1ac - mega constellations stock 1nc - mining xi debris cp 1ar - all 2nr - debris cp xi case 2ar - case cp xi
Harvard
5
Opponent: Newport JQ | Judge: greg stevens
1ac- megaconstellations stock 1nc- weather xi da debris cp 1ar- case das cp 2nr- all 2ar- all
Harvard
7
Opponent: Lexington am | Judge: Jada Bourne
1ac- lunar heritage being late t 1nc- nebel t compliance cp agreement cp mining da case 1ar- late t meta t () cp da 2nr- meta nebel late case 2ar- meta nebel late
Harvard
Triples
Opponent: Academy of classicalJM | Judge: vicari, hietala, randolph
1ac- lay 1nc- mining weather debris cp 1ar- all 1nr- mining cp case 2ar- all
Harvard
Doubles
Opponent: Claudia johnson ap | Judge: zinman, fernandez, prasad
1ac- star wars 1nc- t-fw t-spec 1ar- case tees 2nr- t-fw case 2ar- t-fw case
If you'd like any accommodations or interps met, please let me know!
emoticon_smile
4/7/22
JF- CP- Agreement
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 1 | Opponent: san mateo yr | Judge: megha prasad CP Text: Spacefaring nations should create a multilateral agreement to establish a Lunar-Earth observatory. Hamill 16, Patrick. "Atmospheric observations from the moon: A lunar earth-observatory." 2016 Ieee International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (Igarss). IEEE, 2016. (Department of Physics and Astronomy at San Jose State University)Elmer recut amrita The Lunar Earth-Observatory is essentially a telescope placed somewhere on the surface of the Moon and focused on the Earth. The observatory would consist of a telescope and a number of standard instruments such as a diffraction grating with an associated CCD array, a CCD camera, a radiometer, and the associated telemetry. The telescope diameter should be between 0.5 and 0.75 meters, this being a compromise between the desire for a small instrument and the desire of high resolution. For the sake of comparison, a telescope with a diameter of only 0.25 meters has a theoretical resolution of about 1km X 1km on the Earth’s surface. The Ozone Measurement Instrument 3 (OMI on AURA) has a nadir pixel of 13km X 24km and it scans the entire Earth once per day. If the Lunar telescope had a resolution of 100km X 100km, and the CCD array were integrated over 1 sec, the entire disk of Earth, could be scanned in about 3.5 hours. The telescope would scan the disk of the Earth and the light from different points on the Earth would be sent through a diffraction grating onto the CCD array. This allows one to determine the column amounts of various atmospheric gases, such as ozone, CO2, SO2, NO2, as well as aerosols. When the opportunity arises, the telescope could be used to track the image of a bright star as it is occulted by Earth 4. Such scans are best carried out as the star descends onto the dark limb of Earth to avoid “earthshine” and to obtain maximum contrast. From the vantage point of a satellite in a 500 km orbit, a star descends through the atmosphere at a speed of about 8 km/sec. From the vantage point of the Moon, a star descends at about 1 km/sec, that is, eight times slower. Thus since stellar occultation is possible from artificial satellites (the GOMOS instrument on ENVISAT 5, for example), it will be even easier from the surface of the Moon. Note that a star is always a point source, so scanning is not required, as in most solar occultation measurements. (One cannot carry out solar occultation from the Moon because it only occurs during “Earth eclipses.”) Infrared measurements usually require cooling instruments with cryogens, but on the lunar surface extremely low temperatures are obtainable by simply shading the instrument during the day. Furthermore, the side of the Moon facing Earth is dark for half of the month, so cycling between extreme cold and extreme heat allows one to consider the possibility of some sort of heat engine operating in (perhaps) a Stirling cycle to power various components. The surface of the Moon is a highly stable platform, so the observatory should be built to operate for a very long time (decades rather than years). This is reasonable when one considers that many satellite observing systems have lasted much longer than their expected lifetimes. (For example, the SAM II system lasted 15 years before it was turned off due to orbit degradation. The instrument was still operational.) Therefore, the instrumentation of the observatory should be standard and well developed rather than innovative. Although the surface of the Moon is certainly a difficult environment, it is perhaps more benign that the environment of an artificial satellite. The Moon is a stable platform not requiring corrections for drift nor subject to the vibrations of satellites. The temperature extremes on the Moon have a periodicity of a month rather than several hours.
Tournament: Puget Sound | Round: 2 | Opponent: Interlake DB | Judge: David McGinnis cites won't work, check os
4/7/22
JF- DA- Mining
Tournament: Puget Sound | Round: 2 | Opponent: Interlake DB | Judge: David McGinnis i can't get cites to work- check os
4/7/22
JF- DA- Weather
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 5 | Opponent: Newport JQ | Judge: greg stevens Starlink Mega-Constellations enables advanced Weather Forecasting. Erwin 20 Sandra Erwin 10-14-2020 "SpaceX to explore ways to provide weather data to U.S. military" https://spacenews.com/spacex-to-explore-ways-to-provide-weather-data-to-u-s-military/ (Sandra Erwin writes about military space programs, policy, technology and the industry that supports this sector. She has covered the military, the Pentagon, Congress and the defense industry for nearly two decades as editor of NDIA’s National Defense Magazine and Pentagon correspondent for Real Clear Defense.)Elmer The $2 million contract is to “assess the feasibility and long term viability of a ‘weather data as a service business model.” WASHINGTON — SpaceX is looking at ways it could provide weather data to the U.S. military. The company is working under a $2 million six-month study contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center. Charlotte Gerhart, chief of the Space and Missile Systems Center Production Corps Low Earth Orbit Division, said in a statement to SpaceNews that SpaceX received the contract in July from SMC’s Space Enterprise Consortium. The contract is to “assess the feasibility and long term viability of a ‘weather data as a service business model,’” said Gerhart. SpaceX did not respond to questions from SpaceNews on how the company would leverage the Starlink internet constellation to provide weather data. The contract awarded to SpaceX is part of a Space Force program called Electro Optical/Infrared Weather System (EO/IR EWS). The consortium in June awarded $309 million in contracts to Raytheon Technologies, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, and Atmospheric and Space Technology Research Associates to develop weather satellite prototypes and payloads. SpaceX won the portion of the EO/IR EWS program that is looking at how weather data could be purchased as a service from a commercial company. “The EWS program goal remains to provide a more resilient and higher refresh capability, enhancing global terrestrial weather capability,” said Gerhart. The SpEC consortium was created in 2017 to attract commercial space businesses to work with the military. The contracts awarded by SpEC are known as “other transaction authority” deals that are used for research projects and prototyping. The consortium on Oct. 8 informed its members that SpaceX had won the weather study contract. “The Air Force is pursuing a space-based environmental monitoring EO/IR system in a multi phased approach,” the SpEC said in an email to members. The EO/IR EWS program is looking at a future proliferated low-Earth orbit constellation to focus on cloud characterization and theater weather imagery that could be supplemented by commercial services. SpaceX’s contract is for the “weather data as a service system architecture exploration phase,” said SpEC. Industry sources speculated that SpaceX could provide weather data collected by sensors hosted on its own Starlink satellites, or it could team with a weather data services company and use Starlink to distribute the data to customers. One executive noted that both the U.S. military and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have growing demands for data that can be provided at relatively low cost from companies that operate proliferated LEO systems. Advanced Weather Forecasting solves Climate Change. Taylor-Smith 21 Kerry Taylor-Smith 3-25-2021 "What Role can Advanced Weather Forecasting have in Providing Climate Crisis Solutions?" https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1193 (Pursuing a passion for science, Kerry completed a degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Bath; where she studied a range of topics, including chemistry, biology, and environmental sciences. Her passion for writing grew as she worked on the university newspaper as a contributor, feature editor, and editor.)Elmer Humankind is in the midst of a climate crisis, battling to prevent global temperatures from rising while also keeping up with the energy demands of a growing population. Weather-related disasters cost billions of dollars each year, but it is not just the financial cost that should be considered – there is the loss of life, homes, wildlife, and infrastructure. There are several ways weather monitoring can help solve the climate crisis, from lowing transportation emissions to pinpointing extreme weather events such as wildfires and extraordinary variations in temperature. Tackling Emissions Global travel and shipping contribute significantly to global warming. Aircraft, ships, cars – nearly all modes of transportation emit harmful greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, but also nitrous and sulfur oxides as well as particulates. These greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, causing an overall warming effect and a negative impact on our climate. Aviation accounts for 2.4 of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, with international flights in 2019 producing 915 million tons of the gas. Weather forecasting technology providing accurate, real-time data on meteorological conditions can help airlines adjust routes to avoid headwinds or take advantage of favorable winds, both of which can help reduce fuel consumption and emissions. Shipping is one of the most fuel-efficient means of transport, but also one of the most polluting, contributing 3 of all greenhouse gas emissions - a figure expected to almost double by 2050. “Burning bunker fuel accounts for almost 90 of global sulfur emissions and the 15 largest ships in the world produce more sulfur each year than all cars put together,” states Renny Vandewege, Vice President of Weather Operations at DTN, a company providing decision support tools and forecast insights across many sectors. Shipping discharges a large and growing source of noxious gas but the sector has the potential to drastically cut emissions through fuel-saving techniques. Among the most promising is weather routing. “Using weather information and analytics can help mitigate risks today caused by climate change and can also reduce emissions further reducing future impacts”, explains Vandewege, a former director of the Broadcast Meteorology Program at Mississippi State University. Weather analytics can optimize routes and “reduce emissions up to 