Harrison Murno Neg
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| Apple Valley | 2 | Iowa City West ST | Lila Lavender |
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| Columbia | 3 | West Des Moines Valley LS | Eze N |
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| Columbia | 2 | Conal Thomas-McGinnis | Scarsdale DW |
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| Glenbrooks | 1 | Immaculate Heart SS | Diana Alvarez |
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| Glenbrooks | 4 | Lake Highland Prep AV | Mark Kivimaki |
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| Yale Invitational | 2 | West Des Moines Valley SJ | Justin Smith |
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| Yale Invitational | 2 | West Des Moines Valley SJ | Justin Smith |
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| Yale Invitational | 3 | Dublin AL | Symone Whalin |
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| Yale Invitational | 3 | Dublin AL | Symone Whalin |
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| Any | 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any Navigation |
| Any | 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any Contact Information |
| Apple Valley | 2 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Lila Lavender AC - Rawls |
| Colleyville | 4 | Opponent: Michelle Gong | Judge: Lucas Chan AC - Transpacific Reimagining |
| Columbia | 3 | Opponent: West Des Moines Valley LS | Judge: Eze N AC - Environment Util Aff |
| Columbia | 2 | Opponent: Conal Thomas-McGinnis | Judge: Scarsdale DW AC - Kant |
| Glenbrooks | 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SS | Judge: Diana Alvarez AC - US |
| Glenbrooks | 4 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AV | Judge: Mark Kivimaki AC - Agonism |
| Yale Invitational | 2 | Opponent: West Des Moines Valley SJ | Judge: Justin Smith 1AC - Lockean Libertarianism |
| Yale Invitational | 2 | Opponent: West Des Moines Valley SJ | Judge: Justin Smith 1AC - Lockean Libertarianism |
| Yale Invitational | 3 | Opponent: Dublin AL | Judge: Symone Whalin 1AC - Nuke war extinction |
| Yale Invitational | 3 | Opponent: Dublin AL | Judge: Symone Whalin 1AC - Nuke war extinction |
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Cites
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0 - Contact InformationTournament: Any | Round: 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any I disclose and format my documents the way I learned on my team. If you need me to change my docs (i.e change the highlighting color, change the font) I am very happy to accommodate. If you need me to disclose a different way, let me know and I will see what I can do based on the situation. Some of my cites aren't working, please refer to OS. If you know how to fix it please let me know. | 9/18/21 |
0 - NavigationTournament: Any | Round: 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any | 9/18/21 |
1 - Identity PoliticsTournament: Colleyville | Round: 4 | Opponent: Michelle Gong | Judge: A. Link Link Their EXCLUSIVE focus on categories Asian identity ties them to identity politics – they focus 100 of the aff on this. B. Impacts
Indeed the bonds between African Americans struggling to resist racist domination, and all other people of color in this society who suffer from the same system, continue to be fragile, even as we all remain untied by ties, however frayed and weakened, forged in shared anti-racist struggle. ¶ Collectively, within the United States people of color strengthen our capacity to resist white supremacy when we build coalitions. Since white supremacy emerged here within the context of colonization, the conquering and conquest of Native Americans, early on it was obvious that Native and African Americans could best preserve their cultures by resisting from a standpoint of political solidarity. The concrete practice of solidarity between the two groups has been eroded by the divide-and-conquer tactics of racist white power and by the complicity of both groups. Native American artist and activist of the Cherokee people Jimmie Durham, in his collection of essays A Certain Lack of Coherence, talks about the 1960’s as a time when folks tried to regenerate that spirit of coalition: “In the 1960’s and ‘70’s American Indian, African American and Puerto Rican activists said, as loudly as they could, “This country is founded on the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another.” This statement, hardly arguable, was not much taken up by white activists.” As time passed, it was rarely taken up by anyone. Instead the fear that one’s specific group might receive more attention has led to greater nationalism, the showing of concern for one’s racial or ethnic plight without linking that concern to the plight of other non-white groups and their struggles for liberation. ¶ Bonds of solidarity between people of color are continuously ruptured by our complicity with white racism. Similarly, white immigrants to the United States, both past and present, establish their right to citizenship within white supremacist society by asserting it in daily life through acts of discrimination and assault that register their contempt for and disregard of black people and darker-skinned immigrants mimic this racist behavior in their interactions with black folks. In her editorial “On the Backs of Blacks” published in a recent special issue of TIME magazine Toni Morrison discusses the way white supremacy is reinscribed again and again as immigrants seek assimilation: ¶ All immigrants fight for jobs and space, and who is there to fight but those who have both? As in the fishing ground struggle between Texas and Vietnamese shrimpers, they displace what and whom they can…In race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American…So addictive is this ploy that the fact of blackness has been abandoned for the theory of blackness. It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door. ¶ Often people of color, both those who are citizens and those who are recent immigrants, hold black people responsible for the hostility they encounter from whites. It is as though they see blacks as acting in a manner that makes things harder for everybody else. This type of scapegoating is the mark of the colonized sensibility which always blames those victimized rather than targeting structures of domination. ¶ Just as many white Americans deny both the prevalence of racism in the United States and the role they play in perpetuating and maintaining white supremacy, non-white, non-black groups, Native, Asian, Hispanic Americans, all deny their investment in anti-black sentiment even as they consistently seek to distance themselves from blackness so that they will not be seen as residing at the bottom of this society’s totem pole, in the category reserved for the most despised group. Such jockeying for white approval and reward obscures the way allegiance to the existing social structure undermines the social welfare of all people of color. White supremacist power is always weakened when people of color bond across differences of culture, ethnicity, and race. It is always strengthened when we act as though there is no continuity and overlap in the patterns of exploitation and oppression that affect all of our lives. ¶ To ensure that political bonding to challenge and change white supremacy will not be cultivated among diverse groups of people of color, white ruling groups pit us against one another in a no-win game of “who will get the prize for model minority today.” They compare and contrast, affix labels like “model minority,” define boundaries, and we fall into line. Those rewards coupled with internalized racist assumptions lead non-black people of color to deny the way racism victimizes them as they actively work to disassociate themselves from black people. This will to disassociate is a gesture of racism. