You should not give the aff any solvency claim in this debate – private entities as the actor of the plan justifies the worse forms of durable fiat where is we make an arg about states not being able to resolve space war or violence resulting from legal debates then they can just no link the argument and makes mechanism debates useless under their model
2. Drop the debater because it kills clash and lets the aff win every time
3. No Kessler Drmola and Hubik 18 Jakub Drmola, Division of Security and Strategic Studies, Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University. Tomas Hubik, Department of Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematical Logic, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. Kessler Syndrome: System Dynamics Model. Space Policy Volumes 44–45, August 2018, Pages 29-39. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964617300966?via3Dihub The baseline scenario represents a continuation of the current trends, which are simply extended AND future improvements in satellite reliability, debris tracking, and navigation 17.
4. No escalation – Planning Priorities Bowen 18 Bleddyn Bowen 2-20-2018 “The Art of Space Deterrence” https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/the-art-of-space-deterrence/ (Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leicester)Elmer Space is often an afterthought or a miscellaneous ancillary in the grand strategic views of AND of losing specific satellites out of all proportion to their actual strategic effect.
5. Collision risk is very small Fange 17 Daniel Von Fange 17, Web Application Engineer, Founder and Owner of LeanCoder, Full Stack, Polyglot Web Developer, “Kessler Syndrome is Over Hyped”, 5/21/2017, http://braino.org/essays/kessler_syndrome_is_over_hyped/ The orbital area around earth can be broken down into four regions. Low LEO AND hitting that cube are tiny - less than 1 in 10,000.
6. Cannot solve public sats from hitting – we read blue 1AC Wong 19 “Congested Outer Space: Increased Deployment of Small Satellite Constellations Could Hamper Military Space Operations” 2019 Arthur Wong Strategic Development of Forces Division, SHAPE. Prior to working at SHAPE he has worked at NATO HQ, within the Defence Investment Division on interoperability for NATO’s multinational battlegroups. https://www.japcc.org/congested-outer-space/ SM Since the production of a large number of small satellites in a factory environment will AND it is expected to stay in orbit for the next 150 years.21
7. Cannot solve Chinese ASATs Blatt 20 Talia, joint concentration in Social Studies and Integrative Biology at Harvard, specialization in East Asian geopolitics and security issues “Anti-Satellite Weapons and the Emerging Space Arms Race,” Harvard International Review, May 26, 2020, https://hir.harvard.edu/anti-satellite-weapons-and-the-emerging-space-arms-race/ TG Despite their deterrent functions, ASATs are more likely to provoke or exacerbate conflicts than AND and its allies do not want China to successfully close off the region.
8. You should be skeptical of the their internal links and power predictions of the aff – foreign policy analysts are riddled with bad predictions about conflict – they do this because it gives them a pay check – especially overexaggerating Chinese power Drezner 21 Daniel W. 1-15-2021 Foreign Policy Wonks Gone Wild https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/15/foreign-policy-predictions-always-bad-worst-international-relations-rewards-catastrophic-thinking/ Accessed 3-7-2021 CSUF JmB NDT 2021 In a world defined by scarcity, there will always be a bountiful harvest of AND making a prediction here. The odds are excellent that I am wrong.
9. Squo solves AND it’s not talking about the same type of astronomy as Siegel ‘21, we read blue 1AC Grush 20 “The true impact of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation on astronomy is coming into focus” Loren Grush science reporter for The Verge Mar 24, 2020 https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21190273/spacex-starlink-satellite-internet-constellation-astronomy-coating SM Ever since SpaceX launched its first batch of internet-beaming satellites last year, AND -Reed. “It’s just the sheer numbers that are worrying me.”
10. Goodwins internal link is that China hates Elon so much they jam every satellite in an area far past the country which escalates tensions to the point of war. Rupert Goodwins is a British writer, broadcaster and technology journalist, and has zero evidence for why China would take an action like this which mean you should be massively skeptical of the link
Hacking satellites is good – collapses capitalism Mezzadra, S., and Neilson, B. (2013). Extraction, logistics, finance: Global crisis and the politics of operations. Radical Philosophy, 8-18. Recut – CSUF JmB The politics of operations What is an operation? In our understanding an operation is AND , the political decision that would make the crisis worthy of its name.
Framing
The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of extinction, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over try or die risk calculus. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology. Matheson 17 Calum, Assoc. Prof Communication @ Pitt, “The sublime rhetoric of Pascal’s wager,” Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 0, Iss. 0,0, Sep 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CTPGbVmNAmtvfJPI8Q86/full//ak47 The form of Pascal's wager has been adapted outside of its explicitly religious context. AND age when technological progress makes a literal Night of Fire all too possible.
4/20/22
JF - Case - AT Asteroid Mining - Doubles - HWL
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Saratoga AG | Judge: Joseph Barquin, Samantha McLoughlin, Indu Pandey Case
Space War
Not only is there no space war, there is no territory to wage it on. Virtual constructs of space decide where and how power operates. Ignoring this virtuality, in favor of banning operations in name only, only shifts weaponry from one place to another and guises the horror, violence, and abandonment central to any and all virtual wars. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of everyone.
Movements are growing and on the verge of breaking through. Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) As a wise friend from an indigenous community in the Amazon once told me, AND one I continue to ask myself every day. How much is enough?
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
Collisions
International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger AND 2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change.
The asteroid impact threat is propaganda meant to legitimize continued research into incredibly powerful militarized technologies—turning the debate away from existential threats is the only way to develop peaceful solutions and divorce science from militarization Mellor 07. – (Felicity, PhD Theoretical Physics Newcastle University, Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Aug., 2007), pp. 499-531, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547453, SUSSMAN, PDF) During the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of planetary scientists and astronomers set AND that we could tell in order to guide science towards more peaceful ends.
No space war – it’s hype and systems are redundant Johnson-Freese and Hitchens 16 Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese is a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens. Views expressed are those of the author alone. Theresa Hitchens is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), and the former Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Stop The Fearmongering Over War In Space: The Sky’s Not Falling, Part 1. December 27, 2016. https://breakingdefense.com/2016/12/stop-the-fearmongering-over-war-in-space-the-skys-not-falling-part-1/ In the last two years, we’ve seen rising hysteria over a future war in AND likely do so. There is just too much redundancy in the system.
No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of AND unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others.
Framing
The role of the ballot is to determine whether the 1AC was productive in the debate space - material violence does not go away after the ballot and there's no intrinsic connection between their scholarship and a W - any defense against their method means we win.
The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of hyperreality, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over deterrence-based impacts. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology. - Instrumentalizing pascal'Jonathan Shell used pascals wager to push people towards disarmament. That same argument was hijacked by Hawks (Cheney) and instrumentalized to produce the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike – the illogicality of nuclear deterrence/US power projection is that you have to be willing to risk being the nuclear “madman” in order to deter. Makes politics paradoxically irrational and dangerous. - If we understand Pascal’s wager subliminally rather than instrumentally/rationally, then high magnitude impacts orient away from calculative logic toward alternative horizons of the social/political and retain a radical possibility. In the face of infinite harm you should risk everything for a different world. Not the continuation of this one. Matheson 17 Calum, Assoc. Prof Communication @ Pitt, “The sublime rhetoric of Pascal’s wager,” Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 0 , Iss. 0,0, Sep 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CTPGbVmNAmtvfJPI8Q86/full//ak47 The form of Pascal's wager has been adapted outside of its explicitly religious context. AND age when technological progress makes a literal Night of Fire all too possible.
1/23/22
JF - Case - AT Asteroid Mining - Octos - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: Octas | Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: Derek Hilligoss, Scott Brown, Morgan Copeland Case
Space War
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
Interpretation: The affirmative should not be able to fiat that every state, company, and individual follows the laws of the plan Violation: They do – the affirmative makes it so not only does every country sign the OST, but also that zero countries proceed to break the rules later Standards:
1) Real World – we have evidence about specific scenarios in which countries have announced that they will continue to mine – that takes out all of their offense about being able to create tiny “x country says no scenarios”
2) Negative Ground – we lose any and all scenarios in which some country can’t or won’t follow on because the affirmative says the three words “normal means solves” and gets out of the solvency deficit
They will say that it is unfair – no it’s not. If the negative says that a non-space fairing country like Indonesia says no, you still vote affirmative because they can solve their impacts – our argument is contextualized to some of the larger countries and their evidence also supports that those countries test the water
Normal means has some countries not totally comply and still try to mine in space – it is the affirmative’s role to figure out what the punishment for those actions are
Their Jamasmie ev is in the context of the space force escalating tensions which means if they’re right you vote negative on presumption because they can’t solve. Stockdale GS reads blue 1AC Jamasmie 21 Cecilia Jamasmie Cecilia has covered mining for more than a decade. She is particularly interested in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Diamonds and Latin America. Cecilia has been interviewed by BBC News and CBC among others and has been a guest speaker at mining conventions, including MINExpo 2016 and the World’s Copper Conference 2018. She is also member of the expert panel on Social License to Operate (SLO) at the European project MIREU (Mining and Metallurgic Regions EU). She holds a Master of Journalism from the University of British Columbia, and is based in Nova Scotia., 2-2-2021, "Experts warn of brewing space mining war among US, China and Russia," MINING, https://www.mining.com/experts-warn-of-brewing-space-mining-war-among-us-china-and-russia/ DD AG A brewing war to set a mining base in space is likely to see China AND 2020, more than 50 years after the US reached the lunar surface.
Collisions
The advantage bites into the Öberg link – their conceptualization of warfare because imaging satellites gets destroyed is what Öberg is talking about when he describes the necessity and the role of schematics within the battlefield ie that warfare is no longer fought with normal arms, it’s fought with scientists – like the movie War Games. Chance of asteroids is tiny and no extinction Robert Walker 16. Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Wolfson College, Oxford. 12-14-2016. "Why Resilient Humans Would Survive Giant Asteroid Impact." Science 2.0. https://www.science20.com/robert_inventor/we_wont_go_extinct_after_a_major_asteroid_impact_even_96_of_species_extinct_0_chance_of_humans_extinct-187383 This is something you hear said so often - that we risk being hit by AND of years. But it is nearly impossibly unlikely in the next century.
Their ev is about NASA’s programs – not private mining.
The inevitability of the Kessler syndrome reveals that this debate is only a question of whether we reinvest in the future that is already arriving or take the more radical bet on a new relation with technics. Reno 2018 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality” in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 4–18)DR 19 For one thing, space debris is potentially dangerous to spacecraft. Space debris is AND and deformation not unlike what conventional archaeologists encounter amid the Earth’s beguiling surface.
1/24/22
JF - Case - AT Asteroid Mining - Octos - UNLV
Tournament: UNLV | Round: Octas | Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: Nick Fleming, Yoyo Lei, Claudia Ribera Case
Space War
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
Their Jamasmie ev is in the context of the space force escalating tensions which means if they’re right you vote negative on presumption because they can’t solve. Stockdale GS reads blue 1AC Jamasmie 21 Cecilia Jamasmie Cecilia has covered mining for more than a decade. She is particularly interested in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Diamonds and Latin America. Cecilia has been interviewed by BBC News and CBC among others and has been a guest speaker at mining conventions, including MINExpo 2016 and the World’s Copper Conference 2018. She is also member of the expert panel on Social License to Operate (SLO) at the European project MIREU (Mining and Metallurgic Regions EU). She holds a Master of Journalism from the University of British Columbia, and is based in Nova Scotia., 2-2-2021, "Experts warn of brewing space mining war among US, China and Russia," MINING, https://www.mining.com/experts-warn-of-brewing-space-mining-war-among-us-china-and-russia/ DD AG A brewing war to set a mining base in space is likely to see China AND 2020, more than 50 years after the US reached the lunar surface.
Debris
Their Scoles evidence is literally in the context of NASA mining in space, make them read lines from the evidence that assumes otherwise, saying “no it’s not” is not an answer when we read a re-highlighting (blue) 1AC Scoles 15 Freelance science writer, and a contributing writer at WIRED Science, with articles in places like Popular Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, Vice, Outside, and others., 5-27-2015, "Dust from asteroid mining spells danger for satellites," New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630235-100-dust-from-asteroid-mining-spells-danger-for-satellites/ DD AG IF THE gold mine is too far from home, why not move it nearby AND worry about cascades of collisions like the one depicted in the movie Gravity.
The inevitability of the Kessler syndrome reveals that this debate is only a question of whether we reinvest in the future that is already arriving or take the more radical bet on a new relation with technics. Reno 2018 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality” in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 4–18)DR 19 For one thing, space debris is potentially dangerous to spacecraft. Space debris is AND directly mediates the futures that space agencies and industries imagine possible and desirable.
Divorsky is in the context of every satellite getting destroyed at the same time which is not their impact – that means no internal link and you vote negative.
Framing
The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of capitalism, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over try or die risk calculus. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology.
The spectre of the climate disaster functions as a new zone of investment in which humanity can legitimize itself as in a perfectly cohesive image. Reflecting a divine will to will, the affirmative reasserts the unity of being in a reactionary attempt to ward off contingency, ultimately resulting in endless foddering and chatter by masses of indifference Colebrook 14. Dr. Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Letters, Doctor of Philosophy, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction Vol. 1, Michigan Publishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2014, p. 59-72 Questions, today, of climate and climate ethics—and even concerns regarding the AND intentionality and synthesis— only this radical destruction can save us from ourselves.
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of AND unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others.
Adv 2
Economic collapse is good – confrontation with crisis changes the subject Alexander 15—Lecturer and research fellow at the University of Melbourne, co-director of the Simplicity Institute, and a PhD Samuel, Sufficiency Economy: Enough for Everyone, Forever, p. 270-273 Again, one must not romanticise such theories or transitions. The Cuban crisis, AND may encapsulate one of the most realistic forms of hope we have left.
Growth is unsustainable AND innovation can’t solve-~--shifting away from productivism is key to avoid extinction. Milena Büchs and Max Koch 17. Milena Büchs is Associate Professor in Sustainability, Economics and Low Carbon Transitions at the University of Leeds, UK. Max Koch is Professor of Social Policy at Lund University (School of Social Work), Sweden. 2017. Postgrowth and Wellbeing. Springer International Publishing. CrossRef, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-59903-8. As the previous chapters have shown, economic growth is regarded as a prime policy AND the Earth to support life” (Daly and Farley 2011: 12).
Growth’s unsustainable – extinction. Hausknost 19, 11-21-19—Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability at WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business (Daniel, “Tackling the political economy of transformative change,” https://www.cusp.ac.uk/themes/p/blog-dh-transformative-change/, dml) language modifications denoted by brackets Myth number one is the widespread belief in the feasibility of an absolute long- AND transformation. That way we may well govern ourselves into irreversible climate collapse.
Collapse is good—
Causes cognitive collapse and overwrought complexity¬ – extinction. Annunziata and McManus, 19—former Chief Economist and Head of Business Innovation Strategy at General Electric AND Visiting Research Fellow at Autodesk, Senior Advisor at BCG (Marco and Mickey, “The Great Cognitive Depression,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcoannunziata/2019/01/11/the-great-cognitive-depression/#49ed9dc174c1, dml) We have seen a dramatic increase in the amount of complexity that exists in the AND nothing we may ultimately wash up on the shores from a watery grave.
2/6/22
JF - Case - AT Asteroid Mining - Round 3 - HWL
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harker AS | Judge: Leah Clark-Villanueva Case
Mining
Garcia just says that the US has not explicity banned asteriod mining - not that mining is increasing now in the squo - frame this contention through the lense that literally no-one is mining asteriods now which means the aff is solving a problem that doesn't exist yet.
2. AND, Gent is in the context of lunar-mining - not asteroid mining which means they can't access their internal links.
3. AND, Scoles isn't even about mining - it's about NASA re-directing asteriods which is something the affirmative can't solve and means if they are right about their impacts it's inevitable.
4. McKnight is about collision of large objects, not mining - something the affirmative can't solve. Also we control uniqueness - no collision since card was written and Russia blowing up their satelleite didn't cause international war, which answers Johnson
5. We control uniqueness on Ford too - satellites did nothing to stop COVID from spreading and there's already a global pandemic happening now which makes the impact scenarios non-unique. COVID proves that despite idiots no singular virus could knock-out the entire population of the globe.
6. O'Donnel is describing what is happening in the squo - no scenarios for escalation means that you don't care about the impact, besides CFCs, HCFCs, halons, carbon tetrachloride, methyl chloroform and methyl bromide all prove the impact is inevitable
7. Xu '20 is talking about states mining - not corporations - that means the impact happens post-aff and extinction is inevitable .
8. Time frame – Kessler effect 200 years away. Peter Stubbe, PhD in law @ Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, ’17, State Accountability for Space Debris: A Legal Study of Responsibility for Polluting the Space Environment and Liability for Damage Caused by Space Debris, Koninklijke Brill Publishing, ISBN 978-90-04-31407-8, p. 27-31 The prediction of possible scenarios of the future evolution of the debris p o p AND and such collisions are likely to occur every 5 to 9 years.89
9. Their project of sustainability is only ever possible through homogenization as soldiers with green masks launch wars against those who don’t comply– this mythical construct frames any deviance as scum, creating a spiral of violence against that which refuses the sanitary natural order Bauman 15. Whitney, Department of Religious Studies, Florida International University, Oxford JournalsArts and Humanities Jnl of the American Academy of Religion Volume 83, Issue 4Pp. 1005-1023. “Religion, Ecology, and the Planetary Other: Opening Spaces for Difference.” July 14, 2015 PART II: MIMESIS AND EXCEPTIONALISM: THE WORLD AS SACRIFICIAL STANDING RESERVE. Generalized AND the trans-human, and planetary ethics of the “not yet.”
Multilateralism
10. Don't let them fool you with the second-advantage - the internal link is still the same space debris which I already did all of the work to disprove above - it's inevitable, the aff can't solve it, and they don't have a coherent internal link story to explain how they get there
Make them explain how a US satteleite getting hit by space debris makes nuclear terrorism more likely - it just makes it more possible which are two entirely distinct scenarios - one is an actualy increase in the percent chance of it happening, the other is it is easier for it to happen, which means they don't have an impact scenario
12. Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint, condemning the world to the simulacral existence of peace and security, your acts of piety and pity are absurd, committed as if they were irresistible. Your promises are a life spent wandering the surface of the world with minimal intensity—life spent playing penny slots and drinking bud light instead of ever risking anything or buying the good shit. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time. Bishop ‘9 /Ryan, teaches at the National University of Singapore and has published on critical theory, military technology, avantgarde aesthetics, urbanism, architecture, literature, and international sex tourism. He edits or serves on the editorial boards of several journals “Baudrillard, Death, and Cold War Theory” in Baudrillard Now: Current Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies, polity, ed. R. Bishop pg. 60-70/ Extending a conceit borrowed from Francois de Bernard, itself a continuation of his own AND , the subject, the object, thought, and theory as simulation.
13. There are multiple logical barriers that preclude any state from ever supplying terrorists with WMDs Walt, 7/25/13 (Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he served as academic dean from 2002-2006, 7/25/13, “Why We Don't Need to Worry About a 'Nuclear Handoff'”, Foreign Policy, http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/25/why_we_dont_need_to_worry_about_a_nuclear_handoff, Accessed 9/3/13, NC) After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. national security establishment AND the need to keep whatever weapons they might have under very reliable control.
14. Multilateralism can’t stop conflict Bordachev 13 (Timofei, Doctor of Political Science, is the Director of the Center for Comprehensive International and European Studies at the Higher School of Economics, “Political Tsunami Hits Hard,” 6/30, http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/Political-Tsunami-Hits-Hard-16054) The financial crisis in the United States, which in 2008 went global, and AND community has no other means to prevent the emergence or escalation of conflicts.
15. Space cooperation doesn’t lead to broader relations. Sterner 15 (Eric Sterner is a fellow at the George C. Marshall Institute. He held senior staff positions for the U.S. House Science and Armed Services committees and served in DoD and as NASA’s associate deputy administrator for policy and planning, “Talk and Cooperation in Space” 8/6/2015 https://spacenews.com/op-ed-china-talk-and-cooperation-in-space/) How might cooperation with China benefit the United States? Some hold that cooperation in AND . The United States is a status quo power; China is not.
Solvency
16. China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
Framing
17. The role of the ballot is to determine whether the 1AC was productive in the debate space - material violence does not go away after the ballot and there's no intrinsic connection between their scholarship and a W - any defense against their method means we win.
1/23/22
JF - Case - AT Asteroid Mining - Round 3 - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 3 | Opponent: Monta Vista KR | Judge: Gabriela Gonzales Case
Space War
Not only is there no space war, there is no territory to wage it on. Virtual constructs of space decide where and how power operates. Ignoring this virtuality, in favor of banning operations in name only, only shifts weaponry from one place to another and guises the horror, violence, and abandonment central to any and all virtual wars. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND and bayonets. This is a homogenisation that mirrors the rise of modern society
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of AND unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others.
Collisions
Russia and China say no, or the plan gets watered down. Bahney and Pearl 19 Benjamin Bahney and Jonathan Pearl, 3-26-2019, "Why Creating a Space Force Changes Nothing," BENJAMIN BAHNEY and JONATHAN PEARL are Senior Fellows at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research and contributing authors to Cross Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity. Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/space/2019-03-26/why-creating-space-force-changes-nothing accessed 12/10/21 Adam As Russia and China continue to push forward, U.S. policymakers may AND and does nothing at all to address ground-based antisatellite weapons development.
Underview
CI if the docs arent open sourced ask for the docs - even if its a norm on the wiki we just forget about it beucase we took the L in elims out round straregy doesnt matter beucase we are a one off K team non uq we have debated you before with you reading the same aff you shouldnt punish me for their lazy debating beucase they could have just emailed me for the docS
Hobbs misses the point – Baudrillard’s analysis is about the way in which the media obfuscates the actons of the war through filters of capital and hegemony which is why they framed Iraq as a dominating victory for America, also the card says literally nothing about debate
Framing
The role of the ballot is to determine whether the 1AC was productive in the debate space
1/23/22
JF - Case - AT Asteroid Mining - Round 4 - Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: 4 | Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: River Cook Case
Space War
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
The incessant productivity of hegemony is a drive toward its own destruction. hegemonic power has surpassed the domain of being referentially related to any material reality and can now only identify with the image of its own destruction. Pope 7. Professor of Language at York University, Pope, “Baudrillard’s Simulacrum: Of War, Terror, and Obituaries,” October 2007, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies: Volume 4, Number 3 Many of the obituaries printed some variance of the following quote: “It is AND logic, while engaging in the realm of challenge and the collusive relation.
Interpretation: The affirmative should not be able to fiat that every state, company, and individual follows the laws of the plan Violation: They do – the affirmative makes it so not only does every country sign the OST, but also that zero countries proceed to break the rules later Standards:
1) Real World – we have evidence about specific scenarios in which countries have announced that they will continue to mine – that takes out all of their offense about being able to create tiny “x country says no scenarios”
2) Negative Ground – we lose any and all scenarios in which some country can’t or won’t follow on because the affirmative says the three words “normal means solves” and gets out of the solvency deficit
They will say that it is unfair – no it’s not. If the negative says that a non-space fairing country like Indonesia says no, you still vote affirmative because they can solve their impacts – our argument is contextualized to some of the larger countries and their evidence also supports that those countries test the water
Normal means has some countries not totally comply and still try to mine in space – it is the affirmative’s role to figure out what the punishment for those actions are
Their Jamasmie ev is in the context of the space force escalating tensions which means if they’re right you vote negative on presumption because they can’t solve. Stockdale GS reads blue 1AC Jamasmie 21 Cecilia Jamasmie Cecilia has covered mining for more than a decade. She is particularly interested in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Diamonds and Latin America. Cecilia has been interviewed by BBC News and CBC among others and has been a guest speaker at mining conventions, including MINExpo 2016 and the World’s Copper Conference 2018. She is also member of the expert panel on Social License to Operate (SLO) at the European project MIREU (Mining and Metallurgic Regions EU). She holds a Master of Journalism from the University of British Columbia, and is based in Nova Scotia., 2-2-2021, "Experts warn of brewing space mining war among US, China and Russia," MINING, https://www.mining.com/experts-warn-of-brewing-space-mining-war-among-us-china-and-russia/ DD AG A brewing war to set a mining base in space is likely to see China AND 2020, more than 50 years after the US reached the lunar surface.
You should be skeptical of the their internal links and power predictions of the aff – foreign policy analysts are riddled with bad predictions about conflict – they do this because it gives them a pay check – especially overexaggerating Chinese power Drezner 21 Daniel W. 1-15-2021 Foreign Policy Wonks Gone Wild https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/15/foreign-policy-predictions-always-bad-worst-international-relations-rewards-catastrophic-thinking/ Accessed 3-7-2021 CSUF JmB NDT 2021 In a world defined by scarcity, there will always be a bountiful harvest of AND all this is clear: To stand out, future foreign-policy observers
Debris
Their Scoles evidence is literally in the context of NASA mining in space, make them read lines from the evidence that assumes otherwise, saying “no it’s not” is not an answer when we read a re-highlighting (blue) 1AC Scoles 15 Freelance science writer, and a contributing writer at WIRED Science, with articles in places like Popular Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, Vice, Outside, and others., 5-27-2015, "Dust from asteroid mining spells danger for satellites," New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630235-100-dust-from-asteroid-mining-spells-danger-for-satellites/ DD AG IF THE gold mine is too far from home, why not move it nearby AND worry about cascades of collisions like the one depicted in the movie Gravity.
The inevitability of the Kessler syndrome reveals that this debate is only a question of whether we reinvest in the future that is already arriving or take the more radical bet on a new relation with technics. Reno 2018 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality” in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 4–18)DR 19 For one thing, space debris is potentially dangerous to spacecraft. Space debris is AND directly mediates the futures that space agencies and industries imagine possible and desirable.
Divorsky is in the context of every satellite getting destroyed at the same time which is not their impact – that means no internal link and you vote negative.