4 and reduce fuel consumption up to 10, depending on the type of vessel, the season, and the conditions,” states Vandewege. “If there’s bad weather ahead, sophisticated algorithms that use information about the ship and its capabilities and the weather effects on that specific ship can make numerous calculations and provide optimal route alternatives for the mariner.” Extreme Weather Events Advanced weather forecasting alerts us to the probability of extreme meteorological events occurring. While these events are largely unpredictable, accurate meteorological data can identify hotspots where they are likely to occur. The better the data, the better prepared the general public and authorities can be. Wildfires have ravaged the US state of California and huge swathes of land in Australia. Climate change is responsible for the increasing intensity and occurrence of blazes, not just here, but worldwide. It has created the optimal conditions for wildfires to start, including warmer weather, less precipitation, dryer vegetation, and stronger winds. Advanced weather forecasting, such as DTN’s live Geographic Information System (GIS) can monitor atmospheric conditions to evaluate wildfire risk and predict areas where conditions are just right for a wildfire to ignite. “Fire weather forecasting uses atmospheric conditions to evaluate wildfire risk,” explains Vendewege. “Meteorologists can also use their tools and experience to identify the specific location of wildfires. Sophisticated imaging systems can show fire locations in real time, allowing for a live look at the conditions using a GIS layer service containing the latest fire hotspot data and also showing the likelihood of a fire.” Machine learning, a means of artificial intelligence, can also be used in conjunction with current forecasting methods to predicts heat waves or cold snaps. These extreme weather events are the result of unusual atmospheric patterns that researchers from Rice University realized could be taught to a pattern recognition program. The technology, designed to work with current analog forecasting systems rather than replace them, could predict events with 80 accuracy, five days before the event occurred. Although only proof-of-concept, the technology could provide an early warning about when and where an extreme weather event might occur. Conclusion Humans are heavily reliant on the weather; it has a role in every aspect of our lives, from feeding us to providing power for our ever-growing needs. Climate change has warmed the planet and altered our weather, making extreme weather events such as droughts and floods more likely. High-tech weather forecasting technology can help in the fight against climate change by monitoring meteorological conditions to aid decision making, whether that be in the aviation or shipping industry, or by helping us understand and predict natural hazards and disasters, allowing us to reduce the risk of adverse events – and the costs, environmental, economic or otherwise. Warming causes Extinction Kareiva 18, Peter, and Valerie Carranza. "Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes back." Futures 102 (2018): 39-50. (Ph.D. in ecology and applied mathematics from Cornell University, director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment and Sustainability at UCLA)Re-cut by Elmer In summary, six of the nine proposed planetary boundaries (phosphorous, nitrogen, biodiversity, land use, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution) are unlikely to be associated with existential risks. They all correspond to a degraded environment, but in our assessment do not represent existential risks. However, the three remaining boundaries (climate change, global freshwater cycle, and ocean acidification) do pose existential risks. This is because of intrinsic positive feedback loops, substantial lag times between system change and experiencing the consequences of that change, and the fact these different boundaries interact with one another in ways that yield surprises. In addition, climate, freshwater, and ocean acidification are all directly connected to the provision of food and water, and shortages of food and water can create conflict and social unrest. Climate change has a long history of disrupting civilizations and sometimes precipitating the collapse of cultures or mass emigrations (McMichael, 2017). For example, the 12th century drought in the North American Southwest is held responsible for the collapse of the Anasazi pueblo culture. More recently, the infamous potato famine of 1846–1849 and the large migration of Irish to the U.S. can be traced to a combination of factors, one of which was climate. Specifically, 1846 was an unusually warm and moist year in Ireland, providing the climatic conditions favorable to the fungus that caused the potato blight. As is so often the case, poor government had a role as well—as the British government forbade the import of grains from outside Britain (imports that could have helped to redress the ravaged potato yields). Climate change intersects with freshwater resources because it is expected to exacerbate drought and water scarcity, as well as flooding. Climate change can even impair water quality because it is associated with heavy rains that overwhelm sewage treatment facilities, or because it results in higher concentrations of pollutants in groundwater as a result of enhanced evaporation and reduced groundwater recharge. Ample clean water is not a luxury—it is essential for human survival. Consequently, cities, regions and nations that lack clean freshwater are vulnerable to social disruption and disease. Finally, ocean acidification is linked to climate change because it is driven by CO2 emissions just as global warming is. With close to 20 of the world’s protein coming from oceans (FAO, 2016), the potential for severe impacts due to acidification is obvious. Less obvious, but perhaps more insidious, is the interaction between climate change and the loss of oyster and coral reefs due to acidification. Acidification is known to interfere with oyster reef building and coral reefs. Climate change also increases storm frequency and severity. Coral reefs and oyster reefs provide protection from storm surge because they reduce wave energy (Spalding et al., 2014). If these reefs are lost due to acidification at the same time as storms become more severe and sea level rises, coastal communities will be exposed to unprecedented storm surge—and may be ravaged by recurrent storms. A key feature of the risk associated with climate change is that mean annual temperature and mean annual rainfall are not the variables of interest. Rather it is extreme episodic events that place nations and entire regions of the world at risk. These extreme events are by definition “rare” (once every hundred years), and changes in their likelihood are challenging to detect because of their rarity, but are exactly the manifestations of climate change that we must get better at anticipating (Diffenbaugh et al., 2017). Society will have a hard time responding to shorter intervals between rare extreme events because in the lifespan of an individual human, a person might experience as few as two or three extreme events. How likely is it that you would notice a change in the interval between events that are separated by decades, especially given that the interval is not regular but varies stochastically? A concrete example of this dilemma can be found in the past and expected future changes in storm-related flooding of New York City. The highly disruptive flooding of New York City associated with Hurricane Sandy represented a flood height that occurred once every 500 years in the 18th century, and that occurs now once every 25 years, but is expected to occur once every 5 years by 2050 (Garner et al., 2017). This change in frequency of extreme floods has profound implications for the measures New York City should take to protect its infrastructure and its population, yet because of the stochastic nature of such events, this shift in flood frequency is an elevated risk that will go unnoticed by most people. 4. The combination of positive feedback loops and societal inertia is fertile ground for global environmental catastrophes Humans are remarkably ingenious, and have adapted to crises throughout their history. Our doom has been repeatedly predicted, only to be averted by innovation (Ridley, 2011). However, the many stories of human ingenuity successfully addressing existential risks such as global famine or extreme air pollution represent environmental challenges that are largely linear, have immediate consequences, and operate without positive feedbacks. For example, the fact that food is in short supply does not increase the rate at which humans consume food—thereby increasing the shortage. Similarly, massive air pollution episodes such as the London fog of 1952 that killed 12,000 people did not make future air pollution events more likely. In fact it was just the opposite—the London fog sent such a clear message that Britain quickly enacted pollution control measures (Stradling, 2016). Food shortages, air pollution, water pollution, etc. send immediate signals to society of harm, which then trigger a negative feedback of society seeking to reduce the harm. In contrast, today’s great environmental crisis of climate change may cause some harm but there are generally long time delays between rising CO2 concentrations and damage to humans. The consequence of these delays are an absence of urgency; thus although 70 of Americans believe global warming is happening, only 40 think it will harm them (http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us-2016/). Secondly, unlike past environmental challenges, the Earth’s climate system is rife with positive feedback loops. In particular, as CO2 increases and the climate warms, that very warming can cause more CO2 release which further increases global warming, and then more CO2, and so on. Table 2 summarizes the best documented positive feedback loops for the Earth’s climate system. These feedbacks can be neatly categorized into carbon cycle, biogeochemical, biogeophysical, cloud, ice-albedo, and water vapor feedbacks. As important as it is to understand these feedbacks individually, it is even more essential to study the interactive nature of these feedbacks. Modeling studies show that when interactions among feedback loops are included, uncertainty increases dramatically and there is a heightened potential for perturbations to be magnified (e.g., Cox, Betts, Jones, Spall, and Totterdell, 2000; Hajima, Tachiiri, Ito, and Kawamiya, 2014; Knutti and Rugenstein, 2015; Rosenfeld, Sherwood, Wood, and Donner, 2014). This produces a wide range of future scenarios. Positive feedbacks in the carbon cycle involves the enhancement of future carbon contributions to the atmosphere due to some initial increase in atmospheric CO2. This happens because as CO2 accumulates, it reduces the efficiency in which oceans and terrestrial ecosystems sequester carbon, which in return feeds back to exacerbate climate change (Friedlingstein et al., 2001). Warming can also increase the rate at which organic matter decays and carbon is released into the atmosphere, thereby causing more warming (Melillo et al., 2017). Increases in food shortages and lack of water is also of major concern when biogeophysical feedback mechanisms perpetuate drought conditions. The underlying