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as ‘woman’ or ‘person of color’ as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. She adds: The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. The need to split one's political energies between two sometimes opposing political agendas is a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront. Indeed, their specific raced and gendered experiences, although intersectional, often define as well as confine the interests of the entire group. For example, Racism as experienced by people of color who are of a particular gender--male—tends to determine the parameters of antiracist strategies, just as sexism as experienced by women who are of a particular race-white- tends to ground the women's movement. The problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of color by not acknowledging the "additional" burden of patriarchy or of racism, but that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism. Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color, and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women, dominant conceptions of antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms. Among the most troubling political consequences of the failure of antiracist and feminist discourses to address the intersections of racism and patriarchy is the fact that, to the extent they forward the interest of people of color and "women," respectively, one analysis often implicitly denies the validity of the other. The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women. These mutual elisions present a particularly difficult political dilemma for women of color. Adopting either analysis constitutes a denial of a fundamental dimension of our subordination and works to preclude the development of a political discourse that more fully empowers women of color. C. Alternative hooks 2 Reject their political framing and embrace a politics of solidarity activism, which seeks to address oppression from an intersectional and coalition-based approach. Even though progressive people of color consistently critique these standpoints, we have yet to build a contemporary mass movement to challenge white supremacy that would draw us together. Without an organized collective struggle that consistently reminds us of our common concerns, people of color forget. Sadly forgetting common concerns sets the stage for competing concerns. Working within the system of white supremacy, non-black people of color often feel as though they must compete with black folks to receive white attention. Some are even angry at what they wrongly perceive as a greater concern on the part of white of the dominant culture for the pain of black people. Rather than seeing the attention black people receive as linked to the gravity of our situation and the intensity of our resistance, they want to make it a sign of white generosity and concern. Such thinking is absurd. If white folks were genuinely concerned about black pain, they would challenge racism, not turn the spotlight on our collective pain in ways that further suggest that we are inferior. Andrew Hacker makes it clear in Two Nations that the vast majority of white Americans believe that “members of the black race represent an inferior strain of the human species.” He adds: “In this view Africans-and Americans who trace their origins to that continent-are seen as languishing at a lower evolutionary level than members of other races.” Non-black people of color often do not approach white attention to black issues by critically interrogating how those issues are presented and whose interests the representations ultimately serve. Rather than engaging in a competition that sees blacks as winning more goodies from the white system than other groups, non-black people of color who identify with black resistance struggle recognize the danger of such thinking and repudiate it. They are politically astute enough to challenge a rhetoric of resistance that is based on competition rather than a capacity on the part of non-black groups to identify with whatever progress blacks make as being a positive sign for everyone. Until non-black people of color define their citizenship via commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice rather than investing in the dehumanization and oppression of black people, they will always act as mediators, keeping black people in check for the ruling white majority. Until racist anti-black sentiments are let go by other people of color, especially immigrants, and complain that these groups are receiving too much attention, they undermine freedom struggle. When this happens people of color war all acting in complicity with existing exploitative and oppressive structures. ¶ As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer. The most recent effort to undermine progressive bonding between people of color is the institutionalization of “multiculturalism”. Positively, multiculturalism is presented as a corrective to a Eurocentric vision of model citizenship wherein white middle-class ideals are presented as the norm. Yet this positive intervention is undermined by visions of multiculturalism that suggest everyone should live with and identify with their own self contained group. If white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is unchanged then multiculturalism within that context can only become a breeding ground for narrow nationalism, fundamentalism, identity politics, and cultural, racial, and ethnic separatism. Each separate group will then feel that it must protect its own interests by keeping outsiders at bay, for the group will always appear vulnerable, its power and identity sustained by exclusivity. When people of color think this way, white supremacy remains intact. For even though demographics in the United States would suggest that in the future the nation will be more populated by people of color, and whites will no longer be the majority group, numerical presence will in no way alter white supremacy if there is no collective organizing, no efforts to build coalitions that cross boundaries. Already, the white Christian Right is targeting large populations of people of color to ensure that the fundamentalist values they want this nation to uphold and represent will determine the attitudes and values of these groups. The role Eurocentric Christianity has played in teaching non-white folks Western metaphysical dualism, the ideology