Harrison Pein Neg
| Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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| Bronx | 4 | Catonsville AT | Derek Ying |
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| Emory | 1 | Marlborough MJ | Sim Guerrero |
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| Emory | Doubles | Harker DS | Panel |
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| Glenbrooks | 2 | Harker MK | Morgan Copeland |
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| Glenbrooks | 3 | Iowa City West ST | Rafael Li |
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| Glenbrooks | Octas | Strake Jesuit KS | Panel |
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| Grapevine | 2 | Cypress Woods AT | Clement Agho-Otoghile |
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| Grapevine | 3 | Strake MS | Allison Aldridge |
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| Grapevine | Doubles | San Mateo YR | Panel |
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| Greenhill | 1 | Westlake MR | Javier |
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| Greenhill | 5 | Lake Highland Prep AB | Will Freedman |
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| Harvard | 2 | Hunter AI | Kati Johnson |
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| Harvard | 3 | Montville NP | Tahj Johnson |
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| Harvard Round Robin | 1 | Memori SC | Panel |
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| Isidore Newman | Quarters | Lovejoy JV | Panel |
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| Isidore Newman | Semis | Valor Christian LS | Panel |
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| Kandi King | 2 | Harker AR | Panel |
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| Kandi King | 4 | Strake Jesuit JW | Panel |
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| Penn | 3 | Stuyvesant IL | Carolyn Vicari |
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| Princeton | 1 | Bergen County AK | Claudia Ribera |
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| Princeton | 6 | Ardrey Kell RG | Kiarra Broadnax |
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| Scarsdale | 1 | Lexington EY | Javier Hernandez |
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| Scarsdale | 4 | Stuyve LC | Tarun Ratnasabapathy |
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| Valley | 4 | Strake JS | Maya Xia |
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| Valley | 6 | Mission San Jose Shrey Raju | Faizaan Dossani |
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| Valley | Doubles | BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Independent Shreyas Kapavarapu | Panel |
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| X | Finals | na | na |
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| Tournament | Round | Report |
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| Bronx | 4 | Opponent: Catonsville AT | Judge: Derek Ying 1AC - deleuze |
| Emory | 1 | Opponent: Marlborough MJ | Judge: Sim Guerrero 1AC - space debris |
| Emory | Doubles | Opponent: Harker DS | Judge: Panel 1AC - china |
| Glenbrooks | 2 | Opponent: Harker MK | Judge: Morgan Copeland 1AC - egypt |
| Glenbrooks | 3 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Rafael Li 1AC - rawls |
| Glenbrooks | Octas | Opponent: Strake Jesuit KS | Judge: Panel 1AC - courts |
| Grapevine | 2 | Opponent: Cypress Woods AT | Judge: Clement Agho-Otoghile 1AC - Set Col |
| Grapevine | 3 | Opponent: Strake MS | Judge: Allison Aldridge 1ac - covid |
| Grapevine | Doubles | Opponent: San Mateo YR | Judge: Panel 1AC - evergreening |
| Greenhill | 1 | Opponent: Westlake MR | Judge: Javier 1ac - evergreening |
| Greenhill | 5 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AB | Judge: Will Freedman 1AC - stock |
| Harvard | 2 | Opponent: Hunter AI | Judge: Kati Johnson 1AC - baudrillard |
| Harvard | 3 | Opponent: Montville NP | Judge: Tahj Johnson 1AC - common core |
| Harvard Round Robin | 1 | Opponent: Memori SC | Judge: Panel 1AC - Rawls |
| Isidore Newman | Quarters | Opponent: Lovejoy JV | Judge: Panel 1AC - ag |
| Isidore Newman | Semis | Opponent: Valor Christian LS | Judge: Panel 1AC - disability |
| Kandi King | 4 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit JW | Judge: Panel 1AC - debri |
| Penn | 3 | Opponent: Stuyvesant IL | Judge: Carolyn Vicari whole round was lay |
| Princeton | 1 | Opponent: Bergen County AK | Judge: Claudia Ribera 1AC - ag workers |
| Princeton | 6 | Opponent: Ardrey Kell RG | Judge: Kiarra Broadnax 1AC - democracy and climate advantage |
| Scarsdale | 1 | Opponent: Lexington EY | Judge: Javier Hernandez 1AC - UK |
| Scarsdale | 4 | Opponent: Stuyve LC | Judge: Tarun Ratnasabapathy 1AC - kant |
| Valley | 4 | Opponent: Strake JS | Judge: Maya Xia 1AC - pandemics |
| Valley | 6 | Opponent: Mission San Jose Shrey Raju | Judge: Faizaan Dossani 1AC - eu legitimacy |
| Valley | Doubles | Opponent: BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Independent Shreyas Kapavarapu | Judge: Panel 1ac - spikes and evergreening |
| X | Finals | Opponent: na | Judge: na ) |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
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1- Contact InfoTournament: X | Round: Finals | Opponent: na | Judge: na 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 for accessibility reasons) I am very happy to accommodate. If you want me to meet any interps before round, please let me know. | 9/8/21 |
CP- Living WageTournament: Isidore Newman | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Lovejoy JV | Judge: Panel The idea of a living wage is that workers and their families should be able to afford a basic, but decent, life style that is considered acceptable by society at its current level of economic development. Workers and their families They should be able to live above the poverty level, and be able to participate in social and cultural life. The flow chart in Figure 1 indicates how a living wage is typically estimated. Several estimates or assumptions are required. First, it is necessary to estimate the per capita cost of a basic, but decent, quality life style that is acceptable for the society and times (first left-hand box). The cost for this basic quality life style is typically estimated by adding up (1) cost of basic necessities such as If Washington, DC Mayor Vincent Gray signs a bill Mandating that big retailers pay a living wage, he’ll do more than raise workers’ remuneration. He’ll establishes a potent precedent for powerful corporate actors like Walmart, showingThreaten to shelve construction plans, as the retail giant has warned it will do if the legislation is approved, and democratic governments will remain undeterred. He’ll demonstrate that elected officials, instead of being cowed by businesses that blackmail, can bring them to heel. He’ll prove that policies which corporations bitterly oppose, which negatively affect their best efforts at unbridled accumulation, don’t have to be deep-sixed. At issue, in other words, is the relationship between democracy and capitalism. Can the prerogative of capital be curtailed, or must self-governing communities accept the terms that corporations dictate? Gray, who expended a great deal of energy trying to lure Walmart to the nation’s capitol, is expected to veto the living wage legislation; it’s set to hit his desk today. The Large Retailer Accountability Act is narrowly drawn, applying only to stores which exceed 75,000 feet and whose parent companies pull in more than $1 billion in gross annual revenue. The businesses who meet those criteria—the most prominent of which is Walmart—would be required to pay workers at least $12.50. In July, less than than 24 hours before the DC Council was set to vote on the proposal, Walmart said they’d forgo construction of at least three stores if the city imposed the wage floor. But the Council stood fast. They approved the legislation by a vote of 8-5, one shy of a veto-proof majority. Since then, Target, Home Depot, and other retailers—unaffected, as of yet, but still vexed—have registered their own disapproval. In defense of the living wage bill, pro-labor liberals have rightly argued that Walmart, an immensely profitable company, can easily afford to pay its employees a relatively paltry $12.50. They’ve also pointed to the stimulative effect of boosting low-wage workers’ pay. What’s been missing, however, is a forceful defense of public power to rectify injustice in the market, of the right of citizens and their representatives to constrain capitalism’s cruelty. Government action shouldn’t supplant collective, extra-legislative worker action. But When corporations unceasingly quash organizing attempts, it’s salutary for the state to step in. Not to say it’s easy. | 12/15/21 |
DA- Colonial MimicryTournament: Kandi King | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker AR | Judge: Panel
Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination-the demand for identity, stasis-and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history- change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, then colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both “normalized” knowledges and disciplinary powers. The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. The ambivalence which thus informs this strategy is discernible, for example, in Locke's Second Treatise which splits to reveal the limitations of liberty in his double use of the word "slave": first simply, descriptively as the locus of a legitimate form of ownership, then as the trope for an intolerable, illegitimate exercise of power. What is articulated in that distance between the two uses is the absolute, imagined difference between the "Colonial" State of Carolina and the Original State of Nature. It is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come. What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely "rupture" the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a “partial presence”. By "partial". I mean both "incomplete" and "virtual." It is as if the very emergence of the "colonial" is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.
What I have called is not the familiar exercise of colonial mimicry dependent relations through narcissistic identification so that, as Fanon has observed,12 the black man stops being an actional person for only the white man can represent his self-esteem. Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is not what Cesaire describes as "colonization-thingification"13 behind which there stands the essence of the presence Africaine. The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double-vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object. Grant's colonial as partial imitator, Macaulay's translator, Naipaul's colonial politician as play- actor, Decoud as the scene setter of the opera bouffe of the New World, these are the appropriate objects of a colonialist chain of command, authorized versions of otherness. But they are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as “inappropriate” colonial subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial, and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority. It is a desire that reverses “in part” the colonial appropriation by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer’s presence. A gaze of otherness, that shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze which, as Foucault describes it, liberates marginal elements and shatters the unity of man's being through which he extends his sovereignty. 2. Freiere Second, ANTI-LIBERATION: mimicry forces the oppressed to rely on the “master’s tools” so they can never truly be free. The "fear of freedom" which afflicts the oppressed,3 a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the preserver’s consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor. The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearing of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But the struggle to be more fully human has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation. Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle. However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression. When they discover within themselves the yearning to be free, they perceive that this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is aroused in their comrades. But while dominated by the fear of freedom they refuse to appeal to others, or to listen to the appeals of others, or even to the appeals of their own conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom. The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account. This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade. The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be ‘hosts’ of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization. | 3/26/22 |
JF- Afrofuturism KTournament: Emory | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marlborough MJ | Judge: Sim Guerrero | 1/28/22 |
JF- Ethnofuturism KTournament: Emory | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Harker DS | Judge: Panel ROJ and Giroux 1 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. However, despite the enthusiasm of asteroid mining advocates, the proposed extractive industry is not unproblematic. Whilst the narratives surrounding asteroid mining frame this industry’s future as something certain – discussed in advertising material, websites, and NSE circles in the affirmative – there are still many unanswered questions. Aside from issues of technological and fiscal viability, uncertainty remains surrounding ownership, land rights, and whose future this industry speaks of, for, and mobilises. Due to such uncertainties, actors with vested interests are seeking to enclose the Global Common of Outer Space, ‘opening’ the ‘final frontier’ to what some commentators are referring to as a modern Gold Rush (Cofield, 2016: Elvis and Milligan, 2019: Pandya, 2019). This pursual of enclosure relies – broadly speaking – on the same underlying principle(s) as the enclosure of commons historically and lobbying efforts have resulted in these arguments appearing in legislation in several countries 3. These manoeuvres to privatise Outer Space rely not only on the enclosure of physical and legislative places but also seek to enclose imaginative spaces through the process(es) of disimagination. Broadly conceived, disimagination is a process that curtails our ability to think critically and imagine new futures through cultural apparatuses and public pedagogies designed to erase the multiplicity of historical realities that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ (Didi-Huberman, 2008: Giroux, 2014). Whilst this concept has been used in Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the destruction of concentration camp materials and Giroux’s work on critical pedagogy and civic rights, the process of disimagination is operating within and upon discourses of Outer Space, as I discuss later in this piece. These attempts at disimagination are not going unchallenged, however, with Ethnofuturist works disrupting the oftentimes de facto futures of Outer Space and asteroid mining. Ethnofuturism critically responds to the disimagination process as it combines the Ethno- (the archaic, indigenous, or cultural histories of peoples) and -futurism (deemed the cosmopolitan, urban, and technological) (Hennoste, 2012). Consequently, Ethnofuturism can be construed as a process by and through which histories that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ are reinvigorated and mobilised to (re)produce alternative discourses of futurity. ‘Ethnofuturism’ here is used as an umbrella term that contains within it futurisms from a variety of groups and people. Examples of such futurisms include, but are not limited to: Afrofuturism, Aotearoa futurism, Cambrofuturism, and Sinofuturism. The following discusses enclosure, disimagination, and Ethnofuturism to problematise these futures of asteroid mining: highlighting how popular NSE discourses draw upon a Eurocentric rendition of a ‘Grand Historical Narrative’. Through this, we may begin to challenge the totalising concept of ‘humanity’ 4 oft-invoked by asteroid mining advocates and turn a more critical lens to these purported futures and the discourses (re)created to justify them. The implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. The end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood. Because of the end product, tools are designed and implements invented, and the same end product organizes the work process itself, decides about the needed specialists, the measure of co-operation, the number of assistants, etc. During the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else. The same standards of means and end apply to the product itself. Though it is an end with respect to the means by which it was produced and is the end of the fabrication process, it never becomes, so to speak, an end in itself, at least not as long as it remains an object for use. The chair which is the end of carpentering can show its usefulness only by again becoming a means, either as a thing whose durability permits its use as a means for comfortable living or as a means of exchange. The trouble with the utility standard inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some other context. In other words, in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends.19 This perplexity, inherent in all consistent utilitarianism, the philosophy of homo faber par excellence, can be diagnosed theoretically as an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness, which we express linguistically by distinguishing between "in order to" and "for the sake of." Thus the ideal of usefulness permeating a society of craftsmen-— like the ideal of comfort in a society of laborers or the ideal of acquisition ruling commercial societies—is actually no longer a matter of utility but of meaning. It is "for the sake of" usefulness in general that homo faber judges and does everything in terms of "in order to." The ideal of usefulness itself, like the ideals of other societies, can no longer be conceived as something needed in order to have something else; it simply defies questioning about its own use. Obviously there is no answer to the question which Lessing once put to the utilitarian philosophers of his time: "And what is the use of use?" The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some principle which could justify the category of means and end, that is, of utility itself. The ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’; in other words, utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness. Within the category of means and end, and among the experiences of instrumentality which rules over the whole world of use objects and utility, there is no way to end the chain of means and ends and prevent all ends from eventually being used again as means, except to declare that one thing or another is "an end in itself." Alternative Jones 2 Thus, the alternative is to reject the aff and replace their representations with Ethnofuturism, abbreviated “EF,” a method that emphasizes critical thinking by confronting colonialist capitalism. These manoeuvres to privatise Outer Space rely not only on the enclosure of physical and legislative places but also seek to enclose imaginative spaces through the process(es) of disimagination. Broadly conceived, disimagination is a process that curtails our ability to think critically and imagine new futures through cultural apparatuses and public pedagogies designed to erase the multiplicity of historical realities that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ (Didi-Huberman, 2008: Giroux, 2014). Whilst this concept has been used in Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the destruction of concentration camp materials and Giroux’s work on critical pedagogy and civic rights, the process of disimagination is operating within and upon discourses of Outer Space, as I discuss later in this piece. These attempts at disimagination are not going unchallenged, however, with Ethnofuturist works disrupting the oftentimes de facto futures of Outer Space and asteroid mining. Ethnofuturism critically responds to the disimagination process as it combines the Ethno- (the archaic, indigenous, or cultural histories of peoples) and -futurism (deemed the cosmopolitan, urban, and technological) (Hennoste, 2012). Consequently, Ethnofuturism can be construed as a process by and through which histories that deviate from the hegemonic ‘norm’ are reinvigorated and mobilised to (re)produce alternative discourses of futurity. Ethnofuturism here is used as an umbrella term that contains within it futurisms from a variety of groups and people. Examples of such futurisms include, but are not limited to: Afrofuturism, Aotearoa futurism, Cambrofuturism, and Sinofuturism. The following discusses enclosure, disimagination, and Ethnofuturism to problematise these futures of asteroid mining: highlighting how popular NSE discourses draw upon a Eurocentric rendition of a ‘Grand Historical Narrative’. Through this, we may begin to challenge the totalising concept of ‘humanity’ 4 oft-invoked by asteroid mining advocates and turn a more critical lens to these purported futures and the discourses (re)created to justify them. | 1/30/22 |
JF- Lay NCTournament: Penn | Round: 3 | Opponent: Stuyvesant IL | Judge: Carolyn Vicari 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. 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. | 2/13/22 |
JF- Mining DATournament: Emory | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marlborough MJ | Judge: Sim Guerrero | 1/28/22 |
K- Identity PoliticsTournament: Isidore Newman | Round: Semis | Opponent: Valor Christian LS | Judge: Panel Link Their EXCLUSIVE focus on categories like PWD ties them to identity politics – they focus 100 of the aff on this. 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. 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 and 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. | 12/15/21 |
K- New Affs BadTournament: Harvard Round Robin | Round: 1 | Opponent: Memori SC | Judge: Panel 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 OR: alternate link to framework. 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. 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. | 2/17/22 |
K-DemocracyTournament: Princeton | Round: 6 | Opponent: Ardrey Kell RG | Judge: Kiarra Broadnax Guinier and Torres RACISM IS RAMPANT, AND DEBATE’S A PLACE TO CHALLENGE IT – rounds are practice for real world engagement of political problems. As more and more teachers, administrators, schools and organizations are questioning their practices and looking at the racist history of their institutions, many are finally asking, “How we can listen to and support Black students, teachers and communities who have been systemically silenced for too long?” This question is essential, and examining anti-Blackness in our practice is something we all must be looking at. Looking at anti-Blackness or inequities brought about by systems rooted in white supremacy and racism is something all students should be doing. While more institutions, including primarily or historically white ones, are committing to this work, white teachers with primarily white students can feel hesitant to discuss these issues since they may not feel it affects them. This idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti-racist work actually is. Anti-racist work means acknowledging that racist beliefs and structures are pervasive in all aspects of our lives—from education to housing to climate change—and then actively doing work to tear down those beliefs and structures. Those beliefs and structures don’t just exist in primarily white/and or privileged institutions—they thrive there. Schools that house mostly students and teachers who have benefited from white privilege can lack the perspective to push back on institutional malpractice or racist mindsets that may be present. In addition, it is difficult to convince those with power and privilege to give those privileges up without clear education and work to understand why doing so is a necessity for true justice in our society. Doing the work in spaces of privilege may look different, but educators cannot pretend that anti-racist work doesn’t exist simply because their student body isn’t directly harmed by racism. There are clear aims that primarily white and otherwise privileged institutions must work toward in the fight against racism. Teachers must re-evaluate their curriculum. When teaching standards and core curricula have been developed for your students, it’s easy to simply follow along. However, it’s important to remember that our education system has been founded on historically racist practices, including silencing those from disenfranchised communities. It’s not just BIPOC who need to see themselves in the literature or history they study. White students need to hear those perspectives as well, just as straight and cisgender students need to read LGBTQ+ stories. This is because students need not just mirrors but also windows into other cultures, as Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop notes in her essay “Mirrors, Windows and Sliding Glass Doors.” Students from communities with white privilege need to hear voices from other perspectives in order to grow their own thinking. Those perspectives need to be diverse and empowering as well—only showing Black suffering or slavery does not begin to break down problematic beliefs about Black people. Instead, students coming from positions of power need to see and understand the power and agency of those who have been historically disenfranchised, particularly since society frequently tells them otherwise. This will allow white students and teachers to have a more accurate and nuanced understanding of our history, while also ensuring they can center BIPOC voices and be allies and accomplices instead of “saviors.” Students need to understand privilege and rethink power. Students from privileged communities can struggle to understand privilege since they may feel that they have had to work hard or struggle at times in their lives. Teachers must help students understand how privilege works at a systemic level that may have given students an edge that, while it may be one they didn’t ask for, is still very real. The work does not stop there, though. It can be easy in teaching privilege to fall into the trap of “white guilt” or “privilege guilt” (or even “survivor guilt” for BIPOC who have moved up socioeconomically and have internalized the belief that their communities were something to be “survived”). While guilt can be an important emotion to notice and process, educators should help students move through it to a place of action. Beyond “feeling bad” about generations of oppression, how can they use this knowledge to advocate for change and begin breaking down their own racist beliefs? How can they also reframe their understandings of privilege so that they stop prioritizing hegemonic ideas of success and worth? Some of that will mean teaching students to analyze and reframe how they see values and stories from other cultures. Most of us were taught to praise white-dominant cultural ideas: financial success, rugged individualism, paternalism. Because of this, cultures with different priorities may not be seen as “successful” or “valuable” in our eyes and in the eyes of our students. We need to teach students with privilege not to be “saviors” for historically disenfranchised communities, but rather to listen to, value and stand in kinship with them so we can work together toward justice. Schools must interrogate their practices and how they gained institutional privilege to begin with.
