such communities and they have likely had little impact on the larger societies outside of them, even though they possess many transformative elements. Some of these communities are insular in nature and mainly represent a way to get away from what is painful, irrational, or at the very least, undesirable in the mainstream communities. Many of these communities are also known for leading a rustic, some might even say primitive existence. That is partly a reflection of the distance between these communities and the consumerism that surrounds them. I would offer that for the type of liberated zones that I think will make more of a difference to be viable, they would have to be able to create an intense loyalty among those who live in them, and a strong base of support for those on the outside, who, for one reason or the other do not. It would never be sufficient to offer that these communities are capable, or even interested in replicating the lifestyles that have been created in the dominant society. There would need to be some conscious breaking away from societal norms. But I contend that it becomes easier as the existing structures prove themselves increasingly incapable of keeping their promises of a comfortable life for the many. But we still have to ask, “Is it enough stuff?” You know we are addicted to bigger and bigger piles of stuff, despite the ecological price that we pay and the fact that for whatever we accumulate there is someone somewhere trying to sell us more. There are still those who will not be satisfied unless they are able to buy the things that are being marketed to them. Many young people will not remember, but once a 19-inch TV was considered a big screen. Nowadays, folks with limited income will buy 52” and 80” screens on time terms, claiming that these are household needs. While I am no one to object to other people’s desires, I don’t think the liberated zones that I envision would be producing large screen TV units in the near term. There would likely be live theatre, and live concerts, and live music, art and poetry shows on the regular. This is what I mean when I talk about the need to make meaning. We are capable of leading good lives without the consumer debt peonage that many of us have become accustomed to as a means of fulfilling the dreams not of our families and communities, but rather the dreams of the marketers who derive their privilege from compensation they get from getting us to buy things that we don’t need, and quite honestly might not have even thought of, had the marketers not told us that we just had to have them. It is sad that we are called upon to measure ourselves, not by what we know, not by what we can do, not by what we are, but rather by what we buy at high prices because of celebrity endorsements. It is sad to hear “I just want to get paid.” As the highest aspiration of some young folks. And when someone points out to them the unfairness of a system that makes many more losers than winners and points out that we deserve a society that is fair and creates opportunities for all, it is so sad to hear, “I'll take my chance. I’d rather take a chance at being rich than to have certainty of a less glamorous existence.” We need to remember that we are addicted. But more and more people are coming to realize that the deck is stacked. You get to cut the cards but the jokers, the aces and kings have all been taken out of the deck. There is very little left to win. This isn’t really gambling, because we have no chance. | 12/4/21 |
C - NovDec Extra T V1Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 3 | Opponent: Saratoga AG | Judge: Derek, Ying B. Violation
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C - NovDec Extra T V2Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Claudia Ribera A. Interpretation Gourevitch The aff must defend only recognition of an unconditional right of workers to strike. The right to strike is peculiar. It is not a right to quit. The right to quit is part of freedom of contract and the mirror of employment-at-will. Workers may quit when they no longer wish to work for an employer; employers may fire their employees when they no longer want to employ them. Either of those acts severs the contractual relation- ship and the two parties are no longer assumed to be in any relationship at all. The right to strike, however, assumes the continuity of the very relationship that is suspended. Workers on strike refuse to work but do not claim to have left the job. After all, the whole point of a strike is that it is a collective work stoppage, not a collective quitting of the job. This is the feature of the strike that has marked it out from other forms of social action. If a right to strike is not a right to quit, what is it? It is the right that workers claim to refuse to perform work they have agreed to do while retaining a right to the job. Most of what is peculiar, not to mention fraught, about a strike is contained in that latter clause. Yet, surprisingly, few commentators recognize just how central and yet peculiar this claim is.Opponents of the right to strike are sometimes more alive to its distinctive features than defenders. One critic, for instance, makes the distinction between quitting and striking the basis of his entire argument: the unqualified right to withdraw labour, which is a clear right of free men, does not describe the behaviour of strikers.... Strikers . . . withdraw from the performance of their jobs, but in the only relevant sense they do not withdraw their labour. B. Violation Violation They defend that “a just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike as a ghostly revolutionary tatic” – that’s WAY MORE than the topic, since it involves a method totally separate from implementing the right to strike. C. Net Benefits
Accessibility – that’s a prior question to fairness or education because it’s a question of whether people join and feel comfortable in debate in the first place. No RVIs NO RVIs:
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C - NovDec Just Government UK T V1Tournament: Princeton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington EY | Judge: Daniel Iskhakov A. Interpretation Hill The aff must defend a just government as the agent of action – that means a state that treats people equally. Why not have differing levels of respect and noninterference depending on differing abilities? Human beings demonstrating mind-numbing levels of rationality or scoring in the 99th percentile on rationality tests could be accorded higher levels of respect and noninterference than others. But the respect is not parceled out in chunks upon receipt of rationality vouchers, or distributed as a reward for dexterity in forming Venn diagrams or executing syllogistic reasoning. It results from humanity as a group crossing a threshhold; because human beings can make choices, importantly moral choices, and formulate plans, they are due the opportunity to make the choices and design the plans. No matter how well or poorly thought-out the plans or how selfish or altruistic the choices, the fundamental human ability to choose and plan grounds the moral rights equally for all human beings. The ability is a shared, species-wide ability (I do not mean to claim that this has some biological foundation) and the concomitant moral rights are also equally shared. Being treated equally is one of the indicators of justice. Rawls muses about justice "always expressing a kind of equality" (1971, p. 58) and John Stuart Mill claims that equality is "included among the precepts of justice" (1987, p. 474). Being treated justly, in the sense of being treated fairly and equitably, would seem to flow naturally out of the minimal moral rights mentioned above. (I am referring here only to fairness and equity in respect of basic rights, not with respect to distribution of resources, as presented by Rawls.) Relating to others respectfully requires evenhandedness: It would be disrespectful to take advantage of someone, cheat her or coerce her into an action. A State, recast here as a collective of human beings, should operate with the injunction that it must respect all human beings based on recognition of their moral rights. In its pursuit of that goal, it would be forced to act justly, for to treat another with respect, in Kantian terms as an "end" rather than as a "means" only, is simply to act with the equality and impartiality that characterize justice. It might be charged that if the government has to treat everyone justly and with this minimal level of respect, then it would have to treat citizen and non-citizen in the same way. Citizen and non-citizen would be afforded security and protection under the law. So diffuse would government regulation become that it would be difficult to tell where one country ended and another began since all persons would be showered with benign superintendence. This charge stretches "minimal respect and just dealings" to an unsupportable extent. The possession of minimal rights does not entail voting rights or other benefits accruing from citizenship. It simply ushers forth forbearance from harm, justice in transactions. A question has been raised as to whether grounding the justification of the state in the upholding the rights of its citizens may not be too strong; that is, it would preclude states from taking actions that are necessary for the maintenance and progress of the state, such as sending citizens to war, or exercising "eminent domain" over property. To this objection I would argue that having a right does not guarantee that a person always gets her way. This would depend on whether there were another competing and equally valid right held by another or whether there were some compelling need by other right-holders which could temporarily override the claiming of the original right. Having rights would entail that a person's concerns, goals, interests would be taken into account and weighed carefully against the competing claims of other rights-holders. It would ensure that citizens not be sent to fight wars for frivolous or unjust causes, that they not be tricked or forced into testing mustard gas, Agent Orange, or suffering unnecessarily the long-term effects of syphilis, and that they not have their house demolished to build a freeway without good reason and compensation. If, as Locke and others argue, the state's only raison d'être is the betterment of its citizens' lives, then I see no reason why the argument that the state must recognize the rights of its citizens and base its actions on upholding those rights would be deemed dangerous. A State is obligated, then, because of the moral rights attached to humanity, to relate to all human beings with which it comes into contact with at least minimal respect and forbearance, or more succinctly, with justice. Democratic Audit 18 Britain is a unjust government, where human rights are at stake Despite these various layers of legal protection, human rights nevertheless remain a contested concept in the British political tradition. They are capable of being interpreted and understood in different ways. Deep disagreement often exists as to what exactly constitutes a breach of a fundamental right. Furthermore, different views exist as to when and how the courts should intervene to protect individual rights. Politicians regularly subject the HRA to criticism, and bemoan the influence exerted by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over UK law. In 2010 and again in 2015 the Conservative election manifesto proposed replacing the HRA with a ‘British Bill of Rights’, although in practice Tory governments since 2015 have not been able to implement this idea. Successive UK governments have also introduced legislation that has diluted protections for civil liberties and fundamental rights in the spheres of national security/counter-terrorism, immigration and socio-economic entitlements: it is likely that this pattern will continue. Brexit is posing further challenges, by in particular removing the safety blanket for certain non-discrimination, migrant and labour rights formerly provided by EU law. The place of both the HRA and European Convention of Human Rights within the UK’s legal system thus remains open to debate, as does the status of human rights values more generally: no consensus yet exists as to how human rights should best be protected within the framework of the British constitution. And while the scope of legal rights protection in the UK is relatively strong, it is limited. Socio-economic rights are particularly poorly covered, and international human rights law has very limited