that under girds binary notion of superior/inferior, good/bad, white/black, cannot be ignored. While progressive organizations are having difficulty reaching wider audiences, the white-dominated Christian Right organizes outreach programs that acknowledge diversity and have considerable influence. Just as the white-dominated Christian church in the U.S. once relied on biblical references to justify racist domination and discrimination, it now deploys a rhetoric of multiculturalism to invite non-white people to believe that racism can be overcome through a shared fundamentalist encounter. Every contemporary fundamentalist white male-dominated religious cult in the U.S. has a diverse congregation. People of color have flocked to these organizations because they have felt them to be places where racism does not exist, where they are not judged on the basis of skin color. While the white-dominated mass media focus critical attention on black religious fundamentalist groups like the Nation of Islam, and in particular Louis Farrakhan, little critique is made of white Christian fundamentalist outreach to black people and other people of color. Black Islamic fundamentalism shares with the white Christian Right support for coercive hierarchy, fascism, and a belief that some groups are inferior and others superior, along with a host of other similarities. Irrespective of the standpoint, religious fundamentalism brainwashes individuals not to think critically or see radical politicization as a means of transforming their lives. When people of color immerse themselves in religious fundamentalism, no meaningful challenge and critique of white supremacy can surface. Participation in a radical multiculturalism in any form is discouraged by religious fundamentalism. ¶ Progressive multiculturalism that encourages and promotes coalition building between people of color threatens to disrupt white supremacist organization of us all into competing camps. However, this vision of multiculturalism is continually undermined by greed, one group wanting rewards for itself even at the expense of other groups. It is this perversion of solidarity the authors of Night Vision address when they assert: “While there are different nationalities, races and genders in the U.S., the supposedly different cultures in multiculturalism don’t like to admit what they have in common, the glue of it all-parasitism. Right now, there’s both anger among the oppressed and a milling around, edging up to the next step but uncertain what it is fully about, what is means. The key is the common need to break with parasitism.” A based identity politics of solidarity that embraces both a broad based identity politics which acknowledges specific cultural and ethnic legacies, histories, etc. as it simultaneously promotes a recognition of overlapping cultural traditions and values as well as an inclusive understanding of what is gained when people of color unite to resist white supremacy is the only way to ensure that multicultural democracy will become a reality. | 2/5/22 |
1 - New Affs Bad KTournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AV | Judge: Mark Kivimaki 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. A. Link Link They wouldn’t disclose anything about the aff because they said it’s new – I didn’t know anything about the advocacy, whether it was whole res, etc. Screenshot in the doc. B. Impacts
Opportunity hoarding was originally articulated and defined by sociologist Charles Tilly. In his words, it represents a mechanism of social inequality that ‘operates when members of a categorically bounded network acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network’s modus operandi’.4 4 Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 10. View all notes Such a resource could be an occupational designation, a residential area, an educational credential, a lifestyle classification, or other categories that convey distinction, exclude other groups and are subject to conditions described above. Consequently, the concept of opportunity hoarding is applicable to a range of social settings and circumstances, contributing advantages to members of both elites and non-elites who can restrict access to resources and opportunities to eligible participants. Tilly employs the term somewhat differently from others, however, and distinctions in its definition and use are important. TURNS CASE – THEIR PERFORMANCE ACTIVELY PROPS UP STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE/UNDERMINES LIBERATION STRATEGIES. INDEPENDENT REASON TO DROP THEM – they’re not consistent with their own framework, and they don’t get to weigh substance against the K, since I question their ability to read it in the first place. I fall squarely on the side of disclosure. I find that the largest advantage of widespread disclosure is the educational value it provides. First, disclosure streamlines research. Rather than every team and every lone wolf researching completely in the dark, the wiki provides a public body of knowledge that everyone can contribute to and build off of. Students can look through the different studies on the topic and choose the best ones on an informed basis without the prohibitively large burden of personally surveying all of the literature. The best arguments are identified and replicated, which is a natural result of an open marketplace of ideas. Quality of evidence increases across the board. In theory, the increased quality of information could trade off with quantity. If debaters could just look to the wiki for evidence, it might remove the competitive incentive to do one’s own research. Empirically, however, the opposite has been true. In fact, a second advantage of disclosure is that it motivates research. Debaters cannot expect to make it a whole topic with the same stock AC – that is, unless they are continually updating and frontlining it. Likewise, debaters with access to their opponents’ cases can do more targeted and specific research. Students can go to a new level of depth, researching not just the pros and cons of the topic but the specific authors, arguments, and adovcacies employed by other debaters. The incentive to cut author-specific indicts is low if there’s little guarantee that the author will ever be cited in a round but high if one knows that specific schools are using that author in rounds. In this way, disclosure increases incentive to research by altering a student’s cost-benefit analysis so that the time spent researching is more valuable, i.e. more likely to produce useful evidence because it is more directed. In any case, if publicly accessible evidence jeopardized research, backfiles and briefs would have done LD in a long time ago. Lastly, and to my mind most significantly, disclosure weeds out anti-educational arguments. I have in mind the sort of theory spikes and underdeveloped analytics whose strategic value comes only from the fact that the time to think of and enunciate responses to them takes longer than the time spent making the arguments themselves. If these arguments were made on a level playing field where each side had equal time to craft answers, they would seldom win rounds, which is a