Debris:
1 No Kessler Drmola and Hubik 18 Jakub Drmola, Division of Security and Strategic Studies, Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Masaryk University. Tomas Hubik, Department of Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematical Logic, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. Kessler Syndrome: System Dynamics Model. Space Policy Volumes 44–45, August 2018, Pages 29-39. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265964617300966?via3Dihub The baseline scenario represents a continuation of the current trends, which are simply extended AND future improvements in satellite reliability, debris tracking, and navigation 17.
No Escalation over Satellites:
1 Planning Priorities Bowen 18 Bleddyn Bowen 2-20-2018 “The Art of Space Deterrence” https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/the-art-of-space-deterrence/ (Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leicester)Elmer Space is often an afterthought or a miscellaneous ancillary in the grand strategic views of AND of losing specific satellites out of all proportion to their actual strategic effect.
2 Military Precedent Zarybnisky 18, Eric J. Celestial Deterrence: Deterring Aggression in the Global Commons of Space. Naval War College Newport United States, 2018. (Senior Materiel Leader at United States Air Force)Elmer PREVENTING AGGRESSION IN SPACE While deterrence and the Cold War are strongly linked in the AND fundamentals of deterrence illuminates how it applies to prevention of aggression in space.
3 Collision risk is very small Fange 17 Daniel Von Fange 17, Web Application Engineer, Founder and Owner of LeanCoder, Full Stack, Polyglot Web Developer, “Kessler Syndrome is Over Hyped”, 5/21/2017, http://braino.org/essays/kessler_syndrome_is_over_hyped/ The orbital area around earth can be broken down into four regions. Low LEO AND hitting that cube are tiny - less than 1 in 10,000.
2/20/22
JF - Case - AT Asteroid Mining - Round 5 - Palm
Tournament: Palm | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker RM | Judge: Ben Erdmann Case
Adv 1
No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of AND unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others.
Russia and China say no, or the plan gets watered down. Bahney and Pearl 19 Benjamin Bahney and Jonathan Pearl, 3-26-2019, "Why Creating a Space Force Changes Nothing," BENJAMIN BAHNEY and JONATHAN PEARL are Senior Fellows at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research and contributing authors to Cross Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity. Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/space/2019-03-26/why-creating-space-force-changes-nothing accessed 12/10/21 Adam As Russia and China continue to push forward, U.S. policymakers may AND and does nothing at all to address ground-based antisatellite weapons development.
AND they cut the scoles ev out of context – it’s actually about NASA’s mining projects, not private companies which means they have no internal link.
Reject the team – they specifically cut out the paragraph before that contextualizes this claim, only way to remedy, rejecting the argument is functionally the same because it’s their main internal link and means you vote neg on presumption because the plan does not affect NASA 1AC Scoles 15 Freelance science writer, and a contributing writer at WIRED Science, with articles in places like Popular Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, Vice, Outside, and others., 5-27-2015, "Dust from asteroid mining spells danger for satellites," New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630235-100-dust-from-asteroid-mining-spells-danger-for-satellites/ DD AG IF THE gold mine is too far from home, why not move it nearby AND worry about cascades of collisions like the one depicted in the movie Gravity.
Adv 2
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
Interpretation: The affirmative should not be able to fiat that every state, company, and individual follows the laws of the plan Violation: They do – the affirmative makes it so not only does every country sign the OST, but also that zero countries proceed to break the rules later Standards:
1) Real World – we have evidence about specific scenarios in which countries have announced that they will continue to mine – that takes out all of their offense about being able to create tiny “x country says no scenarios”
2) Negative Ground – we lose any and all scenarios in which some country can’t or won’t follow on because the affirmative says the three words “normal means solves” and gets out of the solvency deficit
They will say that it is unfair – no it’s not. If the negative says that a non-space fairing country like Indonesia says no, you still vote affirmative because they can solve their impacts – our argument is contextualized to some of the larger countries and their evidence also supports that those countries test the water
Normal means has some countries not totally comply and still try to mine in space – it is the affirmative’s role to figure out what the punishment for those actions are
Their faith in a post-labor and post-racial future enabled by technology produces a surrogate human affect that conceals the role of racialization in making human freedom possible. This technoliberalism claims to transcend difference while neglecting that racial logics are constitutive of both the very concept of technology and technological innovation. Atanasoski and Vora 19 Neda, Prof. Feminist Studies and Critical, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Legal Studies @ UC Santa Cruz, and Kalindi, Assoc. Prof Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Dir., Feminist Research Institute, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, pp. 28-9ak47 This chapter assesses the shifting contours of US racial liberalism and white supremacy through readings AND which technology has innovated upon capital’s dependence on racialized and gendered labor. 3
A New Hope
The aff’s left accelerationism died before it began because its rhetorical appeal to direct action, collective desire, and communist futurism were sequestered into theoretical and academic debates that were defanged by the academy and fascism. When Mark Fisher died, the aff died with him. Irvill et al, 17 (John Irvill, independent scholar; Thomas Dunn, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and the Director of the Basic Course at Colorado State University; Heather Koehler, Post Doc at Emory Vaccine Center, “Requiem for Left Accelerationism,” https://medium.com/@syffr/requiem-for-left-accelerationism-4048d8bec72e) A brief moment of euphoric illusion in between the depression. For all the remarks AND worth screaming into the void. Left-accelerationism died with Mark Fisher.
Thanos
Their hope for the debate space represents a relationship of cruel optimism to the ballot—a hopeful attachment to the logic of a problematic system of economic exchange that kills the potential for successful politics—the ballot, the source of subjectification and violence, is invested with optimism rather than productive progress. Berlant 06 (Lauren, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, “Cruel Optimism” in differences 17.3) When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talk- ing AND attachment, I will describe the shape of my transference with her thought.
1/23/22
JF - Case - AT Collisions - Round 2 - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 2 | Opponent: Northwood AA | Judge: Ben Cortez Case
Space Congestion
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of everyone.
No space war – it’s hype and systems are redundant Johnson-Freese and Hitchens 16 Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese is a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens. Views expressed are those of the author alone. Theresa Hitchens is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), and the former Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Stop The Fearmongering Over War In Space: The Sky’s Not Falling, Part 1. December 27, 2016. https://breakingdefense.com/2016/12/stop-the-fearmongering-over-war-in-space-the-skys-not-falling-part-1/ In the last two years, we’ve seen rising hysteria over a future war in AND likely do so. There is just too much redundancy in the system.
Time frame – Kessler effect 200 years away. Peter Stubbe, PhD in law @ Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, ’17, State Accountability for Space Debris: A Legal Study of Responsibility for Polluting the Space Environment and Liability for Damage Caused by Space Debris, Koninklijke Brill Publishing, ISBN 978-90-04-31407-8, p. 27-31 The prediction of possible scenarios of the future evolution of the debris p o p AND and such collisions are likely to occur every 5 to 9 years.89
1/23/22
JF - Case - AT Debris - Round 1 - Palm
Tournament: Palm | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit JW | Judge: Derek Hilligoss Case Debris The inevitability of the Kessler syndrome reveals that this debate is only a question of whether we reinvest in the future that is already arriving or take the more radical bet on a new relation with technics. Reno 2018 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality” in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 4–18)DR 19 For one thing, space debris is potentially dangerous to spacecraft. Space debris is AND and deformation not unlike what conventional archaeologists encounter amid the Earth’s beguiling surface. International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger than ten centimetres in diameter colliding in space at “millions, maybe even billions, to one” (Rincon, 2009). The chances of damage being sustained by operational objects as they collide with smaller objects are much higher, at 1–10; this may be their single greatest threat (Rex, 1998; Williamson, 2006; Wright, 2009, page 6). A United Nations report in 1999 brought together a range of measurements and statistical models from different agencies in an attempt to draw up a risk assessment. These models “did not agree quantitatively because of differences in assumptions and starting conditions” (UN, 1999, page 25). But despite this, it concluded that collision risk in Low Earth Orbit (less than 2000 kilometres) was “not great”, and the collision risk in Geostationary Orbit was “correspondingly lower”. However, all were also agreed that the number of major collisions would rise exponentially if current trends continued. This is based on the understanding that because it takes a long time to disperse, debris created from one impact will go on to create more impacts in a ‘collision cascade’, referred to as the ‘Kessler Syndrome’ (Brearley, 2005; Williamson, 2006; Wright, 2009). In a 2006 report NASA referred to this situation as “supercritical” (Wright, 2009). Modelling this effect adds to the complexity of a risk assessment already understood to be limited by knowledge of current amounts of debris and of how spacecraft respond to impacts that “do not fall into categories normally known from solid-state physics” (Rex, 1998, page 100; UN, 1999). To these difficulties in modelling the physical risks to spacecraft should be added the impossibility of establishing the social and economic consequences of a collision cascade in Geostationary Orbit, which one author describes as a (limited) resource “necessary to human life” as “the space ... which allows contemporary communication practices to exist” (2) Geostationary Orbit exists at an altitude of 35 786 kilometres at which satellites appear stationary from Earth. See Collis (2009) for a useful discussion of its legal geography. (Collis, 2009, pages 55 and 49). Expert opinion has suggested a collision cascade “could take out world communications” (Ellis, 2009). Outer space was once considered inexhaustible. It is now being realised that the development of outer space has been unevenly concentrated in key regions (see MacDonald, 2007), with implications for thinking of outer space as a ‘common pool resource’. Debris might impede the use of space within a generation as the unintended consequences of human activity undermine its promise (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a). Earth’s orbit now has to be seen as a ‘fragile environment’ for human activity (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a; Williamson, 2006). A 1972 UN Convention established that the ‘launching state’ is liable for any damage caused by its activities or by nongovernmental entities operating under its jurisdiction. In terms of damage caused by debris in outer space, if fault can be established then financial reparation must be made to restore damage to people or property. There is therefore, in principle, a mechanism for establishing accountability. Lotta Viikari (2008) still holds out hope for the development of Environmental Impact Assessments and the extension of ‘polluter pays’ principles to space debris (page 20). This convention breaks down, however, in a ‘supercritical’ space environment in which it becomes increasingly difficult for a claims commission to establish cause, fault, and damages (Zhao, 2004). Due to the impossibility of establishing fault, no claims for compensation have ever been settled in regard to space debris (Kai-Uwe Schrogl, personal communication, October 2010). As international law only considers direct damage between states and their corporations, there is no incentive to protect the space environment itself (Brearley, 2005, page 26). As the shortcomings of the system of accountability have become increasingly apparent, measures to address the space debris issue have been agreed by international bodies. NASA guidelines having already been established following a commitment by President Reagan (in consultation with industry), the 1999 UN report detailed a number of possible strategies for dealing with the space debris issue. Firstly, space objects should avoid releasing debris as part of their normal operations, avoid on-orbit explosion (eg, by venting energy sources), and be disposed of at the end of their lifetimes, either by reducing their orbit so that they reenter the atmosphere more quickly or by moving them to a ‘disposal’ or ‘graveyard’ orbit further from the Earth, though neither is risk-free (Rex, 1998). Secondly, space object designers should protect them with adequate shielding and collision avoidance mechanisms. Many of these guidelines have since been reiterated in 2002 Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee guidelines and were eventually accepted by the UN in 2008. The possibility but incalculability of a future collision cascade is a prime example of late-modern risk. It is particularly interesting to note that the reports were also marked by the paradox of risk modelling in a reflexive society (Beck, 2009, page 136): scientists attempted to incorporate responses to their predictions into the predictions themselves, thus reducing the predicted risk on which these responses were supposedly based. But the degree of voluntary international cooperation in response to the issue of space debris appears to vindicate Beck’s optimism about a cosmopolitanism ‘from above’, shared with others such as David Held and echoed in regard to space debris by David Wright (2009, page 10). There are, however, reasons to be sceptical. In an excellent paper on sovereignty in outer space, Jill Stuart (2009) contrasts Held’s (2002) cosmopolitan sovereignty with regime theories based on the Realpolitik of state confrontation or Everett Dolman’s (2002) ‘Astropolitik’, on which see Fraser MacDonald (2007) for a critique. Cosmopolitan sovereignty is based on a cosmopolitan consciousness both influencing and influenced by international cooperation in outer space (eg, the International Space Station). Stuart argues that the declining importance of the nation-state resonates with the ‘overview effect’ of viewing a borderless Earth from space (White, 1987). Despite her optimism, Stuart is aware that there are serious issues with Held’s cosmopolitanism, especially when applied to outer space. There is good reason to believe that the apparent cosmopolitanism of human activity in outer space is an ideological smokescreen behind which neoconservative policies are being pursued (see, for example, Caldicott, 2002). In his analysis of images of Earth taken from space, Denis Cosgrove (1994) identifies both a ‘One World’ discourse that views a globally connected world as the project of a modern Christian American imperialism, and a ‘Whole Earth’ vitalist environmentalism that sees Earth as fragile, isolated organic unity. “Each”, however, “effectively exemplifies the Apollonian urge to re-establish a transcendental, univocal, and universally valid vantage point from which to sketch a totalising discourse” (page 288). Both thus erase locality. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1996) also tears apart the ‘spaceship Earth’ ideology reflected in White’s overview effect, arguing that the illusion of a unified Earth serves only to disguise inequalities of power. The lack of accountability for space debris actually polarises international interest in space debris mitigation. States such as the US that rely on the ‘space operating environment’ to exercise control over social order (see Dickens and Ormrod, 2009), and that have an economic interest in maintaining capital growth in outer space, have a long-term interest in mitigating against debris although the US withholds high-quality data because of security concerns (Rincon, 2009). States with only a short-term interest in space, such as Indonesia, have not been willing to mitigate space debris (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a). Rational actor theory has been employed to argue both that the major spacefaring nations will be willing to mitigate space debris voluntarily (Brearley, 2005) and that international agreements are necessary (Viikari, 2008). Such theory reaches its limits here as it cannot cope with the differing political and economic interests within states and their temporal nature. Even when alliances and agreements hold, it must be questioned whether the current trajectory of space debris mitigation serves the interests of a global public. As Enzensberger (1996) observes, industrial measures to protect the environment either serve to concentrate capital in the hands of larger companies as smaller companies cannot finance their own mitigation systems, or they manifest themselves as costs to the public (page 26). Viikari (2008, page 24) suggests the former is also true of competing spacefaring states. Viikari nonetheless advocates a system wherein ‘environmental losers’ could receive other benefits. Neil Smith (2009) anticipates the development of outer space becoming the next stage in the extensive expansion of capitalism. He also makes clear, in relation to carbon trading on Earth, that a system such as Viikari proposes would neither protect the nearby space environment nor spread the benefits of space activity more equally (it merely represents ‘the vertical integration of nature into capital’). The costs borne by the public, meanwhile, include those associated with debris-monitoring and with state mission compliance with international guidelines. There has also been discussion of developing lasers, tethers, and slings to drag debris out of orbit (ESA, 2005), all of which introduce their own forms of risk. A contract to develop such technology would benefit one space technology company or another but the cost would be borne by the public, as recently demonstrated by NASA’s $1.9 million award to Star Technology and Research to develop the ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator (Chang, 2012). Commercial sector compliance with voluntary codes of practice is understandably low as it can be extremely costly and organisations within the sector cannot be held responsible in the event of catastrophe. Nor does capital, as an abstract and fluid entity, have any interest in the long-term future of the space environment. Satellites fix capital for a decade, but their investors have no concern for the future beyond this. Whether or not guidelines are forced on commercial operators will depend on the relationship between states or suprastates and capital. While the costs of mitigation are seen to undermine commercial viability it is unlikely that procedures will become compulsory. This includes the possibility of a launch tax, which would fly in the face of legislative trends in US space policy. Compulsory measures are more likely, however, if major stakeholders in the space industry become the ones to profit from them. European company EADS Astrium has funded £1 million in research into the CubeSail project at the Surrey Space Centre in the UK. The CubeSail is intended to drag satellites out of orbit at the end of their lifetimes. EADS is a major state contractor as well as a commercial operator. France has recently made it law that satellites under its jurisdiction must be deorbited after twenty-five years. There are profits to be made by Astrium if other countries follow suit. The politics of space debris call into question Beck’s assertion that the old alliances between the state, capital, and science are over. In recent work, Beck (2005, page 138) makes clear that he believes the transnational logic of capital trumps the power of states. But this work lacks the attention to the complexity of relationships between neoliberal and neoconservative politics that characterises the work of David Harvey (2003). Harvey argues that states vacillate historically between protecting regional interests and opening borders. The creation of larger and larger alliances of states is one potential outcome of this process. It may be that international state alliances in one form or another take responsibility for space debris. But Harvey reminds us that, firstly, these ‘cosmopolitan’ agreements do not represent the public interest but exist to safeguard capital accumulation, and, secondly, that they are always prone to dissolution. None of the parties involved support the measure most certain to improve orbital pollution, which is to stop (or limit) the launch of objects into orbit (UN, 1999). Instead, the solutions being pursued only serve to deepen the contradiction between those who benefit from risk mitigation and those who bear the costs. As attention to the problem grows, the perceived impending catastrophe appears to demand an immediate technological solution that actually obscures the politics at work see de Goede and Randalls (2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change. Time frame – Kessler effect 200 years away. Peter Stubbe, PhD in law @ Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, ’17, State Accountability for Space Debris: A Legal Study of Responsibility for Polluting the Space Environment and Liability for Damage Caused by Space Debris, Koninklijke Brill Publishing, ISBN 978-90-04-31407-8, p. 27-31 The prediction of possible scenarios of the future evolution of the debris p o p ulation involves many uncertainties. Long-term forecasting means the prediction of the evolution of the future debris environment in time periods of decades or even centuries. Predictions are based on models84 that work with certain assumptions, and altering these parameters significantly influences the outcomes of the predictions. Assumptions on the future space traffic and on the initial object environment are particularly critical to the results of modeling efforts.85 A well-known pattern for the evolution of the debris population is the so-called Kessler effect’, which assumes that there is a certain collision probability among space objects because many satellites operate in similar orbital regions. These collisions create fragments, and thus additional objects in the respective orbits, which in turn enhances the risk of further collisions. Consequently, the number of objects and collisions increases exponentially and eventually results in the formation of a self-sustaining debris belt around the Earth. While it has long been assumed that such a process of collisional cascading is likely to occur only in a very long-term perspective (meaning a time 1 n of several hundred years),87 a consensus has evolved in recent years that an uncontrolled growth of the debris population in certain altitudes could become reality much sooner.88 In fact, a recent cooperative study undertaken by various space agencies in the scope of i a d c shows that the current l e o debris population is unstable, even if current mitigation measures are applied. The study concludes:Even with a 90 implementation of the commonly-adopted mitigation measures ... the l e o debris population is expected to increase by an average of 30 in the next 200 years. The population growth is primarily driven by catastrophic collisions between 700 and 1000 km altitudes and such collisions are likely to occur every 5 to 9 years.89 No space war – it’s hype and systems are redundant Johnson-Freese and Hitchens 16 Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese is a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens. Views expressed are those of the author alone. Theresa Hitchens is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), and the former Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Stop The Fearmongering Over War In Space: The Sky’s Not Falling, Part 1. December 27, 2016. https://breakingdefense.com/2016/12/stop-the-fearmongering-over-war-in-space-the-skys-not-falling-part-1/ In the last two years, we’ve seen rising hysteria over a future war in space. Fanning the flames are not only dire assessments from the US military, but also breathless coverage from a cooperative and credulous press. This reporting doesn’t only muddy public debate over whether we really need expensive systems. It could also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The irony is that nothing makes the currently slim possibility of war in space more likely than fearmongering over the threat of war in space. Two television programs in the past two years show how egregious this fearmongering can get. In April 2015, the CBS show 60 Minutes ran a segment called “The Battle Above.” In an interview with General John Hyten, the then-chief of U.S. Air Force Space Command, it came across loud and clear that the United States was being forced to prepare for a battle in space — specifically against China — that it really didn’t want. It was explained by Hyten and other guests that China is building a considerable amount of hardware and accumulating significant know-how regarding space, all threatening to space assets Americans depend on every day. If viewers weren’t frightened after watching the segment, it wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of CBS. Using terms like “offensive counterspace” as a 1984 NewSpeak euphemism for “weapons,” it was made clear that the United States had no choice but to spend billions of dollars on offensive counterspace technology to not just thwart the Chinese threat, but control and dominate space. While it didn’t actually distort facts — just omit facts about current U.S. space capabilities — the segment was basically a cost-free commercial for the military-industrial complex. In retrospect though, “The Battle Above” was pretty good compared to CNN’s recent special, War in Space: The Next Battlefield. The latter might as well have been called Sharknado in Space – because the only far-out weapons technology our potential adversaries don’t have, according to the broadcast, seems to be “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!” First, CNN needs to hire some fact checkers. Saying “unlike its adversaries, the U.S. has not yet weaponized space” is deeply misleading, like saying “unlike his political opponents, President-Elect Donald Trump has not sprouted wings and flown away”: A few (admittedly alarming) weapons tests aside, no country in the world has yet weaponized space. Contrary to CNN, stock market transactions are not timed nor synchronized through GPS, but a closed system. Cruise missiles can find their targets even without GPS, because they have both GPS and precision inertial measurement units onboard, and IMUs don’t rely on satellite data. Oh, and the British rock group Pink Floyd holds the only claim to the Dark Side of the Moon: There is a “far side” of the Moon — the side always turned away from the Earth — but not a “dark side” — which would be a side always turned away from the Sun. More nefariously, the segment sensationalized nuggets of truth within a barrage of half-truths, backed by a heavy bass, dramatic soundtrack (and gravelly-voiced reporter Jim Sciutto) and accompanied by sexy and scary visuals. Make no mistake there are dangers in space, and the United States has the most to lose if space assets are lost. The question is how best to protect them. Here are a few facts CNN omitted. The Reality The U.S. has all of the technologies described on the CNN segment and deemed potentially offensive: maneuverable satellites, nano-satellites, lasers, jamming capabilities, robotic arms, ballistic missiles that can be used as anti-satellite weapons, etc. In fact, the United States is more technologically advanced than other countries in both military and commercial space. That technological superiority scares other countries; just as the U.S. military space community is scared of other countries obtaining those technologies in the future. The U.S. military space budget is more than 10 times greater than that of all the countries in the world combined. That also causes other countries concern. More unsettling still, the United States has long been leery of treaty-based efforts to constrain a potential arms race in outer space, as supported by nearly every other country in the world for decades. Indeed, under the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. talking points centered on the mantra “there is no arms race in outer space,” so there is no need for diplomat instruments to constrain one. Now, a decade later, the U.S. military – backed by the Intelligence Community which operates the nation’s spy satellites – seems to be shouting to the rooftops that the United States is in danger of losing the space arms race already begun by its potential adversaries. The underlying assumption — a convenient one for advocates of more military spending — is that now there is nothing that diplomacy can do. However, it must be remembered that most space-related technologies – with the exception of ballistic missiles and dedicated jammers – have both military and civil/commercial uses; both benign — indeed, helpful — and nefarious uses. For example, giving satellites the ability to maneuver on orbit can allow useful inspections of ailing satellites and possibly even repairs. Further, the United States is not unable to protect its satellites, as repeated during the CNN broadcast by various interviewees and the host. Many U.S. government-owned satellites, including precious spy satellites, have capabilities to maneuver. Many are hardened against electro-magnetic pulse, sport “shutters” to protect optical “eyes” from solar flares and lasers, and use radio frequency hopping to resist jamming. Offensive weapons, deployed on the ground to attack satellites, or in space, are not a silver bullet. To the contrary, U.S. deployment of such weapons may actually be detrimental to U.S. and international security in space (as we argued in a recent Atlantic Council publication, Towards a New National Security Space Strategy). Further, there are benefits to efforts started by the Obama Administration to find diplomatic tools to restrain and constrain dangerous military activities in space. These diplomatic efforts, however, would be undercut by a full-out U.S. pursuit of “space dominance.” This includes dialogue with China, the lack of which Gen. William Shelton, retired commander of Air Force Space Command, lamented in the CNN report. Given CNN’s “cast,” the spin was not surprising. Starting with Ghost Fleet author Peter Singer set the sensationalist tone, which never altered. The apocalyptic opening, inspired by Ghost Fleet, posited a scenario where all U.S. satellites are taken off-line in nearly one fell swoop. Unless we are talking about an alien invasion, that scenario is nigh on impossible. No potential adversary has such capabilities, nor will they ever likely do so. There is just too much redundancy in the system. No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of the ultimate high ground and the ease of destruction of space-based assets by the potential space weaponry, the utilization of space weapons is with current technology and no effective means to protect them far from fulfilling this potential (Steinberg 2012, p. 255). In current global international political and technological setting, the utility of space weapons is very limited, even if we accept that the ultimate high ground presents the potential to get a decisive tangible military advantage (which is unclear). This stands among the reasons for the lack of their utilization so far. Last but not the least, it must be pointed out that the states also develop passive defense systems designed to protect the satellites on orbit or critical capabilities they provide. These further decrease the utility of space weapons. These systems include larger maneuvering capacities, launching of decoys, preparation of spare satellites that are ready for launch in case of ASAT attack on its twin on orbit, or attempts to decrease the visibility of satellites using paint or materials less visible from radars (Moltz 2014, p. 31). Finally, we must look at the main obstacles of connection of the outer space and warfare. The first set of barriers is comprised of physical obstructions. As has been presented in the previous chapter, the outer space is very challenging domain to operate in. Environmental factors still present the largest threat to any space military capabilities if compared to any man-made threats (Rendleman 2013, p. 79). A following issue that hinders military operations in the outer space is the predictability of orbital movement. If the reconnaissance satellite's orbit is known, the terrestrial actor might attempt to hide some critical capabilities-an option that is countered by new surveillance techniques (spectrometers, etc.) (Norris 2010, p. 196)-but the hide-and-seek game is on. This same principle is, however, in place for any other space asset-any nation with basic tracking capabilities may quickly detect whether the military asset or weapon is located above its territory or on the other side of the planet and thus mitigate the possible strategic impact of space weapons not aiming at mass destruction. Another possibility is to attempt to destroy the weapon in orbit. Given the level of development for the ASAT technology, it seems that they will prevail over any possible weapon system for the time to come. Next issue, directly connected to the first one, is the utilization of weak physical protection of space objects that need to be as light as possible to reach the orbit and to be able to withstand harsh conditions of the domain. This means that their protection against ASAT weapons is very limited, and, whereas some avoidance techniques are being discussed, they are of limited use in case of ASAT attack. We can thus add to the issue of predictability also the issue of easy destructibility of space weapons and other military hardware (Dolman 2005, p. 40; Anantatmula 2013, p. 137; Steinberg 2012, p. 255). Even if the high ground was effectively achieved and other nations could not attack the space assets directly, there is still a need for communication with those assets from Earth. There are also ground facilities that support and control such weapons located on the surface. Electromagnetic communication with satellites might be jammed or hacked and the ground facilities infiltrated or destroyed thus rendering the possible space weapons useless (Klein 2006, p. 105; Rendleman 2013, p. 81). This issue might be overcome by the establishment of a base controlling these assets outside the Earth-on Moon or lunar orbit, at lunar L-points, etc.