mechanism here is that losses in vegetation increases the surface albedo, which suppresses rainfall, and thus enhances future vegetation loss and more suppression of rainfall—thereby initiating or prolonging a drought (Chamey, Stone, and Quirk, 1975). To top it off, overgrazing depletes the soil, leading to augmented vegetation loss (Anderies, Janssen, and Walker, 2002). Climate change often also increases the risk of forest fires, as a result of higher temperatures and persistent drought conditions. The expectation is that forest fires will become more frequent and severe with climate warming and drought (Scholze, Knorr, Arnell, and Prentice, 2006), a trend for which we have already seen evidence (Allen et al., 2010). Tragically, the increased severity and risk of Southern California wildfires recently predicted by climate scientists (Jin et al., 2015), was realized in December 2017, with the largest fire in the history of California (the “Thomas fire” that burned 282,000 acres, https://www.vox.com/2017/12/27/16822180/thomas-fire-california-largest-wildfire). This catastrophic fire embodies the sorts of positive feedbacks and interacting factors that could catch humanity off-guard and produce a true apocalyptic event. Record-breaking rains produced an extraordinary flush of new vegetation, that then dried out as record heat waves and dry conditions took hold, coupled with stronger than normal winds, and ignition. Of course the record-fire released CO2 into the atmosphere, thereby contributing to future warming. Out of all types of feedbacks, water vapor and the ice-albedo feedbacks are the most clearly understood mechanisms. Losses in reflective snow and ice cover drive up surface temperatures, leading to even more melting of snow and ice cover—this is known as the ice-albedo feedback (Curry, Schramm, and Ebert, 1995). As snow and ice continue to melt at a more rapid pace, millions of people may be displaced by flooding risks as a consequence of sea level rise near coastal communities (Biermann and Boas, 2010; Myers, 2002; Nicholls et al., 2011). The water vapor feedback operates when warmer atmospheric conditions strengthen the saturation vapor pressure, which creates a warming effect given water vapor’s strong greenhouse gas properties (Manabe and Wetherald, 1967). Global warming tends to increase cloud formation because warmer temperatures lead to more evaporation of water into the atmosphere, and warmer temperature also allows the atmosphere to hold more water. The key question is whether this increase in clouds associated with global warming will result in a positive feedback loop (more warming) or a negative feedback loop (less warming). For decades, scientists have sought to answer this question and understand the net role clouds play in future climate projections (Schneider et al., 2017). Clouds are complex because they both have a cooling (reflecting incoming solar radiation) and warming (absorbing incoming solar radiation) effect (Lashof, DeAngelo, Saleska, and Harte, 1997). The type of cloud, altitude, and optical properties combine to determine how these countervailing effects balance out. Although still under debate, it appears that in most circumstances the cloud feedback is likely positive (Boucher et al., 2013). For example, models and observations show that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations reduces the low-level cloud fraction in the Northeast Pacific at decadal time scales. This then has a positive feedback effect and enhances climate warming since less solar radiation is reflected by the atmosphere (Clement, Burgman, and Norris, 2009). The key lesson from the long list of potentially positive feedbacks and their interactions is that runaway climate change, and runaway perturbations have to be taken as a serious possibility. Table 2 is just a snapshot of the type of feedbacks that have been identified (see Supplementary material for a more thorough explanation of positive feedback loops). However, this list is not exhaustive and the possibility of undiscovered positive feedbacks portends even greater existential risks. The many environmental crises humankind has previously averted (famine, ozone depletion, London fog, water pollution, etc.) were averted because of political will based on solid scientific understanding. We cannot count on complete scientific understanding when it comes to positive feedback loops and climate change.
Tournament: UPenn | Round: 5 | Opponent: Hamilton al | Judge: Jalyn Wu Oxford Languages:
Appropriation (noun)- The act of taking something for one's own use, typically for without the owner's permission
4/22/22
JF- G- Extinction 1st
Tournament: UPenn | Round: 2 | Opponent: Princeton cb | Judge: jonah gentlemen My value is morality. LD is a debate about morals- all arguments collapse to what is moral or not. The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing First, pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. People consistently regard pleasure and pain as good reasons for action, despite the fact that pleasure doesn’t seem to be instrumentally valuable for anything. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative.2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good.3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask a man what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value. Moreover, only pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable. All other values can be explained with reference to pleasure; Occam’s razor requires us to treat these as instrumentally valuable. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI I think several things should be said in response to Moore’s challenge to hedonists. First, I do not think the burden of proof lies on hedonists to explain why the additional values are not intrinsic values. If someone claims that X is intrinsically valuable, this is a substantive, positive claim, and it lies on him or her to explain why we should believe that X is in fact intrinsically valuable. Possibly, this could be done through thought experiments analogous to those employed in the previous section. Second, there is something peculiar about the list of additional intrinsic values that counts in hedonism’s favor: the listed values have a strong tendency to be well explained as things that help promote pleasure and avert pain. To go through Frankena’s list, life and consciousness are necessary presuppositions for pleasure; activity, health, and strength bring about pleasure; and happiness, beatitude, and contentment are regarded by Frankena himself as “pleasures and satisfactions.” The same is arguably true of beauty, harmony, and “proportion in objects contemplated,” and also of affection, friendship, harmony, and proportion in life, experiences of achievement, adventure and novelty, self-expression, good reputation, honor and esteem. Other things on Frankena’s list, such as understanding, wisdom, freedom, peace, and security, although they are perhaps not themselves pleasurable, are important means to achieve a happy life, and as such, they are things that hedonists would value highly. Morally good dispositions and virtues, cooperation, and just distribution of goods and evils, moreover, are things that, on a collective level, contribute a happy society, and thus the traits that would be promoted and cultivated if this were something sought after. To a very large extent, the intrinsic values suggested by pluralists tend to be hedonic instrumental values. Indeed, pluralists’ suggested intrinsic values all point toward pleasure, for while the other values are reasonably explainable as a means toward pleasure, pleasure itself is not reasonably explainable as a means toward the other values. Some have noticed this. Moore himself, for example, writes that though his pluralistic theory of intrinsic value is opposed to hedonism, its application would, in practice, look very much like hedonism’s: “Hedonists,” he writes “do, in general, recommend a course of conduct which is very similar to that which I should recommend.”24 Ross writes that “it is quite certain that by promoting virtue and knowledge we shall inevitably produce much more pleasant consciousness. These are, by general agreement, among the surest sources of happiness for their possessors.”25 Roger Crisp observes that “those goods cited by non-hedonists are goods we often, indeed usually, enjoy.”26 What Moore and Ross do not seem to notice is that their observations give rise to two reasons to reject pluralism and endorse hedonism. The first reason is that if the suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values are potentially explainable by appeal to just pleasure and pain (which, following my argument in the previous chapter, we should accept as intrinsically valuable and disvaluable), then—by appeal to Occam’s razor—we have at least a pro tanto reason to resist the introduction of any further intrinsic values and disvalues. It is ontologically more costly to posit a plurality of intrinsic values and disvalues, so in case all values admit of explanation by reference to a single intrinsic value and a single intrinsic disvalue, we have reason to reject more complicated accounts. The fact that suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values tend to be hedonistic instrumental values does not, however, count in favor of hedonism solely in virtue of being most elegantly explained by hedonism; it also does so in virtue of creating an explanatory challenge for pluralists. The challenge can be phrased as the following question: If the non-hedonic values suggested by pluralists are truly intrinsic values in their own right, then why do they tend to point toward pleasure and away from pain?27 Moral uncertainty means preventing extinction should be our highest priority. Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom. Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School University of Oxford. “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority.” Global Policy (2012) These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk; they also suggest a new way of thinking about the ideal of sustainability. Let me elaborate.¶ Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know — at least not in concrete detail — what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving — and ideally improving — our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe. Reducing the risk of extinction is always priority number one. Bostrom 12 Faculty of Philosophy and Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford., Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority. Forthcoming book (Global Policy). MP. http://www.existenti...org/concept.pdf Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 10^16 human lives. This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives. The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 10 54 humanbrain-emulation subjective life-years (or 10 52 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly. Even if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a mere 1 chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any ordinary good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives. And, further, that the absolute value of the indirect effect of saving 1 billion lives on the total cumulative amount of existential risk—positive or negative—is almost certainly larger than the positive value of the direct benefit of such an action.