impact on UK law or policy. C. Net Benefit Roberts and Rizzo THEY REINFORCE RACISM – their unquestioning acceptance of unjust governments as just PASSIVELY PERPETUATES THE PROBLEM. American Passivism Perhaps the most insidious component of American racism is passive racism; an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems exist. The American psychologist Beverly Tatum (1997) characterized racism as a moving walkway at an airport. Individuals who are actively racist, she argued, acknowledge racial hierarchy and the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that reinforce it, and choose to walk—or run—along with it. Individuals who are passively racist, on the other hand, simply stand still and are moved along by the walkway. These individuals are not actively reinforcing racism, but they are nonetheless moving in the same direction as those who are. As an illustration, imagine two people playing a game of Monopoly. One player is allowed to collect $200 whenever they pass go, build property wherever and whenever they want, and has a lower probability of drawing “Go to Jail” cards. The other player gets none of these luxuries. To rectify the system of advantage, one could restart the game, redefine the rules and redistribute the wealth, or stop playing the game altogether. To maintain the system, however, one could simply do nothing, or have both players follow the same rules moving forward (i.e., both players can now collect $200 whenever they pass go, build property wherever and whenever they want, and have an equal probability of drawing “Go to Jail” cards), while leaving the unequal wealth distribution intact. Continuing to play under this guise of “equality” would not entail actively contributing to the system; it would entail passively maintaining it (i.e., one player is still advantaged).3 This scenario is in many ways analogous to American racism, in which for centuries, Americans of color were forced into free or cheap labor and denied the right to own businesses and properties, vote in political elections, and receive an education or fair employment. These realities, many of which persist today, continue to exert their effect. For example, in 1983, the median net worth of White Americans was $86,500 higher than that of Black Americans, and by 2013, this difference rose to $133,000 (Stepler, 2016). In 2015, the household median net worth for White Bostonians was $247,000, whereas for Black Bostonians, it was $8 (Johnson, 2017). To maintain such racism, individuals and institutions need only do nothing about it. There are many pathways to passive racism. One is through ignorance (Nelson, Adams, and Salter, 2013). Consider again the Monopoly scenario. If a child observes that one player has amassed greater wealth than the other, but is ignorant as to how this inequality came to be, they will likely have no reason to intervene and may even develop preferences for the wealthier player (Roberts, Ho, et al., 2020). Yet if the child learns that there exists a structural reason for the inequality (i.e., racism), rather than a dispositional reason (i.e., the poor player’s incompetence), they may perceive the game as unfair and in need of intervention (Rizzo and Killen, 2018). Indeed, U.S. adults who are ignorant about historical racism often deny contemporary racism (Nelson et al., 2013). A second (and related) pathway to passive racism is through denial. Both White Americans and Americans of color are more likely than ever to deny that racism is a major problem facing U.S. society, which reduces the motivation to support antiracist policies, such as affirmative action or the redistribution of wealth, and could promote the belief that racial inequality is justified by differences in effort (e.g., Black people should simply work harder; Kraus, Onyeador, Daumeyer, Rucker, and Richeson, 2019; Salter et al., 2018). A third pathway to passive racism is through the observation of inaction in others. Darley and Latané (1968) found that in emergencies, people are less likely to help others when surrounded by bystanders (i.e., individuals who observe but do not act). This phenomenon, recognized as the “bystander effect,” is motivated by at least three psychological factors: (a) a feeling of less responsibility in the presence of others (i.e., diffusion of responsibility), (b) a fear that helping will elicit negative public judgment (i.e., evaluation apprehension), and (c) the belief that the situation must not really be an emergency if nobody is helping (i.e., pluralistic ignorance, see Hortensius and de Gelder, 2018). These factors may apply to racism as well. Taking refuge in the comfort of other societal bystanders, fearing the ramifications of speaking out against racist institutions, and the denial of the full weight of the consequences of living in a racist society all passively reinforce racism. Those who observe others do nothing about racism may reason that there is no problem in need of solving, and may subsequently become passively, if not actively, racist. Note that White Americans who are passively racist are further advantaged by racism, whereas Americans of color who are passively racist continue to be disadvantaged by it. Treating the U.K. as just means we can’t question its actions – we assume they’re fair from the outset. Voter CRITICAL EDUCATION – we can’t critique English injustice if we treat the state as just in the first place – means they ACTIVELY MISEDUCATE DEBATERS by shutting down major objections. That comes first, since we defeat the purpose of debate as an activity if we can’t use it to question the squo. No RVIs NO RVIs: generic justifications for reading a spec aff aren’t responsive to this shell – I’m calling out the SPECIFIC framing of the U.K. as just – and even showing that the U.K. IS just doesn’t warrant an aff ballot; it just means they don’t link. | 12/4/21 |
D - NovDec Wages CP V1Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 3 | Opponent: Saratoga AG | Judge: Derek, Ying Solvency Net Benefit Lafer and Loustaunau Unions are key for worker equality and closing racial wage gaps. | 11/6/21 |
E - Cap Resilience V1Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit ZD | Judge: Morgan Copeland We now live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished. (1) The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor people of color and any vestige of the social contract. Free-market policies, values and practices – with their emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of socia cal ections and the deregulation of economic activity – now shape practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, noncommodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly commercialized – or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins. For example, higher education is defined more and more as simply another core element of corporate power and culture, viewed mostly as a waste of taxpayers’ money, and denied its value as a democratic public sphere and guardian of public values. What has become clear is that the attack on the social state, workers and unions is now being matched by a full-fledged assault on higher education. Such attacks are not happening just in the United States but in many other parts of the globe where casino capitalism is waging a savage battle to eliminate all of those public spheres that might offer a glimmer of opposition to and protection from market-driven policies, institutions, ideology and values. We live at a time when it is more crucial than ever to believe that the university is both a public trust and social good. At best, it is a critical institution infused with the promise of cultivating intellectual insight, the imagination, inquisitiveness, risk-taking, social responsibility and the struggle for justice. In addition, higher education should be at the “heart of intense public discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times.” (2) Underlying this vision of the university are some serious questions about its relationship to the larger society. For instance, how might the university’s responsibility be understood with respect to safeguarding the interests of young people at a time of violence and war, the rise of a rampant anti-intellect ualism, a devastating gap in income and wealth, the rise of the surveillance state, and the threat of ecological and nuclear devastation? What might it mean to define the university as a pedagogical space that disrupts, disturbs, inspires and energizes young people to be individual and social agents rather than as an institution that redefines itself in terms of market values and reacts mostly to market fluctuations? It is in the spirit of such considerations that I first want to address those larger economic, social and cultural interests produced largely by the growing inequalities in wealth, income and power that threaten the notion of higher education as a democratic public good. As higher education’s role as a center of critical thought and civic engagement is devalued, society is being transformed into a “spectacular space of consumption” and financial looting. One consequence is an ongoing flight from mutual obligations and social responsibilities and a loss of faith in politics itself. This loss of faith in the power of politics, public dialogue and dissent is not unrelated to the diminished belief in higher education as central to producing critically engaged, civically literate and socially responsible citizens. At stake here are not only the meaning and purpose of higher education, but also civil society, politics and the fate of democracy itself. And yet, under the banner of right-wing reforms, the only questions being asked about knowledge production, the purpose of education, the nature of politics and the future are determined largely by market forces. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Education, which means they must enhance our potential to fight dominant, oppressive social biases. Thus, whoever better promotes critical empowerment wins. 1
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. B. Impacts
(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. 2. James 3 Second, since resilience requires something to overcome, the aff ENTRENCHES the harm they try to solve, linking Black people into an endless feedback loop of oppression. MRWaSP is deregulated, but it is also dynamic. Your social/political status in MRWaSP— is thus not taken as an immutable given (like a “born this way” social identity), but as the effect of an ongoing process—the process, as Lester Spence puts it, of being “formed according to market logic” (Spence 15). MRWaSP doesn’t care so much who you are, but what happens through you: that investing in you furthers the aims of MRWaSP, and that these aims are not better accomplished by divesting your human capital. If the color line and the gender binary cut inside from outside, human from sub/non-human. MRWaSP doesn’t so much cut a tine as create a feedback process, one that’s flexible, tuneable, and tweakable so that the white always get whiter and the black always get blacker, so to speak. Racialization, gendering, etc., these aren’t lines that cut but processes that distribute.14 The process of resilience compounds past successes and past failures, creating a probabilistic distribution of success and failure. Your ability to bounce back from a crisis depends on the resources at your disposal; these resources (i.e., your material and social situation) is the result of your response, or your family’s response, to past crises. So, the more resilient you and your family have been, the more resilient you are likely to be now and in the future. Because white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and so on all shape the background material and ideological conditions in which we all work, those who have the best odds of successfully demonstrating their resilience are the ones who have the most heavily stacked decks. Moreover, bourgeois, cis gendered, able-bodied people of color are generally the most resilient ones...in no small part because MRWaSP has to make fewer material and ideological compromises to let them in. Thus, though MRWaSP’s methods are dynamic, the overall distribution of power, bodies, domination, resources, and so on, that remains relatively consistent. The second half of the book discusses the relationship between resilience discourse, MRWaSP, and pop music in much greater detail; it focuses especially on the role of anti- blackness in ideals of resilient femininity. There I will argue that resilient femininity plays a very specific and central