Saucier and Woods ENDORSING RACISM – racism is inherent to democracy as a system – it’s there by design. We are not interested in wrestling with Omi and Winant, or any other racial optimists for that matter, over proprietary claims to “democracy.” They can have it. It is not our position that racial formation theory has corrupted the concept or whittled away its essential meaning. Instead, we see in “democracy” the same intrinsic fatal flaw that we find in “emancipation,” “sovereignty,” “inclusion,” “rights,” “justice,” or any of the rest of modern society’s nomenclature. While Omi and Winant understand democracy as “the heart of the racial formation process,” we follow black radical thought in viewing legal abstractions like “democracy” in relation to material political practices (Winant 1994, 147). As such, democracy proves to be embedded within enslavement, rooted in captivity, and a leitmotif for social parasitism. Democracy first emerges as a political value only among the Western European societies that were already deeply invested in the slave trade, and struggles internal to these societies for democratic inclusion were premised upon the concomitant expansion of slaveholding (Cesaire 2000; Du Bois 2013; Eltis 2000; Wells 2014). In North America specifically, the “slave democracy” or “democratic slave state” went to war with itself—not once, but twice—to preserve both slavery and democracy’s basis in black captivity (DuBois 2013; Horne 2014; James 2005). Having had emancipation forced upon it by the self-determination of black people, the slave democracy renovated itself for a new era. It is popularly understood by now that the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not actually abolish the institution of slavery, but instead relocated it into the purview of the criminal justice system. What remains under appreciated, however, is that the Thirteenth Amendment is not the provincialization of slavery, a discrete winnowing of the scope of enslavement to criminal convicts. On the contrary: since criminalization is first and foremost a political-symbolic tool, it harkens not to individual behavior but rather to the social itself, to an onto-epistemic framework structuring social relations (Saucier and Woods 2014; Woods 2013). As such, the Thirteenth Amendment oversees the reiteration of democracy’s basis in social captivity. We cannot ignore or retreat from the analysis of democracy that these insights present. Karl Marx asserted that we can only construct a new world through “the ruthless criticism of everything existing,” that is, criticism of the very ideas and realities that constitute the present. “Criticism,” Marx argued, “must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be” (1978, 13). To be ruthless in these two ways is to link “our criticism with real struggles” (14). We agree with Marx on this score, and when he declares, “Our motto must therefore be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through analyzing the mystical consciousness, the consciousness which is unclear to itself” (15, emphasis added). To be ruthlessly critical directs us to the social fact that blackness enables democracy, mass incarceration is the prerequisite for democracy, and democracy is therefore the internal limit to the black freedom struggle. Consequently, racial theory’s apprehension of “democracy” is something of a litmus test for conceptual aphasia. Joao Costa Vargas and Joy James (2012) ask the questions that are unanswerable within the racial formation framework: What happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every time a black person is killed in the United States, we recognize black death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy? What will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least consider) that the very notion of justice—indeed the gamut of political and cognitive elements that constitute formal, multiracial democratic practices and institutions—produces or requires black exclusion and death as normative? (193) Democracy as the normative terrain for black death explodes the conceptual aphasia characterizing Omi and Winant’s insistence on “racial democracy” as a viable category of analysis. James has referred to the conceptual aphasia we are identifying in this volume as the “conceptual dead zone”: the graveyard where discussions of black genocide and the ongoing relations of slavery as constitutive to contemporary democracy lie buried as impermissible knowledge (James 2009). James explains that “the dead zone has a gravitational pull that slows down radical critique” (2009, 461). Mainstream analysis, however, finds sustenance from the dead zone. What exactly is happening to blackness in order to give life to vampiric racial optimism like racial formation theory? The notion of racial democracy necessarily eclipses the reality of gratuitous violence gripping the black body. Gratuitous violence turns the black body into flesh and destroys the possibility of ontology, so the only way that blackness can appear to participate in the world alongside the subjects of humanity, the denizens of the democratic polity, is by way of a structural adjustment wherein blacks are perceived to act as if they possess ontological capacity (Spillers 1987). The price of this ticket is that social analysis must remain within the agreed upon limits of knowledge and ethics. Sexton terms it the “borrowed institutionality” of blackness.15 Take for instance the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter. In recent years, the meme has become a political Rorschach producing a cornucopia of identitarian hashtags from #alllivesmatter to #copslivesmatter that, at the end of the day, effortlessly obscures or subsumes blackness’s grammar of suffering. This identity boosterism imagines, through liberalism’s lingua franca of rights and reform, an “existential commons” in which black people enjoy a shared human capacity for generating recognition, honor, and bodily integrity alongside non-blacks (Wilderson 2010, 20). The dieins, marches, and political theater of disrupting presidential candidates’ stump speeches, all in the name of Black Lives Matter (not to mention “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” “I Can’t Breathe,” #RealeasetheTapes, and so on), are statements and events of outrage. The fury states the obvious and regulates itself: the demand for justice sequesters black collective existence through its suggestion that black lives would matter if only the police were prosecuted when they kill black people, if politicians would apologize for mass incarceration, or if a university president would resign. #BlackLivesMatter reveals a historical and ethical negligence when it replaces black liberation with the performance of democracy. Whitfield We should reject democracy and embrace Liberated Zones – intentional communities that operate independent of the state – key to Black conceptions of freedom. No perms – this requires MOVING AWAY FROM THE STATE, not increasing state power. Life in a liberated zone entails: •Sustainably making and/or finding food •Sustainably making and developing people as the carriers and creators of productivity, culture, wisdom and technology •Making meaning: evolving life beyond birth, survival, and death •Collectively and determinedly defending what we have made The Limitations of The So-called Democracy of an Oppressive System There was a time when you could buy a car of any color, as long as it was black. There wasn’t much choice. These days, we are encouraged to vote in elections where we can support candidates from either of the two-capitalist war-mongering parties. Independent candidates who actually support social transformation are described as wasted votes or not allowed to get very far in the political vetting process. It brings to mind an option that might have been offered to the enslaved to vote on which plantation to be enslaved on, or to choose their overseer based on their position on what would be the maximum number of lashes in a beating, or the best way to punish low production or talking back. I’d like to think that I am a descendent from the slave who would have stood on the back row of such a slave voting campaign gathering, constantly looking up into the sky. When asked what they were looking for and why, they would whisper, “Y’all go ahead and vote on one of them or the other, but I’m looking for the north star in the dipping gourd. ‘Cause first chance I get, I’m outta here.” In the USA, we won’t vote ourselves to freedom in spite of the rhetoric of what claims to be the more progressive of the two oppressive exploitative parties. We will have to build freedom. And on leaving the plantation, we may want to burn down the big house. Not because burning it will feed us, but rather because it just seems like the right thing to do. The Devastating Nature of the Present It should be clear to us that we don't all share equitably in the benefits from modern world. We live in a world of the domination of capital. In it the owner class accumulates the surplus created by those who produce value. Those in the owning class then use their control over the socially created value to dominate virtually every aspect of social life for the singular purpose of being able to extract and accumulate even more value. This power that comes as a benefit of the ownership of means of life is used to threaten death by starvation to all who resist obeying the needs of capital expansion. There is no limit to the greed of the capitalist system. The unlimited expansion of capital is the singular logic of this world system. But infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet, and we see the effect of careless exploitation of natural resources and human activity on the planet’s ability to support human life with its needs for clean water and clean air in addition to controlling the potential for climate disasters that are caused by human activity. He adds: 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. | 12/5/21 |
K-Sick Womxn TheoryTournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: Hunter AI | Judge: Kati Johnson hedva 1: hedva, johanna. johanna hedva lives with chronic illness and their sick woman theory is for those who were never meant to survive but did “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine, January 26, 2016. CH
Dolmage 1 Next, CX – it requires that resistant strategies be developed in pedagogical cites and that it means when inside these institutions you have to resist or be labeled as a part of the problem. 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? 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. ROB and Dolmage 2 The Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Debater Who Offers the More Accessible Strategy Against Educational Violence. Violence takes many forms, but interrogating discourse is uniquely key in this process because it shapes reality. In fact, few cultural institutions do a better or more comprehensive job of promoting ableism. What we also learn from higher education is that disablism is almost always wrapped into, and sometimes hidden within, ableism. That is, to value ability through something like the demand to overcome disability, or a research study to cure disability, there is also an implicit belief that being disabled is negative and to be avoided at all costs. This belief then leads to structures in which disabled people live in poverty, are underemployed, and so on. As activist and scholar Lydia Brown writes, “ableism is not some arbitrary list of ‘bad words,’ as much as language is a tool of oppression. Ableism is violence, and it kills” (n.p.). The book then moves back and forth between a perspective from this “emergence” of disability studies, a perspective in which we can use disability studies to effectively critique education, and a perspective in which disability is still actively submerged or controlled within academia, in which there is no more ableist location than the university. To facilitate this movement between spheres, it helps to bring disability studies together with rhetoric. Rhetoricians focus on the uses of language to persuade or to change people’s actions and opinions. Most people think of rhetoric only in a negative sense—as the intentional misuse of language to mislead and misdirect. Yet rhetoricians recognize the ways that words and languages and meaning-making systems shape beliefs, values, institutions, and even bodies—sometimes negatively, sometimes positively, often powerfully. One simple way to define rhetoric is to say that it is the study of all of communication. But more specifically, rhetoricians foreground the persuasive potential of all texts, linking language to power. As Melanie Yergeau and John Duffy write in an article defining autism and rhetoric, “rhetoric functions as a powerfully shaping instru- Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education 2017. University of Michigan Press 8 • academic ableism ment for creating conceptions of identity and positioning individuals relative to established social and economic hierarchies. A function of the rhetorical scholar is to identify such powerfully shaping instruments and their effects upon individuals, including disabled individuals” (n.p.). As they argue, rhetoric is not only useful for studying disability, it is necessary, indispensable. In previous work I have defined rhetoric as the strategic study of the circulation of power through communication (access Disability Rhetoric). Further, I believe that we should recognize rhetoric as the circulation of discourse through the body. This circulation takes on added meaning when we combine rhetorical study with what we might call “institutional critique” and with “rhetorical space.” Institutions (and their geographies) are powerfully rhetorical, and this rhetorical power shapes the bodies within these spaces. Finally, then: colleges and universities are rhetorically constructed. It isn’t necessary to be a rhetorician to understand this shaping. But all stakeholders in higher education can utilize rhetorical tools both to better understand academia and to change it. James Porter, Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeff Grabill, and Libby Meyers wrote about the rhetorical methodology they call institutional critique, a means of carefully interrogating how organizations are put together. They noted that “the materiality of institutions is constructed with the participation of rhetoric” (625, italics mine). One builds academia as one imagines its spaces. It follows that stakeholders can also “change disciplinary practices through the reform of institutional structures” (619). As Amy Wan shows (channeling philosopher John Dewey), the classroom is a “protopublic” space (31). This term means that the classroom shapes larger communities. 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: | 2/19/22 |
K-White PhilTournament: Bronx | Round: 4 | Opponent: Catonsville AT | Judge: Derek Ying ROJ I negate. The Role of the Judge is to Promote Critical Thinking, which means they must enhance our potential to expose dominant, oppressive social biases. The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point.1 The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right-wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought social responsibility, the ethical imagination and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes: the totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare.2 In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency and democratic values. On the contrary,power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intents and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked. Any compromising notion of ideology has been replaced by a discourse of command and certainty backed up by the militarization of local police forces, the surveillance state and all of the resources brought to bear by a culture of fear and a punishing state aligned with the permanent war on terror. Informed judgment has given way to a corporate-controlled media apparatus that celebrates the banality of balance and the spectacle of violence, all the while reinforcing the politics and value systems of the financial elite.3 Following Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States creating both a crisis of memory and agency.4 Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism and culture of ignorance now shapes daily life as agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual foolishness evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and denounce almost any form of reason. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible populace. Politics has become an extension of war, just as systemic economic uncertainty and state-sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization, which promote anxiety, moral panics and fear, and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. This is a much promoted hypercompetitive ideology with a message that surviving in a society demands reducing social relations to forms of social combat. People today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for one’s own self-interest and to reduce the responsibilities of citizenship to the demands of a consumer culture. Yet, there is more at work here than a flight from social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society. With the return of the Gilded Age and its dream worlds of consumption, privatization and deregulation, both democratic values and social protections are at risk. At the same time, the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of being eliminated altogether. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish – from public schools to health-care centers – there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. One consequence is a society stripped of its inspiring and energizing public spheres and the “thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in” any viable democracy.5 This grim reality marks a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy.6 It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of higher education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice that acts directly upon the conditions that bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary. At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract, or any other civic-minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It has to be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, politics and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. There is a need to use education to mobilize students to be critically engaged agents attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. Crawford: Crawford, Neta. Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, Boston University “Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention.” Cambridge University Press, September 2009. CH Coherent arguments are unlikely to take place unless and until actors, at least on some level, agree on what they are arguing about. The at least temporary resolution of meta-arguments regarding the nature of the good (the content of prescriptive norms); what is out there, the way we know the world, how we decide between competing beliefs (ontology and epistemology); and the nature of the situation at hand (the proper frame or representation) must occur before specific arguments that could lead to decision and action may take place. Meta-arguments over epistemology and ontology, relatively rare, occur in instances where there is a fundamental clash between belief systems and not simply a debate within a belief system. Such arguments over the nature of the world and how we come to know it are particularly rare in politics though they are more frequent in religion and science. Meta-arguments over the “good” are contests over what it is good and right to do, and even how we know the good and the right. They are about the nature of the good, specifically, defining the qualities of “good” so that we know good when we see it and do it. Ethical arguments are about how to do good in a particular situation. More common are meta-arguments over representations or frames about how we ought to understand a particular situation. Sometimes actors agree on how they see a situation. More often there are different possible interpretations. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Roger Karapin suggest, “Argument and debate occur when people try to gain acceptance for their interpretation of the world”. For example, “is the war defensive or aggressive?”. Defining and controlling representations and images, or the frame, affects whether one thinks there is an issue at stake and whether a particular argument applies to the case. An actor fighting a defensive war is within international law; an aggressor may legitimately be subject to sanctions. Framing and reframing involve mimesis or putting forward representations of what is going on. In mimetic meta-arguments, actors who are struggling to characterize or frame the situation accomplish their ends by drawing vivid pictures of the “reality” through exaggeration, analogy, or differentiation. Representations of a situation do not re-produce accurately so much as they creatively represent situations in a way that makes sense. “mimesis is a metaphoric or ‘iconic argumentation of the real.’ Imitating not the effectivity of events but their logical structure and meaning.” Certain features are emphasized and others de-emphasized or completely ignored as their situation is recharacterized or reframed. Representation thus becomes a “constraint on reasoning in that it limits understanding to a specific organization of conceptual knowledge.” The dominant representation delimits which arguments will be considered legitimate, framing how actors see possibilities. As Roxanne Doty argues, “the possibility of practices presupposes the ability of an agent to imagine certain courses of action. Certain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place.” If, as Donald Sylvan and Stuart Thorson argue, “politics involves the selective privileging of representations, “it may not matter whether one representation or another is true or not. Emphasizing whether frames articulate accurate or inaccurate perceptions misses the rhetorical import of representationhow frames affect what is seen or not seen, and subsequent choices. Meta-arguments over representation are thus crucial elements of political argument because an actor’s arguments about what to do will be more persuasive if their characterization or framing of the situation holds sway. But, as Rodger Payne suggests, “No frame is an omnipotent persuasive tool that can be decisively wielded by norm entrepreneurs without serious political wrangling.” Hence framing is a meta-argument. THAT MEANS WE FILTER ALL ARGUMENTS THROUGH MY FRAMEWORK – THAT PRECLUDES THEIR CASE IMPACTS.