testimony to the real world applicability (or lack thereof) of such strategies. A model in which arguments have to withstand close scrutiny to win rounds creates incentive to find the best arguments on the topic rather than the shadiest. Having transitioned from LD to policy where disclosure is more universal, I can say that debates are more substantive, developed, and responsive when both sides know what they’re getting into prior to the round. The educational benefits of disclosure alone aren’t likely to convince the fairness-outweighs-education crowd, but I’ve learned over the course of many theory debates that most of that crowd has a very warped and confusing conception of fairness. Debaters who produce better research are more deserving of a win. Debaters who can make smart arguments and defend them from criticism should win out over debaters who hide behind obfuscation. That so many rounds these days are resolved on frivolous theory and dropped, single-sentence blips suggests that wins are not going to the “better debaters” in any meaningful sense of the term. The structure of LD in the status quo doesn’t incentivize better debating. TURNS CASE – if their method is good, that’s ALL THE MORE REASON they should disclose it and modify it to withstand well-researched objections. AND turn the “think on your feet” advantage – they had 5 months to prep this aff and I had 4 minutes. They had time to script an answer to every possible response to the aff – that’s WAY LESS independent thinking. AND generics don’t solve – I couldn’t cut an update to my generics that was specific to the aff, and they can always say my generics don’t answer the nuances of their case. Implication REJECT THEIR PERFORMANCE AND DROP THE DEBATER – they should lose for performatively contradicting their benefits AND for making debate less educational. A loss at least creates a risk that they’ll disclose in the future – that’s worth it if it improves the quality of in-round education. AND drop them for denying substantive engagement – you wouldn’t vote for a debater who took their opponent’s computer or stole their flow in round, so don’t vote for similar practices that stop debate from happening. | 11/21/21 |
1 - White Phil DATournament: Yale Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: West Des Moines Valley SJ | Judge: Justin Smith
We begin with the first author’s reflections on philosophy and its recurring problem of denying the realities of race and racism, reflections that have arisen as a Black (male) philosopher whose life has been threatened for doing Black philosophy. The experience of confronting death, being fearful of being killed doing my job as a critical race theorist, and being threatened with violence for thinking about racism in America has a profound effect on concretizing what is at stake in our theories about anti-Black racism. Whereas my work on race and racism in philosophy earlier in my career was dedicated to the problems created by the mass ignorance of the discipline to the political debates and ethnological history of Black philosophers in the 19th and 20th centuries, I now find myself thinking more seriously about the way that philosophy, really theory itself—our present categories of knowledge, such as race, class, and gender, found through disciplines—actually hastens the deaths of subjugated peoples in the United States. Academic philosophy routinely abstracts away from—directs thought to not attend to the realities of death, dying, and despair created by—antiBlack racism. Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations are routinely rationalized as disposable flesh. The deaths of these groups launch philosophical discussions of social injustice and spark awareness by whites , while the deaths of white people direct policy and demand outrage. Because racialized bodies are confined to inhumane living conditions that nurture violence and despair that become attributed to the savage nature of nonwhites and evidence of their inhumanity, the deaths of these dehumanized peoples are often measured against the dangers they are thought to pose to others. The interpretation of the inferior position that racialized groups occupy in the United States is grounded in how whites often think of themselves in relation to problem populations. This relationship is often rationalized by avoidance and by the denials of whites about being causally related to the harsh conditions imposed on nonwhites in the world. Philosophy, and its glorification of the rational individual, ignores the complexity of anti-Black racism by blaming the complacency, if not outright hostility, towards Blacks on the mass ignorance of white America. To remedy this problem, Black philosophers are asked to respond by gearing their writings, lectures, and professional presence to further educate and dialogue with white philosophers in order to enable them to better understand anti-Black racism and white supremacy (Curry 2008, 2015). This therapy is often rewarded as scholarship. Philosophical positions that analyze racism as a problem of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and ignorance (philosophies predicated on the capacity of whites to change) are rewarded and praised as the cutting edge and most impactful theories about race and racism. Reducing racism to a problem of recognition and understanding allows white philosophers to remain absolved of their contribution to the apathy that white America has to the death and subjugation Black Americans endure at the hands of the white race. | 9/18/21 |
JanFeb - Owning NCTournament: Columbia | Round: 3 | Opponent: West Des Moines Valley LS | Judge: Eze N 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. | 1/29/22 |
JanFeb - TTournament: Colleyville | Round: 4 | Opponent: Michelle Gong | Judge: Lucas Chan Interp The aff must defend only the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. Violation They defend that a method of transpacific imagining – they are adding a method beyond a justice statement. 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:
| 2/5/22 |
NovDec - Marcuse KTournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Lila Lavender Framework ROB and Kellner The Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Rejection of One-Dimensional Thought. This means distancing ourselves from existing institutions. 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. 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. 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. 