4/22/22
JF- K- Perf Cap
Tournament: Harvard | Round: Octas | Opponent: Strake jesuit zd | Judge: hertzig, melin, prasad We’ve reached the end of art and history – capitalism is running out of supplies and must turn to recycling the waste of modernity as the only means to sustain growth. The 1ac’s transgression and symbolic rupture aren’t radical but simply a deregulation of debate’s sign economy. Their performance is absorbed and recycled as raw material for neoliberal culture industries – the impact is semiotic feedback loops which cause nihilism and ressentiment James 16 (Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte, FORTHCOMING- Incandescence, Melancholy, and Feminist Bad Vibes: A Response to Ziarek’s Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism, Differences 25 (2), p. 120-123, philpapers- http://philpapers.org/rec/JAMIMA)
A method for overcoming melancholia (97), potentiality is a way of bouncing back from the damage wrought by modern white supremacist patriarchy. For white men, this damage manifests as what Robert Gooding Williams calls “skeptical melancholy” (54), or alienation from embodied receptivity; for women and nonwhites, it manifests as melancholic muteness, immanence rather than alienation.8 The women writers Ziarek studies rework this damaging immanence into ecstatic incandescence, effecting “an aesthetic transformation of loss into art’s own shining possibilities” (115). This incandescence is a two-step process: the artist first performs her damage (sparking a fire) so that she can then be seen to overcome it (radiating beyond her past inertia). Neoliberalism co-opts this incandescence (or at least the most visible, legible part of its spectrum), domesticating its critical force into the means of producing aesthetic pleasure and reproducing social normativity. Potentiality has been “upgraded” into resilience.9 In resilient art, formal experimentation cultivates, or incites (to use a more Foucaultian term), shocks and feeds the resultant shockwaves back into the system.10 This feedback supports rather than destabilizes hegemonic institutions. The aesthetic damage through which modernist art established its heteronomous/ autonomous position of critique—stuttering, fragmented, degraded, aleatory, dissonant—is now the very medium of normalization.11 Neoliberal resilience, in other words, is a method or process of recycling modernist damage. For example, if modernist art invested aesthetic pleasure in the objectification of women (what Laura Mulvey famously calls scopophilia), neoliberal art invests aesthetic pleasure in women’s spectacular assumption of subjectivity—what Ziarek calls incandescence. If in modernity we liked doing damage to women, we now like to see women overcome that damage.12 This means that we expect women to perform their damage as a baseline from which “good” women then progress. That damage is the fuel for incandescent fires, so it must be constantly incited and invoked so that there’s something for incandescent women to ignite. In this way, resilience discourse normalizes traditional patriarchal damage (e.g., the damage of exclusion and objectification) as a systemic or background condition that individual women are then responsible for overcoming. “Undoing . . . feminism while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a wellinformed and even well-intended response to feminism” (McRobbie 1), resilient incandescence is quintessentially postfeminist. We, the audience, use our identification with the resilient heroine as a way to disidentify with and (supposedly) transgress the imperatives of modernist patriarchy. This is why, as Ziarek explains, audiences have a “sympathetic identification with subversive femininity, with the mother avenging the murderous sacrifice of her daughter for political ends, rather than with the murderous father/king” (104). We enjoy women’s spectacular subjectivization (i.e., their overcoming of scopophilic objectification) because this distances us from unfashionable patriarchal formations and tastes (i.e., this latter scopophilia). In postfeminist neoliberalism, “bearing witness to both the destruction of women’s artistic capacities and women’s revolutionary aspirations” (5) becomes a source of aesthetic pleasure not because it’s revolutionary, but because it’s normative. To use Jack Halberstam’s term, we like our women to “go gaga” because this incandescence, this “unpredictable feminine” (114) methodology allows us to eke even more light out of otherwise exhausted enlightenment modernity. If we’ve reached, as Ziarek discusses, the so-called end of art and the end of history (and the end of tonality and the end of representation and, well, the end of modernity), then the only way to find more resources is, like Pixar’s wall-e, by sifting through our vast piles of waste. And in that waste heap is abject femininity (what musicologist Susan Cook calls the feminized “abject popular”). Femininity is abject because its exclusion from patriarchy is what constitutes patriarchy as a coherent system. In both Ziarek’s aesthetics of potentiality and in resilience discourse, women artists do the cultural work of remaking abjection or constitutive exclusion into ecstatic radiance.13 In the former case, that work is revolutionary; in the latter case, that work normalizes. Resilience discourse transposes feminist revolution into a nationalist, patriarchal, white supremacist practice. Take, for example, Katy Perry’s “Firework,” in which the lyrics trace the affective journey from dejection to radiant exceptionality. The song begins by asking listeners to identify with feelings of irrelevance, weakness, loneliness, and hopelessness; it posits and affirms damage, suffering, and pain. But then Perry’s narrator argues that in spite and perhaps because of this damage, the listener has precisely the means to connect to others, to make a difference, to have hope: “There’s a spark in you / You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine.” She uses the metaphor of fireworks (and their association with u.s. Independence Day celebrations) to describe the listener’s self-transformation from black dust to shining light: you may feel like trash, but if you can just light yourself on fire, that trash will burn with a dazzling radiance that lights up the sky, just as it lights up audiences’ faces. Here, Perry transforms abjection—feeling like trash, unmoored, socially dead—into incandescent triumph. In the song, the addressee’s personal triumph evokes u.s. nationalist narratives of overcoming colonization (i.e., the Declaration of Independence, celebrated on the Fourth of July). Feminine incandescence—the transformation of waste and melancholy into glowing potential—is no longer revolutionary. Not only parallel to u.s. nationalism, it is the very means for reproducing normativity. In resilience discourse, wild and crazy femmes—like, say, Ke$ha— reproduce normativity in the same way that deregulatory economic practices do (see Cardenas). Unlike Kant’s genius, who gives laws and generates order (i.e., regulation, giving a law) out of unruly materiality, the incandescent, “gaga” femme amplifies what feels like disorder by “resignifying damaged bodies and objects previously expelled from the realm of meaning” (6). And to do this, incandescent femme geniuses use a specific type of experimentation, what Ziarek calls “a dynamic model of interrelation between literary form and material elements of the work of art” (6). This “dynamic interaction” between large-scale form and material details produces “effects” that are “unpredictable and unforeseeable” (Adorno qtd. in Ziarek 114). Experimental methods produce aleatory results.14 Neoliberalism, however, has systematized the aleatory; deregulatory practices are designed to control background conditions so that “dynamic interactions” between form and material produce a range of superficially random outcomes.15 Deregulation turns experimentation into the means of capitalist/hegemonic production. Brilliant gaga ecstasy is what fuels economic and social reproduction.16 So even though incandescent potentiality might be “the very opposite of the traffic in women” (Ziarek 119) figured as the exchange of commodities (e.g., in Irigaray and Rubin), it is quite consistent with neoliberal political and aesthetic economies. Who radiates with potentiality more than the resilient, entrepreneurial postfeminist woman? In the same way that feminized, blackened receptivity was the solution to modernist anxieties about alienation (e.g., the aforementioned Gooding-Williams), feminized, racially nonwhite resilience is taken as a solution to the problem of the “end of art.” Having transgressed all limits and prohibitions—for example, emancipating dissonance, making music out of noise—modernist art had no means of establishing its opposition to society/social normativity. Similarly, capitalism had colonized the globe, exhausting its ability to profit through simple expansion; with no new markets, with nothing else new to conquer, it needed a new method for generating surplus value. As Jeffery Nealon and others argue, capitalism has become a logic of investment and intensity. Instead of expanding and assimilating, it recycles waste and increases efficiencies. Thus, traditionally non- or devalued “women’s work” becomes the fastest growing sector of the service-and-care-work economy. And women’s art-making practices become the hottest new thing in the artworld: think of all the “feminist art” retrospectives and exhibits that have taken place in the past five or so years. Modernism’s constitutive outside becomes neoliberalism’s bread and butter; or, the abject is now central to the means of capital, political, and aesthetic production.17 Antiracism and identity politics is part and parcel of strengthening neoliberal hegemony and market-based economic exploitation—their ahistorical understanding of racial subordination mystifies class antagonism Warren et al., 16—*specializes in African-American literature and 19th- and 20th-century American literature and critical theory; professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics; *associate professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago; associate professor of 20th Century US and African American History at Illinois State University; *specializes in postwar black politics with an emphasis on housing and class; Professor Emeritus in political science at South Carolina State University (*Kenneth Warren, Adolph Reed, *Cedric Johnson, Touré F. Reed, *Preston Smith II, Willie Legette; 9/16/16, “On the End(s) of Black Politics,” http://nonsite.org/editorial/on-the-ends-of-black-politics, Accessed 4/27/17, HWilson) In its commitment to making visible and less pervasive the various forms of theoretical neoliberalism that define the present moment, nonsite.org has illustrated on multiple occasions that the broad acceptance of antiracism and identity politics, in whatever guise, as a fundamentally left politics has been part and parcel of securing neoliberal hegemony. This is not because a socialist vision countenances racism or other forms of discrimination, but rather because antiracists—as demonstrated this past spring when Ta-Nehisi Coates faulted the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign for refusing to embrace a call for reparations for black Americans—remain attuned to a vision of justice defined by ensuring equal access to hierarchically distributed social goods such as family wealth (and redressing historical impediments to the accumulation of wealth rooted in discrimination). Indeed in making frequent recourse to the adjective “narrow” in chastising a politics that roots inequality in economic exploitation, antiracists and identitarians have positioned the idea of racial justice as a critique of, rather than an expected consequence of, socialism. It is largely for this reason, as Walter Benn Michaels has noted on these pages, “the commitment to identity politics has been more an expression of…enthusiasm for the free market than a form of resistance to it.” It is also because many “left” identitarians, in particular those associated with #BlackLivesMatter, have, at least nominally, placed neoliberalism in their crosshairs that we thought it necessary to establish this new section of nonsite.org to draw attention to the ways in which contemporary black political projects exemplify the “left in form, right in essence” character that so often plagues progressive politics in the US. Black antiracists have rightly decried the assault on the public sector and the pursuit of privatization that defines that project, but their account of neoliberalism rests on an inaccurate and essentially ahistorical understanding of the relation of black racial subordination to the development and ongoing legitimation of the capitalist order—and it is this ahistoricism, so pithily captured in the epigraph by Willie Legette that heads up this section, that we seek to counter. That capitalist domination has continually sought to locate the sources of inequality outside the domain of economic relations (thereby naturalizing them) through establishing what Adolph Reed has termed ascriptive hierarchies of worth, has, in the analyses put forward by black antiracists, ossified into a claim that neoliberalism requires the specific subordination of black people and, correspondingly, that any project promoting black solidarity and the social worth of black people is inherently radical. As an example one can point to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s proclamation in a recent book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, that “When the Black movement goes into motion, it throws the entire mythology of the United States—freedom, democracy, and endless opportunity—into chaos.” Taylor’s hyperbolic celebration of a politics whose point of departure requires harmonizing the interests of the black poor and working class with those of the black professional-managerial class indicates the conceptual and political confusion that underwrites the very idea of a Black Freedom Movement. The prevalence of such confusion is lamentable; that it go unchecked and without criticism is unacceptable. The essays that appear in this section will critique this tendency and offer in its stead a vision of what we think ought to be. Class analysis has the best explanatory power for modern day racialized violence—their starting point of racial emancipation obscures class struggle and prevents effective anti-capitalist resistance Reed 16—professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics (Adolph, 9/16/16, “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence,” http://nonsite.org/editorial/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violence, Accessed 4/27/17, HWilson) Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1 of the population controlled 90 of the resources so long as the dominant 1 were 13 black, 17 Latino, 50 female, 4 or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions. We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1 For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon. Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise2 called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies sic in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3 This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings. But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5; Alaska 3.9; South Dakota 1.9; Arizona 4.6, Wyoming 1.7, and Colorado 4.5. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17 of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2 of the 42 victims of police killing. What is clear in those states, however, is that the great disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days. What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism. There is no need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of policing—from bogus “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to anti-terrorism hysteria and finally assertion of a common sense understanding that any cop has unassailable authority to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired inspection sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or warrantless search into a capital offense. And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza, Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments. It is also a demand that, in insisting that for all intents and purposes police violence must be seen as mainly, if not exclusively, a black thing, we cut ourselves off from the only basis for forging a political alliance that could effectively challenge it. All that could be possible as political intervention, therefore, is tinkering around with administration of neoliberal stress policing in the interest of pursuing racial parity in victimization and providing consultancies for experts in how much black lives matter.5 Another revealing datum regarding the imagery of an unbroken history of racist denigration of black “bodies” stretching back at least to 1619 as explanation of the current racial disparity in police killings is that, as Mike Males has shown, police killings of black men under 25 years of age declined 79 between 1968 and 2011, and 61 for men over 25 during that same period.6 Nor is that quite surprising. The victories won by the civil rights movement were real, as were the entailments of the Voting Rights Act. Things were generally worse with respect to everyday police terror in inner-city black neighborhoods than they are now. One of the few of the Black Panthers’ slogans that wasn’t simply empty hyperbole was their characterization of the role of police as an “occupying army” in black communities. (When I first saw The Battle of Algiers in the late 1960s, I felt an instant shock of recognition, a sense that I’d lived some of the film.) Racial transition in local government and deepening incorporation of minority political interests into local governing coalitions had a moderating effect on police brutality in black communities.7 My point is not in any way to make light of the gravity of the injustice or to diminish outrage about police violence. (I realize, however, that some will impute that intention to me; for them and all who would take the charge seriously, see note 1 below.) However, noting a decline—or substantial change in either direction for that matter—in the rate of police killings does underscore the inadequacy of reified, transhistorical abstractions like “racism” or “white supremacy” for making sense of the nature and sources of police abuse of black Americans. Racism and white supremacy don’t really explain how anything happens. They’re at best shorthand characterizations of more complex, or at least discrete, actions taken by people in social contexts; at worst, and, alas, more often in our political moment, they’re invoked as alternatives to explanation. In that sense they function, like the Nation of Islam’s Yacub story, as a devil theory: racism and white supremacy are represented as capable of making things happen in the world independently, i.e. magically. This is the fantasy expressed in formulations like racism is America’s “national disease” or “Original Sin”—which, incidentally, are elements of the liberal race relations ideology that took shape in postwar American political discourse precisely as articulations of a notion of racial equality that was separated from political economy and anchored in psychology and individualist notions of prejudice and intolerance.8 Nevertheless, putting to the side for a moment those ways in which causal invocations of racism and white supremacy are wrongheaded and inadequate and accepting for the sake of argument that the reified forces can do things in the world, if their manifest power can vary so significantly with social, political, and historical context, wouldn’t the objective of combating the injustice be better served by giving priority to examining the shifting and evolving contexts under which racism and white supremacy are more or less powerful or that condition the forms in which they appear rather than to demonstrating that those forces that purportedly cause inequality must be called racism or white supremacy in particular? One problem with the latter objective is that it is ultimately unrealizable. There is no definitive standard of what qualifies as racism; like terrorism or any other such abstraction, it is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, an illustration of the great cultural victory of the postwar civil rights struffle is that “racism” is negatively sanctioned in American society. No one with any hope of claim to political respectability—not even Maine governor Paul LePage, who leaves one struggling to imagine what he assumes would thus qualify as racist, (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/profane-phone-message-has-gov-paul-lepage-of-maine-in-hot-water-again.html?_r=0)—embraces it. In addition, advocates of antiracist politics argue that debate over the name that should be attached to the injustice is important because acknowledging the existence of racism/white supremacy as a causal agent is a necessary first step to overcoming its power. But that claim rests on shaky political ground. It is at bottom a call for expiation and moral rehabilitation as political action. In that sense Black Lives Matter is like its rhetorical grandparent, Black Power; it is a slogan that has condensed significant affective resonance but is without programmatic or strategic content. Also like Black Power, in response to criticisms of its lack of concrete content, BLM activists generated a 10 Point Plan—http:www.puckermob.com/lifestyle/black-lives-matter-just-delivered-their-10-point-manifesto-and-this-is-what-they-want, in part clearly to address criticisms that they had no affirmative agenda beyond demands that the slogan be validated and the names of selected victims of police killing be invoked. This was followed more recently by an expanded document featuring roughly sixty items called “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice”—https:policy.m4bl.org. Some, perhaps many, of the items propounded in the initial 10 Point Plan are fine as a statement of reforms that could make things better in the area of criminal justice policy and practice. Many, if not most, of those assembled under the rubric “Vision for Black Lives” are empty sloganeering and politically wrongheaded and/or unattainable and counterproductive. However, the problem is not a shortage of potentially effective reforms that could be implemented. The problem is much more a political and strategic one. And the focus on racial disparity both obscures the nature and extent of the political and strategic challenges we face and in two ways undercuts our ability to mount a potentially effective challenge: 1) As my colleague, Marie Gottschalk, has demonstrated in her most important book, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2016),9 the carceral apparatus in its many manifestations, including stress policing as well as the many discrete nodes that constitute the regime of mass incarceration, has emerged from and is reproduced by quite diverse, bipartisan, and evolving complexes of interests, some of which form only in response to the arrangements generated and institutionalized by other interests. Constituencies for different elements of the carceral state do not necessarily overlap, and their interests in maintaining it, or their favored components of it, can be material, ideological, political, or alternating or simultaneous combinations of the three. Challenging that immensely fortified and self-reproducing institutional and industrial structure will require a deep political strategy, one that must eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing. 2) It should be clear by now that the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic. Capitalism generates a present of differentially distributed mass violence, environmental destruction and extinction. Robinson 14 (William I., Prof. of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies, @ UC-Santa Barbara, “Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism” The World Financial Review) Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises ¶ Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the “Great Recession” of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be found in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any one place tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the explosive contradictions built into the system. ¶ Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into a structural crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contra- dictions that can only be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the struc- tural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of corpo- rate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the replacement of a system by an entirely new system or by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in great flux. ¶ Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system’s authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other indicators. By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new “Dark Ages.”2 ¶ This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present: ¶ 1. The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at “tipping points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries. ¶ 2. The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived; ¶ 3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand? ¶ 4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,”4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification, and so on; ¶ 5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction. ¶ Global Police State ¶ How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute. ¶ One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical re- sponses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges. ¶ Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5 The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic. The alternative is a refusal to perform the aff’s method in spaces like debate. Rather, we believe that other spaces ie in private homes, collective organizations, are better as they do not reveal the strategy to recycle semiocapitalism.