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. 2. Curry and Curry 2 Second, PERPETUATING RACISM: their philosophy is actively used to rationalize Black deaths. Whereas white philosophers often share a similar language with other whites, namely, that all people are human beings and rational individuals, Black philosophers who study race often speak in terms of their negations: non-being. Harris (2018) refers to this as “necro-being.” Curry (2016, 2017, 2018a, 2018b) speaks of the Man-Not. Wilderson (2009) writes of the slave. To be Black is to render the very grammar of the academy delusional. To speak of impending death and sub-personhood and explain the experiences of violence and dehumanization that accompany this position to white individuals who only think of their existence in terms of always being human and persons is ineffable. Perhaps the theorist Calvin Warren best captures this problem in his book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Warren (2018: 2) argues: The human being provides an anchor for the declaration, and since the being of the human is invaluable, then Black life must also matter, if the Black is a human (the declaration anchors mattering in the human’s Being). But we reach a point of terror with this syllogistic reasoning. One must take a step backward and ask the fundamental question: is the Black, in fact, a human being? Or can Black(ness) ground itself in the being of the human? If it cannot, then on what bases can we assert the mattering of Black existence? The consequence of attending to the problem of Blackness and the realities of death is that the theories that emerge to account for what is taken to be the accidental positionality of whites who are thought to be human, individuals, citizens, and persons must make sense of a reality where to be Black is to be nonhuman, savage, alien, and reified and consequently subject to violence and wished dead. As the late Critical Race Theorist, Derrick Bell (1997: 23) once said: We have never understood that the essence of the racism we contended against was not simply that we were exploited in slavery, degraded by segregation, and frustrated by the unmet promises of equal opportunity. The essence of racism in America was the hope that we who were Black would not exist. Instead of racism being defined as a set of attitudes or beliefs about racial groups held by biased individuals, the authors prefer to understand racism as a complex nexus, a cognitive architecture used to invent, reimagine, and evolve the presumed political, social, economic, sexual, and psychological superiority of the white races in society, while materializing the imagined inferiority and hastening the death of inferior races. Said differently, racism is the manifestation of the social processes and concurrent logics that facilitate the death and dying of racially subjugated peoples. (Curry 2017a: 4) Racism is a social process that demands the extinguishing of Black life. Racism craves death. It is constructed, then legitimized through cultural and individual complacency. When a young Black boy is killed, the instruments of the state, the authority of the police, and the vulnerability of the Black male body converge in the ultimate expression of violence that results in death. The public then rationalizes this exercise of state violence and the individual will of the police officer who killed the Black boy through empathy. The white individual who sees the dead Black male body understands the need to kill the Black boy because Blackness socially expresses criminality, danger, and the possible death of a white life. This fear of Blackness creates empathy for the officer who killed the Black boy. He is thought of by the white interpreter who is watching the dead Black male body as a corpse. The fear shared between the officer and white onlooker is legitimated by the state because the state offers its society security from this Black male threat. This is how populations feared by the society are simultaneously constructed and destroyed. This brief example describes the depth of the problem involved with racism. Black philosophers are not simply objecting to the thoughts individuals hold about different groups of people, but how the thoughts that white individuals hold can be supported and expressed in violence against Black men and women in the world. Because a white supremacist world supports the fears of the white racist, the individual racist’s anti-Blackness is aspirational. It is expressed as a will for there to be no Black bodies there. As such, the human becomes an untenable account of Black life, given this disposability. The world is simply not organized in such a way that allows Blackness to not be seen, perceived, and dehumanized in relation to whites. No amount of evidence or argument seems to be able to displace the faith philosophers have in education, dialogue, and mutual understanding between Blacks and whites as the remedies of racism (Curry 2008). Generations of nonwhite philosophers have spent their careers and research showing the discipline the horrors of racism, xenophobia, and ethno-nationalist thinking, but there has been little to no change in departments or the discipline at large. For many philosophers, the idea that racism is permanent is unthinkable. Despite the words and works of Black political theorists like the lawyer Robert F. Williams or Dr. Huey P. Newton, or even more canonically established Black figures like W. E. B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, Frantz Fanon, or Derrick Bell, philosophy as a discipline and philosophers more generally refuse to acknowledge that racism remains the core and most determining aspect of America’s social processes. Enamored by the stories of Blacks suffering, many scholarly conversations about Blackness and racism focus on the harm that Black individuals suffer at the hands of whites or the discipline of philosophy. Relatively few works actually analyze racism structurally or beyond identity at all. Philosophical analyses do not revolve around death or the material consequences of anti-Blackness. Instead, the fear and anxiety that Black philosophers and graduate students share with whites become more worthwhile topics. The debate about what constitutes or is real philosophy continues to dominate the discussions concerning race and racism. Drawing from the inclusion/exclusion or integrationist/segregationist paradigms, the problem of race and racism in philosophy is routinely understood as what is allowed to stand within or excluded from the discipline. The integrationist or post-civil-rights understanding of racism in philosophy routinely misses that racism involves a complex and denaturing dynamic regarding the thought and perceptions of oppressed groups. This is a paradigmatic and methodological problem introduced by Curry (2011a, 2011b) as signs of Black philosophy’s “derelictical” crisis. As Curry (2011a: 144) explains: At its most basic level, philosophy is an activity of inquiry into the world which is supposed to guarantee its practitioners some level of assuredness in the ways we interpret the realities before us. If we take African American philosophy to be philosophical activity, then we should expect, by necessity of being philosophy, that Africana philosophy should result in the same methodological rigor—some assuredness in the ways that Africana people have used to interpret their realities. Unfortunately, the present day crisis of African American philosophy makes this simple formulation an impossibility. By making the methodological rigor of Africana philosophy dependent on its popular acceptance; its closeness to the political dogmas of our racial era, we condemn our area of study to under-specialization whereby our works of philosophical genius, past and present, will be judged solely by the degree to which they extend the universalizing character of Europe and her theories. To the extent that African American philosophy chooses to abandon the genealogical patterns of Black thought for philosophically privileged associations with white thinkers, it remains derelictical—continuing to neglect its only actual duty—the duty to inquiry into the reality of African-descended people as they have revealed it. We begin with the premise that racism permeates the discipline of philosophy. We are attempting to bring attention to the ways in which authentic Black philosophy has been revised and denatured into a form that whites in the discipline accept as philosophical. Whereas all disciplines have norms or rules of scholarly rigor, philosophy demands that Black thinking and thought tend towards specific political ends in order to be considered philosophy. Whether or not the thought and texts of Black philosophers are correctly interpreted, understood, or even read ultimately becomes irrelevant to the larger political orientation of the discipline. Black philosophers are read as extensions of white thought. A Black philosophical figure is relevant only to the extent that he or she can be understood as the unrealized intentionality of canonical white figures. Black historical figures are made philosophical by the extent to which their voice can be imagined as what Dewey, Hegel, Addams, or Foucault would have said if they thought more seriously about race and racism. Consequently, writes Curry (2011b: 141): Black thinkers function as the racial hypothetical of European thought whereby Black thought is read as the concretization of European reflections turned to the problem of race, and Black thinkers are seen as racial embodiments of white thinkers’ philosophical spirits. In this vein, the most studied Black philosophers are read as the embodiment of their white associates; W. E. B. Du Bois is read as the Black Hegel, the Black James, the Black Dewey, and Frantz Fanon as a Black Sartre, or Black Husserl. This demonization of Black thinkers by the various manifestations of the European logos as necessary to the production of AfricanAmerican philosophy is a serious impediment to the development of a genuine genealogy of the ideas that actually define Africana philosophy’s Diasporic identity. They add: Black philosophy has a responsibility to engage the Black experience as a genuine site of existential reflection and epistemological tool making. The idea that Black experience and reality must be accounted for by white theories of causality or aim towards the same ends of white philosophy is delusional. Black philosophy must engage in radical theorizations that can be traced back to the problems tackled in the texts and debates of Black thinkers. The social prognoses suggested by Black philosophers should also have some accountability to the realities that Black people are facing in the United States, if not the world. There is no time for idle thought that simply attempts to imitate white theories of causality and canonical traditions in order to be accepted. How can we demonstrate the importance of Black philosophy, if not for what we observe and verify in the lives of Black people in the world? Its ability to express the full complexity of Black life and death in theory at the most abstract levels of thought is what is at stake in the Black philosophical project. | 10/16/21 |
ND- Ban Nukes CPTournament: Scarsdale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington EY | Judge: Javier Hernandez 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. | 11/13/21 |
ND- Curry DATournament: Scarsdale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Stuyve LC | Judge: Tarun Ratnasabapathy
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. | 11/14/21 |
ND- Public Perceptions DATournament: Scarsdale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington EY | Judge: Javier Hernandez Tens of thousands of workers around the US could go on strike in the coming weeks in what would be the largest wave of labor unrest since a series of teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019, which won major victories and gave the American labor movement a significant boost. The unrest spans a huge range of industries from healthcare to Hollywood and academia, and is largely focused on higher wages, fighting cuts and better working and safety conditions, especially in light of Covid-19. ‘I was doing a job where people who were sitting next to me were getting paid three to four times as much as me,’ one contract worker said. ‘A race to the bottom’: Google temps are fighting a two-tier labor system Read more It also plays out against a backdrop of an economy bouncing back from the torrid experience of widespread economic shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, but one that is still marked by profound inequality. However, the pandemic is also seen as potentially providing a shot in the arm for US labor unions by increasing bargaining power amid increased union drives and labor shortages in some industries. About 24,000 nurses and other healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente in California represented by the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals will vote on a strike authorization from 1 to 10 October. The union took issue with Kaiser Permanente’s 1 wage increase for workers, cuts to wages for new staff, and benefit cuts in the company’s most recent offer. “We have people burned out, complaining of mental health issues and PTSD. We’re in a situation as a union where we’re concerned about the future of nursing, and how we recruit and retain nurses and other healthcare professionals,” said Denise Duncan, president of UNAC/UHCP and a registered nurse. About 700 building engineers at Kaiser Permanente in the San Francisco area are already on strike. An additional 3,400 health workers in Oregon and 7,400 health workers with USW at Kaiser Permanente also announced strike authorization votes. Other unions representing thousands of workers at the company with expiring union contracts are considering strike authorization votes. There is a fundamental problem in education that has been on vivid display recently: confusion about whom our schools exist to serve. Our public school system exists to give our children a foundation in literacy and numeracy and to help them become informed citizens. It is not the purpose of the public schools to use children as leverage for the gains of others. Only that base misconception could drive mass school closures and disruptions right in the midst of a critical time in the school year. Only that misconception could lead adults to go on strike, thrusting chaos and untenable choices on the most vulnerable families least able to cope with abrupt changes in the routines of their children. When coal miners strike they lay down their equipment. When teachers strike, they lay down their students’ minds." We strongly believe in the importance and honor of great teaching and teachers. We believe policymakers should set budgets so that the best teachers are attracted and retained. Those decisions must be made at each state and district level. We strongly disagree that adults in our public schools should use systematic disruption of students and families—that is, strikes or walkouts—as a tactic to secure financial outcomes. There are several basic reasons for this: First, abrupt school closure interrupts and damages the progress of students. We either believe that school and teaching time matters, or we do not. Teaching time does matter, and we should be very reluctant to interrupt it. Strikes (and walkouts) do exactly that. When coal miners strike they lay down their equipment. When teachers strike, they lay down their students’ minds. Second, teachers want us to treat them as professionals. To be treated as such, they must act as such. Certainly, individuals and groups have every right to seek changes to their compensation or pensions. But to do so in a manner that damages both students and the critical role public schools play is the antithesis of professionalism. No other professionals have a summer in which they can pursue their financial goals or other endeavors. Let’s be honest and recognize that the past weeks have not been about serving students, but rather pursuing financial ends, thus hurting the cause of professionalism. There is a time, place, and manner for these fiscal discussions. Strikes during the school year are not it. Finally, many publicly stated “demands” associated with these strikes and walkouts do not withstand review. In Kentucky, teachers are angry at their state’s current governor when their anger should be directed at the pension-fund board that set policies rife with selfish abuse and headed to collapse over the course of decades. The current leaders are left to stabilize the situation. In Colorado, state legislators do not set teacher salaries—that is the role of the local school boards. But the walkout organizers in Colorado clearly think they can maneuver a sweeter deal through disruption, regardless of the consequences for the state’s children and families. Before the Los Angeles strike began, local officials took steps to keep schools open by hiring substitute instructors and aides. The striking teachers did everything they could to sabotage those efforts, like taking textbooks and supplies home to ensure that they weren’t used during the strike. That’s an odd way of looking out for the interests of your students. Ms. Weingarten’s reference to “all public schools” is misleading. She really means all public schools that employ union members. Public charter schools, which are mostly nonunionized and growing rapidly in the city, don’t count in her estimation. Charters now enroll about 20 of public school students in Los Angeles, up from 12 seven years ago, and curbing the expansion of schools that don’t employ their members has long been a major priority of teachers unions. The Los Angeles Times reports that only 42 of the district’s students can read at grade level, and math proficiency is an even lower 32. Families are fleeing union-run schools, so labor leaders are trying to block the exits. Whether students benefit from more school choice is not something that concerns teachers unions. They care whether their members benefit. Los Angeles teachers were following a path blazed last year by educators who demonstrated in places like Arizona, North Carolina, West Virginia, Colorado and Washington state. They demanded bigger budgets, higher salaries, smaller class sizes and less standardized testing. Put another way, they want more pay for less work and accountability. Gee, who doesn’t? For teachers, reducing the size of each class means fewer children to mind and assignments to grade. For unions, it means more jobs for dues-paying teachers and ultimately more money in AFT and NEA coffers to spend lobbying politicians and policy makers to keep schools organized in a way that benefits their members first and foremost. The union has won some concessions on pay and class size, but whether the deal will improve test scores, graduation rates or college readiness is an afterthought for labor leaders. And we have every reason to believe it won’t. The U.S. spends more than twice as much on education—per student and after inflation—as it did in 1970 and more than three times as much as in 1960. School expenditures in high-poverty districts are typically well above the national average. Yet standardized test results show little improvement, and large racial gaps persist. We’ve long known that class size matters much less than teacher quality. Charter schools with larger classes have outperformed traditional public schools with smaller classes. And in countries such as Japan and South Korea, which regularly outperform the U.S. on international tests, average class sizes are larger than here. Teachers unions are unions first, not reformers or student advocates. Their real agenda—their only agenda—is to protect their members by any means possible. No matter what those picket signs said, the unions weren’t helping students. They were using them. | 11/13/21 |
ND- Two - Tier DATournament: Isidore Newman | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Lovejoy JV | Judge: Panel Garneau 1 THE AFF’S A GIANT RUSE: they frame strikes as key to better treatment for laborers, but strikes only create CYCLES OF OPPRESSION – their goal is to get workers back to work. Last week social media and the labor press were filled with triumphant celebration of the strike at Stop and Shop, which saw some 31,000 workers off the job, and then of its resolution with a new collective agreement. There has been considerable excitement on the left lately about strikes in general, especially since, for a long time, that tactic lay somewhat dormant. With strikes on the uptick, the left is primed to view this as a hopeful turnaround, signaling labor’s re-consolidation of its power. However, there is sometimes a troubling news cycle in all of this. Basically: a union goes out on strike, it all looks very exciting, the left cheers the worker militancy, then notice of a settlement comes down, the union writes a press release declaring victory, and the left affirms the power of labor. If you read the content of the collective bargaining agreements, though, there is often less reason to be enthusiastic. In three strikes that were settled in the past few weeks—Stop and Shop, the Saskatoon Co-op, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—all of the contracts involved the introduction of a two-tier system. This is one of the worst moves a union can make. What are two-tier contracts and why are they a problem? A two-tier system stipulates different employment terms for future employees than for current employees, or for full-timers versus part-timers, etc. In the case of the Saskatoon Co-op, new employees will top out at a lower wage, and will take longer to reach that maximum wage. In the case of Stop and Shop, new part-timers (the majority of the workforce is part-time) lose out on time-and-a-half pay, and get lower pension contributions. In the case of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, future hires are losing guaranteed pensions in favor of riskier defined-contribution plans. Two-tier contracts divide the workforce, pitting different groups of workers against each other. Existing employees or senior employees take a superior deal for themselves, and in so doing, burn future hires or those less senior. This is toxic to worker solidarity and undermines the overall power of workers—ensuring they’ll be weaker for future job actions like strikes. When a union signs a two-tier contract, it signals to the workforce that what they really are is a craft union for the high-seniority, full-time staff, with everyone else invited to fight for one of those spots, if they remain accessible at all. Two-tier contracts are a short-sighted move by the union and a long-game strategic move by the boss. They allow a union to settle a strike with their existing members keeping what they have (and maybe making a few gains elsewhere), while selling out future workers. Employers get to look forward to lower employment costs down the road, not to mention a divided workforce. Unions are also in effect selling out their future selves. The upper tier of workers whose interests they serve better shrinks over time, as those workers retire or leave. The workers who remain are less powerful. That means the union is less powerful. It may still have membership numbers and dues income, but its workforce is more vulnerable, and the union is bargaining from a weaker position going forward. Acknowledging that unions are signing two-tier or rollback contracts is demoralizing. It is especially so at a time when labor is supposed to be in a strong bargaining position because of a decent economy with low unemployment. If strikes are the best tactic labor has, and the economic circumstances are in our favor, why are unions signing crappy contracts? Why don’t strikes achieve more? There are a number of factors that contain how effective strikes can be, and impel unions to settle them. For one thing, they are expensive. If a union is providing even minimal strike pay, it needs a war chest of millions of dollars to be able to support even a few hundred workers. Strikes drain union coffers, and they take a financial, physical, and emotional toll on workers as well, who aren’t usually earning as much in strike pay as they would on the job, while getting yelled at or hit by cars or freezing on the picket line. Quite often, strikes don’t succeed in completely shutting down a business, not least because employers can legally hire scabs. The product may suffer, and employers may take a hit, but they can