role in producing African Americans” as “the exceptions unable to be re-formed” by neoliberal market logic” (Spence 15). MRWaSP is absolutely anti-black anti-queer, ableist, and misogynist. It Is a strategy for producing blackness, queerness, disability, and femininity as mutually-intensifying feedback loops of precariousness.’5 Just think about the most vulnerable populations in the US: it’s usually queer people of color, people whose situations actively deny them the opportunities and resources necessary to profit from their own resilience. People in precarious situations are constantly bouncing back from adversity, but they don’t get to re-invest the surplus value they generate back into their own human capital. Femininity, blackness, queerness, disability, class— these have always been technologies for extracting unpaid surplus value (e.g., slavery, housework, commodified labor). MRWaSP just updates them to work in neoliberalism’s preferred mode: deregulation. James 4 Vote neg to DRAIN NEOLIBERALISM’S BATTERIES – embrace melancholia instead of endorsing the aff’s resilient performance. Refuse the productivity of the debate space to stop debate from plugging your ballot back into the system. Melancholy isn’t just failed or misfired resilience; it is the continual, compounded draining of neoliberalism’s batteries. If resilience is a positive feedback loop, melancholia is a vicious cycle. Melancholic hang-ups bend resilient circuits into entropic ones; instead of amplifying life, they go into the death. (e) Spiraling Downward Into The Death Neoliberal melancholy often looks, on the surface, just like resilience. It takes the procedures and practices of resilience and uses them to invest in what MRWaSP otherwise renders as exception, what, as Lester Spence puts it, “cannot be remade for the purposes of capital” because it “does not operate according to market dictates” (38-9). Applying resilience to phenomena that, when remade as a market, do not generate sufficient surplus value for MRWaSP produces melancholy. Markets that don’t operate according to MRWaSP’s dictates are melancholic because they detract from MRWaSP’s vitality. For example, there is a whole subgenre of right-wing outrage journalism focused on people on public assistance who “waste” their money on supposedly frivolous purchases like manicures or name-brand apparel and electronics. In March 2014, the Tea Party News Network posted an online survey that asked “Do you agree with welfare recipients being forbidden to spend their taxpayer provided welfare money at lingerie shops, tattoo parlors, nail salons, jewelry stores, and anything other than food?” Similarly, the website somecards.com has a relatively large number of user-created ecards that reflect similar attitudes about the behavior of “welfare recipients.” Many mockingly depict women living indulgent lives full of manicures and designer clothes, while simultaneously reinforcing the stereotype that uses “welfare recipients” as a code word for urban, working-class black women.132 As Hill-Collins notes, “portrayed as being content to sit around and collect welfare, shunning work and passing bad values on to her offspring,” the point of racializing this “welfare queen” stereotype is to “label as unnecessary and even dangerous to the values of the country the fertility of women who are not White and middle class,” values such as (Black Feminist Thought, 87). The poll and the ecards give voice to a widespread worry that “welfare recipients”—that is, black women—are unable to properly execute the economic rationality we expect of good neoliberal subjects: they invest in the “wrong” things, in things that don’t maximize the vitality and profitability of MRWaSP. Nails, hair, and clothes are investments in black aesthetics, in a black woman’s own enjoyment of and satisfaction with her body. These small pleasures might be a way to “bounce back” from the daily grind of dealing with the increasingly baroque and repressive welfare state bureaucracy, and from, you know, constant, pervasive anti-black misogyny. These melancholic behaviors might also be very canny investments in one’s own human capital. As Tressie McMillan Cottom argues, poor African-Americans sometimes cultivate the appearance of uppermiddle class respectability in order to accumulate the human capital necessary to successfully navigate MRWaSP institutions. She explains: It took half a day but something about my mother’s performance of respectable black person — her Queen’s English, her Mahogany outfit, her straight bob and pearl earrings — got done what the elderly lady next door had not been able to get done in over a year. I learned, watching my mother, that there was a price we had to pay to signal to gatekeepers that we were worthy of engaging. It meant dressing well and speaking well. So, designer clothes, nice jewelry, these things may seem like exorbitant purchases for someone on a very limited budget. However, if these investments actually help you navigate the institutions that determine your access to and the success of your interaction with the welfare system or the justice system, then these investments are actually quite savvy: the returns far outweigh the costs. The return is access to more and better human capital than is usually granted black femininity; for example, as Cottom argues, her investments in a Jones New York suite “signaled that I was not a typical black or a typical woman, two identities that in combination are almost always conflated with being poor.” Add-Ons Alt Solves James 5 The alt solves – we use melancholia to resist cycles of oppression. James 5: James, Robin. Associate Professor of Philosophy, UNC Charlotte Resiliency and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism. Zero Books: Winchester, 2015. CH Because MRWaSP must at least pay lip service to neoliberalism’s idealization of individual free choice, it has to delegitimize the rationality of choices that aren’t in its interest. That’s why this logic is “stupid”: this rhetorical move frames what would otherwise be seen as one free choice among others and as ignorance, pathology, or as a symptom of one’s inability to make free choices for oneself. When white women and people of color practice resilience in ways that don’t adequately support MRWaSP, they do not appear to be exercising free choice, to be choosing an alternative way of life. Rather, they appear to lack the capacity to choose— they’re supposedly victims of poverty, ignorance, misogynist ethnic cultural traditions, and so on, capable only of “stupid people logic.” Melancholia is resilience that isn’t socially legible as such,. It’s the application of resilient techniques— market-based calculation, balancing cost and benefit, investing in oneself—to material that MRWaSP cannot or does not want to capitalize on, to damage it does not want to recycle but render exceptional. Melancholia is the inability to recover from damage, to invest in oneself, in a way that MRWaSP recognizes as “healthy.” “Healthy” subjectivity is supposed to work as a positive feedback loop on both the subjective and the social levels: gains in the microcosm are compounded and amplified at the macrocosmic level. Melancholy, on the other hand can become a pathological vicious cycle wherein gains at microcosm are drains to the macrocosm. At the individual level, melancholia is double-edged: because what is good for you isn’t what’s healthiest for MRWaSP, your good decisions will be punished and pathologized, not rewarded. Smart self-capitalization is derided as “stupid,” for example. This sort of concern-trolling can be a way for MRWaSP to turn melancholic damage back into profit; it’s an opportunity for healthy subjects to demonstrate their, well, health—that they know better, that they’re not stupid, etc. This is why we should avoid getting troll-baited into fighting accusations of stupidity, toxicity, and so on: it’s just co-opting our noise and turning it back into signal. Instead, we should focus our energies on changing the circumstances and institutions that make our survival appear toxic, that make investments in ourselves seem pathological and irrational. Melancholia can, I think, be a way to do just this. Though MRWaSP will always try to recoup melancholic noise as resilient signal, there can be instances in which melancholia stacks the deck against MRWaSP so that any attempts to profit from melancholy, to overcome or co-opt its damage for monetary, aesthetic, and political gain are losing bets for MRWaSP. In such instances, Melancholy diminishes the capacity at which neoliberal institutions can function. Instead of recycling this damage into more life (by overcoming it and/or rendering it exceptional), melancholy intensifies it, pushing it into the death. | 11/21/21 |
E- Util DATournament: Colleyville | Round: Octas | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Jason Sykes
A common view in contemporary Western culture is that personal happiness is one of the most important values in life. For example, in American culture it is believed that failing to appear happy is cause for concern. These cultural notions are also echoed in contemporary Western psychology (including positive psychology and much of the research on subjective well-being). However, some important (often culturally-based) facts about happiness have tended to be overlooked in the psychological research on the topic. One of these cultural phenomena is that, for some individuals, happiness is not a supreme value. In fact, some individuals across cultures are averse to various kinds of happiness for several different reasons. This article presents the first review of the concept of aversion to happiness. Implications of the outcomes are discussed, as are directions for further research.Key words: Aversion to happiness; values, subjective well-being; happiness; Western psychology; positive psychology; fear of happiness*School of Psychology, Mohsen.Joshanloo@vuw.ac.nz ^Philosophy Programme, Dan.Weijers@vuw.ac.nzAVERSION TO HAPPINESS 21. IntroductionIn contemporary psychological literature, scientific analysis of individuals’ well-being is focussed on subjective well-being, and is mainly undertaken in the well-established field of happiness studies. Subjective well-being is believed to consist of life satisfaction, the presence of positive affect, and the absence of negative affect (Diener et al., 1999). Ever since the Enlightenment, Westerners have responded to the ideas of liberal modernity, hedonism, and romantic individualism (Christopher and Hickinbottom, 2008) by believing in the sovereignty of individuals over their personal happiness (Haybron, 2008), and the importance of positive mood and affect balance as ingredients of a good life (Christopher, 1999; Tatarkiewicz, 1976). Indeed, Western culture and psychology seem to take for granted that happiness is one of the most important values guiding individuals’ lives, if not the most important. Western culture and psychology also seem to take for granted that happiness is best understood as a personal concept, such that an individual’s happiness is not directly constituted (but may be affected) by the success, health, or psychological well-being of others. In this paper, any unqualified use of the term ‘happiness’ refers to the Western concept of personal happiness that is characterised by satisfaction with life and a preponderance of positive over negative emotions. Contrary to this Western view, our survey of some less-studied aspects of various cultures reveals that many individuals possess negative views about happiness, and are sometimes averse to it. In this paper the aversion to happiness, and particularly different reasons why different cultures are averse to happiness, are analysed through a brief review of relevant theoretical and empirical literature on happiness from a variety of cultures and academic disciplines. We find that there are many claimed justifications2AVERSION TO HAPPINESS 3for being averse to happiness, and that at least some people from all cultures are likely to be averse to some kind of happiness for these reasons. We conclude that this important aspect of human culture should be given consideration in future studies on happiness, and that such consideration is likely to produce more informed results, especially in cross-cultural studies.We begin with a brief analysis of the sometimes-hidden assumption in Western culture, and the majority of Western research on subjective well-being, that all kinds of happiness are always worthy of active pursuit (Section 2). Then we provide a philosophical analysis of the concept ‘aversion to