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"; Marcuse 3 The alternative is to embrace indigenous modes of society pre colonization and capitalism. However, another alternative seems possible. If industrialization and the introduction of technology in the backward countries encounter strong resistance from the indigenous and traditional modes of life and labor-a resistance which is not abandoned even at the very tangible prospect of a better and easier life- could this pre-technological tradition itself become the source of progress and industrialization? Such indigenous progress would demand a planned policy which, instead of superimposing technology on the traditional modes of life and labor, would extend and improve them on their own grounds, eliminating the oppressive and exploitative forces (material and religious) which made them incapable of assuring the development of a human existence. Social revolu- tion, agrarian reform, and reduction of over-population would be prerequisites, but not industrialization after the pattern of the advanced societies. Indigenous progress seems indeed possible in areas where the natural resources, if freed from suppressive encroachment, are still sufficient not only for subsistence but also for a human life. And where they are not, could they not be made sufficient by the gradual and piecemeal aid of technology-within the framework of the traditional forms? If this is the case, then conditions would prevail which do not exist in the old and advanced industrial societies (and never existed there)-namely, the "immediate producers" themselves would have the chance to create, by their own labor and leisure, their own progress and determine its rate and direction. Self- determination would proceed from the base, and work for the necessities could transcend itself toward work for gratification. But even under these abstract assumptions, the brute limits of self-determination must be acknowledged. The initial revolution which, by abolishing mental and material exploitation, is to establish the prerequisites for the new development, is hardly conceivable as spontaneous action. Moreover, indigenous pro- gress would presuppose a change in the policy of the two great industrial power blocs which today shape the world- abandonment of neo-colonialism in all its forms. At present, there is no indication of such a change. | 11/5/21 |
NovDec - Racist Strikes DATournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart SS | Judge: Diana Alvarez Wilson 1 The white labor movement will always perpetuate racism even if it is not beneficial for the strike. The racialized picket line can be thought of as a metaphorical dividing line of conflict influencing the way a strike unfolds. Part of this process occurs when labor (class) soli- darity becomes weakened and/or replaced with racial forms of solidarity (Martinot, 2003). Racialized strikes arise within the context of capitalism, where exploitation is structured on the racial and gender divisions among workers which encourages differen- tial treatment and a wage tier system (Jackman, 1994). Social inequality structurally determines varying degrees of exploitation particular groups of workers face based on a group’s race, gender, and/or citizenship status (Bonacich et al., forthcoming). These divi- sions allow capitalists to seek out labor forces that are most susceptible to higher degrees of exploitive labor practices while simultaneously lowering the wages of more privileged workers (Bonacich, 1972, 1975, 1976). Glenn (2002) develops a similar argument, tracing the ways in which capitalists utilize divisions of workers along lines of race and gender inequality. Owners of cap- ital sought to maximize their profits by paying the lowest possible wages while enact- ing maximum control over the production processes. Moreover, they took advantage of existing inequalities by using marginalized groups (people of color, immigrants, women, lesser skilled) that could be hired more cheaply. Free labor, as a Western institution, was not developed for people of color but instead for white people and white societies (Blauner, 2001). Citizenship rights, or the lack thereof, prove to be a pivotal signifier of defining class relations in the USA along racialized and gendered lines. Citizenship as it applies to labor thus plays a major role in linking racist eco- nomic doctrines that distinguish between forms of free labor and unfree labor (Almaguer, 1994; Glenn, 2002). Since citizenship rights were historically given to free (white male) labor groups, white men were allowed a privileged position in the US labor market. These privileges have allowed white men to join unions and increase their economic and social power in society (Royster, 2003). This also led to the for- mation of the ‘worker citizen’ ideal, which is constitutive of the dual attributes of whiteness and masculinity forming the ideal-type American worker (Glenn, 2002). Therefore, exclusion was a primary feature of the making of the white working class (Fletcher, 2002; Kimmel, 1996). For white strikers participating in a multiracial labor struggle such as the grocery strike, this racial divide creates a host of practices that white strikers enact in order to maintain the racialized picket line. Although white workers ultimately stand to lose from a racially divided working class, many white workers continue to reinforce racial divisions. One of the reasons for this is that the ideological component of white supremacy becomes a site of influence beyond the sheer class location of the white working class (Martinot, 2003; Wellman, 1993). Wilson 2 First, white people otherize workers of color in the strike to create racial hierarchies. Roediger’s (1991) analysis of the formation of the white working class offers a start- ing point for explaining how racial divisions operate in today’s labor conflicts. From the perspective of white workers during a strike, scabs are racialized and ‘othered’ as impediments to class victory. In this sense, white workers view workers of color as a threat and thus express their resentment toward workers of color as an act to protect white workers’ interests (Bonacich, 1972). The split labor market theory has been used to explain the underlying causes behind racialized labor and the divide among work- ing classes along racial lines (Bonacich, 1972, 1975, 1976; Boswell, 1986; Brown and Boswell, 1995; Brueggemann and Boswell, 1998). According to Bonacich (1972: 549), ‘The central hypothesis of the split labor theory is that ethnic antagonism first germinates in a labor market split along ethnic lines.’ In a split labor market, the domi- nant racial/ethnic (i.e. white) group develops a racial caste system that confines lower-cost labor of color to lower-paying and lower-status jobs, thereby undermining multiracial class solidarity. This impacts the degree of solidarity across racial lines and often reinforces divisions among workers. In other words, split labor markets can aid in maintaining/producing racism and racial privilege along with other forms of inequality, such as patriarchy and sexism. In the UFCW grocery strike, the union was not formally split along racial lines. However, white workers still enacted racial divisions despite standing side-by-side with workers of color. By divided I am not referring to physical barriers, but more so along the lines of where (racial) solidarity is transmitted. People of color are marked as such by white workers, while white workers themselves remain racially un-marked, or race- less. This serves both to strengthen the power of the capitalist class while simultaneously weakening the power of the working class. In other words, this process produces tension among workers and deflects tension away from capital. In strikes that have a public component, especially in the retail sector where