hobble along (while draining the union’s bank account). (A note on the alleged $100 million loss suffered by Stop and Shop during the recent strike, which leftists also celebrated: that figure was put out by the employer, and is more than double an estimate put forward by an industry analyst. We should always remain skeptical about boss communications. In this case, they may be crying poverty to get workers to sign the proposed collective agreement.) Sometimes strikes end because of government intervention, as when workers are legislated back to work, or fired en masse. Less dramatically, the government can intervene to bring about some kind of settlement in the form of binding arbitration. Sometimes employers even goad unions into striking, knowing what a heavy toll strikes take. If an employer knows they can weather a strike much better than the union, they are perfectly incentivized to provoke one and starve the union out. The bottom line is that strikes, under the current labor relations system, are not the slam-dunk tactic the left takes them to be. Strikes can only take place when the contract has expired, and once the membership has been balloted. This means that the employer has years to prepare, knowing when the contract is set to expire. They probably even know roughly how long the strike can last. They’ve also seen strikes before, and aren’t bowled over by them. There is no element of surprise. They know the union won’t do anything too drastic like occupy the workplace or chain the doors shut. They hire scabs, they manage public relations (often by crying poverty or publicly claiming the union won’t come to the table), and they wait it out. Of course we in left labor circles sympathize with strikers and see their cause as morally and politically righteous. But sympathy is one matter, and clear-eyed analysis is another. That we wish workers victory does not mean we suspend judgement about the effectiveness of their tactics. Nor is any of this meant to judge or condemn unions for choosing the tactics that they do. Instead, it is about zooming out and understanding what factors are constraining the situation in general. When leftists picture strikes, they are probably in part remembering black-and-white images of workers in the 1910s and 1920s streaming out of factories and mines and violently clashing with Pinkerton guards. But strikes have been tamed by the labor relations framework established by the Wagner Act (the National Labor Relations Act) of 1935 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Those legislative measures were passed in response to massive upheaval, in which workers shut down production with strikes, or employers shut down production with lockouts. The goal of the Wagner Act is right there in its full title: “to diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce.” The NLRA forced employers to sit down and bargain with workers, not out of a desire to strengthen workers as a class, but to funnel disputes between workers and bosses into a less disruptive process – in boardrooms and away from the shopfloor — so that economic production could continue. Taft-Hartley further contained strikes in numerous ways, again in response to creative and effective forms of economic disruption, by outlawing sympathy strikes, political strikes, “wildcat” strikes taken without the authorization of union leadership, secondary picketing and boycotts, and so on. Under this legal framework, strikes are a blunted tactic, quite intentionally so. They do accomplish something – in each of the three cases described above, workers would almost certainly have got a worse deal had they not struck. There are also strikes that yield apparently better deals, such as the contract bargained by Unite Here with Marriott hotels – arguably in part because contracts at seven different bargaining units expired simultaneously, allowing almost 8,000 workers to strike at once. But strikes don’t change the big-picture balance of power between employers and workers. Most of the time, strikes are like a fistfight in which one side gets a bloody nose, the other gets a black eye, and each walks away saying “You shoulda seen the other guy.” At best, a win looks like giving the other side two wounds while you only suffer one. Garneau 2 GUTTING UNIONS: strikes BLEED UNIONS DRY, divide workers, and actively HELP employers. A two-tier system stipulates different employment terms for future employees than for current employees, or for full-timers versus part-timers, etc. In the case of the Saskatoon Co-op, new employees will top out at a lower wage, and will take longer to reach that maximum wage. In the case of Stop and Shop, new part-timers (the majority of the workforce is part-time) lose out on time-and-a-half pay, and get lower pension contributions. In the case of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, future hires are losing guaranteed pensions in favor of riskier defined-contribution plans. Two-tier contracts divide the workforce, pitting different groups of workers against each other. Existing employees or senior employees take a superior deal for themselves, and in so doing, burn future hires or those less senior. This is toxic to worker solidarity and undermines the overall power of workers—ensuring they’ll be weaker for future job actions like strikes. When a union signs a two-tier contract, it signals to the workforce that what they really are is a craft union for the high-seniority, full-time staff, with everyone else invited to fight for one of those spots, if they remain accessible at all. Two-tier contracts are a short-sighted move by the union and a long-game strategic move by the boss. They allow a union to settle a strike with their existing members keeping what they have (and maybe making a few gains elsewhere), while selling out future workers. Employers get to look forward to lower employment costs down the road, not to mention a divided workforce. Unions are also in effect selling out their future selves. The upper tier of workers whose interests they serve better shrinks over time, as those workers retire or leave. The workers who remain are less powerful. That means the union is less powerful. It may still have membership numbers and dues income, but its workforce is more vulnerable, and the union is bargaining from a weaker position going forward. Acknowledging that unions are signing two-tier or rollback contracts is demoralizing. It is especially so at a time when labor is supposed to be in a strong bargaining position because of a decent economy with low unemployment. If strikes are the best tactic labor has, and the economic circumstances are in our favor, why are unions signing crappy contracts? Why don’t strikes achieve more? There are a number of factors that contain how effective strikes can be, and impel unions to settle them. For one thing, they are expensive. If a union is providing even minimal strike pay, it needs a war chest of millions of dollars to be able to support even a few hundred workers. Strikes drain union coffers, and they take a financial, physical, and emotional toll on workers as well, who aren’t usually earning as much in strike pay as they would on the job, while getting yelled at or hit by cars or freezing on the picket line. Quite often, strikes don’t succeed in completely shutting down a business, not least because employers can legally hire scabs. The product may suffer, and employers may take a hit, but they can hobble along (while draining the union’s bank account). (A note on the alleged $100 million loss suffered by Stop and Shop during the recent strike, which leftists also celebrated: that figure was put out by the employer, and is more than double an estimate put forward by an industry analyst. We should always remain skeptical about boss communications. In this case, they may be crying poverty to get workers to sign the proposed collective agreement.) Sometimes strikes end because of government intervention, as when workers are legislated back to work, or fired en masse. Less dramatically, the government can intervene to bring about some kind of settlement in the form of binding arbitration. Sometimes employers even goad unions into striking, knowing what a heavy toll strikes take. If an employer knows they can weather a strike much better than the union, they are perfectly incentivized to provoke one and starve the union out. The bottom line is that strikes, under the current labor relations system, are not the slam-dunk tactic the left takes them to be. Strikes can only take place when the contract has expired, and once the membership has been balloted. This means that the employer has years to prepare, knowing when the contract is set to expire. They probably even know roughly how long the strike can last. They’ve also seen strikes before, and aren’t bowled over by them. There is no element of surprise. They know the union won’t do anything too drastic like occupy the workplace or chain the doors shut. They hire scabs, they manage public relations (often by crying poverty or publicly claiming the union won’t come to the table), and they wait it out. Of course we in left labor circles sympathize with strikers and see their cause as morally and politically righteous. But sympathy is one matter, and clear-eyed analysis is another. That we wish workers victory does not mean we suspend judgement about the effectiveness of their tactics. Nor is any of this meant to judge or condemn unions for choosing the tactics that they do. Instead, it is about zooming out and understanding what factors are constraining the situation in general. When leftists picture strikes, they are probably in part remembering black-and-white images of workers in the 1910s and 1920s streaming out of factories and mines and violently clashing with Pinkerton guards. But strikes have been tamed by the labor relations framework established by the Wagner Act (the National Labor Relations Act) of 1935 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Those legislative measures were passed in response to massive upheaval, in which workers shut down production with strikes, or employers shut down production with lockouts. The goal of the Wagner Act is right there in its full title: “to diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce.” The NLRA forced employers to sit down and bargain with workers, not out of a desire to strengthen workers as a class, but to funnel disputes between workers and bosses into a less disruptive process – in boardrooms and away from the shopfloor — so that economic production could continue. Taft-Hartley further contained strikes in numerous ways, again in response to creative and effective forms of economic disruption, by outlawing sympathy strikes, political strikes, “wildcat” strikes taken without the authorization of union leadership, secondary picketing and boycotts, and so on. Under this legal framework, strikes are a blunted tactic, quite intentionally so. TURNS AND OUTWEIGHS CASE – strikes ACTIVELY STRENGTHEN EMPLOYERS – they’re DESIGNED to weaken unions, make future strikes impossible, and ENTRENCH CAPITALISTIC OPPRESSION. | 12/15/21 |
ND- Union Legitimacy DATournament: Scarsdale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington EY | Judge: Javier Hernandez The GM strike, beginning in September of 2019, is set to be the largest strike of the past 18 years. In fact, 2018 as a whole saw the largest number of strikes in decades and support for labor unions has polled at a 20 year high with candidates like Bernie Sanders highlighting their importance in his economic and political strategies. Many left-leaning individuals often express admiration for the union golden era of the 1940s and 50s, when there were sometimes as many as 400 strikes of over 1000 people per year and union membership was at a historic high. With all the positive rhetoric surrounding unions, it may be difficult for someone to understand why anyone, aside from cartoonish caricatures of capitalist pig-men in coat and tails, would ever dislike unions. However, the unintended consequences of the GM strike highlight the ways in which the main tool of unions, the strike, is deeply flawed from a political economy perspective. With a decline in union membership and manufacturing in the US and the interconnectivity of global supply chains, the benefits of a strike fall to fewer and fewer hands while the direct consequences of the strike can still cause great harm to the local economy. Many in America live paycheck-to-paycheck, and strikes can have a strong impact on the financial well-being of the strikers who have to tighten their belt or go into debt. In communities that rely on money from manufacturing workers to spend, this can cause an intense ripple effect that can be felt for miles. If Bob the tire quality control specialist doesn’t have any money, then he doesn’t buy coffee from his local diner, which in turn affects the income of the cooks in the diner who may then forgo purchases at other stores. This is essentially the so-called “virtuous cycle” of economic growth working in reverse, which can cause an intense contraction, which some fear could cause a recession locally as well as statewide. Thusly, even ordinary working people in an area attached to a factory town have a vested interest in ensuring union strikes are ended quickly and do not happen often. This generally results in anti-union legislation or in legislation to cement union desires into public policy without causing the type of damage typically associated with strikes. Locals near an autoplant are not the only people that have direct financial stake in ensuring strikes don’t happen. Suppliers up and down the chain are also deeply affected and even more intimately attached to these strikes. Within GM itself, roughly 10,000 non-union workers have been placed on furlough as a result of the strike mentioned at the beginning of the piece. This is because without unionized labor in certain fields, the whole cycle of production shuts down, and everyone involved is unable to continue working. With chains of supply so directly interlinked, a stop at any point, union or non-union, could cause a work-stop for all other points in the chain. Workers in Canada and Mexico have also been placed on unpaid furlough, causing them to lose income without any possibility of gain and with no incentive on behalf of their American counterparts to represent their competing interests. Auto parts suppliers to GM, such as American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings, have already reported having to lay off workers due to projected losses from the strike. Car dealerships, which are up the supply chain from the plant, have reported hardships in servicing GM cars due to shortages of materials as well. This point brings me to the last victim of strikes: the wider public. America is fundamentally a consumption heavy economy. Our strength relies on our ability to purchase and consume. Almost 70 percent of our GDP comes from consumption. Any reduction in consumption affects the economy as a whole in a big way, and strikes cause a reduction in production and consumption of the product in question and other products inadvertently. If prices or parts get too scarce, that causes prices to go up and consumers to be shut out of the market. Even worse than that, many states such as Tennessee rely almost exclusively on sales tax for government revenue (California still nets about 20 billion a year in sales taxes). A strike not only affects consumers but also affects the most vulnerable members of our society who rely on government sponsored welfare. In conclusion, part of the reason for the decline in political support for unions is due to incredible destructive and disruptive power of strikes. While national labor standards laws can be achieved through the ballot box, the picket line drives a wedge between union interests and the rest of society. Unions should stick to grassroots and political organization because, while strikes can bring them short term gains, they hurts those around them and expose the single-minded interest that unions have for their membership and the ability to disregard and harm their community at large. Perez et al TURNS CASE: union legitimacy is key to worker retention, good conditions, and more. Reform must be responsive to the lessons we have learned from the challenges working people have faced during the pandemic. One of the main lessons is the need for and power of workers’ collective voice in the workplace. Where workers have been able to act collectively and through their union, they have been able to secure enhanced safety measures, additional premium pay, and paid sick time. Unionized workers have had a voice in how their employers navigate the pandemic, including negotiating for terms of furloughs or work-share arrangements to save jobs. Research shows the advantages workers in unions have over nonunionized workers. Workers with strong unions have been able to set industry standards for wages and benefits that help all workers, both union and nonunion (Rhinehart and McNicholas 2020). Never in recent history has this dynamic been more clear. Never has it been more important that all workers have a voice in the workplace and access to a union. Workers’ lives and the health and safety of working families depends on their ability to have a say in how they do their jobs. They add: The Trump administration’s failure to provide essential workers with basic protections during the coronavirus pandemic has underscored the importance of unions (McNicholas and Poydock 2020b). With a union, workers have negotiated additional pay,10 health and safety measures,11 paid sick leave,12 and job preservation.13 Furthermore, unionized workers have felt more secure speaking out about hazards (Jamieson 2020). Without unions, many workers are forced to work without personal protective equipment or access to paid leave or premium pay. And when nonunion workers have advocated for health and safety protections or wage increases, they have often been retaliated against or even fired for doing so (Paul 2020; Davenport, Bhattarai, and McGregor 2020; Kruzel 2020; Eidelson 2020; Miller 2020). The lack of these basic protections has led to thousands of essential workers becoming infected with the coronavirus, and many are dying as a result (Bhattarai 2020; Kaplan and Kent 2020; Jewett, Bailey, and Renwick 2020). | 11/13/21 |
ND- Weheliye KTournament: Scarsdale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Stuyve LC | Judge: Tarun Ratnasabapathy Hart Subjects are fundamentally unstable because of evolution : all subjects fluctuate as they continue to evolve. Babies become toddlers, teenagers become adults, all which prove evolution. Weheliye 1 The 1ACs rhetoric of inclusion via the state reinforces the narrative of a common humanity that oppresses deviant bodies. Their offense about why the government needs to recognize rights to have freedom forces people to appeal to state recognition. Paradoxically, the particular biological material in question remains the property, at least nominally, of all humanity and is not proper to Moore the individual person: “Lymphokines, unlike a name or a face, have the same molecular structure in every human being and the same, important functions in every human being's immune system. Moreover, the particular genetic material which is responsible for the natural production of lymphokines, and which defendants use to manufacture lymphokines in the laboratory, is also the same in every person; it is no more unique to Moore than the number of vertebrae in the spine or the chemical formula of hemoglobin.”20 So, while the court grants personhood to human subjects in an individualized fashion that is based on comparatively distinguishing between different humans, when biological material clashes with the interests of capital, the court appeals to the indivisible biological sameness of the Homo sapiens species. Since the court's ruling does not place this slice of human flesh in the commons for all humans to share, it tacitly grants corporations the capability of legally possessing this material with the express aim of generating monetary profit. Considering that corporations enjoy the benefits of limited personhood and the ability to live forever under U.S. law, corporate entities are entrusted with securing the immortal life of biological matter, while human persons are denied ownership of their supposed essence.21 My interest here lies not in claiming inalienable ownership rights for cells derived from human bodies such as Lacks's and Moore's but to draw attention to how thoroughly the very core of pure biological matter is framed by neoliberal market logics and by liberal ideas of personhood as property. We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need no tbe redeployed within hegemonic framework but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. Suffering, especially when caused by political violence, has long functioned as the hallmark of both humane sentience and of inhuman brutality. Frequently, suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality. In western human rights discourse, for instance, the physical and psychic residues of political violence enable victims to be recognized as belonging to the “brotherhood of Man.” Too often, this tendency not only leaves intact hegemonic ideas of humanity as indistinguishable from western Man but demands comparing different forms of subjugation in order to adjudicate who warrants recognition and belonging. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2 Wendy Brown maintains, “politicized identity” operates “only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future...that triumphs over this pain.”3 Brown suggests replacing the identitarian declaration “I am,” which merely confirms and solidifies what already exists, with the desiring proclamation “I want,” which offers a Nietzschean politics of overcoming pain instead of clinging to suffering as an immutable feature of identity politics. While I recognize Brown's effort to formulate a form of minority politics not beholden to the aura of wounded attachments and fixated almost fetishistically on the state as the site of change, we do well to recall that many of the political agendas based on identity (the suffragette movement, the movement for the equality of same-sex marriages, or the various movements for the full civil rights of racialized minority subjects, for instance) are less concerned with claiming their suffering per se (I am) than they are with using wounding as a stepping stone in the quest (I want) for rights equal to those of full citizens. Liberal governing bodies, whether in the form of nation-states or supranational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court make particular forms of wounding the precondition for entry into the hallowed halls of full personhood, only acknowledging certain types of physical violence. For instance, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed a resolution in 2008 that includes rape and other forms of sexual violence in the category of war crimes, there are many forms of sexual violence that do not fall into this purview, and thus bar victims from claiming legal injury and/or personhood.4 Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one's personhood. Then and only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status. Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject's desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state's dogged insistence on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status in the vein of property. Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities. Life in a liberated zone entails: •Sustainably making and/or finding food •Sustainably making and developing people as the carriers and creators of productivity, culture, wisdom and technology •Making meaning: evolving life beyond birth, survival, and death •Collectively and determinedly defending what we have made The Limitations of The So-called Democracy of an Oppressive System There was a time when you could buy a car of any color, as long as it was black. There wasn’t much choice. These days, we are encouraged to vote in elections where we can support candidates from either of the two-capitalist war-mongering parties. Independent candidates who actually support social transformation are described as wasted votes or not allowed to get very far in the political vetting process. It brings to mind an option that might have been offered to the enslaved to vote on which plantation to be enslaved on, or to choose their overseer based on their position on what would be the maximum number of lashes in a beating, or the best way to punish low production or talking back. I’d like to think that I am a descendent from the slave who would have stood on the back row of such a slave voting campaign gathering, constantly looking up into the sky. When asked what they were looking for and why, they would whisper, “Y’all go ahead and vote on one of them or the other, but I’m looking for the north star in the dipping gourd. ‘Cause first chance I get, I’m outta here.” In the USA, we won’t vote ourselves to freedom in spite of the rhetoric of what claims to be the more progressive of the two oppressive exploitative parties. We will have to build freedom. And on leaving the plantation, we may want to burn down the big house. Not because burning it will feed us, but rather because it just seems like the right thing to do. The Devastating Nature of the Present It should be clear to us that we don't all share equitably in the benefits from modern world. We live in a world of the domination of capital. In it the owner class accumulates the surplus created by those who produce value. Those in the owning class then use their control over the socially created value to dominate virtually every aspect of social life for the singular purpose of being able to extract and accumulate even more value. This power that comes as a benefit of the ownership of means of life is used to threaten death by starvation to all who resist obeying the needs of capital expansion. There is no limit to the greed of the capitalist system. The unlimited expansion of capital is the singular logic of this world system. But infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet, and we see the effect of careless exploitation of natural resources and human activity on the planet’s ability to support human life with its needs for clean water and clean air in addition to controlling the potential for climate disasters that are caused by human activity. He adds: 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. Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding anti-pathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality.40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture's purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources...—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter's oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups. | 11/14/21 |