4/23/22
JF- K- Set-col
Tournament: UPenn | Round: 5 | Opponent: Hamilton al | Judge: Jalyn Wu cites won't upload, check os
4/22/22
JF- S- Priv good
Tournament: Puget Sound | Round: 4 | Opponent: University AS | Judge: Kristen east cites won't work, check os
4/7/22
JF- T- Spec Priv Ent
Tournament: Harvard | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Claudia johnson ap | Judge: zinman, fernandez, prasad Interpretation—the aff may not specify an entity by which appropriation is unjust. A is an generic indefinite singular. Cohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf *IS generic = Indefinite Singulars French, then, expresses the two types of reading differently. In English, on¶ the other hand, generic BPs are ambiguous between inductivist and normative¶ readings. But even in English there is one type of generic that can express only¶ one of these readings, and this is the IS generic. While BPs are ambiguous¶ between the inductivist and the rules and regulations readings, ISs are not. In¶ the supermarket scenario discussed above, only (44.b) is true:¶ (44) a. A banana sells for $.49/lb.¶ b. A banana sells for $1.00/lb.¶ The normative force of the generic IS has been noted before. Burton-Roberts¶ (1977) considers the following minimal pair:¶ (45) a. Gentlemen open doors for ladies.¶ b. A gentleman opens doors for ladies.¶ He notes that (45.b), but not (45.a), expresses what he calls “moral necessity.”7¶ Burton-Roberts observes that if Emile does not as a rule open doors for ladies, his mother could utter (45.b) and thereby successfully imply that Emile was not, or was¶ not being, a gentleman. Notice that, if she were to utter. . . (45.a) she¶ might achieve the same effect (that of getting Emile to open doors for¶ ladies) but would do so by different means. . . For (45.a) merely makes a¶ generalisation about gentlemen (p. 188).¶ Sentence (45.b), then, unlike (45.a), does not have a reading where it makes¶ a generalization about gentlemen; it is, rather, a statement about some social¶ norm. It is true just in case this norm is in effect, i.e. it is a member of a set of¶ socially accepted rules and regulations.¶ An IS that, in the null context, cannot be read generically, may receive a¶ generic reading in a context that makes it clear that a rule or a regulation is¶ referred to. For example, Greenberg (1998) notes that, out of the blue, (46.a)¶ and (46.b) do not have a generic reading:¶ (46) a. A Norwegian student whose name ends with ‘s’ or ‘j’ wears green¶ thick socks.¶ b. A tall, left-handed, brown haired neurologist in Hadassa hospital¶ earns more than $50,000 a year.¶ However, Greenberg points out that in the context of (47.a) and (47.b),¶ respectively, the generic readings of the IS subject are quite natural:¶ (47) a. You know, there are very interesting traditions in Norway, concerning the connection between name, profession, and clothing. For¶ example, a Norwegian student. . .¶ b. The new Hadassa manager has some very funny paying criteria. For¶ example, a left-handed. . .¶ Even IS sentences that were claimed above to lack a generic reading, such¶ as (3.b) and (4.b), may, in the appropriate context, receive such a reading:¶ (48) a. Sire, please don’t send her to the axe. Remember, a king is generous!¶ b. How dare you build me such a room? Don’t you know a room is¶ square? Rules readings are always generalized – specific instances are not consistent. lCohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf In general, as, again, already noted by Aristotle, rules and definitions are not relativized to particular individuals; it is rarely the case that a specific individual¶ forms part of the description of a general rule.¶ Even DPs of the form a certain X or a particular X, which usually receive¶ a wide scope interpretation, cannot, in general, receive such an interpretation in the context of a rule or a definition. This holds of definitions in general, not¶ only of definitions with an IS subject. The following examples from the Cobuild¶ dictionary illustrate this point:¶ (74) a. A fanatic is a person who is very enthusiastic about a particular¶ activity, sport, or way of life.¶ b. Something that is record-breaking is better than the previous¶ record for a particular performance or achievement.¶ c. When a computer outputs something it sorts and produces information as the result of a particular program or operation.¶ d. If something sheers in a particular direction, it suddenly changes¶ direction, for example to avoid hitting something. That outweighs—only our evidence speaks to how indefinite singulars are interpreted in the context of normative statements like the resolution. This means throw out aff counter-interpretations that are purely descriptive Violation—they specified star war groups Vote neg: 1 Precision –any deviation justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. 2 Limits—specifying a just government offers huge explosion in the topic since they get permutations of hundreds of governments in the world depending on their definitions.
1 No RVIs: a. Chills theory – If people know they might lose for reading theory, it will disincentivize them. b. You don’t get to win by being fair. c. Theory Baiting – good theory debaters will bait people into reading theory against certain cases 2 Use competing interpretations: a. Reasonability causes a race to the bottom with testing the limit of it b. Finding the best possible interp makes debate have higher quality arguments c. Judge intervention shouldn’t be allowed bc it produces bias 3 Drop the debater: Drop the debater for being abusive – we can’t restart the round from the 1AC and I’m skewed for the rest of the debate.
Topicality is a voting issue that should be evaluated through competing interpretations – it tells the negative what they do and do not have to prepare for No RVIs—it’s your burden to be topical.
4/23/22
JF- T- Subset Appropriation
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 7 | Opponent: Lexington am | Judge: Jada Bourne Interpretation—the aff may not defend a subset of appropriation. Appropriation is a generic indefinite singular. Cohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf *IS generic = Indefinite Singulars French, then, expresses the two types of reading differently. In English, on¶ the other hand, generic BPs are ambiguous between inductivist and normative¶ readings. But even in English there is one type of generic that can express only¶ one of these readings, and this is the IS generic. While BPs are ambiguous¶ between the inductivist and the rules and regulations readings, ISs are not. In¶ the supermarket scenario discussed above, only (44.b) is true:¶ (44) a. A banana sells for $.49/lb.¶ b. A banana sells for $1.00/lb.¶ The normative force of the generic IS has been noted before. Burton-Roberts¶ (1977) considers the following minimal pair:¶ (45) a. Gentlemen open doors for ladies.¶ b. A gentleman opens doors for ladies.¶ He notes that (45.b), but not (45.a), expresses what he calls “moral necessity.”7¶ Burton-Roberts observes that if Emile does not as a rule open doors for ladies, his mother could utter (45.b) and thereby successfully imply that Emile was not, or was¶ not being, a gentleman. Notice that, if she were to utter. . . (45.a) she¶ might achieve the same effect (that of getting Emile to open doors for¶ ladies) but would do so by different means. . . For (45.a) merely makes a¶ generalisation about gentlemen (p. 188).¶ Sentence (45.b), then, unlike (45.a), does not have a reading where it makes¶ a generalization about gentlemen; it is, rather, a statement about some social¶ norm. It is true just in case this norm is in effect, i.e. it is a member of a set of¶ socially accepted rules and regulations.¶ An IS that, in the null context, cannot be read generically, may receive a¶ generic reading in a context that makes it clear that a rule or a regulation is¶ referred to. For example, Greenberg (1998) notes that, out of the blue, (46.a)¶ and (46.b) do not have a generic reading:¶ (46) a. A Norwegian student whose name ends with ‘s’ or ‘j’ wears green¶ thick socks.¶ b. A tall, left-handed, brown haired neurologist in Hadassa hospital¶ earns more than $50,000 a year.¶ However, Greenberg points out that in the context of (47.a) and (47.b),¶ respectively, the generic readings of the IS subject are quite natural:¶ (47) a. You know, there are very interesting traditions in Norway, concerning the connection between name, profession, and clothing. For¶ example, a Norwegian student. . .¶ b. The new Hadassa manager has some very funny paying criteria. For¶ example, a left-handed. . .¶ Even IS sentences that were claimed above to lack a generic reading, such¶ as (3.b) and (4.b), may, in the appropriate context, receive such a reading:¶ (48) a. Sire, please don’t send her to the axe. Remember, a king is generous!¶ b. How dare you build me such a room? Don’t you know a room is¶ square? Their plan violates. Rules readings are always generalized – specific instances are not consistent. Cohen 01 Ariel Cohen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “On the Generic Use of Indefinite Singulars,” Journal of Semantics 18:3, 2001 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188590876.pdf In general, as, again, already noted by Aristotle, rules and definitions are not relativized to particular individuals; it is rarely the case that a specific individual¶ forms part of the description of a general rule.¶ Even DPs of the form a certain X or a particular X, which usually receive¶ a wide scope interpretation, cannot, in general, receive such an interpretation in the context of a rule or a definition. This holds of definitions in general, not¶ only of definitions with an IS subject. The following examples from the Cobuild¶ dictionary illustrate this point:¶ (74) a. A fanatic is a person who is very enthusiastic about a particular¶ activity, sport, or way of life.¶ b. Something that is record-breaking is better than the previous¶ record for a particular performance or achievement.¶ c. When a computer outputs something it sorts and produces information as the result of a particular program or operation.¶ d. If something sheers in a particular direction, it suddenly changes¶ direction, for example to avoid hitting something. That outweighs—only our evidence speaks to how indefinite singulars are interpreted in the context of normative statements like the resolution. This means throw out aff counter-interpretations that are purely descriptive Vote neg: 1 Precision –any deviation justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. 2 Limits—specifying a type of appropriation offers huge explosion in the topic since space is, quite literally, infinite. 3Topic education—even if you think subsets of appropriation are fine on this topic. If you put “lunar heritage” and “appropriation” in google, there are only 32 results. Not a single one of them are about private approporiation. They need to provide evidence that private entities are appropriating heritage sites. This independently is a reason you can vote neg on presumption
TVA: read the aff as an advantage to the resolution- you still to use your research and I can actually read whole res generic das , etc
Drop the debater to preserve fairness and education – use competing interps –reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation Hypothetical neg abuse doesn’t justify aff abuse, and theory checks cheaty CPs No RVIs—it’s their burden to be topical.