there are workers and customers interacting on the picket line, a whole set of other actors (i.e. customers) become important in understanding the racialized picket line. Customers who enter the stores can act as a crucial determinant regarding the outcome of retail strikes/boycotts. While white strikers generally disapprove of any person who breaks the picket line regardless of race, customers of color who cross the picket line face a racialized form of antagonism during the strike that white picket line crossers do not encounter. This leads to a number of instances by which white workers racialize particular racial groups of color as either ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ labor. In the majority of cases, people of color are associated as being anti-labor by white strikers (although in distinct ways for each group), while their white counterparts who choose to continue to shop at the stores are only associated as anti-labor on an individual basis. Since white workers do not view their racist practices as an implicit move of racial solidarity with (white) capital, the capitalist class continues to benefit from the racial divisions of workers. There has been a tendency in the labor movement to only define solidarity solely in color-blind class specific terms. | 11/21/21 |
SeptOct - Ban Nukes CPTournament: Yale Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Dublin AL | Judge: Symone Whalin Blechman CP Text: States ought to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. This entails that national governments agree to remove their collections of nuclear weapons. 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. | 9/18/21 |
SeptOct - Gene-Editing KTournament: Yale Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: West Des Moines Valley SJ | Judge: Justin Smith ROB and Arana ‘21 As educational oppression is rooted in ignorance; the Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Strategy that Better Addresses Oppression. This means we use the round to increase education about hidden rights violations. While this framework is open to multiple forms of oppression, it’s time to specifically talk about minorities since republicans are making it increasingly difficult to do so. This Pride month, as revelers hit the streets to celebrate LGBTQ history, Republican state legislatures are hard at work trying to erase it. And it’s not just epochal events like the Stonewall riots, or towering figures like Harvey Milk, that could be wiped from classroom instruction. In public schools in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Montana, it may soon become illegal even to mention Bayard Rustin, the openly gay co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, or educate kids about the AIDS crisis. In May, Tennessee became the first state to pass what queer-rights advocates have branded as “Don’t Say Gay” laws, which either forbid the teaching of LGBTQ history in K-12 schools outright or allow parents to choose whether their children participate in lessons that include it. Within days, Montana followed suit. Yet another bill in Arkansas awaits the signature of the state’s Republican governor. Similar bills have been considered in West Virginia, Iowa, and Missouri, and even more proposals are percolating through red-state legislatures. Akin to bans on the teaching of critical race theory, these laws seek to preserve the myth that the story of America is one of inexorable progress and unblemished virtue, that we stand exceptional among nations as the gleaming embodiment of democracy; they also imply that a great number of us don’t matter. In particular, legislation forbidding the teaching of queer history aims to ossify what remains of society’s moral disapproval of LGBTQ people and endangers queer youth susceptible to suicide. “It is a false representation of the past, one in which LGBTQ people are imagined never to have existed,” said Anthony Mora, associate professor of history and Latinx studies at the University of Michigan. “The hesitancy to open up questions about the failures of the past—of not living up to the goals of the republic—is less about the past than about not wanting to change the present, to hold in place the status quo and not allow for real moments of debate and change.” Link The aff endorses a conception of medicine that is defined by doctors and experts. The idea for gene therapy—a type of DNA-based medicine that inserts a healthy gene into cells to replace a mutated, disease-causing variant—was first published in 1972. After decades of disputed results, treatment failures and some deaths in experimental trials, the first gene therapy drug, for a type of skin cancer, was approved in China in 2003. The rest of the world was not easily convinced of the benefits, however, and it was not until 2017 that the U.S. approved one of these medicines. Since then, the pace of approvals has accelerated quickly. At least nine gene therapies have been approved for certain kinds of cancer, some viral infections and a few inherited disorders. A related drug type interferes with faulty genes by using stretches of DNA or RNA to hinder their workings. After nearly half a century, the concept of genetic medicine has become a reality. Holbrook The medical community determines what is viewed as pathological – harming PWDs. What constitutes pathological is often infected by social and cultural norms, not simply medical knowledge. The most obvious example is homosexuality itself. As discussed above, until the early 1970s, the medical community, with considerable internal debate, did consider homosexuality to be pathological. Nothing changed in the 1970s with respect to homosexuality– instead social norms and views of homosexuals changed with in the medical community, resulting in it being eliminated as a pathological condition.212 The contextual nature of psychological disorders, therefore, may result in an ever-moving target of what constitutes pathological. The medical line of therapy/enhancement could truly break down in the context of the deaf, dwarfs, and high-functioning autistics. The deaf do not view themselves as medically pathological, although the hearing community would view them as lacking one of the key human senses and, thus, possessing a pathological condition. The medical community would seem to be more in line with that of the hearing community, risking that the use of a medical norm would allow patents that arguably would express disfavor to the deaf community. A similar argument could be made for dwarfs, who have bodies that function entirely normally. They are simply statistically far outside the normal range of human height. High- functioning autistics can view themselves as simply having different social skills, which is not inherently wrong. Arguably, this should not be viewed as a pathological condition, but likely the medical community would disagree. Simply because these distinctions are difficult to make, however, does not inevitably mean that we should allow everything to be patented. Regulatory agencies other than the PTO are charged with making this distinction already.213 The PTO could be require the demonstration of a utility that