happiness’ (Section 3). Following this we report on a range of theoretical and empirical research from several cultures to provide evidence that many individuals and cultures tend to not value certain kinds of happiness highly, and may even be averse to happiness for a variety of different reasons (Section 4). We then report on a wider range of research (from psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and religious studies) to provide evidence for a range of different reasons why people claim to be averse to happiness, including that: being happy causes bad things to happen to you, being happy makes you a worse person, expressing happiness is bad for you and others, and pursuing happiness is bad for you and others (Section 5). Finally, we summarise our findings and discuss the implications, especially for interpreting cross-cultural differences in levels of subjective well-being and designing future studies of subjective well-being across cultures (Section 6).2. The hegemony of the quest for personal happiness in Western culture Much of the Western research on happiness shares the assumptions that happiness is something that we should want for ourselves and something that we are at least3AVERSION TO HAPPINESS 4partially responsible for attaining for ourselves (Joshanloo 2013a). In the United States, for example, it is commonly assumed that failing to appear happy is cause for concern (Eid and Diener, 2001; Held, 2002; Lyubomirsky, 2000; Menon, 2012). Indeed, “failure to achieve happiness ... can be seen as one of the greatest failures a person can experience” (Morris, 2012, p. 436), and one that he only has himself to blame for (Bruckner, 2012, p. 61). Western psychologists (and some economists) often write as though happiness is universally considered to be one of the highest human goods, if not the highest. For example, Braun (2000) writes “every human being, no matter what culture, age, educational attainment, or degree of physical and mental development, wants to be happy. It is the common end to which all humans strive...” (p. x, see also, e.g., Frey and Stutzer, 2002, p. vii; Myers, 1993; Seligman, 1998). Indeed, it is not uncommon to read that, in this era of subjective well-being worship, people should strive for happiness in any way possible (Gruber, Mauss, and Tamir, 2011), that psychologists should provide “scientific” short-cuts for them, and that policymakers should tailor policies with an eye to maximising happiness (Zevnik, 2010). Empirical data from research on Western cultures support these notions. For example, North Americans report valuing happiness highly (Triandis et al., 1990) and thinking about it at least once a day (Freedman, 1978). With respect to the burning desire for personal happiness in Western culture and psychology, Richardson (2012, p. 26) comments that, for Western psychologists, ideals like happiness and well-being function like “god terms” that seem to be beyond doubt or question. Given such a state of affairs, it is not surprising that there has been a large upsurge in psychological research on subjective well-being over the last three decades. Interest in the study of subjective well-being has leaked into other branches of social4AVERSION TO HAPPINESS 5science as well. Indeed, De Vos (2012) argues that happiness has turned into the hottest topic of contemporary social science. And, while it still doesn’t attract as much scholarly attention as some more established areas of social science, social scientific research on happiness is certainly more likely to be picked up by mainstream media than social scientific research on most other topics. Especially since the rise of the “economics of happiness” (Frey, 2008), psychologists and economists have increasingly called for more attention to subjective well-being as an important basis for guiding policy-making (Diener et al., 2009; Lucas and Diener, 2008). And policymakers have listened to these calls, as shown by the recent release of the United Nations-backed World Happiness Report (Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs, 2012).How about other cultures? Does happiness work as the supreme value or, at least, a key pillar of a good life across all cultures? Acknowledging that there are cultural differences in this regard, Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade (2005) maintain that for North Americans the high value of happiness and the importance of its pursuit are intrinsically salient, while for other parts of the world, it is not as important. However, Lyubomirsky and colleagues also claim that the value of happiness and the importance of its pursuit are becoming increasingly salient around the world. That is, with globalization and democratization, people around the world are becoming increasingly obsessed with their personal happiness—their subjective well-being. While there seems to be an element of truth in this claim, other values are still more salient than this kind of happiness for many non-Western cultures. Many researchers argue that personal happiness is more strongly emphasized in individualistic cultures than in collectivistic cultures, and that the idea of ‘happiness as one of the highest goals, if not the highest’ is far from universal (e.g., Ahuvia, 2001; D’Andrade, 1984; Lutz, 1987; Mesquita and Albert,5AVERSION TO HAPPINESS 62007; Snyder and Lopez, 2007; Wierzbicka, 1994). For example, Suh (2000) argues that while Westerners feel a strong pressure to be happy (i.e., to attain and express personal happiness), East Asians tend to feel a certain pressure to belong (i.e., to bring about and experience social harmony), and thus their life is more firmly guided by the need to have good interpersonal relationships, than to be happy. When the supreme goal of a culture is social harmony, personal happiness can even be perceived as detrimental to social relationships (Uchida, Norasakkunkit, and Kitayama, 2004). However, as we argue below, the value of social harmony is not the only reason people in non-Western cultures are wary of the Western tendency to focus on personal happiness.3. Aversion to happiness: The conceptThe concept ‘aversion to happiness’ discussed in this paper constitutes a heterogeneous set of con-attitudes about different types of happiness that are based on a diverse group of relatively stable beliefs that certain personal relations with different types of happiness should be avoided for one or more reasons. Divisions within the set of beliefs underpinning aversion to happiness include: the different reasons for believing that people should be averse to happiness, the different extents to which people should be averse to happiness (e.g., happiness is something to be slightly cautious of, to be very cautious of, or to be extremely worried about), the different degrees of happiness that people should be averse to (e.g., some people are only cautious of extreme happiness), the different kinds of happiness that people are averse to (e.g., happiness as pleasure and not pain, happiness as satisfaction with life, happiness as worldly success, or all kinds of personal happiness), and the different relations that an individual can have to happiness (e.g., being happy, expressing happiness, or actively pursuing happiness). Everyone wants to be happy. It's a fundamental human right. It's associated with all sorts of benefits. We, as a society, spend millions trying to figure out what the key to personal happiness is. There are now even apps to help us turn our frowns upside down. So everyone wants to be happy—right? Well, maybe not.A new research paper by Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers from Victoria University of Wellington, argues that the desire for personal happiness, though knitted into the fabric of American history and culture, is held in less esteem by other cultures. There are many parts of the world that are more suspicious of personal happiness, defined in the paper as experiencing pleasure, positive emotion, or success, and now empirical research is catching up with these cultural beliefs. ADVERTISEMENT The researchers focused on how eastern versus western cultures approach happiness. In one study from 2004, Taiwanese and American students were asked their opinions about what happiness is; whereas many of the American participants considered happiness to be the highest value and supreme goal in their lives, Taiwanese participants made no such statements. Other research has found that personal accountability – a belief that happiness is everybody’s right and each persona is responsible for their own happiness – was more strongly endorsed by American than Chinese participants. In contrast, the dialectical balance between happiness and unhappiness was more strongly endorsed by Chinese than American participants. When Chinese volunteers were shown different graphs of how happiness might change over the course of a life – in a linear vs. nonlinear trend, and asked to pick the graph they preferred. Whereas Americans were likely to choose the linear graph, Chinese respondents were more likely to choose the nonlinear graph in which their personal happiness reverts or oscillates. What explains these major cultural differences? Part of the answer lies in the fundamental values that different cultures emphasize. In Eastern cultures, the emphasis is on attainment of social harmony, where community and belonging are held in high regard. In Western cultures, the emphasis is on attainment of happiness, where the individualistic self tends to be celebrated. These values translate to different weights placed on personal happiness. In one paper, Oishi and his colleagues examined the definition of happiness in dictionaries from 30 nations, and found that internal inner feelings of pleasure defined happiness in Western cultures, more so than East Asian cultures. Instead, East Asians cultures define happiness more in line with social harmony, and it is associated with good luck and fortune. Indeed, when researchers measure feelings of positive affect or pleasure, they go hand in hand with enhanced feelings of happiness by North America individuals but not by East Asian individuals. Instead, social factors - such as adapting to social norms or fulfilling relational obligations – were associated with enhanced feelings of happiness in East Asia. Put differently, personal happiness can become aversive, particularly when it comes at cost to the social harmony or moral obligations held in high esteem by collectivistic cultures. ADVERTISEMENTShould Americans rethink their love affair with personal happiness in light of this research? We know that happiness boasts a long list of advantages, from broadening one’s thinking skills to improving physical and mental health. But prioritizing personal happiness leads to a number of problems, like focusing too much on the self. Perhaps we need a more balanced approach to happiness in American culture. Personal happiness is beneficial in some contexts, a limitation in others—good in moderation, but harmful in excess. In some moments, we may need and benefit from feeling good, but in other moments, we might be better served anchoring on balanced, meaningful life focused on others. Happiness, in this light, is not the proverbial goal to chase, but a (happy) outcome of a life well lived. | 2/12/22 |