ND- Weheliye K V2Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker MK | Judge: Morgan Copeland Weheliye 1 The 1ACs rhetoric of inclusion via the state reinforces the narrative of a common humanity that oppresses deviant bodies. They put faith in Egypt as their “ just government” to recognize worker’s rights. Paradoxically, the particular biological material in question remains the property, at least nominally, of all humanity and is not proper to Moore the individual person: “Lymphokines, unlike a name or a face, have the same molecular structure in every human being and the same, important functions in every human being's immune system. Moreover, the particular genetic material which is responsible for the natural production of lymphokines, and which defendants use to manufacture lymphokines in the laboratory, is also the same in every person; it is no more unique to Moore than the number of vertebrae in the spine or the chemical formula of hemoglobin.”20 So, while the court grants personhood to human subjects in an individualized fashion that is based on comparatively distinguishing between different humans, when biological material clashes with the interests of capital, the court appeals to the indivisible biological sameness of the Homo sapiens species. Since the court's ruling does not place this slice of human flesh in the commons for all humans to share, it tacitly grants corporations the capability of legally possessing this material with the express aim of generating monetary profit. Considering that corporations enjoy the benefits of limited personhood and the ability to live forever under U.S. law, corporate entities are entrusted with securing the immortal life of biological matter, while human persons are denied ownership of their supposed essence.21 My interest here lies not in claiming inalienable ownership rights for cells derived from human bodies such as Lacks's and Moore's but to draw attention to how thoroughly the very core of pure biological matter is framed by neoliberal market logics and by liberal ideas of personhood as property. We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need no tbe redeployed within hegemonic framework but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. Suffering, especially when caused by political violence, has long functioned as the hallmark of both humane sentience and of inhuman brutality. Frequently, suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality. In western human rights discourse, for instance, the physical and psychic residues of political violence enable victims to be recognized as belonging to the “brotherhood of Man.” Too often, this tendency not only leaves intact hegemonic ideas of humanity as indistinguishable from western Man but demands comparing different forms of subjugation in order to adjudicate who warrants recognition and belonging. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2 Wendy Brown maintains, “politicized identity” operates “only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future...that triumphs over this pain.”3 Brown suggests replacing the identitarian declaration “I am,” which merely confirms and solidifies what already exists, with the desiring proclamation “I want,” which offers a Nietzschean politics of overcoming pain instead of clinging to suffering as an immutable feature of identity politics. While I recognize Brown's effort to formulate a form of minority politics not beholden to the aura of wounded attachments and fixated almost fetishistically on the state as the site of change, we do well to recall that many of the political agendas based on identity (the suffragette movement, the movement for the equality of same-sex marriages, or the various movements for the full civil rights of racialized minority subjects, for instance) are less concerned with claiming their suffering per se (I am) than they are with using wounding as a stepping stone in the quest (I want) for rights equal to those of full citizens. Liberal governing bodies, whether in the form of nation-states or supranational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court make particular forms of wounding the precondition for entry into the hallowed halls of full personhood, only acknowledging certain types of physical violence. For instance, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed a resolution in 2008 that includes rape and other forms of sexual violence in the category of war crimes, there are many forms of sexual violence that do not fall into this purview, and thus bar victims from claiming legal injury and/or personhood.4 Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one's personhood. Then and only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status. Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject's desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state's dogged insistence on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status in the vein of property. Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities. Life in a liberated zone entails: •Sustainably making and/or finding food •Sustainably making and developing people as the carriers and creators of productivity, culture, wisdom and technology •Making meaning: evolving life beyond birth, survival, and death •Collectively and determinedly defending what we have made The Limitations of The So-called Democracy of an Oppressive System There was a time when you could buy a car of any color, as long as it was black. There wasn’t much choice. These days, we are encouraged to vote in elections where we can support candidates from either of the two-capitalist war-mongering parties. Independent candidates who actually support social transformation are described as wasted votes or not allowed to get very far in the political vetting process. It brings to mind an option that might have been offered to the enslaved to vote on which plantation to be enslaved on, or to choose their overseer based on their position on what would be the maximum number of lashes in a beating, or the best way to punish low production or talking back. I’d like to think that I am a descendent from the slave who would have stood on the back row of such a slave voting campaign gathering, constantly looking up into the sky. When asked what they were looking for and why, they would whisper, “Y’all go ahead and vote on one of them or the other, but I’m looking for the north star in the dipping gourd. ‘Cause first chance I get, I’m outta here.” In the USA, we won’t vote ourselves to freedom in spite of the rhetoric of what claims to be the more progressive of the two oppressive exploitative parties. We will have to build freedom. And on leaving the plantation, we may want to burn down the big house. Not because burning it will feed us, but rather because it just seems like the right thing to do. The Devastating Nature of the Present It should be clear to us that we don't all share equitably in the benefits from modern world. We live in a world of the domination of capital. In it the owner class accumulates the surplus created by those who produce value. Those in the owning class then use their control over the socially created value to dominate virtually every aspect of social life for the singular purpose of being able to extract and accumulate even more value. This power that comes as a benefit of the ownership of means of life is used to threaten death by starvation to all who resist obeying the needs of capital expansion. There is no limit to the greed of the capitalist system. The unlimited expansion of capital is the singular logic of this world system. But infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet, and we see the effect of careless exploitation of natural resources and human activity on the planet’s ability to support human life with its needs for clean water and clean air in addition to controlling the potential for climate disasters that are caused by human activity. He adds: 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. Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding anti-pathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality.40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture's purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources...—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter's oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups. | 11/21/21 |
ND- Weheliye K V3Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 3 | Opponent: Iowa City West ST | Judge: Rafael Li Paradoxically, the particular biological material in question remains the property, at least nominally, of all humanity and is not proper to Moore the individual person: “Lymphokines, unlike a name or a face, have the same molecular structure in every human being and the same, important functions in every human being's immune system. Moreover, the particular genetic material which is responsible for the natural production of lymphokines, and which defendants use to manufacture lymphokines in the laboratory, is also the same in every person; it is no more unique to Moore than the number of vertebrae in the spine or the chemical formula of hemoglobin.”20 So, while the court grants personhood to human subjects in an individualized fashion that is based on comparatively distinguishing between different humans, when biological material clashes with the interests of capital, the court appeals to the indivisible biological sameness of the Homo sapiens species. Since the court's ruling does not place this slice of human flesh in the commons for all humans to share, it tacitly grants corporations the capability of legally possessing this material with the express aim of generating monetary profit. Considering that corporations enjoy the benefits of limited personhood and the ability to live forever under U.S. law, corporate entities are entrusted with securing the immortal life of biological matter, while human persons are denied ownership of their supposed essence.21 My interest here lies not in claiming inalienable ownership rights for cells derived from human bodies such as Lacks's and Moore's but to draw attention to how thoroughly the very core of pure biological matter is framed by neoliberal market logics and by liberal ideas of personhood as property. We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need no tbe redeployed within hegemonic framework but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. Suffering, especially when caused by political violence, has long functioned as the hallmark of both humane sentience and of inhuman brutality. Frequently, suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality. In western human rights discourse, for instance, the physical and psychic residues of political violence enable victims to be recognized as belonging to the “brotherhood of Man.” Too often, this tendency not only leaves intact hegemonic ideas of humanity as indistinguishable from western Man but demands comparing different forms of subjugation in order to adjudicate who warrants recognition and belonging. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2 Wendy Brown maintains, “politicized identity” operates “only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future...that triumphs over this pain.”3 Brown suggests replacing the identitarian declaration “I am,” which merely confirms and solidifies what already exists, with the desiring proclamation “I want,” which offers a Nietzschean politics of overcoming pain instead of clinging to suffering as an immutable feature of identity politics. While I recognize Brown's effort to formulate a form of minority politics not beholden to the aura of wounded attachments and fixated almost fetishistically on the state as the site of change, we do well to recall that many of the political agendas based on identity (the suffragette movement, the movement for the equality of same-sex marriages, or the various movements for the full civil rights of racialized minority subjects, for instance) are less concerned with claiming their suffering per se (I am) than they are with using wounding as a stepping stone in the quest (I want) for rights equal to those of full citizens. Liberal governing bodies, whether in the form of nation-states or supranational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court make particular forms of wounding the precondition for entry into the hallowed halls of full personhood, only acknowledging certain types of physical violence. For instance, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed a resolution in 2008 that includes rape and other forms of sexual violence in the category of war crimes, there are many forms of sexual violence that do not fall into this purview, and thus bar victims from claiming legal injury and/or personhood.4 Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one's personhood. Then and only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status. Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject's desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state's dogged insistence on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status in the vein of property. Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities. Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding anti-pathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality.40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture's purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources...—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter's oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups. | 11/21/21 |
ND- Weheliye K V4Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: Octas | Opponent: Strake Jesuit KS | Judge: Panel Weheliye 1 The 1ACs rhetoric of inclusion via the state reinforces the narrative of a common humanity that oppresses deviant bodies. They look to ILAW as a metric for inclusion – the worse harm for those who will never be included within domestic law, but especially not international law. Saying this is “key to harmonization” is the link. Paradoxically, the particular biological material in question remains the property, at least nominally, of all humanity and is not proper to Moore the individual person: “Lymphokines, unlike a name or a face, have the same molecular structure in every human being and the same, important functions in every human being's immune system. Moreover, the particular genetic material which is responsible for the natural production of lymphokines, and which defendants use to manufacture lymphokines in the laboratory, is also the same in every person; it is no more unique to Moore than the number of vertebrae in the spine or the chemical formula of hemoglobin.”20 So, while the court grants personhood to human subjects in an individualized fashion that is based on comparatively distinguishing between different humans, when biological material clashes with the interests of capital, the court appeals to the indivisible biological sameness of the Homo sapiens species. Since the court's ruling does not place this slice of human flesh in the commons for all humans to share, it tacitly grants corporations the capability of legally possessing this material with the express aim of generating monetary profit. Considering that corporations enjoy the benefits of limited personhood and the ability to live forever under U.S. law, corporate entities are entrusted with securing the immortal life of biological matter, while human persons are denied ownership of their supposed essence.21 My interest here lies not in claiming inalienable ownership rights for cells derived from human bodies such as Lacks's and Moore's but to draw attention to how thoroughly the very core of pure biological matter is framed by neoliberal market logics and by liberal ideas of personhood as property. We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need no tbe redeployed within hegemonic framework but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. Race is not a perspective on international relations; it is a central organizing feature of world politics. Anti-Japanese racism guided and sustained U.S. engagement in World War II, and broader anti-Asian sentiment influenced the development and structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. During the Cold War, racism and anti-communism were inextricably linked in the containment strategy that defined Washington’s approach to Africa, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And today race shapes threat perception and responses to violent extremism, inside and outside the “war on terror.” Yet mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship denies race as essential to understanding the world, to the cost of the field’s integrity. Take the “big three” IR paradigms: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. These dominant frames for understanding global politics are built on raced and racist intellectual foundations that limit the field’s ability to answer important questions about international security and organization. Core concepts, like anarchy and hierarchy, are raced: They are rooted in discourses that center and favor Europe and the West. These concepts implicitly and explicitly pit “developed” against “undeveloped,” “modern” against “primitive,” “civilized” against “uncivilized.” And their use is racist: These invented binaries are used to explain subjugation and exploitation around the globe. While realism and liberalism were built on Eurocentrism and used to justify white imperialism, this fact is not widely acknowledged in the field. For instance, according to neorealists, there exists a “balance of power” between and among “great powers.” Most of these great powers are, not incidentally, white-majority states, and they sit atop the hierarchy, with small and notably less-white powers organized below them. In a similar vein, raced hierarchies and conceptions of control ground the concept of cooperation in neoliberal thought: Major powers own the proverbial table, set the chairs, and arrange the place settings. Suffering, especially when caused by political violence, has long functioned as the hallmark of both humane sentience and of inhuman brutality. Frequently, suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality. In western human rights discourse, for instance, the physical and psychic residues of political violence enable victims to be recognized as belonging to the “brotherhood of Man.” Too often, this tendency not only leaves intact hegemonic ideas of humanity as indistinguishable from western Man but demands comparing different forms of subjugation in order to adjudicate who warrants recognition and belonging. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2 Wendy Brown maintains, “politicized identity” operates “only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future...that triumphs over this pain.”3 Brown suggests replacing the identitarian declaration “I am,” which merely confirms and solidifies what already exists, with the desiring proclamation “I want,” which offers a Nietzschean politics of overcoming pain instead of clinging to suffering as an immutable feature of identity politics. While I recognize Brown's effort to formulate a form of minority politics not beholden to the aura of wounded attachments and fixated almost fetishistically on the state as the site of change, we do well to recall that many of the political agendas based on identity (the suffragette movement, the movement for the equality of same-sex marriages, or the various movements for the full civil rights of racialized minority subjects, for instance) are less concerned with claiming their suffering per se (I am) than they are with using wounding as a stepping stone in the quest (I want) for rights equal to those of full citizens. Liberal governing bodies, whether in the form of nation-states or supranational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court make particular forms of wounding the precondition for entry into the hallowed halls of full personhood, only acknowledging certain types of physical violence. For instance, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed a resolution in 2008 that includes rape and other forms of sexual violence in the category of war crimes, there are many forms of sexual violence that do not fall into this purview, and thus bar victims from claiming legal injury and/or personhood.4 Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one's personhood. Then and only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status. Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject's desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state's dogged insistence on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status in the vein of property. Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities. Life in a liberated zone entails: •Sustainably making and/or finding food •Sustainably making and developing people as the carriers and creators of productivity, culture, wisdom and technology •Making meaning: evolving life beyond birth, survival, and death •Collectively and determinedly defending what we have made The Limitations of The So-called Democracy of an Oppressive System There was a time when you could buy a car of any color, as long as it was black. There wasn’t much choice. These days, we are encouraged to vote in elections where we can support candidates from either of the two-capitalist war-mongering parties. Independent candidates who actually support social transformation are described as wasted votes or not allowed to get very far in the political vetting process. It brings to mind an option that might have been offered to the enslaved to vote on which plantation to be enslaved on, or to choose their overseer based on their position on what would be the maximum number of lashes in a beating, or the best way to punish low production or talking back. I’d like to think that I am a descendent from the slave who would have stood on the back row of such a slave voting campaign gathering, constantly looking up into the sky. When asked what they were looking for and why, they would whisper, “Y’all go ahead and vote on one of them or the other, but I’m looking for the north star in the dipping gourd. ‘Cause first chance I get, I’m outta here.” In the USA, we won’t vote ourselves to freedom in spite of the rhetoric of what claims to be the more progressive of the two oppressive exploitative parties. We will have to build freedom. And on leaving the plantation, we may want to burn down the big house. Not because burning it will feed us, but rather because it just seems like the right thing to do. The Devastating Nature of the Present It should be clear to us that we don't all share equitably in the benefits from modern world. We live in a world of the domination of capital. In it the owner class accumulates the surplus created by those who produce value. Those in the owning class then use their control over the socially created value to dominate virtually every aspect of social life for the singular purpose of being able to extract and accumulate even more value. This power that comes as a benefit of the ownership of means of life is used to threaten death by starvation to all who resist obeying the needs of capital expansion. There is no limit to the greed of the capitalist system. The unlimited expansion of capital is the singular logic of this world system. But infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet, and we see the effect of careless exploitation of natural resources and human activity on the planet’s ability to support human life with its needs for clean water and clean air in addition to controlling the potential for climate disasters that are caused by human activity. He adds: 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. Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding anti-pathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality.40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture's purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources...—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter's oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups. | 11/23/21 |