is beyond mere enhancement and one that instead is a therapy directed to a known pathology. The DSM could remain an effective tool, however. While on the margins some conditions may seem close to the line of pathology, there are some conditions that universally would be viewed as pathological, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The DSM would at least provide certainty for certain behaviors. SEP The alt is to reject the affs normative conception of medicine and reconceptualize what it means to be “ill”. One of the fundamental and most long-standing debates in the philosophy of medicine relates to the basic concepts of health and disease (see concepts of health and disease). It may seem obvious what we mean by such statements: people seek treatment from medical professionals when they are feeling unwell, and clinicians treat patients in order to help them restore or maintain their health. But people seek advice and assistance from medical professionals for other reasons, such as pregnancy which cannot be construed as a disease state, and high blood pressure which is asymptomatic. Thus the dividing line between disease and health is notoriously vague, due in part to the wide range of variations present in the human population and to debates over whether many concepts of disease are socially constructed. One of the further complicating factors is that both the concepts of health and disease typically involve both descriptive and evaluatory aspects (Engelhardt 1975), both in common usage among lay persons and members of the medical profession. Exploring these distinctions remains epistemologically and morally important as these definitions influence when and where people seek medical treatment, and whether society regards them as “ill”, including in some health systems whether they are permitted to receive treatment. As Tristram Engelhardt has argued, the concept of disease acts not only to describe and explain, but also to enjoin to action. It indicates a state of affairs as undesirable and to be overcome. (1975: 127) Hence how we define disease, health, and related concepts is not a matter of mere philosophical or theoretical interest, but critical for ethical reasons, particularly to make certain that medicine contributes to people’s well-being, and for social reasons, as one’s well-being is critically related to whether one can live a good life. The terms “disease” and “illness” often are used interchangeably, particularly by the general public but also by medical professionals. “Disease” is generally held to refer to any condition that literally causes “dis-ease” or “lack of ease” in an area of the body or the body as a whole. Such a condition can be caused by internal dysfunctions such as autoimmune diseases, by external factors such as infectious or environmentally-induced diseases, or by a combination of these factors as is the case with many so-called “genetic” diseases (on the idea of genetic disease and associated problems, see for instance Hesslow 1984, Ankeny 2002, Juengst 2004). It has been argued that there is no philosophically or scientifically compelling distinction between diseases and other types of complaints that many would not consider to be diseases such as small stature, obesity, or migraine headaches (Reznek 1987). The notion of “disease” is common among most cultures, and may even be a universal concept (Fabrega 1979). It is a useful concept as it allows a clear focus on problems that afflict particular human beings and suggests that medicine can help to control or ameliorate such problems. In contrast, “illness” is usually used to describe the more non-objective features of a condition, such as subjective feelings of pain and discomfort. It often refers to behavioral changes which are judged as undesirable and unwanted within a particular culture, and hence lead members of that culture to seek help, often from professionals identified as health providers of some type within that culture (on some of the complexities relating to the triad of concepts “disease, illness, sickness”, see Hofmann 2002). The term “sickness” emphasizes the more social aspects of ill health, and typically highlights the lack of value placed on a particular condition by society. Disease conditions are investigated not only to be understood scientifically, but in hopes of correcting, preventing, or caring for the states that are disvalued, or that make people sick. The classic work of the sociologist Talcott Parsons (1951) showed how the “sick role” relieves one of certain social responsibilities (for example, allows one to take time off work or to avoid family responsibilities) and also relieves blame for being ill (though not necessarily from having become ill in the first place). Although there are exceptions and counterexamples to this model (for example, some chronic diseases), it does fit our generally accepted societal notions of what it means to be sick (and healthy), and the moral duties and responsibilities that accompany the designation of someone as sick. The dominant approach in much of the recent philosophical scholarship on the philosophy of medicine views disease concepts as involving empirical judgments about human physiology (Boorse 1975, 1977, 1997; Scadding 1990; Wachbroit 1994; Thagard 1999; Ereshefsky 2009). These so-called “naturalists” (sometimes called “objectivists”, for example see Kitcher 1997, or “descriptivists”) focus on what is biologically natural and normal functioning for all human beings (or more precisely human beings who are members of relevant classes such as those within a particular age group or of the same sex). They argue that medicine should aim to discover and describe the underlying biological criteria which allow us to define various diseases. Christopher Boorse’s revised account has been the most influential in the literature, claiming that health is the absence of disease, where a disease is an internal state which either impairs normal functional ability or else a limitation on functional ability caused by the environment (Boorse 1997). “Normal functioning” is defined in terms of a reference class which is a natural class of organisms of uniform functional design (i.e., within a specific age group and sex), so that when a process or a part (such as an organ) functions in a normal way, it makes a contribution that is statistically typical to the survival and reproduction of the individual whose body contains that process or part. His definition includes specific reference to the environment so as not to rule out environmentally-induced conditions which are so common as to be statistically normal such as dental caries. Many have criticized these approaches (to name just a few, Goosens 1980; Reznek 1987; Wakefield 1992; Amundson 2000; Cooper 2002), as well as naturalistic accounts of disease more generally. As they have noted, naturalistic accounts do not reflect our typical usage of the terms “disease” and “health” because they neglect to take into account any values which shape judgments about whether or not someone is healthy. The usual counterexamples proposed to naturalism are masturbation, which was widely believed to be a serious disease