F - Sick Womxn TheoryTournament: Newark | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lexington AR | Judge: Anad, Rao ROJ and Dolmage 1 I negate. Disability HAS to be the first and last question of this debate – any other starting point mystifies a larger network of ableist knowledge production. The Role of the Judge is to Check Ableist Pedagogical Agendas, which means they must actively identify and respond to the ableist underpinnings of educational spaces. Disavowing disability is in no body’s best interest. Teachers recognize the diversity of the students they teach. But teachers must also recognize their roles within institutions, disciplines, and perhaps even personal pedagogical agendas, in which they may seek to avoid and disavow the very idea of disability—to give it no place. This avoidance and disavowal brings with it its own spatial metaphors—I use the steep steps to express this negative force. That these steps are real in the lives of people with disabilities adds to the power of the metaphor. The steps have a strong connotation in the disability community, and not just for people who use wheelchairs and crutches. When I say that the academy builds steep steps, I hope that this verb entails many things—most of all, I want to show that the steep steps are constructed for a reason. As I have already shown, not only did eugenics actually reshape the North American population through things like immigration restriction, not only did it reshape families through its campaigns for “better breeding,” not only did it reshape bodies through medical reinvention, but it reshaped how North Americans thought about bodies and minds. Here, for example, is a diagram of the steps that were created to distinguish between different grades of the “feeble-minded” in the United States in the heyday of the eugenics movement before the Second World War. The definitions were used to classify a group of humans according to mental age, suggesting that development had been arrested and would proceed no further past the step at which the individual was placed. The mental age was determined based upon variations of a standard test, the Binet test, which asked literally hundreds of standard common-knowledge questions, of increasing difficulty. The test was also designed to stop the subject once they had reached the stage or step of difficulty at which they could proceed no further. Fig. 3. “Exhibit of Work and Educational Campaign for Juvenile Mental Defectives.” American Philosophical Society, 1906. Fig. 3. “Exhibit of Work and Educational Campaign for Juvenile Mental Defectives.” American Philosophical Society, 1906. This image shows five people, each stationed on one of five very steep steps. The bottom person, slouched on the ground, is labeled an “idiot, mentally 3 yrs. old.” On the next step up, an individual is hunched over, looking downwards, labeled “low-grade imbecile, 4 to 5 yrs. old.” Next step up, a “medium imbecile, mentally 6 to 8 yrs. old.” Then a “high grade imbecile, mentally 8 to 10 yrs. Old” is pictured on the next step up, now gazing upwards. Finally, we view a person, described in the caption as a “moron, mentally 10 to 12 years old,” attempting to climb above the final and topmost step but only getting halfway up. As the image reveals, the steps were also closely associated with forms of work, and thus classed citizens and linked their value to this labor-output, but also placed almost all of the feebleminded below reason and judgment, not only in a space of rational vacuity, but deficit. You’ll also notice that the bodily bearing of these individuals conveys a message: the different levels of animation suggest physical and cognitive correlation. These people look tired. The disabled mind equates with the disabled body. These states correspond with affects: the slumped shoulders and downcast eyes suggest or physicalize depression. If these steps in the image on the next page represent the very bottom of the steep set we climb to the ivory tower, they nonetheless cannot be disconnected from the history of North American higher education. In fact, “morons,” “imbeciles,” and “idiots” were both rhetorically (and eugenically) constructed by the “fathers” of higher education, and those individuals who were given these labels were also studied and researched.10 At the top of the steps were those who taught and studied at premier universities, and these people studied and experimented upon the bodies of those on the bottom steps. We may like to believe that, today, practices of eugenics have not only been rejected but that they’ve also been corrected. Yet the selectivity of this environment must be continually interrogated or questioned. We must all evaluate the ways in which we ourselves continue to decide which bodies and which minds will have access to the considerable resources, privileges, and advantages we have and we bestow—and as we ask this question, we must wonder whether what we have to offer is truly worthwhile if it translates into policies of exclusion, programs of incarceration, and reductive definitions of human worth. Interrogating the steep steps metaphor works to highlight not just how space and spatialization are exclusionary but also the ways that the distance between a hypothetical “us” and a “them,” perhaps the able and the disabled, has a particular structure. Yet we must look at the steps from other angles, along other axes. What are the attitudes, requirements, and practices that might represent boundaries, jumps on the graph, risers on the steps? Are there chutes, or are there ladders, set up to speed movement from top to bottom or bottom to top? What forces move up and down, affecting students’ progress? Should we even want to get to the top? How do students go back down the steps or out of the university gates and back to home communities? What makes this journey possible or impossible? What does it mean to skip the steps? Where do the steps actually start? ROB and Dolmage 2 The Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Debater who Better Challenges the Exclusion of Educational Spaces. This is uniquely key on this topic, as the existence of disability turns colleges into labor-intensive asylums. Interrogating ableism is key to understanding education itself. They were “in every sense apart from society”; “All of the institutional routines were segmented into carefully defined blocks of time, scrupulously maintained and punctuated by bells”; The routine was based on “work and solitude . . . steady labor and isolation” in which individuals are enveloped in the same work in a parallel way; They began as orderly and eventually became overcrowded and corrupt; They all housed the lowest orders of society. (xxv) What is ironic about this list is that if you flip a few key points, you have a great description of the universities also being developed in the same period: fully removed, rigidly patterned, isolating, labor-intensive, increasingly corrupted and corruptible, but for only the highest orders of society. Perhaps the university should always have been thought of as similar to other “total institutions”—to borrow Erving Goffman’s term. Perhaps the college or university is in fact exactly the same as the almshouse or asylum, organizationally and even architecturally. And yet it is viewed as the opposite. Thus the subjects in one total institution, the college, are elevated. The inmates in the other spaces are confined. Importantly: one studies; the other is studied. As Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have shown, “historically, disabled people have been the objects of study but not the purveyors of the knowledge base of disability” (Cultural, 198). As Tanya Titchkosky writes, “disabled people are socially organized under the rubric of knowledge bases . . . within the everyday practices and procedures of university environments, for example, we think of disability as a problem in need of a solution” and not as an “important form of critical knowledge production within the university” (Question, 70). Disability is studied; people with disabilities have been research resources. More than this, higher education has been built upon such research. It is important to map the history of this research, but also to intervene in showing some of the ways that we might hope higher education can be redesigned. We need to understand how universities work to fully understand disability. Inversely, we really need to understand disability to understand the history and the future of higher education. hedva 1 The aff’s appeals to change, progress, and revolution equate the political with action – that requires the oppressed to position themselves in the public sphere and “do something.”
I’ll isolate specific links in the aff – their role of the ballot is… insert links. hedva 2 They adopt a “view from nowhere” – a myth of neutrality that frames the public as an open space for anyone willing to do the work to fight. These reps are rooted in Whiteness – what about people who CAN’T join the public sphere, or those who’ve tried and failed? And assuming progress is possible and things get better is ableist af. There is another problem too. As Judith Butler put it in her 2015 lecture, “Vulnerability and Resistance,” Arendt failed to account for who is allowed in to the public space, of who’s in charge of the public. Or, more specifically, who’s in charge of who gets in. Butler says that there is always one thing true about a public demonstration: the police are already there, or they are coming. This resonates with frightening force when considering the context of Black Lives Matter. The inevitability of violence at a demonstration – especially a demonstration that emerged to insist upon the importance of bodies who’ve been violently un-cared for – ensures that a certain amount of people won’t, because they can’t, show up. Couple this with physical and mental illnesses and disabilities that keep people in bed and at home, and we must contend with the fact that many whom these protests are for, are not able to participate in them – which means they are not able to be visible as political activists. There was a Tumblr post that came across my dash during these weeks of protest, that said something to the effect of: “shout out to all the disabled people, sick people, people with PTSD, anxiety, etc., who can’t protest in the streets with us tonight. Your voices are heard and valued, and with us.” Heart. Reblog. So, as I lay there, unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any traditional capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? 2. I have chronic illness. For those who don’t know what chronic illness means, let me help: the word “chronic” comes from the Latin chronos, which means “of time” (think of “chronology”), and it specifically means “a lifetime.” So, a chronic illness is an illness that lasts a lifetime. In other words, it does not get better. There is no cure. And think about the weight of time: yes, that means you feel it every day. On very rare occasions, I get caught in a moment, as if something’s plucked me out of the world, where I realize that I haven’t thought about my illnesses for a few minutes, maybe a few precious hours. These blissful moments of oblivion are the closest thing to a miracle that I know. When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy. It costs you to do anything: to get out of bed, to cook for yourself, to get dressed, to answer an email. For those without chronic illness, you can spend and spend without consequence: the cost is not a problem. For those of us with limited funds, we have to ration, we have a limited supply: we often run out before lunch. I’ve come to think about chronic illness in other ways. Ann Cvetkovich writes: “What if depression, in the Americas, at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to be biochemical imbalances?” I’d like to change the word “depression” here to be all mental illnesses. Cvetkovich continues: “Most medical literature tends to presume a white and middle-class subject for whom feeling bad is frequently a mystery because it doesn’t fit a life in which privilege and comfort make things seem fine on the surface.” In other words, wellness as it is talked about in America today, is a white and wealthy idea. Let me quote Starhawk, in the preface to the new edition of her 1982 book Dreaming the Dark: “Psychologists have constructed a myth – that somewhere there exists some state of health which is the norm, meaning that most people presumably are in that state, and those who are anxious, depressed, neurotic, distressed, or generally unhappy are deviant.” I’d here supplant the word “psychologists” with “white supremacy,” “doctors,” “your boss,” “neoliberalism,” “heteronormativity,” and “America.” There has been a slew of writing in recent years about how “female” pain is treated – or rather, not treated as seriously as men’s in emergency rooms and clinics, by doctors, specialists, insurance companies, families, husbands, friends, the culture at large. In a recent article in The Atlantic, called “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” a husband writes about the experience of his wife Rachel’s long wait in the ER before receiving the medical attention her condition warranted (which was an ovarian torsion, where an ovarian cyst grows so large it falls, twisting the fallopian tube). “Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours,” he writes. At the end of the ordeal, Rachel had waited nearly fifteen hours before going into the surgery she should have received upon arrival. The article concludes with her physical scars healing, but that “she’s still grappling with the psychic toll – what she calls ‘the trauma of not being seen.’” What the article does not mention is race – which leads me to believe that the writer and his wife are white. Whiteness is what allows for such oblivious neutrality: it is the premise