-but this perspective remains, for now, unrealistic. Furthermore, no contemporary actor will risk full space weaponization in the face of possible competition and the possibility of rendering the outer space useless. No actor is dominant enough to prevent others to challenge any possible attempts to dominate the domain by military means. To quote 2016 Stratfor analysis, "(a) war in space would be devastating to all, and preventing it, rather than finding ways to fight it, will likely remain the goal" (Larnrani 20 16). This stands true unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others. Framing The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of _, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over try or die risk calculus. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology. Matheson 17 Calum, Assoc. Prof Communication @ Pitt, “The sublime rhetoric of Pascal’s wager,” Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 0, Iss. 0,0, Sep 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CTPGbVmNAmtvfJPI8Q86/full//ak47 The form of Pascal's wager has been adapted outside of its explicitly religious context. It perennially crops up in debates over important public political decisions, from space exploration (Bostrom 2003 Bostrom, N. 2003. “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development.” Utilitas 15 (2): 308–314. ) and asteroid collisions (Matheny 2007 Matheny, J. 2007. “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction.” Risk Analysis 27 (5): 1334–1345. Google Scholar , 1340–1342) to climate change (Hurka 1993 Hurka, T. 1993. “Ethical Principles.” In Ethics and Climate Change: The Greenhouse Effect, edited by H. Coward and T. Hurka, 23–38. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. , 25) and anything else potentially covered by the precautionary principle.1 Footnote 1: Those with recent experience in intercollegiate policy debate should recognize the logic of Pascal's wager in the “try or die” arguments that dominate its risk calculus in debates over the desirability of hypothetical plans and the attendant necessity to describe the outcomes of any decision in terms of possible human extinction, whether the topic revolves around military deployment, subsidies for agriculture, or decriminalizing prostitution in the United States. End footnote 1 Chief amongst these is nuclear weapons. Most clearly articulated in Jonathan Schell's (1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ) Fate of the Earth and modified in Dick Cheney's “One Percent Doctrine,” the logic of the wager features in calculations of the catastrophic, but relatively unlikely, prospect of nuclear destruction. But despite its continued iteration, the logic of Pascal's wager is far from uncontroversial. A great number of critics over the years have shown that Pascal's argument is fundamentally unsound whether or not God exists. Indeed, as a logical proof the wager has few defenders. How then might we account for its persistence? What political possibilities does the trope afford? To answer these questions, this article will examine Pascal's original wager and the logical objections to it with reference to debates over nuclear weapons. My central argument is that Pascal's wager is best understood as an example of the rhetorical sublime. In making this case, I will link the sublime to Paul de Man's observations on the undecidability of grammar and rhetoric. Critics of Pascal have often interpreted his wager grammatically as a logical argument for belief rather than rhetorically as a use of trope to establish the impossibility of logical argument. Even those who identify rhetoric at work in Pascal's wager tend to analyze it in terms of rational persuasion, oftentimes with some distrust. However, Pascal's rhetorical method in the wager is more akin to the sublime style of Longinus (1991 Longinus. 1991. On Great Writing (On the Sublime). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. ) than the rational persuasion of Aristotelian logos, a result of the negative theology that informed Pascal's approach to the subject of God. The wager's power comes not from its mathematical consistency or reasoned argument but rather its stark presentation of infinity as something that exceeds reason itself in some measure and forces the potential believer to confront what exceeds logic itself. The outcome of this discussion matters because it implicates modern-day uses of the wager's argumentative structure and the sublime more generally. Appeals to act in the face of enormous, but enormously unlikely, threats cannot be effectively resisted by simply disputing the logic of their calculation, nor are they productive roadmaps for politics as conventionally understood. Rather, these arguments should be read in relation to Pascal's original theological motive as efforts to overwhelm auditors with the appeal to values and forces beyond their ability to comprehend or calculate with reason alone. Like Pascal's wager, the sublime also has its critics, and the nuclear example suggests that it might be particularly threatening in combination with Pascal's wager. However, the wager might also be read as evidence that the sublime also presents opportunities for political critique. Although Schell and Cheney's opposite deployments of the infinite demonstrate that aporia may result, Pascal's sublime rhetoric should not be dismissed. Indecision can also gesture towards political possibilities beyond rational, orderly politics. This essay will proceed in four parts. First, it will elaborate the structure and context of Pascal's original wager in the Pensées and the logical objections to it with the aim of recovering Pascal's reputation as a rhetorician employing a powerful trope, rather than a mathematician systematizing belief. Second, it will discuss Jonathan Schell's famous appeal for nuclear abolition in his book Fate of the Earth and Dick Cheney's so-called “One Percent Doctrine” against terrorism as contemporary uses of the wager's logical structure. Third, it will analyze the wager in terms of its sublime rhetoric and the influence of negative theology on Pascal's work. Finally, it will conclude with a discussion of the appeal to infinity as an argumentative strategy and the challenges of the sublime as an aspect of political rhetoric. Pascal's wager When he died at the age of 39, Blaise Pascal was in the midst of a project (or projects) of apology for the Christian faith. Although the work was never completed, it was ultimately to be assembled as the Pensées, a “mildly heretical” treatise reflecting Pascal's Jansenist conviction (Velchik 2009 Velchik, M. 2009. “Pascal's Wager is a Lie: An Epistemic Interpretation of the Ultimate Pragmatic Argument.” Aporia 19 (2): 1–8. , 1). Much of the book concerns the fallen state of humanity and the inability to directly contemplate the “hidden God,” the motive force of the universe that exists beyond the realms of speech and rational cognition. Pascal's work was inspired by the events of November 23 1654, eight years prior to his death, which he christened the “Night of Fire.” Vividly described in the Pensées, the Night of Fire was a two-hour long religious vision which he interpreted as a revelation of God (Ludwin 2001 Ludwin, D. 2001. Blaise Pascal's Quest for the Ineffable. New York: Peter Lang. , xi). Unable to communicate this experience directly, Pascal nevertheless endeavored to reach unbelievers with his brand of Jansenist Catholicism. One result was his famous wager, which Westel (1995 Westel, D. (1995). Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Penseés. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. , 13) has suggested would have been near the beginning of the assembled Penseés based on Pascal's notes and more recent textual scholarship. There is “not one inkling of doubt” that the final project was intended as an extended Christian apology (Westel 1995 Westel, D. (1995). Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Penseés. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. , 18) with the wager as a key element.22. Pascal himself was not the first to propose such an argument (Ryan 1994 Ryan, J. 1994. “The Wager in Pascal and Others.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 11–20. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. ), but his formulation of it is the most complete, widely known, studied, and influential and is therefore the most appropriate target for analysis. Also, although the wager argument did not originate with Pascal, Patricia Topliss has argued that its mathematical expression did, which again makes it a key analogue for later, secular iterations (Topliss 1966 Topliss, P. 1966. The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion in the Provinciales and the Pensées. Leicester: Leicester University Press. , 193–194). As Westel notes, “apology” applies a modern concept which Pascal would have understood somewhat differently. “‘Either God is or he sic is not,’” Pascal (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). ) wrote. “Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong” (122). Because the proposition that God is real cannot be proven or disproven, neither decision is clearly correct. But some decision must be made, because one either believes or does not – “you are already committed,” as Pascal put it (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). , 122).33. This reflects the Jansenist emphasis on individual faith as an element of salvation, a doctrinal commitment opposed by the Jesuits. View all notes Pascal argues that four outcomes are possible – that God exists and I believe, that God exists and that I do not believe, that God does not exist but I believe, and that God does not exist and I do not believe. These outcomes can be mapped onto a decision matrix, and indeed Pascal is considered one of the progenitors of decision theory for his analysis of alternative choices (Jordan 1994a Jordan, J. 1994a. “Introduction.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 1–10. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. , 3). Although Pascal implied a 50 probability of God's existence (assuming that the coin he described is fair), the most significant aspect of his argument is that probability itself is unimportant for this particular decision. Because the rewards for belief if God is real are “an eternity of life and happiness” while the potential losses of false belief are finite, the potential benefits of belief outweigh any drawback. “Though there were an infinite number of chances,” Pascal (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). ) wrote, “of which only one were in your favor,” one would be right to wager if “there were an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won.” But the chance of God's existence is not one-in-infinity, but some finite fraction: “there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won, one chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing, and what you are staking is finite” (123–124). That Pascal describes the bet in terms of “lives” bet and won only eases the way for its adaptation to public policy questions. Pascal's argument here is not that God exists, but that given the non-zero chance that God exists multiplied by the infinite reward of correct belief, it is rational to act as if God exists. It is rational to believe because of the expected value of this course of action, and if the “passions” prevent “reason” from convincing the gambler, then behaving like one believes by “taking holy water, having masses said, and so on” will eventually lead one to belief (Pascal 2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). , 124). Pascal also argues that the salubrious effects of a pious lifestyle are worth the attendant loss of hedonistic pleasures even without the infinite rewards of Heaven (125). Eventually, as these boons accumulate and the convert behaves in a pious fashion, the repetition of worship will instill genuine faith and fear for one's immortal soul: “Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else” (126). The fear of hell adds a dimension of infinite suffering as an alternative to infinite happiness, and it is this negative incentive that is often echoed in secular incarnations of the wager. Leaving aside the moral objections to Pascal's wager, the logic of this argument has been attacked in a number of ways. One objection is that because many gods – perhaps an infinite number of them – are possible, Pascal cannot do more than argue that atheism and agnosticism are irrational, which does not prove that Catholicism is correct (Jordan 1994b Jordan, J. 1994b. “The Many Gods Objection.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 1–10. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied.). The argument that any small probability with an infinite impact should be assessed as infinite creates an obvious difficulty when two infinitely important outcomes – one good, one bad – are compared against one another. Suppose that choosing the wrong god results in damnation by the right one. On which god does one then decide? The result is either paralysis, which Pascal rejects with his insistence that some choice is inescapable, or an assessment that returns to probability, making the appeal to infinity moot (Schlesinger 1994 Schlesinger, G. 1994. “A Central Theistic Argument.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 83–100. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 89). At this point, Patricia Topliss (1966 Topliss, P. 1966. The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion in the Provinciales and the Pensées. Leicester: Leicester University Press.) argues, the wager no longer makes sense. The unbeliever might argue that sufficiently low odds make the wager irrational (“is there an even chance that the unicorn exists?”) and that, knowing only the mortal world in which we live, to stake one's life in exchange for the possibility of salvation is to risk everything potentially for nothing (195–196). Perhaps God does exist but perversely tortures true believers – even if this outcome is unlikely, to make a judgment on this basis merely returns the debate to probability. Other difficulties exist with the nature of infinity as a concept, vital to the rewards and punishments of Pascal's wager. Leaving aside the well-known problem of Russell's Paradox, in which a set that contains all sets must paradoxically either include or exclude itself, there is also the St. Petersburg Paradox. Imagine that Peter offers a game to Paul involving coin flips. Peter will pay Paul a dollar if the coin ends up heads, two dollars if the second flip also turns up heads, four if this is repeated on the third flip, eight on the fourth, and so on to infinity (Bernoulli 1954, 31). How much would one be willing to pay to play this game? The amount that one could win rises towards the infinite, but the chances of winning decline toward zero as one continues to play. In addition, after a certain amount, doubling the prize money does not double its actual value – while having a 1000 dollars might legitimately make one twice as happy as having 500, having 200 billion dollars is not twice as good as having 100 billion, because as the prize increases the marginal utility of each dollar decreases. Although the expected value may only have an asymptotic relationship to zero, the value of playing this game has been set as low as two dollars (Ellenberg 2014, 244). The various objections to Pascal's wager have substantially discredited it is a logical argument and therefore led to its rejection by many scholars. In the summary judgment of Ian Hacking (1994), although the arguments of the wager are “valid,” none of them are convincing. “The arguments are worthless as apologetics today, for no present agnostic who understood the arguments would ever be moved to accept all the premises” (27). The wager is structured something like a geometric proof, so if Pascal the geometer has the math wrong, the wager has no value. At its extreme, this line of thinking lends credence to Buford Norman's (1977) claim that the Pensées are not rhetorical at all. “Many of the fragments of the Pensées,” he wrote, “consist of a direct association of ideas, with few connectives. This is precisely what the Port-Royal Logique calls jugement, which is basically the same as grammar … perhaps the most logical of all methods (styles), since it follows thought quite closely, and it is definitely far removed from rhetoric” (32). It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that Blaise Pascal, one of the great scientific and mathematical minds of his age, might well have realized the logical deficits of his wager but advanced it anyway for its rhetorical effect. In this sense, it is less a demonstration and more an effort to persuade, and Pascal should instead be judged for his merits as a rhetorician. Grammar and rhetoric of the wager The mathematical or logical reading of Pascal is the chief claim against him as a rhetorician. For interpreters such as Ellenberg and Hacking, Pascal's work is an effort to persuade through demonstration or at best grammar, as Norman argues. This interpretation sees Pascal as an earnest mathematician establishing what amounts to a proof, rather than a rhetorician employing his persuasive art to win the hearts of believers along with their minds. Others, however, have claimed the opposite position that Pascal's Penseés should be understood as primarily rhetorical, and Pascal himself as an expert rhetorician, although whether this is a complement or aspersion varies according to the source. This section will summarize and analyze this rhetorical interpretation, ultimately concluding that the opposition between grammar (as indexical structure) and rhetoric (as persuasion) is an opportunity to view Pascal's rhetoric as something in excess of both, more in line with the sublime tradition than the Aristotelian one. Pascal's own theory of rhetoric is developed in an essay called “The Art of Persuasion” (1909),4 which begins by acknowledging that although people tend to believe what pleases them, this is “base, ignoble and irrelevant” (406). The “art of persuasion,” as Pascal names it, is “simply the process of perfect methodical proofs,” and “consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions; of proposing principles or evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined” (Pascal 1909, 410). Blaise Pascal, “arguably the most successful and significant practitioner of written rhetoric in his century” (Lockwood 1996, 273), thus seems to treat the art of persuasion as something with a set of codifiable, if elusive, rules and laws, a sort of geometry of human interiority. Although Pascal professes not to know all the rules, persuasion is, in this view of his work, still thought of a technique bound by laws, hidden or not (Ijsseling 1976, 73). Rule-bound and systematic, this view of Pascal's rhetoric tends to support the idea that his mathematical language is meant to be taken literally, which is perhaps what Paul Valéry (1968) was thinking when he wrote that the wager is “absurd” because it “concludes with a hope in mathematics” (319). Pascal could be expected to transmit ideas with the minimum amount of figural embellishment or distortion, and it was precisely his failure to do that which sparked Valéry's ire, leading him to describe the deceased mathematician as “an enemy of the human race.” “My complaint against Pascal,” he wrote, “is that he wanted to persuade … For me this is shocking – I've caught him in the act of literature. As I see it, if a man has something to say and thinks it should be said, he should put it just as it is in his mind … Exactly as it is” (318). This attack resonates with criticisms of rhetoric more generally as an art of deception and deceit, unsuited to the serious questions of religion, science, and even statecraft. Indeed, in discussing another of Pascal's arguments Valéry claims that he cannot be an “inspired writer” because “it's a piece of rhetoric, a fake window … It's an effect—Pascal is a rhetorician” (317). Even Velchik, who acknowledges Pascal as a rhetorician without condemning him as such, still concludes that Pascal's wager is deceptive – “a white lie,” no matter how insightful (Velchik 2009, 8). The most influential work on this subject is Topliss's (1966) The Rhetoric of Pascal in which she concurs with Valéry's claim that Pascal uses figurative language as more than mere ornament, transforming the meaning of his arguments through sophisticated rhetorical technique. Although she did not envenom her judgment as did Valéry, Topliss argued that Pascal's technique departed from “Ancient Rhetoric” substantially in this regard (258). For Topliss, while something more may be at work, persuasion is still the central project of the Pensées, and in this sense Pascal does follow a certain tradition of ancient rhetoric beginning with Aristotle's well-known definition of rhetoric as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. Topliss and Valéry thus see Pascal's work as persuasive at its core, the exact opposite of Norman's claim that Pacal communicates so directly that his work is not rhetorical. The work of Paul de Man (1988) suggests one way to resolve this disparity. de Man argued that two theories of the function of language were at work in Pascal's writing. One was a “cognitive function” that is “right (juste) but powerless,” while the other was “a modal function” that was “mighty (forte) in its claim to rightness.” The “necessary choice” between “seduction and truth remains undecidable,” de Man argues, because even the language of Holy Writ cannot be squared in its persuasive power with a geometrical understanding of proof (de Man 1988, 153). This undecidability is what de Man calls allegory. The conflict between “seduction” and “truth” mirrors a distinction he developed in Allegories of Reading between “rhetoric” and “grammar.” In a famous passage in that book, de Man relates a scene from All in the Family in which Archie Bunker's wife, Edith, asks him if he would prefer his bowling shoes laced under or laced over, to which Archie replies “what's the difference?” When Edith begins to explain this difference, Archie becomes agitated; his statement, although it grammatically requests more information, rhetorically denies the need for it and is thus aporetic (de Man 1979, 9–10).5 In this formulation, both Norman and Topliss are correct: Pascal's language is “basically the same as grammar” as Norman argued, and yet paradoxically “restored to figures of rhetoric that had long been thought of as ornaments, their original function as instruments of persuasion” (Topliss 1966, 321). There is something undecidable in Pascal's rhetoric between reason and belief. Rather than leading us to accept the wager as a demonstration of how reason might be applied to God, the second half of this aporia suggests that the wager is a figurative argument for why there can be no such proof – something that Pascal himself hints at when he wrote that because the order of the holy infinitely exceeds the corrupt speech of human beings, “divine truths” could not fall under the arts of persuasion. “God alone,” he wrote, “can place them in the soul” (Pascal 1909, 406–407). If Pascal believed that the “hidden God” lies infinitely beyond the capacity of persuasive language to represent, why write the wager at all? Scholars who, like Topliss, argue that Pascal's work should be analyzed rhetorically share a basic assumption with the grammatical view of Norman and those who treat the wager as a kind of mathematical proof: in short, both view Pascal's central project as one of persuasion. Even de Man's somewhat more subtle reading largely shares this understanding. Pascal, through demonstration, rhetoric, or aporetic uncertainty is guilty of Valéry's charge of attempted persuasion. The wager does not seem to add much in this regard beyond a simple effort to persuade, an appeal to logos with the minor quirk of its mathematical appeal to infinity. Pascal's religious background suggests that this dismissal may be too hasty. As Topliss wrote, that Pascal's style “will not yield up all its secrets” hidden in his “most banal devices,” suggests that the author of the Penseés had his own “impenetrable places” (321). Negative theology and the sublime Dawn Ludwin (2001) makes the case in Blaise Pascal's Quest for the Ineffable that Pascal owed a great debt to the tradition of negative theology, particularly the work of Pseudo-Dionysius,6 which he seems to have read despite his relatively limited reading and citation of other scholarly works (3–4). Negative theology is an ancient tradition in Christian thought with strong parallels in other religions. Its central concern can be framed as the problem of infinity: if God is infinite and exceeds all human understanding, how are we to talk about the divine? Language fails to capture God because it is a fallen thing of human artifice and must necessarily provide a limit where none exists in the case of the divine. Language and its limits are thus central concerns in this line of thinking. Divine experiences, such as Pascal's Night of Fire, might be described, but they can never be fully understood through speech. We can only say what God is not because even the word “infinite” is nothing more than a linguistic marker, a condensation and thus a kind of paradox in itself. Like Pascal, Pseudo-Dionysius described God in striking terms as “light” and “fire,” arguing that although language might show a path, it is only in the silence that exceeds it where God might make itself known (50–56). These metaphors for God do not persuade, but rather lead the audience to the edge of a precipice beyond which the currency of language has no purchase. As Ludwin argues, the rhetorical theory deriving from such a position on God is more consistent with the sublime of Longinus than with the rational persuasion of Aristotle, and it is in these terms that Pascal might be best understood (140–141). The sublime has been partially absorbed into the field of aesthetics, but its origin is squarely rhetorical. For Longinus, powerful rhetorical figures – chiefly metaphor – may circumvent the auditor's reason by the sheer force of the concepts it invokes. Although it is unlikely that Pascal ever read Longinus,7 striking similarities exist in their theories of rhetoric. For Longinus, the greatest writing does not persuade, but “takes the reader out of himself sic” by employing and “irresistible force beyond the control of any audience.” Although the individual elements of style gradually accrete in a text to indicate the author's skill, individual tropes are sublime to the extent that they disrupt this coherence: “greatness appears suddenly,” Longinus wrote, “like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and reveals the writer's full power in a flash” (4). Like Pseudo-Dionysius's belief that the infinite power of God revealed the fragility of human subjects, Longinus's theory of rhetoric uses language as an appeal to a powerful motive force that exceeds the individual. A sublime trope conceals the proof of its own argument by “startling” the reader by “its own brilliance” (Longinus 1991, 27). The best figures are not even identifiable as such because their disruptive effect draws attention away from artifice altogether, making it appear natural (Longinus 1991, 29). The technical character of the trope is less important than its ability to shock the reader away from mundane language by changing their orientation towards the text and its associated concepts, however briefly. Viewed through this lens, Pascal's wager takes on a different significance. The purpose of the wager is not to provide a rational proof for God or even to compel adherence to the liturgy, but to use the trope of the infinite to disorient and displace subjects by revealing their finitude. The wager's logical structure is obviously flawed, but this fact does not undermine its significance – it is an example of rhetoric beyond persuasion. First, following Longinus, the effect of the trope should be to conceal the proof of its own argument if it is successful, rendering the proof itself relatively unimportant. The important part of the wager is not the finitude of probability in the coin toss, but the overwhelming, literally incomprehensible stakes of the wager. The wager is supposed to shock the reader into an inspired choice that will eventually lead to conversion through repetition, not to complete the process all at once. No part of Pascal's wager has to be compelling on its own, so the 50 probability of God's existence, for example, is arbitrary and irrelevant. The sublime is supposed to circumvent the faculty of reason, rather than appeal to it in an effort of persuasion that ends in a carefully calculated decision to convert. Second, following Pseudo-Dionysius, the weakness of the wager's logic might be precisely its appeal. The secret in the “banal devices” that Topliss diagnoses is that words never succeed in capturing the majesty of God. Pascal's sublime trope does its work through catachresis. As Pseudo-Dionysius (1987) writes, “incongruities are more suitable for lifting our minds up into the domain of the spiritual … the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things” (150). The same characteristic describes the wager. The hitch in its logic – the catachresis resulting from juxtaposing the crude indexical statement of the wager with its divine referent – forces the reader to engage the claim more thoroughly. Valéry's fury at Pascal's base rhetoric might be precisely the point: after all, it did lead the later French critic to write at length about a single sentence in Pascal's work, stewing over the crassness of its persuasion for many years.8 Confusion at the logic of the argument only helps to conceal its non-rational effect: after all, to be angered at its irrationality is to presume that it is supposed to be rational in the first place. Pascal was an “enemy of the human race” (in Valéry's language) to the extent that he wished to dissolve its finitude in the rapture of the divine by catachretic revelation. Even at his most rational and precise, Pascal argued that persuasion had its limits because the rules could never be fully known and individuals would follow their passions (Pascal, 1909). It is more fitting with his indisputable genius that the wager be read as an immensely subtle attempt to shock readers out of complacency rather than an immensely clumsy use of probability by one of Europe's greatest and most diligent mathematicians. Pascal's heirs The purpose of this exercise in reinterpretation is not only to vindicate Pascal the rhetorician. The wager's basic form is perhaps more influential today than it ever has been in past. Since the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, human beings have become aware that their decisions have the potential to destroy the entire species – and many others along with it. The challenges of thinking in terms of existential risk are immense, and many old habits of thought are irrelevant or even counterproductive when making these decisions. The root of this problem is that people are not accustomed to thinking in the appropriate scales. The magnitudes of some potential impacts, such as nuclear war, are so large that our minds are not well equipped to fathom them. If they are not truly “infinite,” they are at least close enough to exert the same effects on our minds. At the same time, probabilities are so low that in conjunction with existential risks they too are hard to grasp (Yudkowsky, 2008). It is this intersection that mirrors Pascal's wager: unpredictable, low chances married to immensely, possibly infinitely, important outcomes.9 Debates about existential risk thus adhere to Pascal's wager in form: at issue is not Pascal's argument for religious debate so much as his deployment of infinite value as a rhetorical device. The most thoroughly studied existential risk is nuclear war. Since the beginning of the Cold War, academics, think-tank employees, and military planners have made an effort to quantify the risks of nuclear conflict and manage it with the tools of reason (Abella 2008 Abella, A. 2008. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. ; Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. 2005. The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ). The arms race appears to be the first consistent use of Pascal's wager to inform arguments on both sides of a single dispute, and may serve as a prototype for later deployments. Roy Sorensen (1994 Sorensen, R. 1994. “Infinite Decision Theory.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 139–159. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. ) reported that a version of Pascal's wager showed up in arms control rallies (141), but its most complete and eloquent formulation is in Jonathan Schell's widely-read book Fate of the Earth. Schell (1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ) argues that the consequences of a nuclear war largely are unknown, but due to the possibility that an ensuing nuclear winter might destroy all life on Earth, such a war cannot be risked for any reason. He writes: the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account…. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs … although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble … we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species. (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95) The above passage follows the structure and content of Pascal's wager very closely. First, Schell asserts an infinite value coupled with an uncertain probability, which together result in an infinite expected value for one choice (and therefore, an infinite opportunity cost for another). Like the rewards of Heaven and the consequences of Hell, the virtues of peace and the losses of extinction are unquantifiable. Probability is irrelevant in this calculation because “a fraction of infinity is still infinity.” Second, Schell argues that although the chances of extinction are unknown, we should act as if it is a certain result of nuclear war, just as Pascal attempted not to prove that God exists, but rather that we should act as if this was the truth. It is possible that nuclear winter would not result; it is possible that a nuclear war will not occur; it is possible that the worst-case projections are wrong. Thus, although “scientifically speaking” there is “all the difference in the world between the mere possibility … and the certainty of it, morally they are the same,” which is why we must act “as though we knew for a certainty” that extinction will result from the possession of nuclear arms (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95). Third, Schell appeals not only to the unknown but to the unknowable. The impact of a nuclear war is beyond our comprehension, just as the God of Pascal's negative theology is. The passage cited here comes at the very end of the first part of Fate of the Earth, “Republic of Insects and Grass,” which is an extended description of the potential horrors of nuclear war written lyrically and beautifully, but includes an acknowledgement that nuclear war can be imagined but is indescribable because its witnesses would be dead (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 26). It mirrors the many names of God used by Pseudo-Dionysius to impress upon his readers that God is something that must necessarily exceed the human standpoint. Near the conclusion of his “wager” passage, Schell asserts, “we stand before a mystery.” Like Pascal's worshipper gradually humbled before God's revelation, the reader “taken outside” of themselves by Longinus's sublime, or the believer “struck by God's blazing light,” Schell's audience is to be overwhelmed by his language and made to realize their own finitude. “Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder,” he writes, “and our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution” (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95). Finally, Schell's sublime rhetoric is supposed to be an impetus for action. The third section of Fate of the Earth is called “The Choice” and is an explicit call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The existence of this technology forces a decision, just as the possibility of God does so in Pascal's wager. As in Pascal, for Schell the wager does not merely dislocate its reader – however vital this is to its effect – but also provides a framework for decision under the conditions of uncertainty, perhaps a hallmark of rhetoric itself. Faced with incalculable risks, inaction is not possible. To paraphrase Rush, choosing not to decide is still making a choice. The invocation of infinity does not have to persuade in an Aristotelian sense to serve a purpose. The Old Testament's Abraham was made to feel “but dust and ashes” before the Lord, but the end result of his encounter was clear: follow the divine law. Thus, it is for Schell: our confrontation with finitude breeds humility, reverence, and caution, resulting in support for disarmament without the need for a nuclear Revelation. The paradox of Schell's sublime wager grows out of the necessity for decision. If any fraction of infinity is still infinity, then it becomes impossible to choose between competing options that might stake claims to the same infinitely important outcome. While abolition might prevent a nuclear war from eradicating humanity, through any number of improbable outcomes, it might also cause human extinction, perhaps by triggering devastating non-nuclear wars, another wave of nuclear proliferation, biological war (Payne 2010 Payne, K. 2010. “Disarmament danger.” National Review Online. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/229492/disarmament-danger-keith-b-payne ), or even preventing humanity from deflecting an asteroid collision (Wall 2014 Wall, M. 2014. “How Nuclear Bombs Could Save Earth from Killer Asteroids. Space.com. http://www.space.com/24696-asteroid-strike-nuclear-bombs.html ). When probability is rendered irrelevant by the sign of the infinite, there is no way to distinguish between one outcome and another: all fractions of infinity are infinity. While for Schell the risk of nuclear war mandates a policy of abolition, for advocates of nuclear deterrence, the possibility that disarmament might encourage another power to develop or use nuclear weapons against the defenseless United States mandates the exact opposite: maintenance, perhaps even aggressive expansion, of the nuclear arsenal. Such a position was, in fact, taken by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Ron Suskind reports that in 2001, CIA Director George Tenet briefed Cheney about the possibility that terrorists or hostile nations might develop nuclear weapons with the aid of Pakistani radicals. In response, Cheney proffered the now-infamous “One Percent Doctrine.” “With a low-probability, high impact event like this,” he said, “I'm frankly not sure how to engage. We're going to have to look at it in a completely different way” (qtd. in Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 61). That “different way” turned out to mirror Pascal's familiar construction. “If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response … It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence … It's about our response” (qtd. in Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 62). The bar for acceptable evidence, as Suskind notes, can be “set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply” (62). As Cheney himself stressed, the doctrine was about response: any probability of an adversary possessing nuclear weapons should be taken as a certainty. The “Cheney Doctrine” thus helped to establish the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive use of force against enemies potentially armed with “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” itself a somewhat ill-defined term. In the realm of nuclear weapons, this meant that American leaders could contemplate the preemptive use of nuclear arms against potential nuclear adversaries, as detailed in a 2005 draft of the Pentagon's Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Chiefs of Staff 2005 Joint Chiefs of Staff. 2005. Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Publication 3-12). http://www.wslfweb.org/docs/doctrine/3_12fc2.pdf ). The Cheney Doctrine thus brings Schell's logic full circle and exposes the aporia of the wager's need for decision.1010. This problem is also known as Buridan's Ass: an ass, equally hungry and thirsty, dies of privation when forced to choose between a pile of hay and a trough of water because both are exactly equally appealing. View all notes Conclusion The difficulty with Schell's argument (and conversely, with Cheney's) is equivalent to the “many gods” objection to Pascal's wager. Given a range of mutually exclusive options, each representing a potentially infinite impact, there is no longer a way to choose amongst them. For Pascal, that decision boiled down to faith, but the same was true for the Bush administration in its embrace of impulse and conviction over rationality and evidence (Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 308). This same problem affects decisions over other existential threats: perhaps manipulating asteroids to miss the Earth would save us all, but perhaps the technology could be used to cause a strike; perhaps slowing the rate of climate change could prevent warming temperatures and ecological disruption, but perhaps it could cause a new ice age; perhaps space colonization would safeguard the human species, but perhaps it would attract the attention of xenocidal extraterrestrials. Infinite stakes combined with indeterminate probabilities and the necessity of decision is a counsel of despair. Even if, like Pascal's, Schell's wager is not meant to be a logical proof but an appeal to a dislocating sublime force, the problem remains. The rhetorical effect of the infinity trope is part of nuclear deterrence. One accepted mission of the US nuclear arsenal remains as the capacity to “overawe” enemies with the sheer incalculable force of thermonuclear weapons (Oelrich 2005 Oelrich, I. 2005. Missions for Nuclear Weapons after the Cold War (Federation of American Scientists Occasional Paper No. 3). https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys280/archive/01282005175922.pdf , 46). The “madman” theory of nuclear deterrence, named for Richard Nixon, relies on projecting the image of irrationality over nuclear decisions to that a rational opponent might believe that they will actually be used in response to aggression, even if the cost to the defender is also very high.1111. To some extent, as Kavka's Toxin Puzzle suggests, all nuclear deterrence is paradoxical: after an attack, nuclear retaliation is no longer a rational choice because one's one destruction can no longer be prevented, so, assuming the rational actors necessary for deterrence to work in the first place, it is required that one intend to do something in the future that one would be irrational to actually intend to do at the time when that decision is required. View all notes This is precisely the logic of doomsday weapons such as cobalt bombs or the Dead Hand: the cost of extinction is so high that it overwhelms any possible gain for an aggressor. Schell's vivid descriptions of the nuclear aftermath may just as well result in a passionate commitment to nuclear deterrence. The same factors that make Schell's appeal powerful also limit the ability to resist Cheney's reinterpretation of the wager. When rational calculation is made subservient to infinite risks, then reasoned arguments fail to diminish the force of sublime rhetoric, just as the various logical objections to Pascal's wager have not eliminated its staying power. The limitless damage of a nuclear war (or imagined terrorist attack) overwhelm reason. John Mueller (2010 Mueller, J. 2010. Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ) has done a detailed analysis of the probability of nuclear terrorism that assigns it roughly one in three billion odds (204–206), but the numinous fear of nuclear weapons seems to remain. It is tempting to conclude with Ned O'Gorman claim that the sublime is antithetical to politics. Because the sublime is an overwhelming, illimitable force, no adjective changes it; there is no “political sublime” because one term cannot modify the other. As O'Gorman (2006 O'Gorman, N. 2006. “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron.” Millennium 34: 889–915. ) writes, “the sublime is a free-floating force, a univocal power, which because of its univocality cannot provide alternatives for change, guide critique, or articulate new horizons. The sublime speaks only unpredicated power” (889). The sublime may be radical in a sense, but it is not politically radical. Rather, it tends toward the conservative because it cannot offer alternatives to the status quo and constitutes a “rhetorical lure” best employed by the elite and powerful (O'Gorman 2006 O'Gorman, N. 2006. “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron.” Millennium 34: 889–915. , 891). In this reading, the present article is merely a Synodus Horrenda, dragging Pascal forth again as rhetorician rather than a mathematician and condemning him nonetheless. To write off Pascal's wager so quickly would be premature. As Schell and Cheney demonstrate, it is the need for decision that frustrates its possibility and results in aporia. Both men have read the wager grammatically and used it to calculate a decision. They may also present it rhetorically, attempting to impress not the rightness of their judgment but the overwhelming force represented by the infinite losses of a nuclear war. In either case, the wager is still aimed at persuasion but cannot overcome its own paradoxical logos. What is missing is a different aporia on an altogether different level: that identified by de Man as the contradiction of grammar and rhetoric. At issue is a practice for reading the wager, and this contradiction can be seen working in Pascal's original if it is read not as an appeal to believe in a specific God but rather an attempt to disrupt the obstacles that lead some people not to believe in any power beyond themselves. Pascal himself was not converted by this proof nor any other, but by the revelation of his “night of fire.” His wager is not a rational argument or a rhetorical device, but rather a rhetorical device illustrating the limits both of rationality and rhetoric. The point of the coin flip is to demonstrate that no rational decision is possible. Faith and fidelity constitute a moral life. Pascal argues that piety comes through repeated practice, but this practice itself is a means to realize the scope of what exceeds the human, not an end in itself. This conception of the sublime is not political according to O'Gorman's definition, where the “sine qua non of all politics except the totalitarian is differentiation” (2006, 891). As the juxtaposition of Schell's and Cheney's uses of the wager shows, the political result of sublime rhetoric is by no means determined by its use. To say that these figures do not assist one in making instrumental choices between different political goals is not to suggest that the sublime may still have radical – and not necessarily conservative – potential if “political” is not synonymous with “politics.” As Jean-Luc Nancy (2008 Nancy, J.-L. 2008. Philosophical Chronicles. New York: Fordham University Press. ) argues, nothing requires that the two terms be identical and we should be conscious of our linguistic choice between them (27–28). The political can be understood as an orientation to community, an attitude rather than being “dissolved in the sociotechnical element of forces and needs” (Nancy 1991 Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. , 40). The sublime may not aid directly in politics, but it may help to develop a conception of the political by revealing the limits of our capacity to order and to comprehend our social world. To dislocate the reader by illustrating the limit of knowledge is to call into question the inevitability of social structures that we have built and inherited. Nothing about the sublime need favor the elite and powerful. Oft forgotten in Longinus's writing is an attack on avarice and material accumulation as measures of value. Longinus argues that “wealth, honors, reputation, absolute power, and all things which are accompanied by much external and theatrical pomp” cannot be noble because to “despise them is in itself no mean blessing” (9). There is a contradiction inherent in any set of social values that idolizes the rich because they are rich and also values those who forgo material benefits because they are hollow and superficial. Why is it, Longinus asks, that although there is “no dearth” of people “who are persuasive, interested in public affairs, shrewd, skillful, and certainly delightful speakers,” there are so few who are truly outstanding? His answer is that the love of money “is a disease that shrinks a man sic.” “I cannot see how we can honor wealth without limit or, and this is nearer the truth, make it our god, without admitting into our souls those kindred evils that inevitably follow it” (Longinus 1991, 57). Rather than proscribe an instrumental solution like those shrewd speakers occupied with public affairs might, Longinus seeks to identify the attachments that serve as the conditions of possibility for corruption. “For surely if our selfish desires were altogether freed from prison, as it were, and let loose upon our neighbors, they would scorch the earth with their evils” (Longinus 1991, 58). The “worst bane” is that nothing is done for its own sake, he argues, but only because it serves as a means to an end (58) – which is close to Nancy's concern about dissolving the political into the “sociotechnical element” of politics. The sublime's inattention to differentiation might be read as a critique of instrumental politics and accumulation. Configured this way, Pascal's wager, like Longinus's sublime and Pseudo-Dionysius's negative theology, displays the presence of something beyond the technical capacities of reason to resolve and reveals the arbitrariness of power as it is exercised in an unequal society. In disorienting its readers, the sublime is a check on hubris rather than the basis for programmatic action. At the very least, the sublime is important for argument research because its use continues, for better or for worse, and exploring the collective psychology underpinning its appeal might be a more effective means of countering its dangerous uses than rational debunking alone allows. O'Gorman's critique is a useful corrective for those who might use the concept as a kind of universal solvent that obviates the need for day-to-day political choices or provisional commitments. But the genius of Pascal's wager as a rhetorical trope is its capacity to remind us that the quotidian decisions of politics, vital as they are, do not exhaust the political itself. What we value in community has no satisfying objective basis, but is something we must deliberate collectively in an age when technological progress makes a literal Night of Fire all too possible.
2/13/22
JF - Case - AT Debris - Round 3 - UNLV
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 3 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit KP | Judge: Yoyo Lei Case Debris The inevitability of the Kessler syndrome reveals that this debate is only a question of whether we reinvest in the future that is already arriving or take the more radical bet on a new relation with technics. Reno 2018 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality” in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 4–18)DR 19 For one thing, space debris is potentially dangerous to spacecraft. Space debris is AND and deformation not unlike what conventional archaeologists encounter amid the Earth’s beguiling surface. International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger than ten centimetres in diameter colliding in space at “millions, maybe even billions, to one” (Rincon, 2009). The chances of damage being sustained by operational objects as they collide with smaller objects are much higher, at 1–10; this may be their single greatest threat (Rex, 1998; Williamson, 2006; Wright, 2009, page 6). A United Nations report in 1999 brought together a range of measurements and statistical models from different agencies in an attempt to draw up a risk assessment. These models “did not agree quantitatively because of differences in assumptions and starting conditions” (UN, 1999, page 25). But despite this, it concluded that collision risk in Low Earth Orbit (less than 2000 kilometres) was “not great”, and the collision risk in Geostationary Orbit was “correspondingly lower”. However, all were also agreed that the number of major collisions would rise exponentially if current trends continued. This is based on the understanding that because it takes a long time to disperse, debris created from one impact will go on to create more impacts in a ‘collision cascade’, referred to as the ‘Kessler Syndrome’ (Brearley, 2005; Williamson, 2006; Wright, 2009). In a 2006 report NASA referred to this situation as “supercritical” (Wright, 2009). Modelling this effect adds to the complexity of a risk assessment already understood to be limited by knowledge of current amounts of debris and of how spacecraft respond to impacts that “do not fall into categories normally known from solid-state physics” (Rex, 1998, page 100; UN, 1999). To these difficulties in modelling the physical risks to spacecraft should be added the impossibility of establishing the social and economic consequences of a collision cascade in Geostationary Orbit, which one author describes as a (limited) resource “necessary to human life” as “the space ... which allows contemporary communication practices to exist” (2) Geostationary Orbit exists at an altitude of 35 786 kilometres at which satellites appear stationary from Earth. See Collis (2009) for a useful discussion of its legal geography. (Collis, 2009, pages 55 and 49). Expert opinion has suggested a collision cascade “could take out world communications” (Ellis, 2009). Outer space was once considered inexhaustible. It is now being realised that the development of outer space has been unevenly concentrated in key regions (see MacDonald, 2007), with implications for thinking of outer space as a ‘common pool resource’. Debris might impede the use of space within a generation as the unintended consequences of human activity undermine its promise (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a). Earth’s orbit now has to be seen as a ‘fragile environment’ for human activity (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a; Williamson, 2006). A 1972 UN Convention established that the ‘launching state’ is liable for any damage caused by its activities or by nongovernmental entities operating under its jurisdiction. In terms of damage caused by debris in outer space, if fault can be established then financial reparation must be made to restore damage to people or property. There is therefore, in principle, a mechanism for establishing accountability. Lotta Viikari (2008) still holds out hope for the development of Environmental Impact Assessments and the extension of ‘polluter pays’ principles to space debris (page 20). This convention breaks down, however, in a ‘supercritical’ space environment in which it becomes increasingly difficult for a claims commission to establish cause, fault, and damages (Zhao, 2004). Due to the impossibility of establishing fault, no claims for compensation have ever been settled in regard to space debris (Kai-Uwe Schrogl, personal communication, October 2010). As international law only considers direct damage between states and their corporations, there is no incentive to protect the space environment itself (Brearley, 2005, page 26). As the shortcomings of the system of accountability have become increasingly apparent, measures to address the space debris issue have been agreed by international bodies. NASA guidelines having already been established following a commitment by President Reagan (in consultation with industry), the 1999 UN report detailed a number of possible strategies for dealing with the space debris issue. Firstly, space objects should avoid releasing debris as part of their normal operations, avoid on-orbit explosion (eg, by venting energy sources), and be disposed of at the end of their lifetimes, either by reducing their orbit so that they reenter the atmosphere more quickly or by moving them to a ‘disposal’ or ‘graveyard’ orbit further from the Earth, though neither is risk-free (Rex, 1998). Secondly, space object designers should protect them with adequate shielding and collision avoidance mechanisms. Many of these guidelines have since been reiterated in 2002 Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee guidelines and were eventually accepted by the UN in 2008. The possibility but incalculability of a future collision cascade is a prime example of late-modern risk. It is particularly interesting to note that the reports were also marked by the paradox of risk modelling in a reflexive society (Beck, 2009, page 136): scientists attempted to incorporate responses to their predictions into the predictions themselves, thus reducing the predicted risk on which these responses were supposedly based. But the degree of voluntary international cooperation in response to the issue of space debris appears to vindicate Beck’s optimism about a cosmopolitanism ‘from above’, shared with others such as David Held and echoed in regard to space debris by David Wright (2009, page 10). There are, however, reasons to be sceptical. In an excellent paper on sovereignty in outer space, Jill Stuart (2009) contrasts Held’s (2002) cosmopolitan sovereignty with regime theories based on the Realpolitik of state confrontation or Everett Dolman’s (2002) ‘Astropolitik’, on which see Fraser MacDonald (2007) for a critique. Cosmopolitan sovereignty is based on a cosmopolitan consciousness both influencing and influenced by international cooperation in outer space (eg, the International Space Station). Stuart argues that the declining importance of the nation-state resonates with the ‘overview effect’ of viewing a borderless Earth from space (White, 1987). Despite her optimism, Stuart is aware that there are serious issues with Held’s cosmopolitanism, especially when applied to outer space. There is good reason to believe that the apparent cosmopolitanism of human activity in outer space is an ideological smokescreen behind which neoconservative policies are being pursued (see, for example, Caldicott, 2002). In his analysis of images of Earth taken from space, Denis Cosgrove (1994) identifies both a ‘One World’ discourse that views a globally connected world as the project of a modern Christian American imperialism, and a ‘Whole Earth’ vitalist environmentalism that sees Earth as fragile, isolated organic unity. “Each”, however, “effectively exemplifies the Apollonian urge to re-establish a transcendental, univocal, and universally valid vantage point from which to sketch a totalising discourse” (page 288). Both thus erase locality. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1996) also tears apart the ‘spaceship Earth’ ideology reflected in White’s overview effect, arguing that the illusion of a unified Earth serves only to disguise inequalities of power. The lack of accountability for space debris actually polarises international interest in space debris mitigation. States such as the US that rely on the ‘space operating environment’ to exercise control over social order (see Dickens and Ormrod, 2009), and that have an economic interest in maintaining capital growth in outer space, have a long-term interest in mitigating against debris although the US withholds high-quality data because of security concerns (Rincon, 2009). States with only a short-term interest in space, such as Indonesia, have not been willing to mitigate space debris (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a). Rational actor theory has been employed to argue both that the major spacefaring nations will be willing to mitigate space debris voluntarily (Brearley, 2005) and that international agreements are necessary (Viikari, 2008). Such theory reaches its limits here as it cannot cope with the differing political and economic interests within states and their temporal nature. Even when alliances and agreements hold, it must be questioned whether the current trajectory of space debris mitigation serves the interests of a global public. As Enzensberger (1996) observes, industrial measures to protect the environment either serve to concentrate capital in the hands of larger companies as smaller companies cannot finance their own mitigation systems, or they manifest themselves as costs to the public (page 26). Viikari (2008, page 24) suggests the former is also true of competing spacefaring states. Viikari nonetheless advocates a system wherein ‘environmental losers’ could receive other benefits. Neil Smith (2009) anticipates the development of outer space becoming the next stage in the extensive expansion of capitalism. He also makes clear, in relation to carbon trading on Earth, that a system such as Viikari proposes would neither protect the nearby space environment nor spread the benefits of space activity more equally (it merely represents ‘the vertical integration of nature into capital’). The costs borne by the public, meanwhile, include those associated with debris-monitoring and with state mission compliance with international guidelines. There has also been discussion of developing lasers, tethers, and slings to drag debris out of orbit (ESA, 2005), all of which introduce their own forms of risk. A contract to develop such technology would benefit one space technology company or another but the cost would be borne by the public, as recently demonstrated by NASA’s $1.9 million award to Star Technology and Research to develop the ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator (Chang, 2012). Commercial sector compliance with voluntary codes of practice is understandably low as it can be extremely costly and organisations within the sector cannot be held responsible in the event of catastrophe. Nor does capital, as an abstract and fluid entity, have any interest in the long-term future of the space environment. Satellites fix capital for a decade, but their investors have no concern for the future beyond this. Whether or not guidelines are forced on commercial operators will depend on the relationship between states or suprastates and capital. While the costs of mitigation are seen to undermine commercial viability it is unlikely that procedures will become compulsory. This includes the possibility of a launch tax, which would fly in the face of legislative trends in US space policy. Compulsory measures are more likely, however, if major stakeholders in the space industry become the ones to profit from them. European company EADS Astrium has funded £1 million in research into the CubeSail project at the Surrey Space Centre in the UK. The CubeSail is intended to drag satellites out of orbit at the end of their lifetimes. EADS is a major state contractor as well as a commercial operator. France has recently made it law that satellites under its jurisdiction must be deorbited after twenty-five years. There are profits to be made by Astrium if other countries follow suit. The politics of space debris call into question Beck’s assertion that the old alliances between the state, capital, and science are over. In recent work, Beck (2005, page 138) makes clear that he believes the transnational logic of capital trumps the power of states. But this work lacks the attention to the complexity of relationships between neoliberal and neoconservative politics that characterises the work of David Harvey (2003). Harvey argues that states vacillate historically between protecting regional interests and opening borders. The creation of larger and larger alliances of states is one potential outcome of this process. It may be that international state alliances in one form or another take responsibility for space debris. But Harvey reminds us that, firstly, these ‘cosmopolitan’ agreements do not represent the public interest but exist to safeguard capital accumulation, and, secondly, that they are always prone to dissolution. None of the parties involved support the measure most certain to improve orbital pollution, which is to stop (or limit) the launch of objects into orbit (UN, 1999). Instead, the solutions being pursued only serve to deepen the contradiction between those who benefit from risk mitigation and those who bear the costs. As attention to the problem grows, the perceived impending catastrophe appears to demand an immediate technological solution that actually obscures the politics at work see de Goede and Randalls (2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change. Time frame – Kessler effect 200 years away. Peter Stubbe, PhD in law @ Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, ’17, State Accountability for Space Debris: A Legal Study of Responsibility for Polluting the Space Environment and Liability for Damage Caused by Space Debris, Koninklijke Brill Publishing, ISBN 978-90-04-31407-8, p. 27-31 The prediction of possible scenarios of the future evolution of the debris p o p ulation involves many uncertainties. Long-term forecasting means the prediction of the evolution of the future debris environment in time periods of decades or even centuries. Predictions are based on models84 that work with certain assumptions, and altering these parameters significantly influences the outcomes of the predictions. Assumptions on the future space traffic and on the initial object environment are particularly critical to the results of modeling efforts.85 A well-known pattern for the evolution of the debris population is the so-called Kessler effect’, which assumes that there is a certain collision probability among space objects because many satellites operate in similar orbital regions. These collisions create fragments, and thus additional objects in the respective orbits, which in turn enhances the risk of further collisions. Consequently, the number of objects and collisions increases exponentially and eventually results in the formation of a self-sustaining debris belt around the Earth. While it has long been assumed that such a process of collisional cascading is likely to occur only in a very long-term perspective (meaning a time 1 n of several hundred years),87 a consensus has evolved in recent years that an uncontrolled growth of the debris population in certain altitudes could become reality much sooner.88 In fact, a recent cooperative study undertaken by various space agencies in the scope of i a d c shows that the current l e o debris population is unstable, even if current mitigation measures are applied. The study concludes:Even with a 90 implementation of the commonly-adopted mitigation measures ... the l e o debris population is expected to increase by an average of 30 in the next 200 years. The population growth is primarily driven by catastrophic collisions between 700 and 1000 km altitudes and such collisions are likely to occur every 5 to 9 years.89 No space war – it’s hype and systems are redundant Johnson-Freese and Hitchens 16 Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese is a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens. Views expressed are those of the author alone. Theresa Hitchens is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), and the former Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Stop The Fearmongering Over War In Space: The Sky’s Not Falling, Part 1. December 27, 2016. https://breakingdefense.com/2016/12/stop-the-fearmongering-over-war-in-space-the-skys-not-falling-part-1/ In the last two years, we’ve seen rising hysteria over a future war in space. Fanning the flames are not only dire assessments from the US military, but also breathless coverage from a cooperative and credulous press. This reporting doesn’t only muddy public debate over whether we really need expensive systems. It could also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The irony is that nothing makes the currently slim possibility of war in space more likely than fearmongering over the threat of war in space. Two television programs in the past two years show how egregious this fearmongering can get. In April 2015, the CBS show 60 Minutes ran a segment called “The Battle Above.” In an interview with General John Hyten, the then-chief of U.S. Air Force Space Command, it came across loud and clear that the United States was being forced to prepare for a battle in space — specifically against China — that it really didn’t want. It was explained by Hyten and other guests that China is building a considerable amount of hardware and accumulating significant know-how regarding space, all threatening to space assets Americans depend on every day. If viewers weren’t frightened after watching the segment, it wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of CBS. Using terms like “offensive counterspace” as a 1984 NewSpeak euphemism for “weapons,” it was made clear that the United States had no choice but to spend billions of dollars on offensive counterspace technology to not just thwart the Chinese threat, but control and dominate space. While it didn’t actually distort facts — just omit facts about current U.S. space capabilities — the segment was basically a cost-free commercial for the military-industrial complex. In retrospect though, “The Battle Above” was pretty good compared to CNN’s recent special, War in Space: The Next Battlefield. The latter might as well have been called Sharknado in Space – because the only far-out weapons technology our potential adversaries don’t have, according to the broadcast, seems to be “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!” First, CNN needs to hire some fact checkers. Saying “unlike its adversaries, the U.S. has not yet weaponized space” is deeply misleading, like saying “unlike his political opponents, President-Elect Donald Trump has not sprouted wings and flown away”: A few (admittedly alarming) weapons tests aside, no country in the world has yet weaponized space. Contrary to CNN, stock market transactions are not timed nor synchronized through GPS, but a closed system. Cruise missiles can find their targets even without GPS, because they have both GPS and precision inertial measurement units onboard, and IMUs don’t rely on satellite data. Oh, and the British rock group Pink Floyd holds the only claim to the Dark Side of the Moon: There is a “far side” of the Moon — the side always turned away from the Earth — but not a “dark side” — which would be a side always turned away from the Sun. More nefariously, the segment sensationalized nuggets of truth within a barrage of half-truths, backed by a heavy bass, dramatic soundtrack (and gravelly-voiced reporter Jim Sciutto) and accompanied by sexy and scary visuals. Make no mistake there are dangers in space, and the United States has the most to lose if space assets are lost. The question is how best to protect them. Here are a few facts CNN omitted. The Reality The U.S. has all of the technologies described on the CNN segment and deemed potentially offensive: maneuverable satellites, nano-satellites, lasers, jamming capabilities, robotic arms, ballistic missiles that can be used as anti-satellite weapons, etc. In fact, the United States is more technologically advanced than other countries in both military and commercial space. That technological superiority scares other countries; just as the U.S. military space community is scared of other countries obtaining those technologies in the future. The U.S. military space budget is more than 10 times greater than that of all the countries in the world combined. That also causes other countries concern. More unsettling still, the United States has long been leery of treaty-based efforts to constrain a potential arms race in outer space, as supported by nearly every other country in the world for decades. Indeed, under the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. talking points centered on the mantra “there is no arms race in outer space,” so there is no need for diplomat instruments to constrain one. Now, a decade later, the U.S. military – backed by the Intelligence Community which operates the nation’s spy satellites – seems to be shouting to the rooftops that the United States is in danger of losing the space arms race already begun by its potential adversaries. The underlying assumption — a convenient one for advocates of more military spending — is that now there is nothing that diplomacy can do. However, it must be remembered that most space-related technologies – with the exception of ballistic missiles and dedicated jammers – have both military and civil/commercial uses; both benign — indeed, helpful — and nefarious uses. For example, giving satellites the ability to maneuver on orbit can allow useful inspections of ailing satellites and possibly even repairs. Further, the United States is not unable to protect its satellites, as repeated during the CNN broadcast by various interviewees and the host. Many U.S. government-owned satellites, including precious spy satellites, have capabilities to maneuver. Many are hardened against electro-magnetic pulse, sport “shutters” to protect optical “eyes” from solar flares and lasers, and use radio frequency hopping to resist jamming. Offensive weapons, deployed on the ground to attack satellites, or in space, are not a silver bullet. To the contrary, U.S. deployment of such weapons may actually be detrimental to U.S. and international security in space (as we argued in a recent Atlantic Council publication, Towards a New National Security Space Strategy). Further, there are benefits to efforts started by the Obama Administration to find diplomatic tools to restrain and constrain dangerous military activities in space. These diplomatic efforts, however, would be undercut by a full-out U.S. pursuit of “space dominance.” This includes dialogue with China, the lack of which Gen. William Shelton, retired commander of Air Force Space Command, lamented in the CNN report. Given CNN’s “cast,” the spin was not surprising. Starting with Ghost Fleet author Peter Singer set the sensationalist tone, which never altered. The apocalyptic opening, inspired by Ghost Fleet, posited a scenario where all U.S. satellites are taken off-line in nearly one fell swoop. Unless we are talking about an alien invasion, that scenario is nigh on impossible. No potential adversary has such capabilities, nor will they ever likely do so. There is just too much redundancy in the system. No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of the ultimate high ground and the ease of destruction of space-based assets by the potential space weaponry, the utilization of space weapons is with current technology and no effective means to protect them far from fulfilling this potential (Steinberg 2012, p. 255). In current global international political and technological setting, the utility of space weapons is very limited, even if we accept that the ultimate high ground presents the potential to get a decisive tangible military advantage (which is unclear). This stands among the reasons for the lack of their utilization so far. Last but not the least, it must be pointed out that the states also develop passive defense systems designed to protect the satellites on orbit or critical capabilities they provide. These further decrease the utility of space weapons. These systems include larger maneuvering capacities, launching of decoys, preparation of spare satellites that are ready for launch in case of ASAT attack on its twin on orbit, or attempts to decrease the visibility of satellites using paint or materials less visible from radars (Moltz 2014, p. 31). Finally, we must look at the main obstacles of connection of the outer space and warfare. The first set of barriers is comprised of physical obstructions. As has been presented in the previous chapter, the outer space is very challenging domain to operate in. Environmental factors still present the largest threat to any space military capabilities if compared to any man-made threats (Rendleman 2013, p. 79). A following issue that hinders military operations in the outer space is the predictability of orbital movement. If the reconnaissance satellite's orbit is known, the terrestrial actor might attempt to hide some critical capabilities-an option that is countered by new surveillance techniques (spectrometers, etc.) (Norris 2010, p. 196)-but the hide-and-seek game is on. This same principle is, however, in place for any other space asset-any nation with basic tracking capabilities may quickly detect whether the military asset or weapon is located above its territory or on the other side of the planet and thus mitigate the possible strategic impact of space weapons not aiming at mass destruction. Another possibility is to attempt to destroy the weapon in orbit. Given the level of development for the ASAT technology, it seems that they will prevail over any possible weapon system for the time to come. Next issue, directly connected to the first one, is the utilization of weak physical protection of space objects that need to be as light as possible to reach the orbit and to be able to withstand harsh conditions of the domain. This means that their protection against ASAT weapons is very limited, and, whereas some avoidance techniques are being discussed, they are of limited use in case of ASAT attack. We can thus add to the issue of predictability also the issue of easy destructibility of space weapons and other military hardware (Dolman 2005, p. 40; Anantatmula 2013, p. 137; Steinberg 2012, p. 255). Even if the high ground was effectively achieved and other nations could not attack the space assets directly, there is still a need for communication with those assets from Earth. There are also ground facilities that support and control such weapons located on the surface. Electromagnetic communication with satellites might be jammed or hacked and the ground facilities infiltrated or destroyed thus rendering the possible space weapons useless (Klein 2006, p. 105; Rendleman 2013, p. 81). This issue might be overcome by the establishment of a base controlling these assets outside the Earth-on Moon or lunar orbit, at lunar L-points, etc.-but this perspective remains, for now, unrealistic. Furthermore, no contemporary actor will risk full space weaponization in the face of possible competition and the possibility of rendering the outer space useless. No actor is dominant enough to prevent others to challenge any possible attempts to dominate the domain by military means. To quote 2016 Stratfor analysis, "(a) war in space would be devastating to all, and preventing it, rather than finding ways to fight it, will likely remain the goal" (Larnrani 20 16). This stands true unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others. Framing The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of _, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over try or die risk calculus. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology. Matheson 17 Calum, Assoc. Prof Communication @ Pitt, “The sublime rhetoric of Pascal’s wager,” Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 0, Iss. 0,0, Sep 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CTPGbVmNAmtvfJPI8Q86/full//ak47 The form of Pascal's wager has been adapted outside of its explicitly religious context. It perennially crops up in debates over important public political decisions, from space exploration (Bostrom 2003 Bostrom, N. 2003. “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development.” Utilitas 15 (2): 308–314. ) and asteroid collisions (Matheny 2007 Matheny, J. 2007. “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction.” Risk Analysis 27 (5): 1334–1345. Google Scholar , 1340–1342) to climate change (Hurka 1993 Hurka, T. 1993. “Ethical Principles.” In Ethics and Climate Change: The Greenhouse Effect, edited by H. Coward and T. Hurka, 23–38. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. , 25) and anything else potentially covered by the precautionary principle.1 Footnote 1: Those with recent experience in intercollegiate policy debate should recognize the logic of Pascal's wager in the “try or die” arguments that dominate its risk calculus in debates over the desirability of hypothetical plans and the attendant necessity to describe the outcomes of any decision in terms of possible human extinction, whether the topic revolves around military deployment, subsidies for agriculture, or decriminalizing prostitution in the United States. End footnote 1 Chief amongst these is nuclear weapons. Most clearly articulated in Jonathan Schell's (1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ) Fate of the Earth and modified in Dick Cheney's “One Percent Doctrine,” the logic of the wager features in calculations of the catastrophic, but relatively unlikely, prospect of nuclear destruction. But despite its continued iteration, the logic of Pascal's wager is far from uncontroversial. A great number of critics over the years have shown that Pascal's argument is fundamentally unsound whether or not God exists. Indeed, as a logical proof the wager has few defenders. How then might we account for its persistence? What political possibilities does the trope afford? To answer these questions, this article will examine Pascal's original wager and the logical objections to it with reference to debates over nuclear weapons. My central argument is that Pascal's wager is best understood as an example of the rhetorical sublime. In making this case, I will link the sublime to Paul de Man's observations on the undecidability of grammar and rhetoric. Critics of Pascal have often interpreted his wager grammatically as a logical argument for belief rather than rhetorically as a use of trope to establish the impossibility of logical argument. Even those who identify rhetoric at work in Pascal's wager tend to analyze it in terms of rational persuasion, oftentimes with some distrust. However, Pascal's rhetorical method in the wager is more akin to the sublime style of Longinus (1991 Longinus. 1991. On Great Writing (On the Sublime). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. ) than the rational persuasion of Aristotelian logos, a result of the negative theology that informed Pascal's approach to the subject of God. The wager's power comes not from its mathematical consistency or reasoned argument but rather its stark presentation of infinity as something that exceeds reason itself in some measure and forces the potential believer to confront what exceeds logic itself. The outcome of this discussion matters because it implicates modern-day uses of the wager's argumentative structure and the sublime more generally. Appeals to act in the face of enormous, but enormously unlikely, threats cannot be effectively resisted by simply disputing the logic of their calculation, nor are they productive roadmaps for politics as conventionally understood. Rather, these arguments should be read in relation to Pascal's original theological motive as efforts to overwhelm auditors with the appeal to values and forces beyond their ability to comprehend or calculate with reason alone. Like Pascal's wager, the sublime also has its critics, and the nuclear example suggests that it might be particularly threatening in combination with Pascal's wager. However, the wager might also be read as evidence that the sublime also presents opportunities for political critique. Although Schell and Cheney's opposite deployments of the infinite demonstrate that aporia may result, Pascal's sublime rhetoric should not be dismissed. Indecision can also gesture towards political possibilities beyond rational, orderly politics. This essay will proceed in four parts. First, it will elaborate the structure and context of Pascal's original wager in the Pensées and the logical objections to it with the aim of recovering Pascal's reputation as a rhetorician employing a powerful trope, rather than a mathematician systematizing belief. Second, it will discuss Jonathan Schell's famous appeal for nuclear abolition in his book Fate of the Earth and Dick Cheney's so-called “One Percent Doctrine” against terrorism as contemporary uses of the wager's logical structure. Third, it will analyze the wager in terms of its sublime rhetoric and the influence of negative theology on Pascal's work. Finally, it will conclude with a discussion of the appeal to infinity as an argumentative strategy and the challenges of the sublime as an aspect of political rhetoric. Pascal's wager When he died at the age of 39, Blaise Pascal was in the midst of a project (or projects) of apology for the Christian faith. Although the work was never completed, it was ultimately to be assembled as the Pensées, a “mildly heretical” treatise reflecting Pascal's Jansenist conviction (Velchik 2009 Velchik, M. 2009. “Pascal's Wager is a Lie: An Epistemic Interpretation of the Ultimate Pragmatic Argument.” Aporia 19 (2): 1–8. , 1). Much of the book concerns the fallen state of humanity and the inability to directly contemplate the “hidden God,” the motive force of the universe that exists beyond the realms of speech and rational cognition. Pascal's work was inspired by the events of November 23 1654, eight years prior to his death, which he christened the “Night of Fire.” Vividly described in the Pensées, the Night of Fire was a two-hour long religious vision which he interpreted as a revelation of God (Ludwin 2001 Ludwin, D. 2001. Blaise Pascal's Quest for the Ineffable. New York: Peter Lang. , xi). Unable to communicate this experience directly, Pascal nevertheless endeavored to reach unbelievers with his brand of Jansenist Catholicism. One result was his famous wager, which Westel (1995 Westel, D. (1995). Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Penseés. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. , 13) has suggested would have been near the beginning of the assembled Penseés based on Pascal's notes and more recent textual scholarship. There is “not one inkling of doubt” that the final project was intended as an extended Christian apology (Westel 1995 Westel, D. (1995). Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Penseés. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. , 18) with the wager as a key element.22. Pascal himself was not the first to propose such an argument (Ryan 1994 Ryan, J. 1994. “The Wager in Pascal and Others.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 11–20. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. ), but his formulation of it is the most complete, widely known, studied, and influential and is therefore the most appropriate target for analysis. Also, although the wager argument did not originate with Pascal, Patricia Topliss has argued that its mathematical expression did, which again makes it a key analogue for later, secular iterations (Topliss 1966 Topliss, P. 1966. The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion in the Provinciales and the Pensées. Leicester: Leicester University Press. , 193–194). As Westel notes, “apology” applies a modern concept which Pascal would have understood somewhat differently. “‘Either God is or he sic is not,’” Pascal (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). ) wrote. “Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong” (122). Because the proposition that God is real cannot be proven or disproven, neither decision is clearly correct. But some decision must be made, because one either believes or does not – “you are already committed,” as Pascal put it (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). , 122).33. This reflects the Jansenist emphasis on individual faith as an element of salvation, a doctrinal commitment opposed by the Jesuits. View all notes Pascal argues that four outcomes are possible – that God exists and I believe, that God exists and that I do not believe, that God does not exist but I believe, and that God does not exist and I do not believe. These outcomes can be mapped onto a decision matrix, and indeed Pascal is considered one of the progenitors of decision theory for his analysis of alternative choices (Jordan 1994a Jordan, J. 1994a. “Introduction.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 1–10. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. , 3). Although Pascal implied a 50 probability of God's existence (assuming that the coin he described is fair), the most significant aspect of his argument is that probability itself is unimportant for this particular decision. Because the rewards for belief if God is real are “an eternity of life and happiness” while the potential losses of false belief are finite, the potential benefits of belief outweigh any drawback. “Though there were an infinite number of chances,” Pascal (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). ) wrote, “of which only one were in your favor,” one would be right to wager if “there were an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won.” But the chance of God's existence is not one-in-infinity, but some finite fraction: “there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won, one chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing, and what you are staking is finite” (123–124). That Pascal describes the bet in terms of “lives” bet and won only eases the way for its adaptation to public policy questions. Pascal's argument here is not that God exists, but that given the non-zero chance that God exists multiplied by the infinite reward of correct belief, it is rational to act as if God exists. It is rational to believe because of the expected value of this course of action, and if the “passions” prevent “reason” from convincing the gambler, then behaving like one believes by “taking holy water, having masses said, and so on” will eventually lead one to belief (Pascal 2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). , 124). Pascal also argues that the salubrious effects of a pious lifestyle are worth the attendant loss of hedonistic pleasures even without the infinite rewards of Heaven (125). Eventually, as these boons accumulate and the convert behaves in a pious fashion, the repetition of worship will instill genuine faith and fear for one's immortal soul: “Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else” (126). The fear of hell adds a dimension of infinite suffering as an alternative to infinite happiness, and it is this negative incentive that is often echoed in secular incarnations of the wager. Leaving aside the moral objections to Pascal's wager, the logic of this argument has been attacked in a number of ways. One objection is that because many gods – perhaps an infinite number of them – are possible, Pascal cannot do more than argue that atheism and agnosticism are irrational, which does not prove that Catholicism is correct (Jordan 1994b Jordan, J. 1994b. “The Many Gods Objection.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 1–10. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied.). The argument that any small probability with an infinite impact should be assessed as infinite creates an obvious difficulty when two infinitely important outcomes – one good, one bad – are compared against one another. Suppose that choosing the wrong god results in damnation by the right one. On which god does one then decide? The result is either paralysis, which Pascal rejects with his insistence that some choice is inescapable, or an assessment that returns to probability, making the appeal to infinity moot (Schlesinger 1994 Schlesinger, G. 1994. “A Central Theistic Argument.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 83–100. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 89). At this point, Patricia Topliss (1966 Topliss, P. 1966. The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion in the Provinciales and the Pensées. Leicester: Leicester University Press.) argues, the wager no longer makes sense. The unbeliever might argue that sufficiently low odds make the wager irrational (“is there an even chance that the unicorn exists?”) and that, knowing only the mortal world in which we live, to stake one's life in exchange for the possibility of salvation is to risk everything potentially for nothing (195–196). Perhaps God does exist but perversely tortures true believers – even if this outcome is unlikely, to make a judgment on this basis merely returns the debate to probability. Other difficulties exist with the nature of infinity as a concept, vital to the rewards and punishments of Pascal's wager. Leaving aside the well-known problem of Russell's Paradox, in which a set that contains all sets must paradoxically either include or exclude itself, there is also the St. Petersburg Paradox. Imagine that Peter offers a game to Paul involving coin flips. Peter will pay Paul a dollar if the coin ends up heads, two dollars if the second flip also turns up heads, four if this is repeated on the third flip, eight on the fourth, and so on to infinity (Bernoulli 1954, 31). How much would one be willing to pay to play this game? The amount that one could win rises towards the infinite, but the chances of winning decline toward zero as one continues to play. In addition, after a certain amount, doubling the prize money does not double its actual value – while having a 1000 dollars might legitimately make one twice as happy as having 500, having 200 billion dollars is not twice as good as having 100 billion, because as the prize increases the marginal utility of each dollar decreases. Although the expected value may only have an asymptotic relationship to zero, the value of playing this game has been set as low as two dollars (Ellenberg 2014, 244). The various objections to Pascal's wager have substantially discredited it is a logical argument and therefore led to its rejection by many scholars. In the summary judgment of Ian Hacking (1994), although the arguments of the wager are “valid,” none of them are convincing. “The arguments are worthless as apologetics today, for no present agnostic who understood the arguments would ever be moved to accept all the premises” (27). The wager is structured something like a geometric proof, so if Pascal the geometer has the math wrong, the wager has no value. At its extreme, this line of thinking lends credence to Buford Norman's (1977) claim that the Pensées are not rhetorical at all. “Many of the fragments of the Pensées,” he wrote, “consist of a direct association of ideas, with few connectives. This is precisely what the Port-Royal Logique calls jugement, which is basically the same as grammar … perhaps the most logical of all methods (styles), since it follows thought quite closely, and it is definitely far removed from rhetoric” (32). It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that Blaise Pascal, one of the great scientific and mathematical minds of his age, might well have realized the logical deficits of his wager but advanced it anyway for its rhetorical effect. In this sense, it is less a demonstration and more an effort to persuade, and Pascal should instead be judged for his merits as a rhetorician. Grammar and rhetoric of the wager The mathematical or logical reading of Pascal is the chief claim against him as a rhetorician. For interpreters such as Ellenberg and Hacking, Pascal's work is an effort to persuade through demonstration or at best grammar, as Norman argues. This interpretation sees Pascal as an earnest mathematician establishing what amounts to a proof, rather than a rhetorician employing his persuasive art to win the hearts of believers along with their minds. Others, however, have claimed the opposite position that Pascal's Penseés should be understood as primarily rhetorical, and Pascal himself as an expert rhetorician, although whether this is a complement or aspersion varies according to the source. This section will summarize and analyze this rhetorical interpretation, ultimately concluding that the opposition between grammar (as indexical structure) and rhetoric (as persuasion) is an opportunity to view Pascal's rhetoric as something in excess of both, more in line with the sublime tradition than the Aristotelian one. Pascal's own theory of rhetoric is developed in an essay called “The Art of Persuasion” (1909),4 which begins by acknowledging that although people tend to believe what pleases them, this is “base, ignoble and irrelevant” (406). The “art of persuasion,” as Pascal names it, is “simply the process of perfect methodical proofs,” and “consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions; of proposing principles or evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined” (Pascal 1909, 410). Blaise Pascal, “arguably the most successful and significant practitioner of written rhetoric in his century” (Lockwood 1996, 273), thus seems to treat the art of persuasion as something with a set of codifiable, if elusive, rules and laws, a sort of geometry of human interiority. Although Pascal professes not to know all the rules, persuasion is, in this view of his work, still thought of a technique bound by laws, hidden or not (Ijsseling 1976, 73). Rule-bound and systematic, this view of Pascal's rhetoric tends to support the idea that his mathematical language is meant to be taken literally, which is perhaps what Paul Valéry (1968) was thinking when he wrote that the wager is “absurd” because it “concludes with a hope in mathematics” (319). Pascal could be expected to transmit ideas with the minimum amount of figural embellishment or distortion, and it was precisely his failure to do that which sparked Valéry's ire, leading him to describe the deceased mathematician as “an enemy of the human race.” “My complaint against Pascal,” he wrote, “is that he wanted to persuade … For me this is shocking – I've caught him in the act of literature. As I see it, if a man has something to say and thinks it should be said, he should put it just as it is in his mind … Exactly as it is” (318). This attack resonates with criticisms of rhetoric more generally as an art of deception and deceit, unsuited to the serious questions of religion, science, and even statecraft. Indeed, in discussing another of Pascal's arguments Valéry claims that he cannot be an “inspired writer” because “it's a piece of rhetoric, a fake window … It's an effect—Pascal is a rhetorician” (317). Even Velchik, who acknowledges Pascal as a rhetorician without condemning him as such, still concludes that Pascal's wager is deceptive – “a white lie,” no matter how insightful (Velchik 2009, 8). The most influential work on this subject is Topliss's (1966) The Rhetoric of Pascal in which she concurs with Valéry's claim that Pascal uses figurative language as more than mere ornament, transforming the meaning of his arguments through sophisticated rhetorical technique. Although she did not envenom her judgment as did Valéry, Topliss argued that Pascal's technique departed from “Ancient Rhetoric” substantially in this regard (258). For Topliss, while something more may be at work, persuasion is still the central project of the Pensées, and in this sense Pascal does follow a certain tradition of ancient rhetoric beginning with Aristotle's well-known definition of rhetoric as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. Topliss and Valéry thus see Pascal's work as persuasive at its core, the exact opposite of Norman's claim that Pacal communicates so directly that his work is not rhetorical. The work of Paul de Man (1988) suggests one way to resolve this disparity. de Man argued that two theories of the function of language were at work in Pascal's writing. One was a “cognitive function” that is “right (juste) but powerless,” while the other was “a modal function” that was “mighty (forte) in its claim to rightness.” The “necessary choice” between “seduction and truth remains undecidable,” de Man argues, because even the language of Holy Writ cannot be squared in its persuasive power with a geometrical understanding of proof (de Man 1988, 153). This undecidability is what de Man calls allegory. The conflict between “seduction” and “truth” mirrors a distinction he developed in Allegories of Reading between “rhetoric” and “grammar.” In a famous passage in that book, de Man relates a scene from All in the Family in which Archie Bunker's wife, Edith, asks him if he would prefer his bowling shoes laced under or laced over, to which Archie replies “what's the difference?” When Edith begins to explain this difference, Archie becomes agitated; his statement, although it grammatically requests more information, rhetorically denies the need for it and is thus aporetic (de Man 1979, 9–10).5 In this formulation, both Norman and Topliss are correct: Pascal's language is “basically the same as grammar” as Norman argued, and yet paradoxically “restored to figures of rhetoric that had long been thought of as ornaments, their original function as instruments of persuasion” (Topliss 1966, 321). There is something undecidable in Pascal's rhetoric between reason and belief. Rather than leading us to accept the wager as a demonstration of how reason might be applied to God, the second half of this aporia suggests that the wager is a figurative argument for why there can be no such proof – something that Pascal himself hints at when he wrote that because the order of the holy infinitely exceeds the corrupt speech of human beings, “divine truths” could not fall under the arts of persuasion. “God alone,” he wrote, “can place them in the soul” (Pascal 1909, 406–407). If Pascal believed that the “hidden God” lies infinitely beyond the capacity of persuasive language to represent, why write the wager at all? Scholars who, like Topliss, argue that Pascal's work should be analyzed rhetorically share a basic assumption with the grammatical view of Norman and those who treat the wager as a kind of mathematical proof: in short, both view Pascal's central project as one of persuasion. Even de Man's somewhat more subtle reading largely shares this understanding. Pascal, through demonstration, rhetoric, or aporetic uncertainty is guilty of Valéry's charge of attempted persuasion. The wager does not seem to add much in this regard beyond a simple effort to persuade, an appeal to logos with the minor quirk of its mathematical appeal to infinity. Pascal's religious background suggests that this dismissal may be too hasty. As Topliss wrote, that Pascal's style “will not yield up all its secrets” hidden in his “most banal devices,” suggests that the author of the Penseés had his own “impenetrable places” (321). Negative theology and the sublime Dawn Ludwin (2001) makes the case in Blaise Pascal's Quest for the Ineffable that Pascal owed a great debt to the tradition of negative theology, particularly the work of Pseudo-Dionysius,6 which he seems to have read despite his relatively limited reading and citation of other scholarly works (3–4). Negative theology is an ancient tradition in Christian thought with strong parallels in other religions. Its central concern can be framed as the problem of infinity: if God is infinite and exceeds all human understanding, how are we to talk about the divine? Language fails to capture God because it is a fallen thing of human artifice and must necessarily provide a limit where none exists in the case of the divine. Language and its limits are thus central concerns in this line of thinking. Divine experiences, such as Pascal's Night of Fire, might be described, but they can never be fully understood through speech. We can only say what God is not because even the word “infinite” is nothing more than a linguistic marker, a condensation and thus a kind of paradox in itself. Like Pascal, Pseudo-Dionysius described God in striking terms as “light” and “fire,” arguing that although language might show a path, it is only in the silence that exceeds it where God might make itself known (50–56). These metaphors for God do not persuade, but rather lead the audience to the edge of a precipice beyond which the currency of language has no purchase. As Ludwin argues, the rhetorical theory deriving from such a position on God is more consistent with the sublime of Longinus than with the rational persuasion of Aristotle, and it is in these terms that Pascal might be best understood (140–141). The sublime has been partially absorbed into the field of aesthetics, but its origin is squarely rhetorical. For Longinus, powerful rhetorical figures – chiefly metaphor – may circumvent the auditor's reason by the sheer force of the concepts it invokes. Although it is unlikely that Pascal ever read Longinus,7 striking similarities exist in their theories of rhetoric. For Longinus, the greatest writing does not persuade, but “takes the reader out of himself sic” by employing and “irresistible force beyond the control of any audience.” Although the individual elements of style gradually accrete in a text to indicate the author's skill, individual tropes are sublime to the extent that they disrupt this coherence: “greatness appears suddenly,” Longinus wrote, “like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and reveals the writer's full power in a flash” (4). Like Pseudo-Dionysius's belief that the infinite power of God revealed the fragility of human subjects, Longinus's theory of rhetoric uses language as an appeal to a powerful motive force that exceeds the individual. A sublime trope conceals the proof of its own argument by “startling” the reader by “its own brilliance” (Longinus 1991, 27). The best figures are not even identifiable as such because their disruptive effect draws attention away from artifice altogether, making it appear natural (Longinus 1991, 29). The technical character of the trope is less important than its ability to shock the reader away from mundane language by changing their orientation towards the text and its associated concepts, however briefly. Viewed through this lens, Pascal's wager takes on a different significance. The purpose of the wager is not to provide a rational proof for God or even to compel adherence to the liturgy, but to use the trope of the infinite to disorient and displace subjects by revealing their finitude. The wager's logical structure is obviously flawed, but this fact does not undermine its significance – it is an example of rhetoric beyond persuasion. First, following Longinus, the effect of the trope should be to conceal the proof of its own argument if it is successful, rendering the proof itself relatively unimportant. The important part of the wager is not the finitude of probability in the coin toss, but the overwhelming, literally incomprehensible stakes of the wager. The wager is supposed to shock the reader into an inspired choice that will eventually lead to conversion through repetition, not to complete the process all at once. No part of Pascal's wager has to be compelling on its own, so the 50 probability of God's existence, for example, is arbitrary and irrelevant. The sublime is supposed to circumvent the faculty of reason, rather than appeal to it in an effort of persuasion that ends in a carefully calculated decision to convert. Second, following Pseudo-Dionysius, the weakness of the wager's logic might be precisely its appeal. The secret in the “banal devices” that Topliss diagnoses is that words never succeed in capturing the majesty of God. Pascal's sublime trope does its work through catachresis. As Pseudo-Dionysius (1987) writes, “incongruities are more suitable for lifting our minds up into the domain of the spiritual … the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things” (150). The same characteristic describes the wager. The hitch in its logic – the catachresis resulting from juxtaposing the crude indexical statement of the wager with its divine referent – forces the reader to engage the claim more thoroughly. Valéry's fury at Pascal's base rhetoric might be precisely the point: after all, it did lead the later French critic to write at length about a single sentence in Pascal's work, stewing over the crassness of its persuasion for many years.8 Confusion at the logic of the argument only helps to conceal its non-rational effect: after all, to be angered at its irrationality is to presume that it is supposed to be rational in the first place. Pascal was an “enemy of the human race” (in Valéry's language) to the extent that he wished to dissolve its finitude in the rapture of the divine by catachretic revelation. Even at his most rational and precise, Pascal argued that persuasion had its limits because the rules could never be fully known and individuals would follow their passions (Pascal, 1909). It is more fitting with his indisputable genius that the wager be read as an immensely subtle attempt to shock readers out of complacency rather than an immensely clumsy use of probability by one of Europe's greatest and most diligent mathematicians. Pascal's heirs The purpose of this exercise in reinterpretation is not only to vindicate Pascal the rhetorician. The wager's basic form is perhaps more influential today than it ever has been in past. Since the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, human beings have become aware that their decisions have the potential to destroy the entire species – and many others along with it. The challenges of thinking in terms of existential risk are immense, and many old habits of thought are irrelevant or even counterproductive when making these decisions. The root of this problem is that people are not accustomed to thinking in the appropriate scales. The magnitudes of some potential impacts, such as nuclear war, are so large that our minds are not well equipped to fathom them. If they are not truly “infinite,” they are at least close enough to exert the same effects on our minds. At the same time, probabilities are so low that in conjunction with existential risks they too are hard to grasp (Yudkowsky, 2008). It is this intersection that mirrors Pascal's wager: unpredictable, low chances married to immensely, possibly infinitely, important outcomes.9 Debates about existential risk thus adhere to Pascal's wager in form: at issue is not Pascal's argument for religious debate so much as his deployment of infinite value as a rhetorical device. The most thoroughly studied existential risk is nuclear war. Since the beginning of the Cold War, academics, think-tank employees, and military planners have made an effort to quantify the risks of nuclear conflict and manage it with the tools of reason (Abella 2008 Abella, A. 2008. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. ; Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. 2005. The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ). The arms race appears to be the first consistent use of Pascal's wager to inform arguments on both sides of a single dispute, and may serve as a prototype for later deployments. Roy Sorensen (1994 Sorensen, R. 1994. “Infinite Decision Theory.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 139–159. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. ) reported that a version of Pascal's wager showed up in arms control rallies (141), but its most complete and eloquent formulation is in Jonathan Schell's widely-read book Fate of the Earth. Schell (1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ) argues that the consequences of a nuclear war largely are unknown, but due to the possibility that an ensuing nuclear winter might destroy all life on Earth, such a war cannot be risked for any reason. He writes: the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account…. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs … although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble … we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species. (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95) The above passage follows the structure and content of Pascal's wager very closely. First, Schell asserts an infinite value coupled with an uncertain probability, which together result in an infinite expected value for one choice (and therefore, an infinite opportunity cost for another). Like the rewards of Heaven and the consequences of Hell, the virtues of peace and the losses of extinction are unquantifiable. Probability is irrelevant in this calculation because “a fraction of infinity is still infinity.” Second, Schell argues that although the chances of extinction are unknown, we should act as if it is a certain result of nuclear war, just as Pascal attempted not to prove that God exists, but rather that we should act as if this was the truth. It is possible that nuclear winter would not result; it is possible that a nuclear war will not occur; it is possible that the worst-case projections are wrong. Thus, although “scientifically speaking” there is “all the difference in the world between the mere possibility … and the certainty of it, morally they are the same,” which is why we must act “as though we knew for a certainty” that extinction will result from the possession of nuclear arms (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95). Third, Schell appeals not only to the unknown but to the unknowable. The impact of a nuclear war is beyond our comprehension, just as the God of Pascal's negative theology is. The passage cited here comes at the very end of the first part of Fate of the Earth, “Republic of Insects and Grass,” which is an extended description of the potential horrors of nuclear war written lyrically and beautifully, but includes an acknowledgement that nuclear war can be imagined but is indescribable because its witnesses would be dead (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 26). It mirrors the many names of God used by Pseudo-Dionysius to impress upon his readers that God is something that must necessarily exceed the human standpoint. Near the conclusion of his “wager” passage, Schell asserts, “we stand before a mystery.” Like Pascal's worshipper gradually humbled before God's revelation, the reader “taken outside” of themselves by Longinus's sublime, or the believer “struck by God's blazing light,” Schell's audience is to be overwhelmed by his language and made to realize their own finitude. “Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder,” he writes, “and our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution” (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95). Finally, Schell's sublime rhetoric is supposed to be an impetus for action. The third section of Fate of the Earth is called “The Choice” and is an explicit call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The existence of this technology forces a decision, just as the possibility of God does so in Pascal's wager. As in Pascal, for Schell the wager does not merely dislocate its reader – however vital this is to its effect – but also provides a framework for decision under the conditions of uncertainty, perhaps a hallmark of rhetoric itself. Faced with incalculable risks, inaction is not possible. To paraphrase Rush, choosing not to decide is still making a choice. The invocation of infinity does not have to persuade in an Aristotelian sense to serve a purpose. The Old Testament's Abraham was made to feel “but dust and ashes” before the Lord, but the end result of his encounter was clear: follow the divine law. Thus, it is for Schell: our confrontation with finitude breeds humility, reverence, and caution, resulting in support for disarmament without the need for a nuclear Revelation. The paradox of Schell's sublime wager grows out of the necessity for decision. If any fraction of infinity is still infinity, then it becomes impossible to choose between competing options that might stake claims to the same infinitely important outcome. While abolition might prevent a nuclear war from eradicating humanity, through any number of improbable outcomes, it might also cause human extinction, perhaps by triggering devastating non-nuclear wars, another wave of nuclear proliferation, biological war (Payne 2010 Payne, K. 2010. “Disarmament danger.” National Review Online. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/229492/disarmament-danger-keith-b-payne ), or even preventing humanity from deflecting an asteroid collision (Wall 2014 Wall, M. 2014. “How Nuclear Bombs Could Save Earth from Killer Asteroids. Space.com. http://www.space.com/24696-asteroid-strike-nuclear-bombs.html ). When probability is rendered irrelevant by the sign of the infinite, there is no way to distinguish between one outcome and another: all fractions of infinity are infinity. While for Schell the risk of nuclear war mandates a policy of abolition, for advocates of nuclear deterrence, the possibility that disarmament might encourage another power to develop or use nuclear weapons against the defenseless United States mandates the exact opposite: maintenance, perhaps even aggressive expansion, of the nuclear arsenal. Such a position was, in fact, taken by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Ron Suskind reports that in 2001, CIA Director George Tenet briefed Cheney about the possibility that terrorists or hostile nations might develop nuclear weapons with the aid of Pakistani radicals. In response, Cheney proffered the now-infamous “One Percent Doctrine.” “With a low-probability, high impact event like this,” he said, “I'm frankly not sure how to engage. We're going to have to look at it in a completely different way” (qtd. in Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 61). That “different way” turned out to mirror Pascal's familiar construction. “If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response … It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence … It's about our response” (qtd. in Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 62). The bar for acceptable evidence, as Suskind notes, can be “set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply” (62). As Cheney himself stressed, the doctrine was about response: any probability of an adversary possessing nuclear weapons should be taken as a certainty. The “Cheney Doctrine” thus helped to establish the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive use of force against enemies potentially armed with “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” itself a somewhat ill-defined term. In the realm of nuclear weapons, this meant that American leaders could contemplate the preemptive use of nuclear arms against potential nuclear adversaries, as detailed in a 2005 draft of the Pentagon's Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Chiefs of Staff 2005 Joint Chiefs of Staff. 2005. Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Publication 3-12). http://www.wslfweb.org/docs/doctrine/3_12fc2.pdf ). The Cheney Doctrine thus brings Schell's logic full circle and exposes the aporia of the wager's need for decision.1010. This problem is also known as Buridan's Ass: an ass, equally hungry and thirsty, dies of privation when forced to choose between a pile of hay and a trough of water because both are exactly equally appealing. View all notes Conclusion The difficulty with Schell's argument (and conversely, with Cheney's) is equivalent to the “many gods” objection to Pascal's wager. Given a range of mutually exclusive options, each representing a potentially infinite impact, there is no longer a way to choose amongst them. For Pascal, that decision boiled down to faith, but the same was true for the Bush administration in its embrace of impulse and conviction over rationality and evidence (Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 308). This same problem affects decisions over other existential threats: perhaps manipulating asteroids to miss the Earth would save us all, but perhaps the technology could be used to cause a strike; perhaps slowing the rate of climate change could prevent warming temperatures and ecological disruption, but perhaps it could cause a new ice age; perhaps space colonization would safeguard the human species, but perhaps it would attract the attention of xenocidal extraterrestrials. Infinite stakes combined with indeterminate probabilities and the necessity of decision is a counsel of despair. Even if, like Pascal's, Schell's wager is not meant to be a logical proof but an appeal to a dislocating sublime force, the problem remains. The rhetorical effect of the infinity trope is part of nuclear deterrence. One accepted mission of the US nuclear arsenal remains as the capacity to “overawe” enemies with the sheer incalculable force of thermonuclear weapons (Oelrich 2005 Oelrich, I. 2005. Missions for Nuclear Weapons after the Cold War (Federation of American Scientists Occasional Paper No. 3). https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys280/archive/01282005175922.pdf , 46). The “madman” theory of nuclear deterrence, named for Richard Nixon, relies on projecting the image of irrationality over nuclear decisions to that a rational opponent might believe that they will actually be used in response to aggression, even if the cost to the defender is also very high.1111. To some extent, as Kavka's Toxin Puzzle suggests, all nuclear deterrence is paradoxical: after an attack, nuclear retaliation is no longer a rational choice because one's one destruction can no longer be prevented, so, assuming the rational actors necessary for deterrence to work in the first place, it is required that one intend to do something in the future that one would be irrational to actually intend to do at the time when that decision is required. View all notes This is precisely the logic of doomsday weapons such as cobalt bombs or the Dead Hand: the cost of extinction is so high that it overwhelms any possible gain for an aggressor. Schell's vivid descriptions of the nuclear aftermath may just as well result in a passionate commitment to nuclear deterrence. The same factors that make Schell's appeal powerful also limit the ability to resist Cheney's reinterpretation of the wager. When rational calculation is made subservient to infinite risks, then reasoned arguments fail to diminish the force of sublime rhetoric, just as the various logical objections to Pascal's wager have not eliminated its staying power. The limitless damage of a nuclear war (or imagined terrorist attack) overwhelm reason. John Mueller (2010 Mueller, J. 2010. Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ) has done a detailed analysis of the probability of nuclear terrorism that assigns it roughly one in three billion odds (204–206), but the numinous fear of nuclear weapons seems to remain. It is tempting to conclude with Ned O'Gorman claim that the sublime is antithetical to politics. Because the sublime is an overwhelming, illimitable force, no adjective changes it; there is no “political sublime” because one term cannot modify the other. As O'Gorman (2006 O'Gorman, N. 2006. “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron.” Millennium 34: 889–915. ) writes, “the sublime is a free-floating force, a univocal power, which because of its univocality cannot provide alternatives for change, guide critique, or articulate new horizons. The sublime speaks only unpredicated power” (889). The sublime may be radical in a sense, but it is not politically radical. Rather, it tends toward the conservative because it cannot offer alternatives to the status quo and constitutes a “rhetorical lure” best employed by the elite and powerful (O'Gorman 2006 O'Gorman, N. 2006. “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron.” Millennium 34: 889–915. , 891). In this reading, the present article is merely a Synodus Horrenda, dragging Pascal forth again as rhetorician rather than a mathematician and condemning him nonetheless. To write off Pascal's wager so quickly would be premature. As Schell and Cheney demonstrate, it is the need for decision that frustrates its possibility and results in aporia. Both men have read the wager grammatically and used it to calculate a decision. They may also present it rhetorically, attempting to impress not the rightness of their judgment but the overwhelming force represented by the infinite losses of a nuclear war. In either case, the wager is still aimed at persuasion but cannot overcome its own paradoxical logos. What is missing is a different aporia on an altogether different level: that identified by de Man as the contradiction of grammar and rhetoric. At issue is a practice for reading the wager, and this contradiction can be seen working in Pascal's original if it is read not as an appeal to believe in a specific God but rather an attempt to disrupt the obstacles that lead some people not to believe in any power beyond themselves. Pascal himself was not converted by this proof nor any other, but by the revelation of his “night of fire.” His wager is not a rational argument or a rhetorical device, but rather a rhetorical device illustrating the limits both of rationality and rhetoric. The point of the coin flip is to demonstrate that no rational decision is possible. Faith and fidelity constitute a moral life. Pascal argues that piety comes through repeated practice, but this practice itself is a means to realize the scope of what exceeds the human, not an end in itself. This conception of the sublime is not political according to O'Gorman's definition, where the “sine qua non of all politics except the totalitarian is differentiation” (2006, 891). As the juxtaposition of Schell's and Cheney's uses of the wager shows, the political result of sublime rhetoric is by no means determined by its use. To say that these figures do not assist one in making instrumental choices between different political goals is not to suggest that the sublime may still have radical – and not necessarily conservative – potential if “political” is not synonymous with “politics.” As Jean-Luc Nancy (2008 Nancy, J.-L. 2008. Philosophical Chronicles. New York: Fordham University Press. ) argues, nothing requires that the two terms be identical and we should be conscious of our linguistic choice between them (27–28). The political can be understood as an orientation to community, an attitude rather than being “dissolved in the sociotechnical element of forces and needs” (Nancy 1991 Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. , 40). The sublime may not aid directly in politics, but it may help to develop a conception of the political by revealing the limits of our capacity to order and to comprehend our social world. To dislocate the reader by illustrating the limit of knowledge is to call into question the inevitability of social structures that we have built and inherited. Nothing about the sublime need favor the elite and powerful. Oft forgotten in Longinus's writing is an attack on avarice and material accumulation as measures of value. Longinus argues that “wealth, honors, reputation, absolute power, and all things which are accompanied by much external and theatrical pomp” cannot be noble because to “despise them is in itself no mean blessing” (9). There is a contradiction inherent in any set of social values that idolizes the rich because they are rich and also values those who forgo material benefits because they are hollow and superficial. Why is it, Longinus asks, that although there is “no dearth” of people “who are persuasive, interested in public affairs, shrewd, skillful, and certainly delightful speakers,” there are so few who are truly outstanding? His answer is that the love of money “is a disease that shrinks a man sic.” “I cannot see how we can honor wealth without limit or, and this is nearer the truth, make it our god, without admitting into our souls those kindred evils that inevitably follow it” (Longinus 1991, 57). Rather than proscribe an instrumental solution like those shrewd speakers occupied with public affairs might, Longinus seeks to identify the attachments that serve as the conditions of possibility for corruption. “For surely if our selfish desires were altogether freed from prison, as it were, and let loose upon our neighbors, they would scorch the earth with their evils” (Longinus 1991, 58). The “worst bane” is that nothing is done for its own sake, he argues, but only because it serves as a means to an end (58) – which is close to Nancy's concern about dissolving the political into the “sociotechnical element” of politics. The sublime's inattention to differentiation might be read as a critique of instrumental politics and accumulation. Configured this way, Pascal's wager, like Longinus's sublime and Pseudo-Dionysius's negative theology, displays the presence of something beyond the technical capacities of reason to resolve and reveals the arbitrariness of power as it is exercised in an unequal society. In disorienting its readers, the sublime is a check on hubris rather than the basis for programmatic action. At the very least, the sublime is important for argument research because its use continues, for better or for worse, and exploring the collective psychology underpinning its appeal might be a more effective means of countering its dangerous uses than rational debunking alone allows. O'Gorman's critique is a useful corrective for those who might use the concept as a kind of universal solvent that obviates the need for day-to-day political choices or provisional commitments. But the genius of Pascal's wager as a rhetorical trope is its capacity to remind us that the quotidian decisions of politics, vital as they are, do not exhaust the political itself. What we value in community has no satisfying objective basis, but is something we must deliberate collectively in an age when technological progress makes a literal Night of Fire all too possible.