entity in the 18th and 19th centuries (Engelhardt 1974), and homosexuality, which for most of the 20th century was classified as a disease in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. These are counterexamples as their redefinitions as non-disease conditions were due not to new biological information about these states of being but changes in society’s moral values. Naturalists respond to such arguments by pointing out that homosexuality and masturbation were never diseases in the first place but erroneous classifications, and thus these examples do not affect the validity of the definition of disease favored by them when it is applied rigorously. A more telling criticism of naturalism is that although its advocates claim to rely exclusively on biological science to generate their definitions of health and disease, these rely implicitly on an equation of statistical and theoretical normality (or the “natural state” of the organism), at least in Boorse’s formulation (Ereshefsky 2009). But biology does not give us these norms directly, nor is there anything absolutely standard in “species design” (as many philosophers of biology have argued) despite Boorse’s claims. No particular genes are the “natural” ones for a given population, even if we take a subgroup according to age or gender (Sober 1980). Nor does standard physiology provide these norms (Ereshefsky 2009), not in the least part because physiological accounts typically provide idealized and simplified descriptions of organs and their functions, but not of their natural states (Wachbroit 1994). Rachel Cooper (2002) compellingly argues that coming up with an acceptable conception of normal function (and in turn dysfunction) is the major problem with Boorsian-style accounts, arguing that his analysis should focus on disposition to malfunction instead. This argument utilizes counterexamples such as activities that interfere with normal functioning such as taking contraceptive pills that are not diseases, as well as examples of persons with chronic diseases controlled by drugs who function normally as a result. Elselijn Kingma (2007, 2010) has critiqued Boorse’s appeal to reference classes as objectively discoverable, arguing that these cannot be established without reference to normative judgments. A further issue often noted with regard to naturalistic accounts of disease (for example, that of Lennox 1995) is the underlying assumption that biological fitness (survival and reproduction) is the goal of human life, and along with this that medicine is only considered to be interested in biological fitness, rather than other human goals and values, some of which might indeed run contrary to or make no difference in terms of the goal of biological fitness, such as relief of pain. An alternative approach in the philosophical literature to naturalist/descriptivist/objectivist definitions of disease and health can roughly be termed “normative” or “constructivist”. Most proponents agree that we must define the terms “disease” and “health” explicitly and that our definitions are a function of our values (Margolis 1976; Goosens 1980; Sedgewick 1982; Engelhardt 1986). Hence defining various disease conditions is not merely a matter of discovering patterns in nature, but requires a series of normative value judgments and invention of appropriate terms to describe such conditions. Conversely, health involves shared judgments about what we value and what we want to be able to do; disease is a divergence from these social norms. Normativists believe that their definitions are valid not only philosophically but also reflect actual usage of the terminology associated with disease and health both in common language and among medical professionals. They also claim that this approach more adequately explains how certain conditions can come to be viewed in different ways over the course of history as our values changed despite relatively few changes in our underlying biological theories about the condition, for example homosexuality. Further, they are able to accommodate examples of so-called folk illnesses or culture-bound syndromes such as ghost sickness among some Native American tribes, the evil eye in many Mediterranean cultures, or susto in Latin and South American cultures, as their theories explicitly allow for cross-cultural differences in understandings of disease and health. However normativism also generates a series of typical criticisms: it cannot cope adequately with cases where there is general agreement that a state is undesirable (such as alcoholism or morbid obesity) but no similar general agreement that the state is actually a disease condition (Ershefsky 2009). Another classic objection is that normative accounts do not allow us to make retrospective judgments about the validity of disease categories such as “drapetomania” (a disease which was commonly diagnosed among American slaves in the 19th century, with the main symptom being the tendency to run away) (Cartwright 1851). The normativist can point to changes in values to explain the abandonment of belief in this disease condition, but would not be able to claim that the doctors were in any sense “wrong” to consider drapetomania to be a disease. Hence there is more involved in our everyday usage of the terms “disease” and “health” than just value or normative conditions. Hybrid theories of health and disease attempt to overcome the gaps in both the naturalistic and normative approaches, by hybridizing aspects of both theories (Reznek 1987; Wakefield 1992; Caplan 1992). For instance Jerome Wakefield (1992, 1996, 2007), writing about psychiatric conditions in particular, notes that a condition should be considered a disease if it both causes harm to the person or otherwise contributes diminished value, and the condition results from some internal mechanism failing to perform its natural function (hence for instance much of what is diagnosed as “depression” would fail to count as a disease condition). Whereas the normativist is committed to calling any undesirable state a disease condition, these hybrid criteria rule out calling conditions “diseases” which are non-biological,. Then various marginal cases might be considered to be healthy rather than potentially described as diseased, and hence might not be eligible for treatment within conventional medicine. Examples include those organs or structures that no longer have a function due to evolutionary processes cannot malfunction and so cannot be diseased. Many hybrid approaches also retain too many assumptions about their naturalistic components, and hence are criticized for relying on a notion of natural function which cannot be supported by biology. The concept of health has been relatively undertheorized in comparison to those of disease and illness, perhaps in part because it raises even more complicated issues than these concepts describing its absence. One could be a straightforward naturalist about health, and define it as being a product of a functional biology; however this argument would run afoul of the same criticisms of naturalism recounted above (see Hare 1986). | 9/18/21 |
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