of blankness, the presumption of the universal. (Studies have shown that white people will listen to other white people when talking about race, far more openly than they will to a person of color. As someone who is white-passing, let me address white people directly: look at my white face and listen up.) The trauma of not being seen. Again – who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible? I don’t mean to diminish Rachel’s horrible experience – I myself once had to wait ten hours in an ER to be diagnosed with a burst ovarian cyst – I only wish to point out the presumptions upon which her horror relies: that our vulnerability should be seen and honored, and that we should all receive care, quickly and in a way that “respects the autonomy of the patient,” as the Four Principles of Biomedical Ethics puts it. Of course, these presumptions are what we all should have. But we must ask the question of who is allowed to have them. In whom does society substantiate such beliefs? And in whom does society enforce the opposite? Compare Rachel’s experience at the hands of the medical establishment with that of Kam Brock’s. In September 2014, Brock, a 32-year-old black woman, born in Jamaica and living in New York City, was driving a BMW when she was pulled over by the police. They accused her of driving under the influence of marijuana, and though her behavior and their search of her car yielded nothing to support this, they nevertheless impounded her car. According to a lawsuit brought against the City of New York and Harlem Hospital by Brock, when Brock appeared the next day to retrieve her car she was arrested by the police for behaving in a way that she calls “emotional,” and involuntarily hospitalized in the Harlem Hospital psych ward. (As someone who has also been involuntarily hospitalized for behaving “too” emotionally, this story feels like a rip of recognition through my brain.) The doctors thought she was “delusional” and suffering from bipolar disorder, because she claimed that Obama followed her on twitter – which was true, but which the medical staff failed to confirm. She was then held for eight days, forcibly injected with sedatives, made to ingest psychiatric medication, attend group therapy, and stripped. The medical records of the hospital – obtained by her lawyers – bear this out: the “master treatment plan” for Brock’s stay reads, “Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.” It notes her “inability to test reality.” Upon her release, she was given a bill for $13,637.10. The question of why the hospital’s doctors thought Brock “delusional” because of her Obama-follow claim is easily answered: Because, according to this society, a young black woman can’t possibly be that important – and for her to insist that she is must mean she’s “sick.” 3. Before I can speak of the “sick woman” in all of her many guises, I must first speak as an individual, and address you from my particular location. I am antagonistic to the notion that the Western medical-insurance industrial complex understands me in my entirety, though they seem to think they do. They have attached many words to me over the years, and though some of these have provided articulation that was useful – after all, no matter how much we are working to change the world, we must still find ways of coping with the reality at hand – first I want to suggest some other ways of understanding my “illness.” Perhaps it can all be explained by the fact that my Moon’s in Cancer in the 8th House, the House of Death, or that my Mars is in the 12th House, the House of Illness, Secrets, Sorrow, and Self-Undoing. Or, that my father’s mother escaped from North Korea in her childhood and hid this fact from the family until a few years ago, when she accidentally let it slip out, and then swiftly, revealingly, denied it. Or, that my mother suffers from undiagnosed mental illness that was actively denied by her family, and was then exasperated by a 40-year-long drug addiction, sexual trauma, and hepatitis from a dirty needle, and to this day remains untreated, as she makes her way in and out of jails, squats, and homelessness. Or, that I was physically and emotionally abused as a child, raised in an environment of poverty, addiction, and violence, and have been estranged from my parents for 13 years. Perhaps it’s because I’m poor – according to the IRS, in 2014, my adjusted gross income was $5,730 (a result of not being well enough to work full-time) – which means that my health insurance is provided by the state of California (Medi-Cal), that my “primary care doctor” is a group of physician’s assistants and nurses in a clinic on the second floor of a strip mall, and that I rely on food stamps to eat. Perhaps it can be encapsulated in the word “trauma.” Perhaps I’ve just got thin skin, and have had some bad luck. It’s important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me – whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary: “This is the oppressor’s language,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1971, “yet I need it to talk to you.” But let me offer another language, too. In the Native American Cree language, the possessive noun and verb of a sentence are structured differently than in English. In Cree, one does not say, “I am sick.” Instead, one says, “The sickness has come to me.” I love that and want to honor it. So, here is what has come to me: Endometriosis, which is a disease of the uterus where the uterine lining grows where it shouldn’t – in the pelvic area mostly, but also anywhere, the legs, abdomen, even the head. It causes chronic pain; gastrointestinal chaos; epic, monstrous bleeding; in some cases, cancer; and means that I have miscarried, can’t have children, and have several surgeries to look forward to. When I explained the disease to a friend who didn’t know about it, she exclaimed: “So your whole body is a uterus!” That’s one way of looking at it, yes. (Imagine what the Ancient Greek doctors – the fathers of the theory of the “wandering womb” – would say about that.) It means that every month, those rogue uterine cells that have implanted themselves throughout my body, “obey their nature and bleed,” to quote fellow endo warrior Hilary Mantel. This causes cysts, which eventually burst, leaving behind bundles of dead tissue like the debris of little bombs. Bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and depersonalization disorder have also come to me. This means that I live between this world and another one, one created by my own brain that has ceased to be contained by a discrete concept of “self.” Because of these “disorders,” I have access to incredibly vivid emotions, flights of thought, and dreamscapes, to the feeling that my mind has been obliterated into stars, to the sensation that I have become nothingness, as well as to intense ecstasies, raptures, sorrows, and nightmarish hallucinations. I have been hospitalized, voluntarily and involuntarily, because of it, and one of the medications I was prescribed once nearly killed me – it produces a rare side effect where one’s skin falls off. Another cost $800 a month – I only took it because my doctor slipped me free samples. If I want to be able to hold a job – which this world has decided I ought to be able to do – I must take an anti-psychotic medication daily that causes short-term memory loss and drooling, among other sexy side effects. These visitors have also brought their friends: nervous breakdowns, mental collapses, or whatever you want to call them, three times in my life. I’m certain they will be guests in my house again. They have motivated attempts at suicide (most of them while dissociated) more than a dozen times, the first one when I was nine years old. That first attempt didn’t work, only because after taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, I somehow woke up the next day and went to school, like nothing had happened. I told no one about it, until my first psychiatric evaluation in my mid 20s. Finally, an autoimmune disease that continues to baffle all the doctors I’ve seen, has come to me and refuses still to be named. As Carolyn Lazard has written about her experiences with autoimmune diseases: “Autoimmune disorders are difficult to diagnose. For ankylosing spondylitis, the average time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis is eight to twelve years. I was lucky; I only had to wait one year.” Names like “MS,” “fibromyalgia,” and others that I can’t remember have fallen from the mouths of my doctors – but my insurance won’t cover the tests, nor is there a specialist in my insurance plan within one hundred miles of my home. I don’t have enough space here – will I ever? – to describe what living with an autoimmune disease is like. I can say it brings unimaginable fatigue, pain all over all the time, susceptibility to illnesses, a body that performs its “normal” functions monstrously abnormally. The worst symptom that mine brings is chronic shingles. For ten years I’ve gotten shingles in the same place on my back, so that I now have nerve damage there, which results in a ceaseless, searing pain on the skin and a dull, burning ache in the bones. hedva 3 Reject their representations of liberation or progress and endorse Sick Woman Theory as a survival strategy for oppressed people. This means re-centering the discussion to oppose incorporation into oppressive structures. It is NOT the burden of the oppressed to fix the world around them – instead, an ethic of care for self and others should replace the call for public protest. SOLVES CAP AND ROOT CAUSE CLAIMS. Despite taking daily medication that is supposed to “suppress” the shingles virus, I still get them – they are my canaries in the coalmine, the harbingers of at least three weeks to be spent in bed. My acupuncturist described it as a little demon steaming black smoke, frothing around, nestling into my bones. 4. With all of these visitors, I started writing Sick Woman Theory as a way to survive in a reality that I find unbearable, and as a way to bear witness to a self that does not feel like it can possibly be “mine.” The early instigation for the project of “Sick Woman Theory,” and how it inherited its name, came from a few sources. One was in response to Audrey Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory,” which proposes a way of redefining historically feminized pathologies into modes of political protest for girls: I was mainly concerned with the question of what happens to the sad girl when, if, she grows up. Another was incited by reading Kate Zambreno’s fantastic Heroines, and feeling an itch to fuck with the concept of “heroism” at all, and so I wanted to propose a figure with traditionally anti-heroic qualities – namely illness, idleness, and inaction – as capable of being the symbol of a grand Theory. Another was from the 1973 feminist book Complaints and Disorders, which differentiates between the “sick woman” of the white upper class, and the “sickening women” of the non-white working class. Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival. It’s for my fellow spoonies. You know who you are, even if you’ve not been attached to a diagnosis: one of the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to resist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, so that they can try to fix you. You don’t need to be fixed, my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing. I offer this as a call to arms and a testimony of recognition. I hope that my thoughts can provide articulation and resonance, as well as tools of survival and resilience. And for those of you who are not chronically ill or disabled, Sick Woman Theory asks you to stretch your empathy this way. To face us, to listen, to see. 5. Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. To take the term “woman” as the subject-position of this work is a strategic, all-encompassing embrace and dedication to the particular, rather than the universal. Though the identity of “woman” has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans and genderfluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than. The problematics of this term will always require critique, and I hope that Sick Woman Theory can help undo those in its own way. They add: | 1/29/22 |
X - Edited Evidence DATournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Claudia Ribera A. Links 1 In Papastephanou ’11, they bracketed the words, “authoritarian regimes” and “created realities” in the highlighted text – they didn’t announce that the brackets were in the original text, and there’s no indication of what the original language was.