4/23/22
JF- T- T-FW
Tournament: Harvard | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Claudia johnson ap | Judge: zinman, fernandez, prasad Interpretation – the affirmative should defend the hypothetical implementation of a governmental policy that designates appropriation of outer space by private entities as unjust on Earth. Resolved requires policy action Louisiana State Legislature (https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/Glossary.aspx) Ngong Resolution A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations, stating policies, and making decisions where some other form is not required. A bill includes the constitutionally required enacting clause; a resolution uses the term "resolved". Not subject to a time limit for introduction nor to governor's veto. ( Const. Art. III, §17(B) and House Rules 8.11 , 13.1 , 6.8 , and 7.4 and Senate Rules 10.9, 13.5 and 15.1) Appropriation TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW Vol. 2013 No. 4 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should be clear.214 The ITU has, quite blatantly, created something akin to “property interests in outer space.”215 It allows nations to exclude others from their orbital slots, even when the nation is not currently using that slot.216 This is directly in line with at least one definition of outer-space appropriation.217 Start Footnote 217Id. at 236 (“Appropriation of outer space, therefore, is ‘the exercise of exclusive control or exclusive use’ with a sense of permanence, which limits other nations’ access to it.”) (quoting Milton L. Smith, The Role of the ITU in the Development of Space Law, 17 ANNALS AIR and SPACE L. 157, 165 (1992)). End Footnote 217The ITU even allows nations with unused slots to devise them to other entities, creating a market for the property rights set up by this regulation.218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations of the Bogotá Declaration were trying to accomplish, albeit through different means.219 Outer space Lexico. Oxford Dictionary. Outer Space. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/outer_space The physical universe beyond the earth's atmosphere. Private entities Law Insider. Private entity definition. https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/private-entity Private entity means any natural person, corporation, general partnership, limited liability company, limited partnership, joint venture, business trust, public benefit corporation, nonprofit entity, or other business entity. Unjust Lexico. Oxford Dictionary. Unjust. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/just not based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair.
Violation: not a policy, not appropriation since space Vote neg:
Competitive equity---pre-tournament neg research is structured by negating the resolution---plan-less affs monopolize neg ground and ensure it’s concessionary. That saps the utility of debate which requires a judge who can decide between two sides who have an equal opportunity to prepare for a common point of stasis.
2. Clash---abdicating government actions sanctions picking any interpretation for debate---incentivizes a retreat from controversy and forces the neg to first characterize the aff and then debate it which eliminates the benefit of preround research and prep. A common point of engagement ensures effective clash, which is a linear impact---negation is the necessary condition for distinguishing debate from discussion, but negation exists on a sliding scale. The topic of discussion is up to the affirmative, but depth and nuanced engagement is determined by negative ground. Any impact intrinsic to debate, not just discussion, comes from negation because it starts the process of critical thinking, reflexivity, and argument refinement.
Worst case their AFF is effects T – that’s bad because it still steers away from the stasis point of the resolution which links into all of our competitive equity and clash standards.
TVA: Defend a ban of private space colonization as a decolonial practice
They can’t weigh the aff—
T is an epistemic indict since it asks whether or not the aff is a legitimate practice so it comes prior to the aff
Fairness is a voter—
It’s an intrinsic good – some level of competitive equity is necessary to sustain the activity – if it didn’t exist, then there wouldn’t be value to the game since judges could literally vote whatever way they wanted regardless of the competing arguments made
T isn’t violent – A I don’t have the power to impose a norm – only to convince you my side is better. T doesn’t ban you from the activity – the whole point is that norms should be contestable – I just say make a better arg next time. B Exclusion is inevitable – every role of the ballot excludes some arguments and even saying T bad excludes it – that means we should delineate ground along reciprocal lines, not abandon division altogether. Reading T isn’t psychic violence – that was above, but especially if we’re not going for it since reading T can be used to prevent aff shiftiness and make substance a viable option. No silencing DA - T is just like a disad or critique we’ve said a certain practice the aff took was bad and it would’ve been better had they done it differently not that they are bad debaters – just like the cap k says the aff engaged in some practice that reinforced capitalism and it would’ve been better if they had emphasized Marxism – impositions in some form are inevitable because the negative has the burden of rejoinder and needs link arguments – every disad link says the aff did something wrong and theres an implicit version of the aff that wouldn’t have linked Theory before the K – A Prior question. My theory argument calls into question the ability to run the argument in the first place. They can’t say the same even if they criticize theory because theory makes rules of the game not just normative statements about what debaters should say. B Fair testing. Judge their arguments knowing I wasn’t given a fair shot to answer them. Prefer theory takes out K because they could answer my arguments, but I couldn’t answer theirs. Without testing their args, we don’t know if they’re valid, so you prefer fairness impacts on strength of link. Impact turns any critical education since a marketplace of ideas where we innovate, and test ideas presumes equal access. Q of what the ballot can solve for – even if ableism is the highest impact- a ballot only signsals an impact on fairness
4/23/22
JF- T- Tee-FW
Tournament: Harvard | Round: Octas | Opponent: Strake jesuit zd | Judge: hertzig, melin, prasad Interpretation – the affirmative should defend the hypothetical implementation of a governmental policy that designates appropriation of outer space by private entities as unjust. Resolved requires policy action Louisiana State Legislature (https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/Glossary.aspx) Ngong Resolution A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations, stating policies, and making decisions where some other form is not required. A bill includes the constitutionally required enacting clause; a resolution uses the term "resolved". Not subject to a time limit for introduction nor to governor's veto. ( Const. Art. III, §17(B) and House Rules 8.11 , 13.1 , 6.8 , and 7.4 and Senate Rules 10.9, 13.5 and 15.1) Appropriation TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW Vol. 2013 No. 4 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should be clear.214 The ITU has, quite blatantly, created something akin to “property interests in outer space.”215 It allows nations to exclude others from their orbital slots, even when the nation is not currently using that slot.216 This is directly in line with at least one definition of outer-space appropriation.217 Start Footnote 217Id. at 236 (“Appropriation of outer space, therefore, is ‘the exercise of exclusive control or exclusive use’ with a sense of permanence, which limits other nations’ access to it.”) (quoting Milton L. Smith, The Role of the ITU in the Development of Space Law, 17 ANNALS AIR and SPACE L. 157, 165 (1992)). End Footnote 217The ITU even allows nations with unused slots to devise them to other entities, creating a market for the property rights set up by this regulation.218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations of the Bogotá Declaration were trying to accomplish, albeit through different means.219 Outer space Lexico. Oxford Dictionary. Outer Space. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/outer_space The physical universe beyond the earth's atmosphere. Private entities Law Insider. Private entity definition. https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/private-entity Private entity means any natural person, corporation, general partnership, limited liability company, limited partnership, joint venture, business trust, public benefit corporation, nonprofit entity, or other business entity. Unjust Lexico. Oxford Dictionary. Unjust. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/just not based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair.