SO-Abolish PatentsTournament: Valley | Round: Doubles | Opponent: BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Independent Shreyas Kapavarapu | Judge: Panel Medina and ROJ OPPPRESSION IS HERE, AND IT STOPS EDUCATION – excluding some perspectives creates a flawed epistemology that makes answering ethical questions impossible. Foucault invites us to pay attention to the past and ongoing epistemic battles among competing power/knowledge frameworks that try to control a given field. Different fields—or domains of discursive interaction—contain particular discursive regimes with their particular ways of producing knowledge. In the battle among power/ knowledge frameworks, some come on top and become dominant while others are displaced and become subjugated. Foucault’s methodology offers a way of exploiting that vibrant plurality of epistemic perspectives which always contains some bodies of experiences and memories that are erased or hidden in the mainstream frameworks that become hegemonic after prevailing in sustained epistemic battles. What Foucault calls subjugated knowledges are forms of experience and remembering that are pushed to the margins and render unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic discourses. Subjugated knowledges remain invisible to mainstream perspectives; they have a precarious subterranean existence that renders them unnoticed by most people and impossible to detect by those whose perspective has already internalized certain epistemic exclusions. And with the invisibility of subjugated knowledges, certain possibilities for resistance and subversion go unnoticed. The critical and emancipatory potential of Foucaultian genealogy resides in challenging established practices of remembering and forgetting by excavating subjugated bodies of experiences and memories, bringing to the fore the perspectives that culturally hegemonic practices have foreclosed. The critical task of the scholar and the activist is to resurrect subjugated knowledges—that is, to revive hidden or forgotten bodies of experiences and memories—and to help produce insurrections of subjugated knowledges. In order to be critical and to have transformative effects, genealogical investigations should aim at these insurrections, which are critical interventions that disrupt and interrogate epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives (e.g. official histories, standard interpretations, ossified exclusionary meanings, etc). Such insurrections involve the difficult labor of mobilizing scattered, marginalized publics and of tapping into the critical potential of their dejected experiences and memories. An epistemic insurrection requires a collaborative relation between genealogical scholars/activists and the subjects whose experiences and memories have been subjugated: those subjects by themselves may not be able to destabilize the epistemic status quo until they are given a voice at the epistemic table (i.e. in the production of knowledge), that is, until room is made for their marginalized perspective to exert resistance, until past epistemic battles are reopened and established frameworks become open to contestation. Thus, the Role of the Judge is to Promote Resistance to Oppression, which means they endorse strategies that push back against structural denials of due – comes first, since policies mean nothing if they exclude the people who are supposed to benefit from them. Despite these taxpayer subsidies, prescription drug prices are nonetheless increasing at an alarming rate. In 2019, price increases from drug manufacturers affected more than 3,40026 drugs. For example, Allergan, a major pharmaceutical manufacturer, raised prices on 51 drugs, just more than half its portfolio. Some medications that Allergan manufactures saw a 9.5 percent jump in cost, while others saw a 4.9 percent increase in cost.27 Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., the largest generic drug manufacturer in the world, increased its drug prices by more than 9 percent.28 These sharp increases in price occur as companies continue to report millions of dollars in revenue. In 2018, Allergan reported $15.8 million29 in revenue, while Teva Pharmaceuticals reported $18.8 million30 in revenue. Pharmaceutical companies’ profit margins receive significant bumps when they launch new drugs, specifically specialty drugs, used to treat life-threatening conditions. These drugs often cost more than most Americans can afford. Pharmaceutical companies have stated that the prices are high because the drugs are difficult to manufacture. In 2013, for example, industry giant Gilead Sciences launched Sovaldi, a hepatitis C drug, at $1,000 per pill31, or $84,00032 per treatment, which could last 12 to 24 weeks.33 After an 18-month investigation into the company’s pricing, the Senate Finance Committee concluded that Gilead had pursued a marketing and pricing strategy designed to “maximize revenue with little concern for access or affordability.”34 Drug companies also benefit from patents, which give them monopoly power for their on-patent products. These patents ensure that prices remain high by reducing competition. Drug patents last for 20 years after the filing date. Pharmaceutical companies have also employed tactics such as evergreening and thicketing to prolong a drug’s exclusivity. When evergreening, pharmaceutical companies make certain modifications to a drug such as changing its35 chemical composition slightly or making an external change as minor as adding a stripe to a pill36 in order to preserve their patents. A 2018 study in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences found that 78 percent37 of new drug patents awarded in the past decade went to drugs that already existed. Seventy percent 38 of the nearly 100 bestselling drugs extended their exclusivity protections at least once, and 50 percent extended their patents more than once. The second tactic—thicketing—involves flooding the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the courts with excessive patents and applications to make it difficult for competing firms to secure patents. These tactics help preserve pharmaceutical companies’ monopolies and ensure that drug prices remain uncompetitive and thus less affordable for everyday Americans. While consumers continue to pay the price of this market manipulation, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the pharmaceutical industry found that these unfair practices are significantly enriching manufacturers. As the report stated, “Among the largest 25 companies, annual average profit margin fluctuated between 15 and 20 percent.”39 The GAO contextualizes these profits by comparing the pharmaceutical industry’s profits with those of its counterparts, stating that “the annual average profit margin across non-drug companies among the largest 500 globally fluctuated between 4 and 9 percent.” The Role of the Ballot is to Endorse the Interrogation of Medical Capitalism, meaning strategies that reduce market competition to benefit corporations. Controls the link to other frameworks, since harms like disease and death can’t be addressed without access to medical care. Links THE AFF IS PIECEMEAL REFORM – they keep existing patent law in place, only offering temporary and limited waivers. We’ll quote from the doc: the Plan isn’t anti-Patent, just pro-innovation – breaking down secondary patents is key. Trotskyist Fraction MASSIVE INEQUALITY – patents in ANY FORM are the problem – they appropriate public goods for private gain AND cause cycles of disease. At a meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) on October 15-16, 2020, India and South Africa proposed the suspension of certain articles of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). This would allow patents on vaccines and other Covid-related technologies to be released. The proposal was supported by some Latin American and African countries, but was unanimously rejected by the United States, the main EU countries (including the “progressive” government of the PSOE and Unidas Podemos in the Spanish State), Australia, and Japan. Although the United States under the Biden administration has rejoined the WHO — an institution it had left under Trump’s orders — this imperialist country is unlikely to change its position one iota when it comes to patent monopolies. An alliance of non-governmental organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and others, is demanding exemptions from intellectual property rights regarding vaccines and medicines for Covid. They point out that patents in the hands of private groups is already creating outrageous situations. An antiviral treatment with remdesivir costs $3,120 in the United States, while generic versions licensed in India cost between $587 and $792 per treatment even though “the estimated minimum cost to manufacture remdesivir with a reasonable profit margin is only $9 per treatment.” The monopoly ownership of vaccine patents by a handful of capitalist multinational corporations is already causing all kinds of cruel inequalities in vaccine distribution. Whoever pays the most, gets the most — this is the motto guiding the pharmaceutical companies, even if this means leaving large swaths of the world without vaccines. This does not only mean more deaths in the poorest countries, more crises in their economies, increased migration to escape hunger, and more unemployment. It also means that if a large part of the world does not obtain vaccines, the pandemic will be more difficult to eradicate. But the logic of capitalist profit is the opposite of rationality and planning for social needs, as this crisis is tragically illustrating. Patents and intellectual property are nothing more than private appropriation of a public good: the scientific and technical knowledge that has been accumulated over years or decades, the product of extensive research in different countries, largely financed with public money in universities, hospitals, or research centers all over the planet. In the case of some vaccines like that from Moderna, the funding is almost completely public. This company used technology developed by the government as the basis for its vaccine, and then got nearly $1 billion of public money to develop it. Finally, the U.S. government paid another $1.5 billion for advanced purchases. In other words, the entire project was paid for with public money, but the patent remains in private hands. Public funding is no less important for the vaccines from Novavax, Curevac, and Johnson and Johnson. And although private funding has been important in some other cases, they have also benefited from the advance purchase of millions of doses, an indirect form of state funding. Scientific knowledge — just like art, culture, or land — is a public good of humanity. But under capitalism, it is appropriated in a rent-seeking manner by a handful of private companies using patents, intellectual property rights, trademarks, and similar mechanisms. In the case of vaccines and medicines, this is even more serious, because it is a question of life or death for millions of people. This is not only the case with Covid. For example, more than 100,000 children in India die of pneumonia each year, a disease that could be prevented with the PCV13 vaccine. But the patent is held by Pfizer, and the vaccine is prohibitively expensive in that country. The unequal distribution of patents worldwide offers a snapshot of the structure of imperialism in this field. In 2019, 3,224,200 patent applications were registered worldwide — China, the United States, Japan, Korea, and the European Patent Office accounted for 84.7 percent of the total. The combined number of registrations in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania was just 3.3 percent. Vaccines for All: For the Liberation of Patents and the Nationalization of Pharmaceutical Companies and Laboratories Some European countries and the United States are already experiencing a third wave of the pandemic, which continues to ravage Latin America. Employment continues to fall, and a severe economic and social crisis is underway. However, the crisis is not the same for everyone: in the last year alone, 100 million people were pushed into poverty, while the 500 richest people on the planet — representing 0.001 percent of the world population — saw their wealth grow more than at any time in the last decade. This abysmal social inequality is part of the DNA of the deadliest virus, which is capitalism. Faced with this scenario, all governments — whether conservative or “progressive” — have responded to the crisis with mobility restrictions, curfews, and increased police presence in the streets. They claim “there are no resources” to do anything else, but they refuse to touch the capitalists’ profits. Instead, they are placing the burden of the crisis on the backs of the workers and poor nations of the world, increasing their indebtedness, which will mean more pressure from the IMF and other financial agencies for new cuts and austerity in the short term. The struggle for vaccines for everyone and for the liberation of patents is urgent in the face of the catastrophe that is the pandemic. In the same way, immediate state control of all pharmaceutical companies and laboratories is necessary, to put them under the control of health professionals and in the service of rational plans of vaccine and test production and distribution. These companies and the resources of private health care must be nationalized under workers’ control. Emergency increases in health and education budgets, as well as hiring additional healthcare personnel to give the vaccines and avoid the collapse of hospitals, should be funded with extraordinary taxes on large fortunes. Instead of paying the foreign debt, it is necessary to cancel the debt of semicolonial countries. Otherwise, the working masses will be forced to pay for the crisis. Such a program cannot be imposed on the capitalist vampires with online petitions or formal statements to the WHO. Nor can we expect anything from the (neo)reformist parties who join national governments (as in Spain) and refuse to implement emergency measures. The only way to implement these kinds of measures is to develop the common struggle of the working class, women, and youth at an international level. For this, we need to fight against the union bureaucracies that have supported reactionary “national unity” throughout the pandemic, refusing to fight for the necessary measures. The growth of reactionary nationalist tendencies in the imperialist states and the brutal speculation by the multinational corporations makes it necessary to pose an internationalist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist perspective. We call on all working-class organizations to campaign for urgent means of struggle, starting with the demand for the abolition of patents, vaccines for all, and the medicine, equipment, and funds necessary to combat the pandemic. There is no time to lose — our lives are worth more than their profits. It’s a broken system, not delivering the drugs we need at prices we need. At the time of writing, the world death toll from Covid-19 is 350,000. Economist Joseph Stiglitz asks: what if a global network of laboratories, without Intellectual Property (IP) lawyers breathing down their necks, ‘monitored for emerging strains of a contagious virus, periodically updated an established formula for vaccinating against it, and then made that information available to companies and countries around the world?’ It’s not pie in the sky. It’s how flu vaccine research already operates. The World Health Organization (WHO) convenes world experts twice a year to add emerging flu strains in order to update flu vaccines. Researchers from across 110 countries, funded largely by governments, are committed to this open-source science. The infrastructure to gather, interpret and distribute actionable knowledge for the development of vaccines already exists. This system could be funded through prizes, Stiglitz suggests, rewarding companies that invent necessary new medicines. Companies would need to agree to make products patent-free, be transparent over pricing and costs and share clinical trial data so that other countries can develop the same capacity. Researchers at Global Justice Now also propose modelling democratically owned start-up firms with workers, clinicians and patients on their boards and on the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), a UN body set up to increase access to drugs in the Global South. Governments would retain a controlling interest in these bodies. Abolishing the IP burden would incentivize knowledge-sharing across borders, with open-source data that any WHO member could access. With increasing vulnerability to pandemics what is needed is an ambitious strategy to compel industry to manufacture the drugs we need at scale. Transitional steps, proposed by Washington University professors Michele Boldrin and David Levine, include shortening patent terms to slowly but surely ‘decrease the strength of intellectual property interventions’. They hasten to add: ‘the final goal cannot be anything short of abolition.’ | 9/27/21 |
SO-Abolitionist BiomedicineTournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Westlake MR | Judge: Javier Weheliye 1 The state’s conception of identity and inclusion only further exasperates exclusion: by using the WTO as an arbiter to determine whether non - western countries are valued or ignored, these countries are forced to experience violence and compete with one another for rights recognition. Paradoxically, the particular biological material in question remains the property, at least nominally, of all humanity and is not proper to Moore the individual person: “Lymphokines, unlike a name or a face, have the same molecular structure in every human being and the same, important functions in every human being's immune system. Moreover, the particular genetic material which is responsible for the natural production of lymphokines, and which defendants use to manufacture lymphokines in the laboratory, is also the same in every person; it is no more unique to Moore than the number of vertebrae in the spine or the chemical formula of hemoglobin.”20 So, while the court grants personhood to human subjects in an individualized fashion that is based on comparatively distinguishing between different humans, when biological material clashes with the interests of capital, the court appeals to the indivisible biological sameness of the Homo sapiens species. Since the court's ruling does not place this slice of human flesh in the commons for all humans to share, it tacitly grants corporations the capability of legally possessing this material with the express aim of generating monetary profit. Considering that corporations enjoy the benefits of limited personhood and the ability to live forever under U.S. law, corporate entities are entrusted with securing the immortal life of biological matter, while human persons are denied ownership of their supposed essence.21 My interest here lies not in claiming inalienable ownership rights for cells derived from human bodies such as Lacks's and Moore's but to draw attention to how thoroughly the very core of pure biological matter is framed by neoliberal market logics and by liberal ideas of personhood as property. We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need no tbe redeployed within hegemonic framework but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. Suffering, especially when caused by political violence, has long functioned as the hallmark of both humane sentience and of inhuman brutality. Frequently, suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality. In western human rights discourse, for instance, the physical and psychic residues of political violence enable victims to be recognized as belonging to the “brotherhood of Man.” Too often, this tendency not only leaves intact hegemonic ideas of humanity as indistinguishable from western Man but demands comparing different forms of subjugation in order to adjudicate who warrants recognition and belonging. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2 Wendy Brown maintains, “politicized identity” operates “only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future...that triumphs over this pain.”3 Brown suggests replacing the identitarian declaration “I am,” which merely confirms and solidifies what already exists, with the desiring proclamation “I want,” which offers a Nietzschean politics of overcoming pain instead of clinging to suffering as an immutable feature of identity politics. While I recognize Brown's effort to formulate a form of minority politics not beholden to the aura of wounded attachments and fixated almost fetishistically on the state as the site of change, we do well to recall that many of the political agendas based on identity (the suffragette movement, the movement for the equality of same-sex marriages, or the various movements for the full civil rights of racialized minority subjects, for instance) are less concerned with claiming their suffering per se (I am) than they are with using wounding as a stepping stone in the quest (I want) for rights equal to those of full citizens. Liberal governing bodies, whether in the form of nation-states or supranational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court make particular forms of wounding the precondition for entry into the hallowed halls of full personhood, only acknowledging certain types of physical violence. For instance, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed a resolution in 2008 that includes rape and other forms of sexual violence in the category of war crimes, there are many forms of sexual violence that do not fall into this purview, and thus bar victims from claiming legal injury and/or personhood.4 Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one's personhood. Then and only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status. Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject's desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state's dogged insistence on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status in the vein of property. Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities. The Du Boisian vision of alleviating the racial ‘‘cut’’ in the governance of life has yet to be realized. In the era of neoliberal biopolitics, black lives are especially imperiled in the very same moment that life is ostensibly affirmed. Biomedical targeting technologies are predicated on the laudable pursuit of attending to vulnerable populations and alleviating racial disparities of health. These technologies potentially address specific conditions that affect black life, in accord with Du Bois’ call to attend to the color line. In the contemporary era, race-based pharmaceuticals and medical hot spotting bring black subjects into the fold of the vital politics of life through customizing care at different scales of existence—the individual body and the environment of certain populations. Yet in doing so, as we have shown, these practices continue to ontologize those bodies and spaces as a problem. Thus, while they may not explicitly fortify the color line in the Du Boisian sense, they more ominously resecure anti-blackness through the supposed fostering of life. The targeting of specific bodies or spaces extracts them from broader relations of structural racism and customizes medical resources in ways that objectify race or racialized space as that which should be secured against. Ultimately such biomedical targeting recursively protects the reality that health optimization is an exclusionary anti-black project. Our main intervention has been to examine the epistemological underpinnings of anti- blackness with respect to new health governance along the lines of race. Our two examples of BiDil and medical hot spotting show that biomedical targeting anticipates risk and failure and performs death-expectant interventions that ultimately expel African Americans from optimal health but do so in different ways. BiDil extols black responsibility of risk, enlisting African Americans in self-care for lived and embodied conditions of anti-blackness, that is, for violence against blacks and for historically accumulated disadvantage and ill-health from the positioning of African Americans outside of the category of Human. Medical hot spotting further demonstrates anti- blackness as the structural positioning of African Americans outside the rest of the populace as demarcated ‘‘problem spaces’’ inhabited by ‘‘problem bodies.’’ The practice orchestrates violence through spatial abstraction and data-based mapping operations that contain and surveil race as a threat, and, like BiDil, it calls for individualized responsibility. In short, these biomedical targeting technologies fail to cultivate black futures. Instead, they ontologically secure blackness as nonfuturity. Futurity lies at the heart of biopolitical governance and practices, which intervene into life in order to control but also improve the prospects of the population. In a Foucauldian understanding, biopolitics exerts a positive influence over life, ‘‘that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations’’ (Foucault, 1978: 137). Yet, if health, as we have shown, is an exclusionary anti- black achievement, it seems imperative to work to abolish race as an operation that biopolitically adjudicates. To this end, biomedical efforts that seek to organize reparative justice must work against reestablishing race as an ontology at the very same moment that we labor toward alleviating those very real social disparities predicated on race. As such, a just politics would need to address the epistemology of anti-blackness as the basis for health. Essentially, such a politics would refuse this world, precisely because it is structured through anti-blackness and ‘‘looks like no future at all’’ (Bliss, 2015: 93). Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding anti-pathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality.40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture's purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources...—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter's oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups. | 9/18/21 |
SO-Counterfeit DATournament: Greenhill | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AB | Judge: Will Freedman The protection of IP not only provides incentives to innovators to create, but also plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety of vaccines and helping to prevent the importation of fraudulent and dangerous goods. Unlike the typical pharmaceutical industry, the vaccine market is not a free and open market.69 Vaccines contain biological products made from living organisms and the risk of failure in vaccine development and production is high. 70 Moreover, the manufacturing process for vaccines is much more complex as it requires the use of facilities and equipment with a high degree of specialization.71 The complexity of vaccine products implies that more time and regulatory requirements are needed in order to make or “copy” the vaccine production process. Therefore, the innovator should be expected to make conscious and meticulous decisions as to when and to whom to issue licenses, as this is the most responsible way to bring their technologies to the world and safeguard global health. In addition, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues there has been a noticeable increase in the circulation of fake medicines around the world. According to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), organized crime groups have been producing fake drugs and medical products and selling them for lucrative profits in developing countries.72 With the development of COVID-19 vaccines on the market, a rapid rise in the illegal sale of fake items is expected, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).73 Counterfeits of the legitimate products provide false promises of protection and could lead to disastrous consequences, including worsened illness and death for the individual and the retardation of herd immunity for the population at large. Effective and proactive IP procurement is essential and useful in mitigating the risks of counterfeit and substandard medicines. IP enforcement measures play a significant role in preventing these fake and illicit medicines from circulating in the market. While important during normal times, IP enforcement can take on an enhanced role of safeguarding the public during this critical period of time. Waiving all COVID-19 related IPRs raises the risk of unsafe or fake vaccines circulating in supply channels and being sold to unsuspecting governments, putting millions of human lives at risk and reducing trust in vaccines. Although biopharma RandD is under mounting pressure, our analysis shows an uptick for the first time in six years (from 1.6 in 2019 to 2.5 in 2020). While forecast peak sales per pipeline asset have increased by 17.9 (from $357 million in 2019 to $421 million in 2020), companies are still facing rising costs of developing an asset. The average cost to bring an asset to market has risen for the seventh year in a row to $2,4 billion, due in part to longer cycle times. The growing complexities of drug development and increasing numbers of oncology trials have made it difficult to enroll and retain clinical trial participants. In addition, the rising number of therapies targeted at unmet needs and smaller patient subgroups has further increased competition to recruit from the limited pool of available trial participants. These factors have created delays and have been contributing to year-over-year growth in cycle times. Amid growing cycle times, regulators have put in place several pathways to expedite the development and approval of new drugs and accelerate patient access to life-saving innovative therapies. However, despite this, average clinical cycle times have continued to lengthen. Nevertheless, the seeds of change have been sown, with moves to integrate the application of AI and other digital technologies to transform drug development and clinical trials. The use of real-world evidence (RWE) and enhanced segmentation of patients and disease can contribute to shorter cycle times, but upscaling their use will be essential. | 9/26/21 |
SO-Liberated ZonesTournament: Grapevine | Round: Doubles | Opponent: San Mateo YR | Judge: Panel Hardt 14: Hardt, Micheal. Professor at Duke University “The Power to be Affected” Springer Science and Business, 2014. BP – JP Lauren Berlant’s work is filled with explorations of the passions, the many ways in which we are affected by powers greater than ourselves—in institutional contexts and intimate relations, in sexual encounters and aesthetic experiences, and in political affairs and economic struggles. The object of her journeys through the affects is not simply to register or catalogue—let alone lament—the affective damage caused by living in contemporary society or the ways in which our desires are thwarted. Instead, she regards the pains, pleasures, frustrations, and longing as so many tracks we can follow to understand how people manage in this world to create new intimacies, new bonds, and new forms of life.1 Simply getting by and surviving in a dangerous and threatening world, though, is not enough. Berlant revives classical concepts to name her ultimate goals: we should strive for the good life and seek human flourishing. Orienting the analysis and even the affirmation of the affects toward a project for the good life might well seem an odd combination since the classical tradition teaches us—or, at least, this is what we are usually told—that the passions are the ties that bind us in servitude; only following the dictates of sovereign reason can we truly flourish. In Berlant’s work, instead, the only path toward achieving the good life must be constructed with and through the affects. To understand the arc of Berlant’s project, I find it helpful to pose it in relation to that of Baruch Spinoza, to which it has strong correspondences. (Berlant may well be a closet Spinozist—even without knowing it.) For Spinoza being affected by others, by external forces, is not a weakness but a strength, a power. As a first approximation, think of the power to be affected as a gauge of your capacity to be really in the world, to register and feel its diverse powers. Once we open up and expand our power to be affected, however, then begins the work of selecting among the affects and discovering the means to repeat or prolong those that are beneficial and prevent the detrimental. That is a path, through the affects, with the affects, toward joy and flourishing. The first step of this process is to take stock realistically and recognize that we are not sovereign subjects. Berlant is rightly suspicious of the standard ethical injunctions that assume our individual sovereignty, as well as those that aim at constructing or supporting sovereign political powers. Consider the sovereign individual, in correspondence with Carl Schmitt’s political formula, as the one who decides (2007). Berlant questions both elements of this statement: the one and the decision. Sovereign decision, she claims, resides on an illusion of self-control, “a fantasy misrecognized as an objective state” (2011, p. 97). People are not always engaged in projects of self- extension, she says, and in fact, they seldom have significant control over their decision-making. Spinoza expresses the same idea in quantitative terms. The power of all individual or limited subjects to think and act autonomously corresponds proportionally to the relation between their powers and the power of nature as a whole. “The force by which a man perseveres in existing is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes” (1985 Ethics IV P3). Only God (or nature as a whole) is self-caused because it has no outside. The fact that the power of the world outside of us so far surpasses our own power means that we are affected by others much more than we affect the world or even autonomously affect ourselves, and thus, our capacity for sovereign decision-making is minimal too. The other half of Schmitt’s dictum is equally unfounded: “the one” never decides or acts or is acted on. The subject is never one. Agency and causality, Berlant suggests, should be understood not in terms of unities but instead “as dispersed environmental mechanisms at the personal as well as the institutional level” (2011, p. 114). Spinoza expresses this too in mathematical and geometrical form. A body or an individual, he explains, is formed when a great number of parts agree with each other and thus communicate in a consistent way (1985 Ethics II P13 definition). Essential to a body is the relation: the body lives as long as that relation is maintained. Instead of thinking in terms of unities, then, we need to think the relation among multiplicities and recognize the consistency of dispersed landscapes. To identify the locus of decision or acting or being acted upon, we need to look to not the one but the consistent relation among the many. There is no point in lamenting our relative lack of power or unity or ability to rule ourselves autonomously. Spinoza, in fact, ridicules those wise men who, maintaining a fantasy of the sovereign subject, chastise us for being ruled by passions. “Philosophers look upon the passions by which we are assailed as vices, into which men fall by their own fault. So it is their custom to deride, bewail, berate them, or, if their purpose is to appear more zealous than others, to execrate them. They believe that they are thus performing a sacred duty, and that they are attaining the summit of wisdom when they have learnt how to shower extravagant praise on a human nature that nowhere exists and the revile that which exists in actuality. The fact is that they conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be. As a result, for the most part it is not ethics they have written, but satire; and they have never worked out a political theory that can have practical application” (2002 Political Treatise, Chapter 1, Introduction, 680). A practical political theory instead must begin where people are, and really existing people are primarily filled, so to speak, by passions. Berlant poses the terrain of the nonsovereign in terms of the “interruptions” or “intermissions” that break the imagined efforts of self- extension of sovereign subjects. (Be careful, though, not to be misled by these terms because, as Berlant makes clear, they are the norm not the exception: we live in the interruption and the intermission the vast majority of the time.) Paradoxically, the particular biological material in question remains the property, at least nominally, of all humanity and is not proper to Moore the individual person: “Lymphokines, unlike a name or a face, have the same molecular structure in every human being and the same, important functions in every human being's immune system. Moreover, the particular genetic material which is responsible for the natural production of lymphokines, and which defendants use to manufacture lymphokines in the laboratory, is also the same in every person; it is no more unique to Moore than the number of vertebrae in the spine or the chemical formula of hemoglobin.”20 So, while the court grants personhood to human subjects in an individualized fashion that is based on comparatively distinguishing between different humans, when biological material clashes with the interests of capital, the court appeals to the indivisible biological sameness of the Homo sapiens species. Since the court's ruling does not place this slice of human flesh in the commons for all humans to share, it tacitly grants corporations the capability of legally possessing this material with the express aim of generating monetary profit. Considering that corporations enjoy the benefits of limited personhood and the ability to live forever under U.S. law, corporate entities are entrusted with securing the immortal life of biological matter, while human persons are denied ownership of their supposed essence.21 My interest here lies not in claiming inalienable ownership rights for cells derived from human bodies such as Lacks's and Moore's but to draw attention to how thoroughly the very core of pure biological matter is framed by neoliberal market logics and by liberal ideas of personhood as property. We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity-based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.” If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporation of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti-prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “ ‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need no tbe redeployed within hegemonic framework but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered. The cultural history of medical intervention in the colonial world is quite informative with regard to a profounder comprehension of the meaning and practices of the structures of global health. Tropical medicine as a distinctive discipline in the curricula of medical studies was born with the objective of facilitating the settlement of Britons and other Europeans in threatening environments characterized by pests such as smallpox, malaria or yellow fever.64 But it also held the mission of improving the lives of natives engaged in the colonial businesses, therefore pursuing the “benevolent” task assigned to imperialism. Nevertheless, in his revision of British and Australian literature in the imperial period, Cameron-Smith identifies tropical medicine “as a discourse that constructed the space of the tropics as Other and thus as racially pathological.”65 Building upon perceptions of higher mortality overseas as compared to the metropolis, and of climate-conditioned “native laziness” vis-à-vis the superiority of the Northern European spirit, physicians in the 18th century came to the conclusion that “foreign countries were simply unhealthy.”66 In any case, the economic profits from colonial enterprise outweighed the mortality risk, and so the Empire prolonged its mission of civilization and exploitation. In his article on medicine in Somaliland during the first half of the 20th century, Mohamed shows how colonial rule benefited from health interventions, vaccination namely, as it improved public health. The medical mission was therefore “popularizing the Government, and identifying the administration with the people’s welfare.”67 The integration of tropical medicine’s culture and history when linked to the rise of “medical police” is particularly illustrative of both the character of this early securitization of infectious diseases and the apparatus of biopolitical instrumentalization at the global level. Beyond international and national political institutions, culture, science and medical practice informatively contribute to the historical power regime. Hygienism has been notably instrumental with regard to the implementation of powerful white-supremacist regimes such as the one South African experienced during the Apartheid period.68 According to Youde, the legacy of public health intervention as historically anti-black population transpires from the 2000 conflict between South African government, notably President Thabo Mbeki, and the international AIDS community. Mbeki claimed that the international community’s AIDS discourse was a Western neo-colonialist discourse expressing Africans’ inferiority as a race to tackle their own problems. This episode was particularly dramatic since South Africa was holding, as it still does, the highest rate of HIV infections in the world David Fidler is quite right when affirming that major global health concerns are “revolutionizing” the way International Relations researchers observe them, from an “uninteresting” topic to a relatively prominent one as part of post-Cold War human security paradigm. The general issue of Western securitization of infectious diseases is mostly, and hierarchically, connected to scenarios of biological agents spread for terrorist purposes, outbreaks of diseases transmitted within the food chain, and extensive impact of major diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in Southern and Eastern African weak states. The adoption of a historical-political lens vis-à-vis a juridicalinstitutional one allows us to come to, not only denser, but also, perhaps, surprising conclusions about the intimate function of disease in the whole Western global security project. First, the historical-political approach takes governance’s constitution as an assemblage of dispersed, though hierarchized, liberal powers. Second, it permits an appreciation of the power role played by a larger range of actors, namely INGOs, apart from the states and multilateral organizations. As the HIV-security nexus case shows, INGOs played an essential role in the early politicization of the issue of HIV. Third, this approach emphasizes the idea of structure as the major securitization driver. Even though context remains important (e.g. September 11, 2003 SARS outbreaks, etc.), structural governance elements, i.e. surveillance mechanisms of epidemic control, preparedness and response, strongly contributed to Western security. They helped in the expansion and consolidation of the world system of dominance over the colonial world in function of a rising global liberal economy. Post-September 11 ‘new order’ in global health and the security agenda emerging from it unfolds continuities of the colonial legacy. Such continuities appear as tantamount to the post-Cold War reduction of state sovereignty in the international arena, proportionately to the hegemonization of the assemblage of dispersed, multifaceted liberal powers. Suffering, especially when caused by political violence, has long functioned as the hallmark of both humane sentience and of inhuman brutality. Frequently, suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality. In western human rights discourse, for instance, the physical and psychic residues of political violence enable victims to be recognized as belonging to the “brotherhood of Man.” Too often, this tendency not only leaves intact hegemonic ideas of humanity as indistinguishable from western Man but demands comparing different forms of subjugation in order to adjudicate who warrants recognition and belonging. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, “Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?”2 Wendy Brown maintains, “politicized identity” operates “only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future...that triumphs over this pain.”3 Brown suggests replacing the identitarian declaration “I am,” which merely confirms and solidifies what already exists, with the desiring proclamation “I want,” which offers a Nietzschean politics of overcoming pain instead of clinging to suffering as an immutable feature of identity politics. While I recognize Brown's effort to formulate a form of minority politics not beholden to the aura of wounded attachments and fixated almost fetishistically on the state as the site of change, we do well to recall that many of the political agendas based on identity (the suffragette movement, the movement for the equality of same-sex marriages, or the various movements for the full civil rights of racialized minority subjects, for instance) are less concerned with claiming their suffering per se (I am) than they are with using wounding as a stepping stone in the quest (I want) for rights equal to those of full citizens. Liberal governing bodies, whether in the form of nation-states or supranational entities such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court make particular forms of wounding the precondition for entry into the hallowed halls of full personhood, only acknowledging certain types of physical violence. For instance, while the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees passed a resolution in 2008 that includes rape and other forms of sexual violence in the category of war crimes, there are many forms of sexual violence that do not fall into this purview, and thus bar victims from claiming legal injury and/or personhood.4 Even more generally, the acknowledgment and granting of full personhood of those excluded from its precincts requires the overcoming of physical violence, while epistemic and economic brutalities remain outside the scope of the law. Congruently, much of the politics constructed around the effects of political violence, especially within the context of international human rights but also with regard to minority politics in the United States, is constructed from the shaky foundation of surmounting or desiring to leave behind physical suffering so as to take on the ghostly semblance of possessing one's personhood. Then and only then will previously minoritized subjects be granted their humanity as a legal status. Hence, the glitch Brown diagnoses in identity politics is less a product of the minority subject's desire to desperately cling to his or her pain but a consequence of the state's dogged insistence on suffering as the only price of entry to proper personhood, what Samera Esmeir has referred to as a “juridical humanity” that bestows and rescinds humanity as an individualized legal status in the vein of property. Apportioning personhood in this way maintains the world of Man and its attendant racializing assemblages, which means in essence that the entry fee for legal recognition is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities. Life in a liberated zone entails: •Sustainably making and/or finding food •Sustainably making and developing people as the carriers and creators of productivity, culture, wisdom and technology •Making meaning: evolving life beyond birth, survival, and death •Collectively and determinedly defending what we have made The Limitations of The So-called Democracy of an Oppressive System There was a time when you could buy a car of any color, as long as it was black. There wasn’t much choice. These days, we are encouraged to vote in elections where we can support candidates from either of the two-capitalist war-mongering parties. Independent candidates who actually support social transformation are described as wasted votes or not allowed to get very far in the political vetting process. It brings to mind an option that might have been offered to the enslaved to vote on which plantation to be enslaved on, or to choose their overseer based on their position on what would be the maximum number of lashes in a beating, or the best way to punish low production or talking back. I’d like to think that I am a descendent from the slave who would have stood on the back row of such a slave voting campaign gathering, constantly looking up into the sky. When asked what they were looking for and why, they would whisper, “Y’all go ahead and vote on one of them or the other, but I’m looking for the north star in the dipping gourd. ‘Cause first chance I get, I’m outta here.” In the USA, we won’t vote ourselves to freedom in spite of the rhetoric of what claims to be the more progressive of the two oppressive exploitative parties. We will have to build freedom. And on leaving the plantation, we may want to burn down the big house. Not because burning it will feed us, but rather because it just seems like the right thing to do. The Devastating Nature of the Present It should be clear to us that we don't all share equitably in the benefits from modern world. We live in a world of the domination of capital. In it the owner class accumulates the surplus created by those who produce value. Those in the owning class then use their control over the socially created value to dominate virtually every aspect of social life for the singular purpose of being able to extract and accumulate even more value. This power that comes as a benefit of the ownership of means of life is used to threaten death by starvation to all who resist obeying the needs of capital expansion. There is no limit to the greed of the capitalist system. The unlimited expansion of capital is the singular logic of this world system. But infinite expansion is not possible on a finite planet, and we see the effect of careless exploitation of natural resources and human activity on the planet’s ability to support human life with its needs for clean water and clean air in addition to controlling the potential for climate disasters that are caused by human activity. He adds: 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. Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line—instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks—that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding anti-pathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality.40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter's day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies—and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s—lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture's purely biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creation of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latinos, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered.43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources...—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”44 Wynter's oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups. | 9/12/21 |
SO-Racial Cap KTournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Cypress Woods AT | Judge: Clement Agho-Otoghile | 9/11/21 |
SO-Racial Cap K V2Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 3 | Opponent: Strake MS | Judge: Allison Aldridge | 9/11/21 |
SO-Regulation DATournament: Valley | Round: Doubles | Opponent: BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Independent Shreyas Kapavarapu | Judge: Panel Most governments around the world impose regulations on pharmaceutical companies, in an effort to protect their public from harmful drug effects. These regulations often prolong the process for bringing new pharmaceuticals to market. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ensures that new drugs are rigorously tested for safety and efficacy, with an aim towards minimizing side effects. As a result of this testing, most new drugs are researched and investigated for 10 years before they are brought to market and made readily available to consumers. Specifically, drugs must undergo human trials intended to discover potential side effects and accurately gauge treatment efficacy.3 During any point in the multi-iterative testing process, if a new drug lacks effectiveness or triggers undesirable side effects, the company may elect to conduct further laboratory research in an effort to achieve superior results. Since this can be rather costly, companies often consider whether it makes fiscal sense to continue their attempts to achieve desirable results, or whether they should shift their resources elsewhere. Throughout the research and development process, pharmaceutical companies must cultivate reliable sources of financing. This typically comes from loans, investments, or revenue from the sale of products that have already been approved. Generally speaking, long-established drug manufacturers with profitable product lines do not need to rely on outside investors, unlike smaller startups drug companies, which frequently raise venture capital funds to bankroll their efforts. The late 20th century internationalization of IPRs and the expansion of GVC trade have each been driven by a separate set of factors, but there is a link and we see it in the growing role of intangible assets in international trade. GVC trade is qualitatively different from the traditional exchange of final goods or primary products. It requires intense information flows to coordinate the labor process in parts across countries (see section 2.2). Moreover, the density of these information flows entails a risk of appropriation by would-be competitors, even more than in traditional trade of finished products, where a costly process of reverse engineering is required prior to any imitation (Mansfield et al., 1981). In GVCs, lead firms thus have to weigh the advantages of disaggregating the production process and the cost reduction this can bring against the risk of losing control over some of their proprietary intangible assets. 21 Management studies and transaction costs economists have stressed the importance of the IP institutional context for business decisions when there are international alliances, investment and sourcing due to the risk of so called “appropriability hazards” (Oxley, 1997; Teece, 1986). This risk seems to have expanded since the 1990s, although there are some early testimonies from chemical and information industries reporting a reluctance to transfer advanced technology in countries with weak intellectual property regimes (Mansfield, 1994, pp. 26–29). From the perspective of transaction cost economics, considering the case of a relation with a foreign supplier or buyer, the risk of IP leakage due to a weak IP environment will tend to raise the cost of relying on contract-based alliances relative to equity joint venture (Oxley, 1999, pp. 287–288; Williamson, 2008, p. 12). From the perspective of management research, careful management of the flow of technology along GVCs is imperative and necessitates strict control over information flows in countries with weak IPRs (Prasad and Sounderpandian, 2003, p. 246). Adequate governance arrangements, secrecy or restraint to outsource offshore were thus considered as the main way to deal with the risk of IP leaks in GVCs: Companies can mitigate intellectual property risk by bringing, or keeping, some production in-house, or at least under direct company control. That is a major reason why Motorola owns some of the testing equipment at supplier locations. Managers also can decrease risk by limiting the flow of new intellectual property into countries with weak legal protections. Companies like Cisco, which outsources all manufacturing, also lower risk by creating business processes that cannot be easily replicated by a single manufacturer. Electronics manufacturer Sharp Corp. even repairs equipment itself, thus preventing any possibility, accidental or otherwise, that its vendors will share proprietary information with Sharp's competitors. The company goes so far as to reprogram various computer-aided machines used by its vendors without sharing the information. (Chopra and Sodhi, 2004, p. 57) In the 2010s, a new field of business research and consulting emerged around the management of IP in global value chains. Its purpose is to circumvent the difficulty of using formal IP protection channels and to find other ways to enforce IPRs without limiting the scope of GVC activity. A first issue is supplier selection to minimize the risk of IP leaks (Wu, Li, Chu, and Sculli, 2013). There is also an attempt to move beyond legal procedure and use the reporting procedures created for the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility to enforce stricter IPRs standards along the chains (Gillai, Rammohan, and Lee, 2014). The Center for Responsible Enterprise And Trade (CREATe.org) was founded in 2011 with the support of start-up grants from the Microsoft Corporation with this objective of fostering “a culture of IP protection and compliance” throughout the global supply chain. This agenda is becoming mainstream, as it was endorsed by the World Intellectual Property Organization in its annual report dedicated to Intangible Capital in Global Value chains (WIPO, 2017). Szabo et al Waiving IPPs results in unsafe manufacturing and forces trade-offs with medicines for other infectious diseases. Americans are dying of covid-19 by the thousands, but efforts to ramp up production of potentially lifesaving vaccines are hitting a brick wall. Vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are running their factories full tilt and are under enormous pressure to expand production or collaborate with other drug companies to set up additional assembly lines. That pressure is only growing as new viral variants of the virus threaten to launch the country into a deadlier phase of the pandemic. President Joe Biden has said he plans to invoke the Cold War-era authority of the Defense Production Act to provide more vaccines to millions of Americans. Consumer advocates — who had called for Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act more aggressively as president — are now asking Biden to do the same. But even forcing companies to gear up production won’t provide much-needed doses anytime soon. Expanding production lines takes time. Establishing lines in repurposed facilities can take months. “The big problem is that even if you can get the raw material and get the infrastructure set up, how do you get a company that is already producing at maximum capacity to go beyond that maximum capacity?” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. Ordering the companies to work 24/7 “would be a naïve solution,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, a senior adviser to the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an international group that finances vaccines for emerging diseases. “They’re probably already doing that to the extent they have the raw materials.” Lurie added, “If you completely wear people out, mistakes happen. You have to balance speed with quality and safety.” The technological challenges involved are daunting, and the companies haven’t been forthcoming about what’s needed to overcome any supply shortfalls. “We don’t know what the holdup is. Is it capacity? Raw materials? People? Glass vials? We just don’t know what the bottleneck is,” said Erin Fox, senior director of drug information and support services at the University of Utah Health Hospitals. Forcing other companies to start making the vaccines might not work either, Gostin said. “I’m not sure if Biden could require a private company to transfer its technology to another company,” Gostin said. “That is highly questionable legally. … President Biden’s room for maneuvering isn’t as great as people think.” Drug companies define “trade secrets” broadly, Fox said. “In general, drug companies don’t have to tell me who is making their product, where it’s made, the location of the factory. … That’s considered proprietary.” Part of the challenge relates to how these vaccines are made. The first two authorized products use lipid nanoparticles to deliver a snippet of the coronavirus’s genetic material — called messenger RNA, or mRNA — into cells. The viral genes teach our cells how to make proteins that stimulate an immune response to the novel coronavirus. Messenger RNA is fragile and breaks down easily, so it needs to be handled with care, with specific temperatures and humidity levels. The vaccines “are not widgets,” said Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. Every step, experts say, to get vaccines to market has its complexities: obtaining raw materials; building facilities to precise specifications; buying single-use products, such as tubing and plastic bags to line stainless steel bioreactors; and hiring employees with the requisite training and expertise. Companies also must pass safety and quality inspections and arrange for transportation. The Defense Production Act, for instance, would allow the government to commandeer a plant that already has a fermenter — there are plenty in the biotech industry — to expand production. But that’s just the first stage in making an mRNA vaccine and, even then, it would take about a year to get going, said Dr. George Siber, a vaccine expert who is on the advisory board of CureVac, a German mRNA vaccine company. Companies would first have to do a breathtakingly thorough cleaning to prevent cross-contamination, Siber said. Next, they would need to set up, calibrate and test equipment, and train scientists and engineers to run it. Finally, Siber said, unlike a drug, whose components can be tested for purity, there’s no way to be sure a vaccine produced in a new facility is what it claims to be without testing it on animals and people. “Making vaccines is not like making cars, and quality control is paramount,” said Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a vaccine industry consultant credited with inventing the rubella vaccine. “We are expecting other vaccines in a matter of weeks, so it might be faster to bring them into use.” However, even that will require patience. Johnson and Johnson, expected to announce clinical trial results this month, has said that it won’t be able to deliver as many shots as planned because of manufacturing delays. The company did not confirm a manufacturing delay and declined to respond to questions. AstraZeneca’s vaccine, also funded in part by U.S. taxpayers, is in use already in the United Kingdom and India, but the Food and Drug Administration has raised questions about its late-stage trial, so it may not be available here until the spring. Novavax, another U.S.-funded vaccine maker, has been plagued by delays and only recently began recruiting volunteers for its big trial. Merck, the most recent company to get federal support for covid vaccines, announced Monday it was scrapping its two candidates after they failed to produce adequate immune response in early tests. “None of the vaccine makers are manufacturing at the volume they ultimately want to be at,” Lurie said. “They all have manufacturing delays.” Pfizer, which has committed 200 million doses to the U.S. government by the end of July, said last week it expected “no interruptions” in shipments from its primary U.S. covid manufacturing plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Pfizer spokesperson Sharon Castillo said the company has expanded manufacturing facilities and added more suppliers and contract manufacturers. Those efforts, and the company’s announcement that its five-dose vials actually contain an extra dose, mean “we can potentially deliver approximately 2 billion doses worldwide by the end of 2021.” The U.S. government also has an option to acquire another 400 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, though the company declined to provide details on that option when asked. But countries around the world are competing for the same supplies and raw materials, Gostin said. Biden could use the Defense Production Act “to force Pfizer to prioritize U.S. contracts, but that would be politically risky,” given that other countries could retaliate by hoarding supplies. Although Pfizer is an American company, it has partnered with BioNTech, of Germany, to make its covid vaccine. “That would lead to a global mess.” Trying to corner the world market on vaccine ingredients or supplies would look bad, experts say, given that the United States just this week joined Covax, an international venture to source and distribute vaccines, in an effort to ensure poor countries aren’t left behind. Paradoxically, the rush to get vaccines to market may have resulted in a less efficient manufacturing process. Vaccine companies typically spend months making their factories run as efficiently as possible, as well as finding an ideal dose and the most effective interval between doses, Lurie said. Given the urgency of the pandemic, however, they delayed parts of this process and launched straight into mass production. Pfizer angered European countries last week when it paused vaccine production at a Belgian plant to upgrade its capacity. Pfizer said the weeklong closure would decrease vaccine deliveries to Europe for three to four weeks before boosting supplies in February. The move doesn’t affect U.S. vaccine supplies. “The U.S can’t necessarily readily access stuff that’s being held for vaccines in other countries,” Lurie said. And forcing other companies to make covid vaccines could jeopardize production of other important shots, such as measles, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Routine childhood immunization rates have fallen during the pandemic, raising the risk of epidemics. Using the act to prioritize covid vaccine manufacturing has already disrupted supplies of at least one drug, Fox noted. In December, Horizon Therapeutics warned doctors and patients to expect a shortage of a drug called Tepezza, used to treat thyroid-related eye disease, because its manufacturer was ordered to prioritize covid shots. Lawmakers and consumer advocates such as Public Citizen called on the government to use the Defense Production Act more aggressively. In a letter sent earlier this month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) said Moderna should share its technique for stabilizing its vaccine at normal refrigerator temperatures, without “ultracold” freezers. Moderna officials have said the intrinsic differences in the two companies’ mRNA material make that technology hard to share. Besides, they say, Pfizer has declined to share data with Moderna. Pfizer has declined to comment on the issue. Since Moderna’s effort is federally funded, the government presumably has march-in rights and could take over production, said Mike Watson, former president of Moderna subsidiary Valera, in an email. “The reality is that however far you push production capacity, you sooner or later reach a bottleneck.” Experts say it’s not as simple as demanding that glassmaker Corning step up and make glass vials, for example. Of course, the vials will need to meet rigorous requirements. But there’s also this: The U.S. is facing a shortage of mined sand, the main component needed to make glass vials. | 9/27/21 |
SO-White Savior DATournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Cypress Woods AT | Judge: Clement Agho-Otoghile A. Link Link The aff does not defend implementation – but instead says they get offense just from the reading of the aff. They don’t look to material conseuqneces – that was CX. B. Impacts
In 2012, Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole coined The term white savior industrial complex (WSIC) in response to a popular video blowing up on YouTube - “Kony 2012.”1 The WSIC refers to the “confluence of practices, processes, and institutions that reify historical inequities to ultimately validate white privilege” (Anderson, 2013, p. 39). Essentially, as Cole explained, a WSIC involves a “big emotional experience that validates privilege.” Ultimately, People are rewarded from “saving” those less fortunate and are able to completely disregard the policies they have supported that have created/maintained systems of oppression (i.e. The U.S.’s exploitation in Haiti has contributed to poverty and corruption, yet Americans can feel good about their charity after the Earthquake). The rhetoric around how Americans often Talk about Africa—as a continent of chaos, warthirsty people, and impoverished HIV-infected communities, situates these countries as places in need of heroism. This mindset perpetuates the need for external forces to come in and save the day, but what gets left out of this conversation are the roles settler colonialism and white supremacy have had in creating these conditions in the first place (Smith, 2012). 2 Distorted narratives that paint Africa and other developing countries in these ways allow for the hegemonic project of whiteness and white supremacy (Allen, 2001) to do exactly as intended: to create a need for white intervention for “emotional needs to be satisfied” so the opportunity for agency at the local or individual level becomes nonexistent (Cole, 2012). The argument is framed in such a commonsense manner that any opposition to a white savior coming in to save the day is deemed in a negative light. Turns and outweighs the aff on CYCLICAL HARMS – they CREATE THE CONDITIONS THEY TRY TO SOLVE. | 9/11/21 |
T- Framework VS Common Core BadTournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: Montville NP | Judge: Tahj Johnson | 2/20/22 |
T- Framework VS DisabilityTournament: Isidore Newman | Round: Semis | Opponent: Valor Christian LS | Judge: Panel 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 Their plan is to add more TOC bid tournaments and increase mental health resources. C. Net Benefits
2. GROUND: if they don’t have to defend the legal enforceability of the right, I can’t read a ton of neg prep – literally nothing topical responds to this aff. TVA AND A TVA SOLVES: they can read an aff about disability in the context of workers, why workers need to strike, spec workers with disabilities D. Voter Its accessibility – that’s a prior question to things like fairness or education because it’s a question of whether people join and feel comfortable in debate in the first place
| 12/15/21 |
T- Just GovernmentTournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker MK | Judge: Morgan Copeland | 11/21/21 |
T- Just Government V2Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: Octas | Opponent: Strake Jesuit KS | Judge: Panel | 11/23/21 |
T-Just Gov V3Tournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bergen County AK | Judge: Claudia Ribera | 12/3/21 |
T-NebelTournament: Valley | Round: 6 | Opponent: Mission San Jose Shrey Raju | Judge: Faizaan Dossani | 9/26/21 |
T-ReduceTournament: Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Strake JS | Judge: Maya Xia | 9/26/21 |
Th-Cant Read Two FWsTournament: Greenhill | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep AB | Judge: Will Freedman | 9/26/21 |
Th-MisdisclosureTournament: Valley | Round: Doubles | Opponent: BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Independent Shreyas Kapavarapu | Judge: Panel | 9/27/21 |
Th-New Affs BadTournament: Bronx | Round: 4 | Opponent: Catonsville AT | Judge: Derek Ying | 10/16/21 |
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