| 12/4/21 |
Y - Disclosure ShellTournament: Harvard | Round: 1 | Opponent: McNeil KJ | Judge: Jacob Palmer
Im writing in the room right now Im alone I can’t ask for the aff in person or do anything to know what im debating C Net Benefits: D Implication: Drop the debater on theory. NO RVIS- 1. Can’t win just for being fair that’s illogical that should be expected, it also incentivizes theory baiting to win off the RVI Competing interps: Reasonability is too subjective AND THIS FORCES DISIMAGINATION IN THE DEBATE SPACE. CAN’T IMAGINE POSSIBILITY OF AFFs I COULD HIT IF NOTHING IS DISCLOSED NOW K | 2/20/22 |
Z Sept Oct Bio-Tech DATournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Pittsburgh Central Catholic EF | Judge: Altman, Elias It was supposed to be China’s moment of technological triumph—one that would show the world Beijing had not only conquered the coronavirus but also emerged as a biotechnology superpower. But when clinical data on China’s flagship CoronaVac vaccine finally flowed in, they showed it was barely more than 50 percent effective—just clearing the minimum standard set by the World Health Organization. In contrast, not one but two vaccines developed by U.S. firms have been found to be upward of 95 percent effective, a standard no other country’s vaccines have yet met in rigorous clinical trials. The United States’s overall track record in responding to the pandemic has been awful. Yet the success of its vaccine development efforts shows that when it comes to biotechnology, the industry of the future, the U.S. is way ahead of China and most of its other rivals. A continuing refrain from Washington in recent years has been that the United States is falling behind China in the development of critical emerging technologies. In some fields, this may be true. But not in biotechnology. To be sure, China’s biotech sector is growing at a torrid pace, and some of its firms are becoming leaders in certain areas, such as cancer treatment. Yet the U.S. retains a dominant position in research, development and commercialization, accounting for almost half of all biotech patents filed from 1999 to 2013. The triumph of its biotechnology industry during the coronavirus pandemic, producing two highly effective vaccines using an entirely new approach based on messenger RNA, and in record time, shows that the U.S.’s competitive edge in biotechnology remains largely intact. And that has important implications as Washington gears up for a sustained period of geopolitical competition with Beijing. Biotech is such a critical area for technological competition between the U.S. and China because it is transforming fields from medicine to military power. The great advances of the 19th century, like chemical fertilizers, resulted from mastering chemistry. In the 20th century, mastery of physics led to nuclear energy—and, more ominously, nuclear weapons. In the 21st century, biology offers a similar mix of peril and promise. This was illustrated dramatically by the award of the 2020 Nobel Prize for the discovery of an enzyme system known as CRISPR-Cas9, which allows an organism’s genomes to be edited with high precision. It is a transformational breakthrough. But while CRISPR shows great promise in the development of new cures for long-untreatable diseases, it could also lead to a whole new generation of deadly bioweapons. That’s a prospect that increasingly alarms U.S. intelligence officials. In 2016, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned Congress that “research in genome editing conducted by countries with different regulatory or ethical standards than those of western countries probably increases the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents or products.” Although Clapper didn’t name specific countries, it soon became clear that he was referring mainly to China. Four years later, his successor, John Ratcliffe, issued a far more pointed warning that “China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities. There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power.” Such capabilities are almost certainly only speculative—but they underscore why biotech leadership is so important for national security as well as economic competitiveness. Beijing has long envied the United States’s dominant position in biotechnology and spent heavily to overtake it. Biotech has been a priority sector for state investment since the 1980s, and by one estimate Beijing had poured some $100 billion into the sector by 2018. Nowhere did it lavish more attention or invest more of its propaganda power than in developing a coronavirus vaccine. State media have spent months crowing that “China is working around the clock for breakthroughs in COVID-19 vaccines.” Yet despite this push, China’s vaccine program quickly took on a Potemkin air. In February 2020, barely two months after the onset of the pandemic and after a supposedly crash vaccine effort, a military doctor stood in front of a Chinese flag to receive what was billed as an experimental vaccine dose but was widely suspected to be a staged photo op. Now, having spent months talking up its two primary vaccine candidates to developing countries like Brazil and Indonesia, both of which have entered into purchase agreements with Chinese biotech firms, Chinese officials face severe mistrust among their nation’s overseas partners. For China’s leaders, the disappointing returns on their big bet on biotechnology look likely to cause them more headaches at home as well as abroad—there are already signs that affluent Chinese place more trust in foreign-developed coronavirus vaccines than the homegrown ones produced at such great expense. For U.S. officials, though, China’s relative underperformance in vaccine development presents an opportunity to reassert the United States’s leadership in biotechnology and public health and bolster the nation’s depleted soft power in the process. The Biden administration has already signaled it will reengage in multilateral bodies such as the World Health Organization. Yet the U.S. shouldn’t stop there. Washington should begin thinking now about how to emulate the success of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)—which, though imperfect, is widely regarded as one of the most successful single public health interventions in history—to address growing disparities in access to coronavirus vaccines between countries. At the moment, vaccine supplies are controlled largely by rich countries, creating the risk of moral and public health failure if the gap persists. While COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, differs in many respects from AIDS, PEPFAR combined research, prevention, and access to therapeutics. Developing a comparable institutional structure to close the coronavirus vaccine access gap is the right thing to do—but it would also go a long way to restoring America’s battered global reputation. At the same time, the United States can’t afford to rest on its laurels in biotechnology, or any other field. Aside from China, other nations like Singapore and Israel have also invested heavily to develop their biotechnology sectors, with Israel in particular giving rise to a thriving biotech industry. U.S. public investment in basic scientific research and development has meanwhile been on the decline for decades, and there are worrying signs that America’s once world-beating innovation ecosystem is less productive, and less entrepreneurial, than it once was. Despite strengths in translational research, moreover, the frontiers of biology increasingly sit at the intersection with other disciplines like computer science, meaning that funding agencies, universities and other organizations need to break down disciplinary silos. Boosting support for biotechnology research, while reforming how that money is used, will go a long way toward shoring up the United States’s leading position in the global biotech sector. The U.S. biotechnology sector also faces other threats, not least growing espionage and intellectual property theft by foreign actors, especially those linked to China. Several high-profile cases brought by the U.S. Department of Justice’s China Initiative have involved biotechnology researchers, and American biotech firms have been top targets for cyber theft and intrusion. Sustained outreach to researchers and research institutions is critical to preventing such theft. But efforts to clamp down on the threats posed by espionage and intellectual property theft can easily go too far and must preserve the researcher mobility and data-sharing that is essential to doing cutting-edge science. Beyond its shores, the United States should work with its partners and allies to enhance export controls on dual-use biotechnology—used for both peaceful and military gain—especially DNA templates. Many forms of genetic material and synthetic biology products are already subject to U.S. export controls, but gaps remain, and screening for genetic sequence orders relies primarily on voluntary regulation by biotech firms. Better coordinating export controls among major economies and U.S. allies can dramatically reduce the risk of sophisticated bioweapons development in the decades to come. When it comes to biotechnology, the industry of the future, the U.S. remains well ahead of its rivals, including China. That’s something Americans can, and should, take pride in. But the U.S. must make proactive investments and undertake significant reforms now to ensure that things stay that way. Americans will not be safe from covid-19 until the entire world is safe. That basic truth shows why vaccine nationalism is not only immoral but also counterproductive. But the simplest solutions are rarely the correct ones, and some countries are using the issue to advance their own strategic interests. The Biden administration must reject the effort by some nations to turn our shared crisis into their opportunity. As the inequities of vaccine distribution worldwide grow, a group of more than 50 developing countries led by India and South Africa is pushing the World Trade Organization to dissolve all international intellectual property protections for pandemic-related products, which would include vaccine research patents, manufacturing designs and technological know-how. The Trump administration rejected the proposal to waive the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for the pandemic when it was introduced in October. Now, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and dozens of Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Biden administration to support the proposal. But many warn the move would result in the United States handing over a generation of advanced research — much of it funded by the U.S. taxpayer — to our country’s greatest competitors, above all China. In Congress, there’s justified frustration with the United States’ failure to respond to China’s robust vaccine diplomacy, in which Beijing has conditioned vaccine offers to pandemic-stricken countries on their ignoring security concerns over Chinese telecom companies or abandoning diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. There’s also a lot of anger at Big Pharma among progressives for profiting from the pandemic. “We are in a race against time, and unfortunately Big Pharma is standing in the way of speedily addressing this problem,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who supports the effort to waive intellectual property protections, told me in an interview. “I think the real security issue is that while the United States balks in making sure that we help ourselves, that these adversaries will just jump right in.” Schakowsky argued that alternative measures for helping poor countries manufacture vaccines are simply not moving fast enough to save lives and that the United States has a duty to respond. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) personally conveyed her support for the waiver to President Biden, Schakowsky said. But Big Pharma is just one piece of the puzzle. Countries such as India and South Africa have been trying to weaken WTO intellectual property protections for decades. The mRNA technology that underpins the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was funded initially by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and has national security implications. Inside the Biden administration, the National Security Council has already convened several meetings on the issue. The waiver is supported by many global health officials in the White House and at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who believe the United States’ international reputation is suffering from its perceived “America First” vaccine strategy. On Wednesday, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai spoke with WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala about the waiver issue. USTR is convening its own interagency meetings on the issue, which many see as a move to reassert its jurisdiction over WTO matters. If and when this does get to Biden’s desk, he will also hear from national security officials who believe that waiving TRIPS would result in the forced transfer of national security-sensitive technology to China, a country that strives to dominate the biotechnology field as part of its Made in China 2025 strategy. Once countries such as China have this technology, they will apply their mercantilist industrial models to ensure their companies dominate these strategically important industries, potentially erasing thousands of U.S. jobs. “We would be delivering a competitive advantage to countries that are increasingly viewed as our adversaries, at taxpayer expense, when there are other ways of doing this,” said Mark Cohen, senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley Law School. A preferable approach would be to build more vaccine-manufacturing capacity in the United States and then give those vaccines to countries in need, said Cohen. The U.S. pharmaceutical industry would surely benefit, but that’s preferable to being dependent on other countries when the next pandemic hits. “If there’s anything that the pandemic has taught us, it’s that we need to have a robust supply chain, for ourselves and for the world generally,” Cohen said. What’s more, it’s not clear that waiving the TRIPS agreement for the pandemic would work in the first place. Bill Gates and others involved in the current vaccine distribution scheme have argued that it would not result in more vaccines, pointing out that licensing agreements are already successfully facilitating cooperation between patent-holding vaccine-makers and foreign manufacturers. Critics respond that such cooperation is still failing to meet the urgent needs in the developing world. Vaccine equity is a real problem, but waiving intellectual property rights is not the solution. If the current system is not getting shots into the arms of people in poor countries, we must fix that for their sake and ours. But the pandemic and our responses to it have geopolitical implications, whether we like it or not. That means helping the world and thinking about our strategic interests at the same time. Trans-Pacific View author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into the U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Eleonore Pauwels – Director of Biology Collectives and Senior Program Associate, Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C. – is the 104th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.” Explain the motivation behind Chinese investment in U.S. genomics and artificial intelligence (AI). With large public and private investments inland and in the U.S., China plans to become the next AI-Genomics powerhouse, which indicates that these technologies will soon converge in China. China’s ambition is to lead the global market for precision medicine, which necessitates acquiring strategic technological and human capital in both genomics and AI. And the country excels at this game. A sharp blow in this U.S.-China competition happened in 2013 when BGI purchased Complete Genomics, in California, with the intent to build its own advanced genomic sequencing machines, therefore securing a technological knowhow mainly mastered by U.S. producers. There are significant economic incentives behind China’s heavy investment in the increasing convergence of AI and genomics. This golden combination will drive precision medicine to new heights by developing a more sophisticated understanding of how our genomes function, leading to precise, even personalized, cancer therapeutics and preventive diagnostics, such as liquid biopsies. By one estimate, the liquid biopsy market is expected to be worth $40 billion in 2017. Assess the implications of iCarbonX of Shenzhen’s decision to invest US$100 million in U.S.-company PatientsLikeMe relative to AI and genomic data collection. iCarbonX is a pioneer in AI software that learns to recognize useful relationships between large amounts of individuals’ biological, medical, behavioral and psychological data. Such a data-ecosystem will deliver insights into how an individual’s genome is mutating over time, and therefore critical information about this individual’s susceptibilities to rare, chronic and mental illnesses. In 2017, iCarbonX invested $100 million in PatientsLikeMe, getting a hold over data from the biggest online network of patients with rare and chronic diseases. If successful, this effort could turn into genetic gold, making iCarbonX one of the wealthiest healthcare companies in China and beyond. The risk factor is that iCarbonX is handling more than personal data, but potentially vulnerable data as the company uses a smartphone application, Meum, for customers to consult for health advice. Remember that the Chinese nascent genomics and AI industry relies on cloud computing for genomics data-storage and exchange, creating, in its wake, new vulnerabilities associated with any internet-based technology. This phenomenon has severe implications. How much consideration has been given to privacy and the evolving notion of personal data in this AI-powered health economy? And is our cyberinfrastructure ready to protect such trove of personal health data from hackers and industrial espionage? In this new race, will China and the U.S. have to constantly accelerate their rate of cyber and bio-innovation to be more resilient? Refining our models of genomics data protection will become a critical biosecurity issue. Why is Chinese access to U.S. genomic data a national security concern? Genomics and computing research is inherently dual-use, therefore a strategic advantage in a nation’s security arsenal. Using AI systems to understand how the functioning of our genomes impacts our health is of strategic importance for biodefense. This knowledge will lead to increasing developments at the forefront of medical countermeasures, including vaccines, antibiotics, and targeted treatments relying on virus-engineering and microbiome research. Applying deep learning to genomics data-sets could help geneticists learn how to use genome-editing (CRISPR) to efficiently engineer living systems, but also to treat and, even “optimize,” human health, with potential applications in military enhancements. A $15 million partnership between a U.S. company, Gingko Bioworks, and DARPA aims to genetically design new probiotics as a protection for soldiers against a variety of stomach bugs and illnesses. China could be using the same deep learning techniques on U.S. genomics data to better comprehend how to develop, patent and manufacture tailored cancer immunotherapies in high demand in the United States. Yet, what if Chinese efforts venture into understanding how to impact key genomics health determinants relevant to the U.S. population? Gaining access to increasingly large U.S. genomic data-sets gives China a knowledge advantage into leading the next steps in bio-military research. Could biomedical data be used to develop bioweapons? Explain. Personalized medicine advances mean that personalized bio-attacks are increasingly possible. The combination of AI with biomedical data and genome-editing technologies will help us predict genes most important to particular functions. Such insights will contribute to knowing how a particular disease occurs, how a newly-discovered virus has high transmissibility, but also why certain populations and individuals are more susceptible to it. Combining host susceptibility information with pathogenic targeted design, malicious actors could engineer pathogens that are tailored to overcome the immune system or the microbiome of specific populations. The first argument is easily disposed of. Yes, the postwar world has been thoroughly imperfect, featuring nuclear arms races, genocides, widespread poverty and other scourges. But the world has always been imperfect, and by any meaningful comparison, the last seven decades have been a veritable golden age. The liberal international economic order has led to an explosion of domestic and global prosperity: According to World Bank data, both U.S. and global per capita income have increased roughly three-fold (in inflation-adjusted terms) since 1960, with U.S. gross domestic product increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. system of alliances and forward military deployments has contributed critically to the longest period of great-power peace in modern history, and the incidence of war and conquest more broadly have dropped dramatically. The number of democracies in the world has increased from perhaps a dozen during World War II to well over 100 today; respect for basic human rights has also reached impressive levels. As a bevy of scholarship has shown, the policies that the U.S. has pursued and the international order it has built have contributed enormously and directly to these outcomes. If the liberal international order can’t be considered a smashing success, no international order could be. The second critique is also overstated. It is true that Washington, like all great powers throughout history, has been willing to bend the rules to get its way. It is hard to reconcile Cold War-era interventions in Guatemala, Chile and other countries with a professed solicitude for human rights and democracy; the Iraq War of 2003 is only one instance in which the U.S. brushed aside the concerns of international organizations such as the U.N. Security Council. Likewise, when the U.S. government determined that the Bretton Woods system of monetary relations no longer suited its interests in the 1970s, it terminated that scheme and insisted on creating a more favorable one. But again, the proper standard here is not sainthood but reality. And the U.S. has generally enlisted its power in the service of universal values such as democracy and human rights; it has, more often than not, promoted a positive-sum international system in which like-minded nations can be secure and wealthy. This goes back to the very beginning of the liberal order: Washington did not seek to hold its defeated adversaries in subjugation after World War II; it rebuilt Japan and western Germany into thriving, democratic allies that became fierce economic competitors to the U.S. The U.S. has taken this approach not simply because it wanted to do good in the world — powerful as this motivation is — but because of a hard-headed desire to do good for itself. In an interdependent global environment, American officials have long calculated, the U.S. cannot divorce its own well-being from that of the wider world. And in contrast to how other great powers — Imperial Japan, for instance, or the Soviet Union — ruled their spheres of influence, American behavior has been positively enlightened. It is this relatively benign behavior that has convinced so many countries to tolerate American leadership — and it is the emergence of a darker form of U.S. hegemony under the Trump administration that so profoundly worries them today. As for the third critique, the premise is right, but the conclusion can easily go too far. It is always dangerous to become so enraptured by past achievements that one loses sight of the need for adaptation in the future. This is particularly true today, because the strength of the liberal order is being tested from within and without, by issues ranging from unequal burden-sharing among American allies to the ambivalence of the American people themselves. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that either American power or the liberal order it supports have eroded so dramatically that Washington’s postwar project cannot be sustained. Quite the contrary — the U.S. is likely to remain the world’s strongest power for decades to come. | 11/6/21 |
Z Sept Oct US Production CPTournament: Yale | Round: 2 | Opponent: Pittsburgh Central Catholic EF | Judge: Altman, Elias Sauer Solves better – IP rights don’t hinder vaccine cooperation, but manufacturing capacity is the current constraint. 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. | 11/6/21 |
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