Violation: not a policy, not appropriation since space Vote neg:
First is fairness: Their interp explodes limits and allows affs to monopolize the moral high ground. Pre-tournament negative preparation is structured around topical plans as points of offense, which means anything other than a topical plan structurally favors the affirmative. Cutting negs to every possible aff wrecks small schools, which has a disparate impact on under-resourced and minority debaters. Turns the aff since the unpredictable form of the 1AC means we weren’t able to effectively prepare to defeat it, so they don’t get to weigh the aff.
Second is clash: the process of in-depth negation produces iterative testing and refinement, where we learn to improve our arguments based on our opponents’ responses—this maximizes our ability to spur progress and persuade others to our side no matter what field we choose to pursue. Anything else breeds dogmatism and polarization, but only my model of debate allows debaters to understand the nuances of power structures which is what enables us to dismantle them. 2.
Worst case their AFF is effects T – that’s bad because it still steers away from the stasis point of the resolution which links into all of our competitive equity and clash standards. TVA: Defend a ban of private space colonization as resisting anti-black sentiment
They can’t weigh the aff—
T is an epistemic indict since it asks whether or not the aff is a legitimate practice so it comes prior to the aff
Fairness is a voter—
It’s an intrinsic good – some level of competitive equity is necessary to sustain the activity – if it didn’t exist, then there wouldn’t be value to the game since judges could literally vote whatever way they wanted regardless of the competing arguments made
Theory before the aff:
Truth is constrained by discourse—ensuring their theories are true means they can withstand doubt, necessitating engagement as a prior question Misak 2k (Cheryl University Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and former Vice President and Provost at the University of Toronto. She has been a Rhodes Scholar; a Humboldt Research Fellow; a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at NYU; a Visiting Fellow at both St. John's College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Cambridge; and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Visitor at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing,. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. “Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation” Routledge, 2000, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.739.5361andrep=rep1andtype=pdf.)iLake AS So moral thought is not of one uniform kind and starting our moral philosophy from the idea that we aim at truth will not force us to think that. We will not be forced to think of moral inquiry as the active testing of hypotheses. Rather, we will think of moral inquiry as part of the enterprise of giving reasons. And reason here does not have to be a cold thing – a thing which stands apart from cultural meanings, from passion, and from emotion. The core of the pragmatist conception of truth is that a true belief would be the best belief, were we to inquire as far as we could on the matter. We shall see that ‘best’ here amounts to ‘best fits with all experience and argument’, not the kind of ‘best’ that other pragmatists, James and Rorty, for instance, have flirted with – consoling, best for our lives, or most comfortable. A true belief, rather, is a belief that could not be improved upon, a belief that would forever meet the challenges of reasons, argument, and evidence. Pragmatists sometimes put this idea in the following unhelpful way: a true belief is one which would be agreed upon at the hypothetical end of inquiry. But a better characterisation is that a true belief is one that would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could on the matter. A true belief is such that, no matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, that belief would not be overturned by recalcitrant experience and argument. Like the unhelpful formulation, this one captures what is important in pragmatism – the idea that a true belief is one which could not be improved upon. But the new formulation is much better.3 First, it does not run up against the possibility that inquiry might end prematurely, with, say, the destruction of life on earth. On the unhelpful formulation, it looks as if the beliefs which would be held then must be true, which is a crazy thing for a philosopher to suggest. Second, the new formulation does not require the pragmatist to attempt the doomed task of saying just what is meant by the hypothetical end of inquiry, cognitively ideal conditions, or perfect evidence, whatever these might be. Any attempt at articulating such notions will have to face the objection that it is a mere glorification of what we presently take to be good.4 And, finally, the new formulation does not mislead one into thinking that the pragmatist is a contractarian or a certain kind of deliberative democrat – someone who thinks that what is important is agreement, rather than being the best a belief could be. When the new formulation is unpacked, we shall see that there is a version of pragmatism on which truth is not as fickle as Rorty supposes. A belief is not true for one culture and false for another; and a belief is not true at one time and false at another. Beliefs do not, as William James suggested, ‘become’ true and then ‘become’ false, as the evidence for or against them comes to light.5 But truth, on the best version of pragmatism, is also not quite as objective as the correspondence theorist supposes. It is not, for instance, a property that holds regardless of the possibilities for human inquiry. Since philosophy is concerned with understanding our place in the world and with understanding the status of our beliefs, this seems to me an unobjectionable feature of pragmatism. But, of course, to properly argue for this picture of philosophy would be a large undertaking in itself. Some of the points in its favour will come out below, but the reader will have to turn to Misak (1991) and (1995) for more sustained arguments. I shall argue that when this view of truth and knowledge is brought to moral philosophy, we can see moral judgements as being candidates for truth. Truth here is as the pragmatist sees it – a property of the beliefs which would be the best beliefs for us to have. This does not, I shall argue, make such truth and knowledge second-rate. For we shall not follow Habermas in thinking that there is something higher or better with which to contrast it. If you like, the task before us is to say how objectivity and subjectivity can both be characteristic of our judgements. We are pulled to think that there is truth and objectivity, even if what is objectively true – belief – is a product of our deliberation and investigation. Thus, on the meta-ethical view of pragmatism, the semantic issue of whether ethical discourse is truth-apt becomes an epistemological issue about whether we can have knowledge in ethics. The question to be answered is whether our ethical beliefs have the same sorts of legitimate aspirations as our beliefs in science, mathematics, and discourse about ordinary, middle-sized objects. This, of course, is an old and venerable problem, a problem which seems not to go away, despite our best philosophical efforts. We have seen it hound the views of the philosophers canvassed in the last chapter. How can we resolve the tension between the facts of, on the one hand, pluralism and disagreement and, on the other, the ideal of consensus and the aim of getting the right answers to our questions? What I offer here is a position which is as much of an attempt to expose the deep and pressing difficulties as an attempt to solve them. Philosophy, practice, and correspondence The central thought of pragmatism is that our philosophical theories must be connected to experience and practice. A belief, hypothesis, or theory which pretends to be above experience, which thinks so well of itself that it pretends to be immune from recalcitrant experience, is spurious. I have tried elsewhere to elucidate both the semantic and the epistemological arguments in this thought’s favour6, and here I will briefly rehearse some of the reasons why we might think that a belief must be linked to experience. For this requirement will shape our theory of truth, objectivity, and morality. One point is about the demands of inquiry. Hypotheses, Peirce argued, ought not to block the path of inquiry. A hypothesis that had no consequences, that was severed from experience, that provided nothing on to which to latch, would be useless for inquiry. It would be, as Wittgenstein put it, a cog upon which nothing turned. Investigation into such hypotheses is bound to be barren and to direct attention away from worthwhile pursuits. Another is a point about belief, a point made nicely by David Wiggins. A belief aims at truth7 – if I believe p, I believe it to be true. But if this is right, then the belief that p must be sensitive to something – something must be able to speak for or against it. If beliefs need not be sensitive to something, then we could not interpret beliefs by asking: How do things have to be for this state of mind to succeed in its aim or be correct? What does this state of mind have, qua the belief it is, to be differentially sensitive to?8 If there was nothing a belief had to be sensitive to, then we could not individuate it; we could not tell it from another. A belief has a distinguishable content only if we can ‘envisage finding the right sort of licence to project upon subjects’ (Wiggins 1991b: 151). I can interpret or come to understand a sentence which is initially unintelligible to me only by coming to see what it is responsive to. Again, the requirement which presses itself upon the theorist is that a belief must be linked to something which we can experience. Thus discursive engagement is the best method for reaching consensus and solving ethical problems by allowing us to revise and consider opposing viewpoints. This should frame your evaluation of the T flow: 1 If your aff is true, then that means my method is key to reaching consensus about it—for example, the debate community has collectively decided that things like racism or sexism are unacceptable through clash over time. Clashing with stable points of prep allows us to have nuanced discussions of your scholarship, which means that through iterative testing we eventually reach a consensus of your aff being true. 2 Any reason I win why they prevent me from engaging with the aff is a reason why their model of debate is bad—it forecloses self-reflexivity in favor of dogmatism. 3 Prior question. My theory argument calls into question the ability to run the argument in the first place. They can’t say the same even if they criticize theory because theory makes rules of the game not just normative statements about what debaters should say. 4 Fair testing. Judge their arguments knowing I wasn’t given a fair shot to answer them. Prefer theory takes out K because they could answer my arguments, but I couldn’t answer theirs. Without testing their args, we don’t know if they’re valid, so you prefer fairness impacts on strength of link. Impact turns any critical education since a marketplace of ideas where we innovate, and test ideas presumes equal access.
1 No RVIs: a. Chills theory – If people know they might lose for reading theory, it will disincentivize them b. You don’t get to win by being fair c. Theory Baiting – good theory debaters will bait people into reading theory against certain cases 2 Use competing interpretations: a. Reasonability causes a race to the bottom with testing the limit of it b. Finding the best possible interp makes debate have higher quality arguments c. Judge intervention shouldn’t be allowed bc it produces bias 3 Drop the debater: Drop the debater for being abusive – we can’t restart the round from the 1AC and I’m skewed for the rest of the debate.