2/6/22
JF - Case - AT Debris - Round 5 - UNLV
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit EP | Judge: Diana Alvarez Case Debris The inevitability of the Kessler syndrome reveals that this debate is only a question of whether we reinvest in the future that is already arriving or take the more radical bet on a new relation with technics. Reno 2018 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality” in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 4–18)DR 19 For one thing, space debris is potentially dangerous to spacecraft. Space debris is AND and deformation not unlike what conventional archaeologists encounter amid the Earth’s beguiling surface. International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger than ten centimetres in diameter colliding in space at “millions, maybe even billions, to one” (Rincon, 2009). The chances of damage being sustained by operational objects as they collide with smaller objects are much higher, at 1–10; this may be their single greatest threat (Rex, 1998; Williamson, 2006; Wright, 2009, page 6). A United Nations report in 1999 brought together a range of measurements and statistical models from different agencies in an attempt to draw up a risk assessment. These models “did not agree quantitatively because of differences in assumptions and starting conditions” (UN, 1999, page 25). But despite this, it concluded that collision risk in Low Earth Orbit (less than 2000 kilometres) was “not great”, and the collision risk in Geostationary Orbit was “correspondingly lower”. However, all were also agreed that the number of major collisions would rise exponentially if current trends continued. This is based on the understanding that because it takes a long time to disperse, debris created from one impact will go on to create more impacts in a ‘collision cascade’, referred to as the ‘Kessler Syndrome’ (Brearley, 2005; Williamson, 2006; Wright, 2009). In a 2006 report NASA referred to this situation as “supercritical” (Wright, 2009). Modelling this effect adds to the complexity of a risk assessment already understood to be limited by knowledge of current amounts of debris and of how spacecraft respond to impacts that “do not fall into categories normally known from solid-state physics” (Rex, 1998, page 100; UN, 1999). To these difficulties in modelling the physical risks to spacecraft should be added the impossibility of establishing the social and economic consequences of a collision cascade in Geostationary Orbit, which one author describes as a (limited) resource “necessary to human life” as “the space ... which allows contemporary communication practices to exist” (2) Geostationary Orbit exists at an altitude of 35 786 kilometres at which satellites appear stationary from Earth. See Collis (2009) for a useful discussion of its legal geography. (Collis, 2009, pages 55 and 49). Expert opinion has suggested a collision cascade “could take out world communications” (Ellis, 2009). Outer space was once considered inexhaustible. It is now being realised that the development of outer space has been unevenly concentrated in key regions (see MacDonald, 2007), with implications for thinking of outer space as a ‘common pool resource’. Debris might impede the use of space within a generation as the unintended consequences of human activity undermine its promise (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a). Earth’s orbit now has to be seen as a ‘fragile environment’ for human activity (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a; Williamson, 2006). A 1972 UN Convention established that the ‘launching state’ is liable for any damage caused by its activities or by nongovernmental entities operating under its jurisdiction. In terms of damage caused by debris in outer space, if fault can be established then financial reparation must be made to restore damage to people or property. There is therefore, in principle, a mechanism for establishing accountability. Lotta Viikari (2008) still holds out hope for the development of Environmental Impact Assessments and the extension of ‘polluter pays’ principles to space debris (page 20). This convention breaks down, however, in a ‘supercritical’ space environment in which it becomes increasingly difficult for a claims commission to establish cause, fault, and damages (Zhao, 2004). Due to the impossibility of establishing fault, no claims for compensation have ever been settled in regard to space debris (Kai-Uwe Schrogl, personal communication, October 2010). As international law only considers direct damage between states and their corporations, there is no incentive to protect the space environment itself (Brearley, 2005, page 26). As the shortcomings of the system of accountability have become increasingly apparent, measures to address the space debris issue have been agreed by international bodies. NASA guidelines having already been established following a commitment by President Reagan (in consultation with industry), the 1999 UN report detailed a number of possible strategies for dealing with the space debris issue. Firstly, space objects should avoid releasing debris as part of their normal operations, avoid on-orbit explosion (eg, by venting energy sources), and be disposed of at the end of their lifetimes, either by reducing their orbit so that they reenter the atmosphere more quickly or by moving them to a ‘disposal’ or ‘graveyard’ orbit further from the Earth, though neither is risk-free (Rex, 1998). Secondly, space object designers should protect them with adequate shielding and collision avoidance mechanisms. Many of these guidelines have since been reiterated in 2002 Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee guidelines and were eventually accepted by the UN in 2008. The possibility but incalculability of a future collision cascade is a prime example of late-modern risk. It is particularly interesting to note that the reports were also marked by the paradox of risk modelling in a reflexive society (Beck, 2009, page 136): scientists attempted to incorporate responses to their predictions into the predictions themselves, thus reducing the predicted risk on which these responses were supposedly based. But the degree of voluntary international cooperation in response to the issue of space debris appears to vindicate Beck’s optimism about a cosmopolitanism ‘from above’, shared with others such as David Held and echoed in regard to space debris by David Wright (2009, page 10). There are, however, reasons to be sceptical. In an excellent paper on sovereignty in outer space, Jill Stuart (2009) contrasts Held’s (2002) cosmopolitan sovereignty with regime theories based on the Realpolitik of state confrontation or Everett Dolman’s (2002) ‘Astropolitik’, on which see Fraser MacDonald (2007) for a critique. Cosmopolitan sovereignty is based on a cosmopolitan consciousness both influencing and influenced by international cooperation in outer space (eg, the International Space Station). Stuart argues that the declining importance of the nation-state resonates with the ‘overview effect’ of viewing a borderless Earth from space (White, 1987). Despite her optimism, Stuart is aware that there are serious issues with Held’s cosmopolitanism, especially when applied to outer space. There is good reason to believe that the apparent cosmopolitanism of human activity in outer space is an ideological smokescreen behind which neoconservative policies are being pursued (see, for example, Caldicott, 2002). In his analysis of images of Earth taken from space, Denis Cosgrove (1994) identifies both a ‘One World’ discourse that views a globally connected world as the project of a modern Christian American imperialism, and a ‘Whole Earth’ vitalist environmentalism that sees Earth as fragile, isolated organic unity. “Each”, however, “effectively exemplifies the Apollonian urge to re-establish a transcendental, univocal, and universally valid vantage point from which to sketch a totalising discourse” (page 288). Both thus erase locality. Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1996) also tears apart the ‘spaceship Earth’ ideology reflected in White’s overview effect, arguing that the illusion of a unified Earth serves only to disguise inequalities of power. The lack of accountability for space debris actually polarises international interest in space debris mitigation. States such as the US that rely on the ‘space operating environment’ to exercise control over social order (see Dickens and Ormrod, 2009), and that have an economic interest in maintaining capital growth in outer space, have a long-term interest in mitigating against debris although the US withholds high-quality data because of security concerns (Rincon, 2009). States with only a short-term interest in space, such as Indonesia, have not been willing to mitigate space debris (Benko and Schrogl, 1997a). Rational actor theory has been employed to argue both that the major spacefaring nations will be willing to mitigate space debris voluntarily (Brearley, 2005) and that international agreements are necessary (Viikari, 2008). Such theory reaches its limits here as it cannot cope with the differing political and economic interests within states and their temporal nature. Even when alliances and agreements hold, it must be questioned whether the current trajectory of space debris mitigation serves the interests of a global public. As Enzensberger (1996) observes, industrial measures to protect the environment either serve to concentrate capital in the hands of larger companies as smaller companies cannot finance their own mitigation systems, or they manifest themselves as costs to the public (page 26). Viikari (2008, page 24) suggests the former is also true of competing spacefaring states. Viikari nonetheless advocates a system wherein ‘environmental losers’ could receive other benefits. Neil Smith (2009) anticipates the development of outer space becoming the next stage in the extensive expansion of capitalism. He also makes clear, in relation to carbon trading on Earth, that a system such as Viikari proposes would neither protect the nearby space environment nor spread the benefits of space activity more equally (it merely represents ‘the vertical integration of nature into capital’). The costs borne by the public, meanwhile, include those associated with debris-monitoring and with state mission compliance with international guidelines. There has also been discussion of developing lasers, tethers, and slings to drag debris out of orbit (ESA, 2005), all of which introduce their own forms of risk. A contract to develop such technology would benefit one space technology company or another but the cost would be borne by the public, as recently demonstrated by NASA’s $1.9 million award to Star Technology and Research to develop the ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator (Chang, 2012). Commercial sector compliance with voluntary codes of practice is understandably low as it can be extremely costly and organisations within the sector cannot be held responsible in the event of catastrophe. Nor does capital, as an abstract and fluid entity, have any interest in the long-term future of the space environment. Satellites fix capital for a decade, but their investors have no concern for the future beyond this. Whether or not guidelines are forced on commercial operators will depend on the relationship between states or suprastates and capital. While the costs of mitigation are seen to undermine commercial viability it is unlikely that procedures will become compulsory. This includes the possibility of a launch tax, which would fly in the face of legislative trends in US space policy. Compulsory measures are more likely, however, if major stakeholders in the space industry become the ones to profit from them. European company EADS Astrium has funded £1 million in research into the CubeSail project at the Surrey Space Centre in the UK. The CubeSail is intended to drag satellites out of orbit at the end of their lifetimes. EADS is a major state contractor as well as a commercial operator. France has recently made it law that satellites under its jurisdiction must be deorbited after twenty-five years. There are profits to be made by Astrium if other countries follow suit. The politics of space debris call into question Beck’s assertion that the old alliances between the state, capital, and science are over. In recent work, Beck (2005, page 138) makes clear that he believes the transnational logic of capital trumps the power of states. But this work lacks the attention to the complexity of relationships between neoliberal and neoconservative politics that characterises the work of David Harvey (2003). Harvey argues that states vacillate historically between protecting regional interests and opening borders. The creation of larger and larger alliances of states is one potential outcome of this process. It may be that international state alliances in one form or another take responsibility for space debris. But Harvey reminds us that, firstly, these ‘cosmopolitan’ agreements do not represent the public interest but exist to safeguard capital accumulation, and, secondly, that they are always prone to dissolution. None of the parties involved support the measure most certain to improve orbital pollution, which is to stop (or limit) the launch of objects into orbit (UN, 1999). Instead, the solutions being pursued only serve to deepen the contradiction between those who benefit from risk mitigation and those who bear the costs. As attention to the problem grows, the perceived impending catastrophe appears to demand an immediate technological solution that actually obscures the politics at work see de Goede and Randalls (2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change. Time frame – Kessler effect 200 years away. Peter Stubbe, PhD in law @ Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, ’17, State Accountability for Space Debris: A Legal Study of Responsibility for Polluting the Space Environment and Liability for Damage Caused by Space Debris, Koninklijke Brill Publishing, ISBN 978-90-04-31407-8, p. 27-31 The prediction of possible scenarios of the future evolution of the debris p o p ulation involves many uncertainties. Long-term forecasting means the prediction of the evolution of the future debris environment in time periods of decades or even centuries. Predictions are based on models84 that work with certain assumptions, and altering these parameters significantly influences the outcomes of the predictions. Assumptions on the future space traffic and on the initial object environment are particularly critical to the results of modeling efforts.85 A well-known pattern for the evolution of the debris population is the so-called Kessler effect’, which assumes that there is a certain collision probability among space objects because many satellites operate in similar orbital regions. These collisions create fragments, and thus additional objects in the respective orbits, which in turn enhances the risk of further collisions. Consequently, the number of objects and collisions increases exponentially and eventually results in the formation of a self-sustaining debris belt around the Earth. While it has long been assumed that such a process of collisional cascading is likely to occur only in a very long-term perspective (meaning a time 1 n of several hundred years),87 a consensus has evolved in recent years that an uncontrolled growth of the debris population in certain altitudes could become reality much sooner.88 In fact, a recent cooperative study undertaken by various space agencies in the scope of i a d c shows that the current l e o debris population is unstable, even if current mitigation measures are applied. The study concludes:Even with a 90 implementation of the commonly-adopted mitigation measures ... the l e o debris population is expected to increase by an average of 30 in the next 200 years. The population growth is primarily driven by catastrophic collisions between 700 and 1000 km altitudes and such collisions are likely to occur every 5 to 9 years.89 No space war – it’s hype and systems are redundant Johnson-Freese and Hitchens 16 Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese is a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century: Arming the Heavens. Views expressed are those of the author alone. Theresa Hitchens is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), and the former Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Stop The Fearmongering Over War In Space: The Sky’s Not Falling, Part 1. December 27, 2016. https://breakingdefense.com/2016/12/stop-the-fearmongering-over-war-in-space-the-skys-not-falling-part-1/ In the last two years, we’ve seen rising hysteria over a future war in space. Fanning the flames are not only dire assessments from the US military, but also breathless coverage from a cooperative and credulous press. This reporting doesn’t only muddy public debate over whether we really need expensive systems. It could also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The irony is that nothing makes the currently slim possibility of war in space more likely than fearmongering over the threat of war in space. Two television programs in the past two years show how egregious this fearmongering can get. In April 2015, the CBS show 60 Minutes ran a segment called “The Battle Above.” In an interview with General John Hyten, the then-chief of U.S. Air Force Space Command, it came across loud and clear that the United States was being forced to prepare for a battle in space — specifically against China — that it really didn’t want. It was explained by Hyten and other guests that China is building a considerable amount of hardware and accumulating significant know-how regarding space, all threatening to space assets Americans depend on every day. If viewers weren’t frightened after watching the segment, it wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of CBS. Using terms like “offensive counterspace” as a 1984 NewSpeak euphemism for “weapons,” it was made clear that the United States had no choice but to spend billions of dollars on offensive counterspace technology to not just thwart the Chinese threat, but control and dominate space. While it didn’t actually distort facts — just omit facts about current U.S. space capabilities — the segment was basically a cost-free commercial for the military-industrial complex. In retrospect though, “The Battle Above” was pretty good compared to CNN’s recent special, War in Space: The Next Battlefield. The latter might as well have been called Sharknado in Space – because the only far-out weapons technology our potential adversaries don’t have, according to the broadcast, seems to be “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!” First, CNN needs to hire some fact checkers. Saying “unlike its adversaries, the U.S. has not yet weaponized space” is deeply misleading, like saying “unlike his political opponents, President-Elect Donald Trump has not sprouted wings and flown away”: A few (admittedly alarming) weapons tests aside, no country in the world has yet weaponized space. Contrary to CNN, stock market transactions are not timed nor synchronized through GPS, but a closed system. Cruise missiles can find their targets even without GPS, because they have both GPS and precision inertial measurement units onboard, and IMUs don’t rely on satellite data. Oh, and the British rock group Pink Floyd holds the only claim to the Dark Side of the Moon: There is a “far side” of the Moon — the side always turned away from the Earth — but not a “dark side” — which would be a side always turned away from the Sun. More nefariously, the segment sensationalized nuggets of truth within a barrage of half-truths, backed by a heavy bass, dramatic soundtrack (and gravelly-voiced reporter Jim Sciutto) and accompanied by sexy and scary visuals. Make no mistake there are dangers in space, and the United States has the most to lose if space assets are lost. The question is how best to protect them. Here are a few facts CNN omitted. The Reality The U.S. has all of the technologies described on the CNN segment and deemed potentially offensive: maneuverable satellites, nano-satellites, lasers, jamming capabilities, robotic arms, ballistic missiles that can be used as anti-satellite weapons, etc. In fact, the United States is more technologically advanced than other countries in both military and commercial space. That technological superiority scares other countries; just as the U.S. military space community is scared of other countries obtaining those technologies in the future. The U.S. military space budget is more than 10 times greater than that of all the countries in the world combined. That also causes other countries concern. More unsettling still, the United States has long been leery of treaty-based efforts to constrain a potential arms race in outer space, as supported by nearly every other country in the world for decades. Indeed, under the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. talking points centered on the mantra “there is no arms race in outer space,” so there is no need for diplomat instruments to constrain one. Now, a decade later, the U.S. military – backed by the Intelligence Community which operates the nation’s spy satellites – seems to be shouting to the rooftops that the United States is in danger of losing the space arms race already begun by its potential adversaries. The underlying assumption — a convenient one for advocates of more military spending — is that now there is nothing that diplomacy can do. However, it must be remembered that most space-related technologies – with the exception of ballistic missiles and dedicated jammers – have both military and civil/commercial uses; both benign — indeed, helpful — and nefarious uses. For example, giving satellites the ability to maneuver on orbit can allow useful inspections of ailing satellites and possibly even repairs. Further, the United States is not unable to protect its satellites, as repeated during the CNN broadcast by various interviewees and the host. Many U.S. government-owned satellites, including precious spy satellites, have capabilities to maneuver. Many are hardened against electro-magnetic pulse, sport “shutters” to protect optical “eyes” from solar flares and lasers, and use radio frequency hopping to resist jamming. Offensive weapons, deployed on the ground to attack satellites, or in space, are not a silver bullet. To the contrary, U.S. deployment of such weapons may actually be detrimental to U.S. and international security in space (as we argued in a recent Atlantic Council publication, Towards a New National Security Space Strategy). Further, there are benefits to efforts started by the Obama Administration to find diplomatic tools to restrain and constrain dangerous military activities in space. These diplomatic efforts, however, would be undercut by a full-out U.S. pursuit of “space dominance.” This includes dialogue with China, the lack of which Gen. William Shelton, retired commander of Air Force Space Command, lamented in the CNN report. Given CNN’s “cast,” the spin was not surprising. Starting with Ghost Fleet author Peter Singer set the sensationalist tone, which never altered. The apocalyptic opening, inspired by Ghost Fleet, posited a scenario where all U.S. satellites are taken off-line in nearly one fell swoop. Unless we are talking about an alien invasion, that scenario is nigh on impossible. No potential adversary has such capabilities, nor will they ever likely do so. There is just too much redundancy in the system. No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of the ultimate high ground and the ease of destruction of space-based assets by the potential space weaponry, the utilization of space weapons is with current technology and no effective means to protect them far from fulfilling this potential (Steinberg 2012, p. 255). In current global international political and technological setting, the utility of space weapons is very limited, even if we accept that the ultimate high ground presents the potential to get a decisive tangible military advantage (which is unclear). This stands among the reasons for the lack of their utilization so far. Last but not the least, it must be pointed out that the states also develop passive defense systems designed to protect the satellites on orbit or critical capabilities they provide. These further decrease the utility of space weapons. These systems include larger maneuvering capacities, launching of decoys, preparation of spare satellites that are ready for launch in case of ASAT attack on its twin on orbit, or attempts to decrease the visibility of satellites using paint or materials less visible from radars (Moltz 2014, p. 31). Finally, we must look at the main obstacles of connection of the outer space and warfare. The first set of barriers is comprised of physical obstructions. As has been presented in the previous chapter, the outer space is very challenging domain to operate in. Environmental factors still present the largest threat to any space military capabilities if compared to any man-made threats (Rendleman 2013, p. 79). A following issue that hinders military operations in the outer space is the predictability of orbital movement. If the reconnaissance satellite's orbit is known, the terrestrial actor might attempt to hide some critical capabilities-an option that is countered by new surveillance techniques (spectrometers, etc.) (Norris 2010, p. 196)-but the hide-and-seek game is on. This same principle is, however, in place for any other space asset-any nation with basic tracking capabilities may quickly detect whether the military asset or weapon is located above its territory or on the other side of the planet and thus mitigate the possible strategic impact of space weapons not aiming at mass destruction. Another possibility is to attempt to destroy the weapon in orbit. Given the level of development for the ASAT technology, it seems that they will prevail over any possible weapon system for the time to come. Next issue, directly connected to the first one, is the utilization of weak physical protection of space objects that need to be as light as possible to reach the orbit and to be able to withstand harsh conditions of the domain. This means that their protection against ASAT weapons is very limited, and, whereas some avoidance techniques are being discussed, they are of limited use in case of ASAT attack. We can thus add to the issue of predictability also the issue of easy destructibility of space weapons and other military hardware (Dolman 2005, p. 40; Anantatmula 2013, p. 137; Steinberg 2012, p. 255). Even if the high ground was effectively achieved and other nations could not attack the space assets directly, there is still a need for communication with those assets from Earth. There are also ground facilities that support and control such weapons located on the surface. Electromagnetic communication with satellites might be jammed or hacked and the ground facilities infiltrated or destroyed thus rendering the possible space weapons useless (Klein 2006, p. 105; Rendleman 2013, p. 81). This issue might be overcome by the establishment of a base controlling these assets outside the Earth-on Moon or lunar orbit, at lunar L-points, etc.-but this perspective remains, for now, unrealistic. Furthermore, no contemporary actor will risk full space weaponization in the face of possible competition and the possibility of rendering the outer space useless. No actor is dominant enough to prevent others to challenge any possible attempts to dominate the domain by military means. To quote 2016 Stratfor analysis, "(a) war in space would be devastating to all, and preventing it, rather than finding ways to fight it, will likely remain the goal" (Larnrani 20 16). This stands true unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others. Framing The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of _, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over try or die risk calculus. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology. Matheson 17 Calum, Assoc. Prof Communication @ Pitt, “The sublime rhetoric of Pascal’s wager,” Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 0, Iss. 0,0, Sep 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CTPGbVmNAmtvfJPI8Q86/full//ak47 The form of Pascal's wager has been adapted outside of its explicitly religious context. It perennially crops up in debates over important public political decisions, from space exploration (Bostrom 2003 Bostrom, N. 2003. “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development.” Utilitas 15 (2): 308–314. ) and asteroid collisions (Matheny 2007 Matheny, J. 2007. “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction.” Risk Analysis 27 (5): 1334–1345. Google Scholar , 1340–1342) to climate change (Hurka 1993 Hurka, T. 1993. “Ethical Principles.” In Ethics and Climate Change: The Greenhouse Effect, edited by H. Coward and T. Hurka, 23–38. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. , 25) and anything else potentially covered by the precautionary principle.1 Footnote 1: Those with recent experience in intercollegiate policy debate should recognize the logic of Pascal's wager in the “try or die” arguments that dominate its risk calculus in debates over the desirability of hypothetical plans and the attendant necessity to describe the outcomes of any decision in terms of possible human extinction, whether the topic revolves around military deployment, subsidies for agriculture, or decriminalizing prostitution in the United States. End footnote 1 Chief amongst these is nuclear weapons. Most clearly articulated in Jonathan Schell's (1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ) Fate of the Earth and modified in Dick Cheney's “One Percent Doctrine,” the logic of the wager features in calculations of the catastrophic, but relatively unlikely, prospect of nuclear destruction. But despite its continued iteration, the logic of Pascal's wager is far from uncontroversial. A great number of critics over the years have shown that Pascal's argument is fundamentally unsound whether or not God exists. Indeed, as a logical proof the wager has few defenders. How then might we account for its persistence? What political possibilities does the trope afford? To answer these questions, this article will examine Pascal's original wager and the logical objections to it with reference to debates over nuclear weapons. My central argument is that Pascal's wager is best understood as an example of the rhetorical sublime. In making this case, I will link the sublime to Paul de Man's observations on the undecidability of grammar and rhetoric. Critics of Pascal have often interpreted his wager grammatically as a logical argument for belief rather than rhetorically as a use of trope to establish the impossibility of logical argument. Even those who identify rhetoric at work in Pascal's wager tend to analyze it in terms of rational persuasion, oftentimes with some distrust. However, Pascal's rhetorical method in the wager is more akin to the sublime style of Longinus (1991 Longinus. 1991. On Great Writing (On the Sublime). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. ) than the rational persuasion of Aristotelian logos, a result of the negative theology that informed Pascal's approach to the subject of God. The wager's power comes not from its mathematical consistency or reasoned argument but rather its stark presentation of infinity as something that exceeds reason itself in some measure and forces the potential believer to confront what exceeds logic itself. The outcome of this discussion matters because it implicates modern-day uses of the wager's argumentative structure and the sublime more generally. Appeals to act in the face of enormous, but enormously unlikely, threats cannot be effectively resisted by simply disputing the logic of their calculation, nor are they productive roadmaps for politics as conventionally understood. Rather, these arguments should be read in relation to Pascal's original theological motive as efforts to overwhelm auditors with the appeal to values and forces beyond their ability to comprehend or calculate with reason alone. Like Pascal's wager, the sublime also has its critics, and the nuclear example suggests that it might be particularly threatening in combination with Pascal's wager. However, the wager might also be read as evidence that the sublime also presents opportunities for political critique. Although Schell and Cheney's opposite deployments of the infinite demonstrate that aporia may result, Pascal's sublime rhetoric should not be dismissed. Indecision can also gesture towards political possibilities beyond rational, orderly politics. This essay will proceed in four parts. First, it will elaborate the structure and context of Pascal's original wager in the Pensées and the logical objections to it with the aim of recovering Pascal's reputation as a rhetorician employing a powerful trope, rather than a mathematician systematizing belief. Second, it will discuss Jonathan Schell's famous appeal for nuclear abolition in his book Fate of the Earth and Dick Cheney's so-called “One Percent Doctrine” against terrorism as contemporary uses of the wager's logical structure. Third, it will analyze the wager in terms of its sublime rhetoric and the influence of negative theology on Pascal's work. Finally, it will conclude with a discussion of the appeal to infinity as an argumentative strategy and the challenges of the sublime as an aspect of political rhetoric. Pascal's wager When he died at the age of 39, Blaise Pascal was in the midst of a project (or projects) of apology for the Christian faith. Although the work was never completed, it was ultimately to be assembled as the Pensées, a “mildly heretical” treatise reflecting Pascal's Jansenist conviction (Velchik 2009 Velchik, M. 2009. “Pascal's Wager is a Lie: An Epistemic Interpretation of the Ultimate Pragmatic Argument.” Aporia 19 (2): 1–8. , 1). Much of the book concerns the fallen state of humanity and the inability to directly contemplate the “hidden God,” the motive force of the universe that exists beyond the realms of speech and rational cognition. Pascal's work was inspired by the events of November 23 1654, eight years prior to his death, which he christened the “Night of Fire.” Vividly described in the Pensées, the Night of Fire was a two-hour long religious vision which he interpreted as a revelation of God (Ludwin 2001 Ludwin, D. 2001. Blaise Pascal's Quest for the Ineffable. New York: Peter Lang. , xi). Unable to communicate this experience directly, Pascal nevertheless endeavored to reach unbelievers with his brand of Jansenist Catholicism. One result was his famous wager, which Westel (1995 Westel, D. (1995). Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Penseés. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. , 13) has suggested would have been near the beginning of the assembled Penseés based on Pascal's notes and more recent textual scholarship. There is “not one inkling of doubt” that the final project was intended as an extended Christian apology (Westel 1995 Westel, D. (1995). Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Penseés. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. , 18) with the wager as a key element.22. Pascal himself was not the first to propose such an argument (Ryan 1994 Ryan, J. 1994. “The Wager in Pascal and Others.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 11–20. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. ), but his formulation of it is the most complete, widely known, studied, and influential and is therefore the most appropriate target for analysis. Also, although the wager argument did not originate with Pascal, Patricia Topliss has argued that its mathematical expression did, which again makes it a key analogue for later, secular iterations (Topliss 1966 Topliss, P. 1966. The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion in the Provinciales and the Pensées. Leicester: Leicester University Press. , 193–194). As Westel notes, “apology” applies a modern concept which Pascal would have understood somewhat differently. “‘Either God is or he sic is not,’” Pascal (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). ) wrote. “Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong” (122). Because the proposition that God is real cannot be proven or disproven, neither decision is clearly correct. But some decision must be made, because one either believes or does not – “you are already committed,” as Pascal put it (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). , 122).33. This reflects the Jansenist emphasis on individual faith as an element of salvation, a doctrinal commitment opposed by the Jesuits. View all notes Pascal argues that four outcomes are possible – that God exists and I believe, that God exists and that I do not believe, that God does not exist but I believe, and that God does not exist and I do not believe. These outcomes can be mapped onto a decision matrix, and indeed Pascal is considered one of the progenitors of decision theory for his analysis of alternative choices (Jordan 1994a Jordan, J. 1994a. “Introduction.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 1–10. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. , 3). Although Pascal implied a 50 probability of God's existence (assuming that the coin he described is fair), the most significant aspect of his argument is that probability itself is unimportant for this particular decision. Because the rewards for belief if God is real are “an eternity of life and happiness” while the potential losses of false belief are finite, the potential benefits of belief outweigh any drawback. “Though there were an infinite number of chances,” Pascal (2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). ) wrote, “of which only one were in your favor,” one would be right to wager if “there were an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won.” But the chance of God's existence is not one-in-infinity, but some finite fraction: “there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won, one chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing, and what you are staking is finite” (123–124). That Pascal describes the bet in terms of “lives” bet and won only eases the way for its adaptation to public policy questions. Pascal's argument here is not that God exists, but that given the non-zero chance that God exists multiplied by the infinite reward of correct belief, it is rational to act as if God exists. It is rational to believe because of the expected value of this course of action, and if the “passions” prevent “reason” from convincing the gambler, then behaving like one believes by “taking holy water, having masses said, and so on” will eventually lead one to belief (Pascal 2003 Pascal, B. 2003. Pensées Kindle version.. Amazon.com . (Original work published 1670). , 124). Pascal also argues that the salubrious effects of a pious lifestyle are worth the attendant loss of hedonistic pleasures even without the infinite rewards of Heaven (125). Eventually, as these boons accumulate and the convert behaves in a pious fashion, the repetition of worship will instill genuine faith and fear for one's immortal soul: “Anyone who grows accustomed to faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else” (126). The fear of hell adds a dimension of infinite suffering as an alternative to infinite happiness, and it is this negative incentive that is often echoed in secular incarnations of the wager. Leaving aside the moral objections to Pascal's wager, the logic of this argument has been attacked in a number of ways. One objection is that because many gods – perhaps an infinite number of them – are possible, Pascal cannot do more than argue that atheism and agnosticism are irrational, which does not prove that Catholicism is correct (Jordan 1994b Jordan, J. 1994b. “The Many Gods Objection.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 1–10. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied.). The argument that any small probability with an infinite impact should be assessed as infinite creates an obvious difficulty when two infinitely important outcomes – one good, one bad – are compared against one another. Suppose that choosing the wrong god results in damnation by the right one. On which god does one then decide? The result is either paralysis, which Pascal rejects with his insistence that some choice is inescapable, or an assessment that returns to probability, making the appeal to infinity moot (Schlesinger 1994 Schlesinger, G. 1994. “A Central Theistic Argument.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 83–100. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 89). At this point, Patricia Topliss (1966 Topliss, P. 1966. The Rhetoric of Pascal: A Study of his Art of Persuasion in the Provinciales and the Pensées. Leicester: Leicester University Press.) argues, the wager no longer makes sense. The unbeliever might argue that sufficiently low odds make the wager irrational (“is there an even chance that the unicorn exists?”) and that, knowing only the mortal world in which we live, to stake one's life in exchange for the possibility of salvation is to risk everything potentially for nothing (195–196). Perhaps God does exist but perversely tortures true believers – even if this outcome is unlikely, to make a judgment on this basis merely returns the debate to probability. Other difficulties exist with the nature of infinity as a concept, vital to the rewards and punishments of Pascal's wager. Leaving aside the well-known problem of Russell's Paradox, in which a set that contains all sets must paradoxically either include or exclude itself, there is also the St. Petersburg Paradox. Imagine that Peter offers a game to Paul involving coin flips. Peter will pay Paul a dollar if the coin ends up heads, two dollars if the second flip also turns up heads, four if this is repeated on the third flip, eight on the fourth, and so on to infinity (Bernoulli 1954, 31). How much would one be willing to pay to play this game? The amount that one could win rises towards the infinite, but the chances of winning decline toward zero as one continues to play. In addition, after a certain amount, doubling the prize money does not double its actual value – while having a 1000 dollars might legitimately make one twice as happy as having 500, having 200 billion dollars is not twice as good as having 100 billion, because as the prize increases the marginal utility of each dollar decreases. Although the expected value may only have an asymptotic relationship to zero, the value of playing this game has been set as low as two dollars (Ellenberg 2014, 244). The various objections to Pascal's wager have substantially discredited it is a logical argument and therefore led to its rejection by many scholars. In the summary judgment of Ian Hacking (1994), although the arguments of the wager are “valid,” none of them are convincing. “The arguments are worthless as apologetics today, for no present agnostic who understood the arguments would ever be moved to accept all the premises” (27). The wager is structured something like a geometric proof, so if Pascal the geometer has the math wrong, the wager has no value. At its extreme, this line of thinking lends credence to Buford Norman's (1977) claim that the Pensées are not rhetorical at all. “Many of the fragments of the Pensées,” he wrote, “consist of a direct association of ideas, with few connectives. This is precisely what the Port-Royal Logique calls jugement, which is basically the same as grammar … perhaps the most logical of all methods (styles), since it follows thought quite closely, and it is definitely far removed from rhetoric” (32). It seems reasonable to suggest, however, that Blaise Pascal, one of the great scientific and mathematical minds of his age, might well have realized the logical deficits of his wager but advanced it anyway for its rhetorical effect. In this sense, it is less a demonstration and more an effort to persuade, and Pascal should instead be judged for his merits as a rhetorician. Grammar and rhetoric of the wager The mathematical or logical reading of Pascal is the chief claim against him as a rhetorician. For interpreters such as Ellenberg and Hacking, Pascal's work is an effort to persuade through demonstration or at best grammar, as Norman argues. This interpretation sees Pascal as an earnest mathematician establishing what amounts to a proof, rather than a rhetorician employing his persuasive art to win the hearts of believers along with their minds. Others, however, have claimed the opposite position that Pascal's Penseés should be understood as primarily rhetorical, and Pascal himself as an expert rhetorician, although whether this is a complement or aspersion varies according to the source. This section will summarize and analyze this rhetorical interpretation, ultimately concluding that the opposition between grammar (as indexical structure) and rhetoric (as persuasion) is an opportunity to view Pascal's rhetoric as something in excess of both, more in line with the sublime tradition than the Aristotelian one. Pascal's own theory of rhetoric is developed in an essay called “The Art of Persuasion” (1909),4 which begins by acknowledging that although people tend to believe what pleases them, this is “base, ignoble and irrelevant” (406). The “art of persuasion,” as Pascal names it, is “simply the process of perfect methodical proofs,” and “consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions; of proposing principles or evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined” (Pascal 1909, 410). Blaise Pascal, “arguably the most successful and significant practitioner of written rhetoric in his century” (Lockwood 1996, 273), thus seems to treat the art of persuasion as something with a set of codifiable, if elusive, rules and laws, a sort of geometry of human interiority. Although Pascal professes not to know all the rules, persuasion is, in this view of his work, still thought of a technique bound by laws, hidden or not (Ijsseling 1976, 73). Rule-bound and systematic, this view of Pascal's rhetoric tends to support the idea that his mathematical language is meant to be taken literally, which is perhaps what Paul Valéry (1968) was thinking when he wrote that the wager is “absurd” because it “concludes with a hope in mathematics” (319). Pascal could be expected to transmit ideas with the minimum amount of figural embellishment or distortion, and it was precisely his failure to do that which sparked Valéry's ire, leading him to describe the deceased mathematician as “an enemy of the human race.” “My complaint against Pascal,” he wrote, “is that he wanted to persuade … For me this is shocking – I've caught him in the act of literature. As I see it, if a man has something to say and thinks it should be said, he should put it just as it is in his mind … Exactly as it is” (318). This attack resonates with criticisms of rhetoric more generally as an art of deception and deceit, unsuited to the serious questions of religion, science, and even statecraft. Indeed, in discussing another of Pascal's arguments Valéry claims that he cannot be an “inspired writer” because “it's a piece of rhetoric, a fake window … It's an effect—Pascal is a rhetorician” (317). Even Velchik, who acknowledges Pascal as a rhetorician without condemning him as such, still concludes that Pascal's wager is deceptive – “a white lie,” no matter how insightful (Velchik 2009, 8). The most influential work on this subject is Topliss's (1966) The Rhetoric of Pascal in which she concurs with Valéry's claim that Pascal uses figurative language as more than mere ornament, transforming the meaning of his arguments through sophisticated rhetorical technique. Although she did not envenom her judgment as did Valéry, Topliss argued that Pascal's technique departed from “Ancient Rhetoric” substantially in this regard (258). For Topliss, while something more may be at work, persuasion is still the central project of the Pensées, and in this sense Pascal does follow a certain tradition of ancient rhetoric beginning with Aristotle's well-known definition of rhetoric as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. Topliss and Valéry thus see Pascal's work as persuasive at its core, the exact opposite of Norman's claim that Pacal communicates so directly that his work is not rhetorical. The work of Paul de Man (1988) suggests one way to resolve this disparity. de Man argued that two theories of the function of language were at work in Pascal's writing. One was a “cognitive function” that is “right (juste) but powerless,” while the other was “a modal function” that was “mighty (forte) in its claim to rightness.” The “necessary choice” between “seduction and truth remains undecidable,” de Man argues, because even the language of Holy Writ cannot be squared in its persuasive power with a geometrical understanding of proof (de Man 1988, 153). This undecidability is what de Man calls allegory. The conflict between “seduction” and “truth” mirrors a distinction he developed in Allegories of Reading between “rhetoric” and “grammar.” In a famous passage in that book, de Man relates a scene from All in the Family in which Archie Bunker's wife, Edith, asks him if he would prefer his bowling shoes laced under or laced over, to which Archie replies “what's the difference?” When Edith begins to explain this difference, Archie becomes agitated; his statement, although it grammatically requests more information, rhetorically denies the need for it and is thus aporetic (de Man 1979, 9–10).5 In this formulation, both Norman and Topliss are correct: Pascal's language is “basically the same as grammar” as Norman argued, and yet paradoxically “restored to figures of rhetoric that had long been thought of as ornaments, their original function as instruments of persuasion” (Topliss 1966, 321). There is something undecidable in Pascal's rhetoric between reason and belief. Rather than leading us to accept the wager as a demonstration of how reason might be applied to God, the second half of this aporia suggests that the wager is a figurative argument for why there can be no such proof – something that Pascal himself hints at when he wrote that because the order of the holy infinitely exceeds the corrupt speech of human beings, “divine truths” could not fall under the arts of persuasion. “God alone,” he wrote, “can place them in the soul” (Pascal 1909, 406–407). If Pascal believed that the “hidden God” lies infinitely beyond the capacity of persuasive language to represent, why write the wager at all? Scholars who, like Topliss, argue that Pascal's work should be analyzed rhetorically share a basic assumption with the grammatical view of Norman and those who treat the wager as a kind of mathematical proof: in short, both view Pascal's central project as one of persuasion. Even de Man's somewhat more subtle reading largely shares this understanding. Pascal, through demonstration, rhetoric, or aporetic uncertainty is guilty of Valéry's charge of attempted persuasion. The wager does not seem to add much in this regard beyond a simple effort to persuade, an appeal to logos with the minor quirk of its mathematical appeal to infinity. Pascal's religious background suggests that this dismissal may be too hasty. As Topliss wrote, that Pascal's style “will not yield up all its secrets” hidden in his “most banal devices,” suggests that the author of the Penseés had his own “impenetrable places” (321). Negative theology and the sublime Dawn Ludwin (2001) makes the case in Blaise Pascal's Quest for the Ineffable that Pascal owed a great debt to the tradition of negative theology, particularly the work of Pseudo-Dionysius,6 which he seems to have read despite his relatively limited reading and citation of other scholarly works (3–4). Negative theology is an ancient tradition in Christian thought with strong parallels in other religions. Its central concern can be framed as the problem of infinity: if God is infinite and exceeds all human understanding, how are we to talk about the divine? Language fails to capture God because it is a fallen thing of human artifice and must necessarily provide a limit where none exists in the case of the divine. Language and its limits are thus central concerns in this line of thinking. Divine experiences, such as Pascal's Night of Fire, might be described, but they can never be fully understood through speech. We can only say what God is not because even the word “infinite” is nothing more than a linguistic marker, a condensation and thus a kind of paradox in itself. Like Pascal, Pseudo-Dionysius described God in striking terms as “light” and “fire,” arguing that although language might show a path, it is only in the silence that exceeds it where God might make itself known (50–56). These metaphors for God do not persuade, but rather lead the audience to the edge of a precipice beyond which the currency of language has no purchase. As Ludwin argues, the rhetorical theory deriving from such a position on God is more consistent with the sublime of Longinus than with the rational persuasion of Aristotle, and it is in these terms that Pascal might be best understood (140–141). The sublime has been partially absorbed into the field of aesthetics, but its origin is squarely rhetorical. For Longinus, powerful rhetorical figures – chiefly metaphor – may circumvent the auditor's reason by the sheer force of the concepts it invokes. Although it is unlikely that Pascal ever read Longinus,7 striking similarities exist in their theories of rhetoric. For Longinus, the greatest writing does not persuade, but “takes the reader out of himself sic” by employing and “irresistible force beyond the control of any audience.” Although the individual elements of style gradually accrete in a text to indicate the author's skill, individual tropes are sublime to the extent that they disrupt this coherence: “greatness appears suddenly,” Longinus wrote, “like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and reveals the writer's full power in a flash” (4). Like Pseudo-Dionysius's belief that the infinite power of God revealed the fragility of human subjects, Longinus's theory of rhetoric uses language as an appeal to a powerful motive force that exceeds the individual. A sublime trope conceals the proof of its own argument by “startling” the reader by “its own brilliance” (Longinus 1991, 27). The best figures are not even identifiable as such because their disruptive effect draws attention away from artifice altogether, making it appear natural (Longinus 1991, 29). The technical character of the trope is less important than its ability to shock the reader away from mundane language by changing their orientation towards the text and its associated concepts, however briefly. Viewed through this lens, Pascal's wager takes on a different significance. The purpose of the wager is not to provide a rational proof for God or even to compel adherence to the liturgy, but to use the trope of the infinite to disorient and displace subjects by revealing their finitude. The wager's logical structure is obviously flawed, but this fact does not undermine its significance – it is an example of rhetoric beyond persuasion. First, following Longinus, the effect of the trope should be to conceal the proof of its own argument if it is successful, rendering the proof itself relatively unimportant. The important part of the wager is not the finitude of probability in the coin toss, but the overwhelming, literally incomprehensible stakes of the wager. The wager is supposed to shock the reader into an inspired choice that will eventually lead to conversion through repetition, not to complete the process all at once. No part of Pascal's wager has to be compelling on its own, so the 50 probability of God's existence, for example, is arbitrary and irrelevant. The sublime is supposed to circumvent the faculty of reason, rather than appeal to it in an effort of persuasion that ends in a carefully calculated decision to convert. Second, following Pseudo-Dionysius, the weakness of the wager's logic might be precisely its appeal. The secret in the “banal devices” that Topliss diagnoses is that words never succeed in capturing the majesty of God. Pascal's sublime trope does its work through catachresis. As Pseudo-Dionysius (1987) writes, “incongruities are more suitable for lifting our minds up into the domain of the spiritual … the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it could be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things” (150). The same characteristic describes the wager. The hitch in its logic – the catachresis resulting from juxtaposing the crude indexical statement of the wager with its divine referent – forces the reader to engage the claim more thoroughly. Valéry's fury at Pascal's base rhetoric might be precisely the point: after all, it did lead the later French critic to write at length about a single sentence in Pascal's work, stewing over the crassness of its persuasion for many years.8 Confusion at the logic of the argument only helps to conceal its non-rational effect: after all, to be angered at its irrationality is to presume that it is supposed to be rational in the first place. Pascal was an “enemy of the human race” (in Valéry's language) to the extent that he wished to dissolve its finitude in the rapture of the divine by catachretic revelation. Even at his most rational and precise, Pascal argued that persuasion had its limits because the rules could never be fully known and individuals would follow their passions (Pascal, 1909). It is more fitting with his indisputable genius that the wager be read as an immensely subtle attempt to shock readers out of complacency rather than an immensely clumsy use of probability by one of Europe's greatest and most diligent mathematicians. Pascal's heirs The purpose of this exercise in reinterpretation is not only to vindicate Pascal the rhetorician. The wager's basic form is perhaps more influential today than it ever has been in past. Since the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, human beings have become aware that their decisions have the potential to destroy the entire species – and many others along with it. The challenges of thinking in terms of existential risk are immense, and many old habits of thought are irrelevant or even counterproductive when making these decisions. The root of this problem is that people are not accustomed to thinking in the appropriate scales. The magnitudes of some potential impacts, such as nuclear war, are so large that our minds are not well equipped to fathom them. If they are not truly “infinite,” they are at least close enough to exert the same effects on our minds. At the same time, probabilities are so low that in conjunction with existential risks they too are hard to grasp (Yudkowsky, 2008). It is this intersection that mirrors Pascal's wager: unpredictable, low chances married to immensely, possibly infinitely, important outcomes.9 Debates about existential risk thus adhere to Pascal's wager in form: at issue is not Pascal's argument for religious debate so much as his deployment of infinite value as a rhetorical device. The most thoroughly studied existential risk is nuclear war. Since the beginning of the Cold War, academics, think-tank employees, and military planners have made an effort to quantify the risks of nuclear conflict and manage it with the tools of reason (Abella 2008 Abella, A. 2008. Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. ; Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. 2005. The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ). The arms race appears to be the first consistent use of Pascal's wager to inform arguments on both sides of a single dispute, and may serve as a prototype for later deployments. Roy Sorensen (1994 Sorensen, R. 1994. “Infinite Decision Theory.” In Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal's Wager, edited by J. Jordan, 139–159. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied. ) reported that a version of Pascal's wager showed up in arms control rallies (141), but its most complete and eloquent formulation is in Jonathan Schell's widely-read book Fate of the Earth. Schell (1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ) argues that the consequences of a nuclear war largely are unknown, but due to the possibility that an ensuing nuclear winter might destroy all life on Earth, such a war cannot be risked for any reason. He writes: the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that significance into account…. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs … although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble … we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species. (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95) The above passage follows the structure and content of Pascal's wager very closely. First, Schell asserts an infinite value coupled with an uncertain probability, which together result in an infinite expected value for one choice (and therefore, an infinite opportunity cost for another). Like the rewards of Heaven and the consequences of Hell, the virtues of peace and the losses of extinction are unquantifiable. Probability is irrelevant in this calculation because “a fraction of infinity is still infinity.” Second, Schell argues that although the chances of extinction are unknown, we should act as if it is a certain result of nuclear war, just as Pascal attempted not to prove that God exists, but rather that we should act as if this was the truth. It is possible that nuclear winter would not result; it is possible that a nuclear war will not occur; it is possible that the worst-case projections are wrong. Thus, although “scientifically speaking” there is “all the difference in the world between the mere possibility … and the certainty of it, morally they are the same,” which is why we must act “as though we knew for a certainty” that extinction will result from the possession of nuclear arms (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95). Third, Schell appeals not only to the unknown but to the unknowable. The impact of a nuclear war is beyond our comprehension, just as the God of Pascal's negative theology is. The passage cited here comes at the very end of the first part of Fate of the Earth, “Republic of Insects and Grass,” which is an extended description of the potential horrors of nuclear war written lyrically and beautifully, but includes an acknowledgement that nuclear war can be imagined but is indescribable because its witnesses would be dead (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 26). It mirrors the many names of God used by Pseudo-Dionysius to impress upon his readers that God is something that must necessarily exceed the human standpoint. Near the conclusion of his “wager” passage, Schell asserts, “we stand before a mystery.” Like Pascal's worshipper gradually humbled before God's revelation, the reader “taken outside” of themselves by Longinus's sublime, or the believer “struck by God's blazing light,” Schell's audience is to be overwhelmed by his language and made to realize their own finitude. “Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder,” he writes, “and our wonder should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution” (Schell 1982 Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. , 95). Finally, Schell's sublime rhetoric is supposed to be an impetus for action. The third section of Fate of the Earth is called “The Choice” and is an explicit call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The existence of this technology forces a decision, just as the possibility of God does so in Pascal's wager. As in Pascal, for Schell the wager does not merely dislocate its reader – however vital this is to its effect – but also provides a framework for decision under the conditions of uncertainty, perhaps a hallmark of rhetoric itself. Faced with incalculable risks, inaction is not possible. To paraphrase Rush, choosing not to decide is still making a choice. The invocation of infinity does not have to persuade in an Aristotelian sense to serve a purpose. The Old Testament's Abraham was made to feel “but dust and ashes” before the Lord, but the end result of his encounter was clear: follow the divine law. Thus, it is for Schell: our confrontation with finitude breeds humility, reverence, and caution, resulting in support for disarmament without the need for a nuclear Revelation. The paradox of Schell's sublime wager grows out of the necessity for decision. If any fraction of infinity is still infinity, then it becomes impossible to choose between competing options that might stake claims to the same infinitely important outcome. While abolition might prevent a nuclear war from eradicating humanity, through any number of improbable outcomes, it might also cause human extinction, perhaps by triggering devastating non-nuclear wars, another wave of nuclear proliferation, biological war (Payne 2010 Payne, K. 2010. “Disarmament danger.” National Review Online. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/229492/disarmament-danger-keith-b-payne ), or even preventing humanity from deflecting an asteroid collision (Wall 2014 Wall, M. 2014. “How Nuclear Bombs Could Save Earth from Killer Asteroids. Space.com. http://www.space.com/24696-asteroid-strike-nuclear-bombs.html ). When probability is rendered irrelevant by the sign of the infinite, there is no way to distinguish between one outcome and another: all fractions of infinity are infinity. While for Schell the risk of nuclear war mandates a policy of abolition, for advocates of nuclear deterrence, the possibility that disarmament might encourage another power to develop or use nuclear weapons against the defenseless United States mandates the exact opposite: maintenance, perhaps even aggressive expansion, of the nuclear arsenal. Such a position was, in fact, taken by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Ron Suskind reports that in 2001, CIA Director George Tenet briefed Cheney about the possibility that terrorists or hostile nations might develop nuclear weapons with the aid of Pakistani radicals. In response, Cheney proffered the now-infamous “One Percent Doctrine.” “With a low-probability, high impact event like this,” he said, “I'm frankly not sure how to engage. We're going to have to look at it in a completely different way” (qtd. in Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 61). That “different way” turned out to mirror Pascal's familiar construction. “If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response … It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence … It's about our response” (qtd. in Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 62). The bar for acceptable evidence, as Suskind notes, can be “set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply” (62). As Cheney himself stressed, the doctrine was about response: any probability of an adversary possessing nuclear weapons should be taken as a certainty. The “Cheney Doctrine” thus helped to establish the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive use of force against enemies potentially armed with “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” itself a somewhat ill-defined term. In the realm of nuclear weapons, this meant that American leaders could contemplate the preemptive use of nuclear arms against potential nuclear adversaries, as detailed in a 2005 draft of the Pentagon's Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Chiefs of Staff 2005 Joint Chiefs of Staff. 2005. Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Publication 3-12). http://www.wslfweb.org/docs/doctrine/3_12fc2.pdf ). The Cheney Doctrine thus brings Schell's logic full circle and exposes the aporia of the wager's need for decision.1010. This problem is also known as Buridan's Ass: an ass, equally hungry and thirsty, dies of privation when forced to choose between a pile of hay and a trough of water because both are exactly equally appealing. View all notes Conclusion The difficulty with Schell's argument (and conversely, with Cheney's) is equivalent to the “many gods” objection to Pascal's wager. Given a range of mutually exclusive options, each representing a potentially infinite impact, there is no longer a way to choose amongst them. For Pascal, that decision boiled down to faith, but the same was true for the Bush administration in its embrace of impulse and conviction over rationality and evidence (Suskind 2006 Suskind, R. 2006. The One Percent Doctrine. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. , 308). This same problem affects decisions over other existential threats: perhaps manipulating asteroids to miss the Earth would save us all, but perhaps the technology could be used to cause a strike; perhaps slowing the rate of climate change could prevent warming temperatures and ecological disruption, but perhaps it could cause a new ice age; perhaps space colonization would safeguard the human species, but perhaps it would attract the attention of xenocidal extraterrestrials. Infinite stakes combined with indeterminate probabilities and the necessity of decision is a counsel of despair. Even if, like Pascal's, Schell's wager is not meant to be a logical proof but an appeal to a dislocating sublime force, the problem remains. The rhetorical effect of the infinity trope is part of nuclear deterrence. One accepted mission of the US nuclear arsenal remains as the capacity to “overawe” enemies with the sheer incalculable force of thermonuclear weapons (Oelrich 2005 Oelrich, I. 2005. Missions for Nuclear Weapons after the Cold War (Federation of American Scientists Occasional Paper No. 3). https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys280/archive/01282005175922.pdf , 46). The “madman” theory of nuclear deterrence, named for Richard Nixon, relies on projecting the image of irrationality over nuclear decisions to that a rational opponent might believe that they will actually be used in response to aggression, even if the cost to the defender is also very high.1111. To some extent, as Kavka's Toxin Puzzle suggests, all nuclear deterrence is paradoxical: after an attack, nuclear retaliation is no longer a rational choice because one's one destruction can no longer be prevented, so, assuming the rational actors necessary for deterrence to work in the first place, it is required that one intend to do something in the future that one would be irrational to actually intend to do at the time when that decision is required. View all notes This is precisely the logic of doomsday weapons such as cobalt bombs or the Dead Hand: the cost of extinction is so high that it overwhelms any possible gain for an aggressor. Schell's vivid descriptions of the nuclear aftermath may just as well result in a passionate commitment to nuclear deterrence. The same factors that make Schell's appeal powerful also limit the ability to resist Cheney's reinterpretation of the wager. When rational calculation is made subservient to infinite risks, then reasoned arguments fail to diminish the force of sublime rhetoric, just as the various logical objections to Pascal's wager have not eliminated its staying power. The limitless damage of a nuclear war (or imagined terrorist attack) overwhelm reason. John Mueller (2010 Mueller, J. 2010. Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ) has done a detailed analysis of the probability of nuclear terrorism that assigns it roughly one in three billion odds (204–206), but the numinous fear of nuclear weapons seems to remain. It is tempting to conclude with Ned O'Gorman claim that the sublime is antithetical to politics. Because the sublime is an overwhelming, illimitable force, no adjective changes it; there is no “political sublime” because one term cannot modify the other. As O'Gorman (2006 O'Gorman, N. 2006. “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron.” Millennium 34: 889–915. ) writes, “the sublime is a free-floating force, a univocal power, which because of its univocality cannot provide alternatives for change, guide critique, or articulate new horizons. The sublime speaks only unpredicated power” (889). The sublime may be radical in a sense, but it is not politically radical. Rather, it tends toward the conservative because it cannot offer alternatives to the status quo and constitutes a “rhetorical lure” best employed by the elite and powerful (O'Gorman 2006 O'Gorman, N. 2006. “The Political Sublime: An Oxymoron.” Millennium 34: 889–915. , 891). In this reading, the present article is merely a Synodus Horrenda, dragging Pascal forth again as rhetorician rather than a mathematician and condemning him nonetheless. To write off Pascal's wager so quickly would be premature. As Schell and Cheney demonstrate, it is the need for decision that frustrates its possibility and results in aporia. Both men have read the wager grammatically and used it to calculate a decision. They may also present it rhetorically, attempting to impress not the rightness of their judgment but the overwhelming force represented by the infinite losses of a nuclear war. In either case, the wager is still aimed at persuasion but cannot overcome its own paradoxical logos. What is missing is a different aporia on an altogether different level: that identified by de Man as the contradiction of grammar and rhetoric. At issue is a practice for reading the wager, and this contradiction can be seen working in Pascal's original if it is read not as an appeal to believe in a specific God but rather an attempt to disrupt the obstacles that lead some people not to believe in any power beyond themselves. Pascal himself was not converted by this proof nor any other, but by the revelation of his “night of fire.” His wager is not a rational argument or a rhetorical device, but rather a rhetorical device illustrating the limits both of rationality and rhetoric. The point of the coin flip is to demonstrate that no rational decision is possible. Faith and fidelity constitute a moral life. Pascal argues that piety comes through repeated practice, but this practice itself is a means to realize the scope of what exceeds the human, not an end in itself. This conception of the sublime is not political according to O'Gorman's definition, where the “sine qua non of all politics except the totalitarian is differentiation” (2006, 891). As the juxtaposition of Schell's and Cheney's uses of the wager shows, the political result of sublime rhetoric is by no means determined by its use. To say that these figures do not assist one in making instrumental choices between different political goals is not to suggest that the sublime may still have radical – and not necessarily conservative – potential if “political” is not synonymous with “politics.” As Jean-Luc Nancy (2008 Nancy, J.-L. 2008. Philosophical Chronicles. New York: Fordham University Press. ) argues, nothing requires that the two terms be identical and we should be conscious of our linguistic choice between them (27–28). The political can be understood as an orientation to community, an attitude rather than being “dissolved in the sociotechnical element of forces and needs” (Nancy 1991 Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. , 40). The sublime may not aid directly in politics, but it may help to develop a conception of the political by revealing the limits of our capacity to order and to comprehend our social world. To dislocate the reader by illustrating the limit of knowledge is to call into question the inevitability of social structures that we have built and inherited. Nothing about the sublime need favor the elite and powerful. Oft forgotten in Longinus's writing is an attack on avarice and material accumulation as measures of value. Longinus argues that “wealth, honors, reputation, absolute power, and all things which are accompanied by much external and theatrical pomp” cannot be noble because to “despise them is in itself no mean blessing” (9). There is a contradiction inherent in any set of social values that idolizes the rich because they are rich and also values those who forgo material benefits because they are hollow and superficial. Why is it, Longinus asks, that although there is “no dearth” of people “who are persuasive, interested in public affairs, shrewd, skillful, and certainly delightful speakers,” there are so few who are truly outstanding? His answer is that the love of money “is a disease that shrinks a man sic.” “I cannot see how we can honor wealth without limit or, and this is nearer the truth, make it our god, without admitting into our souls those kindred evils that inevitably follow it” (Longinus 1991, 57). Rather than proscribe an instrumental solution like those shrewd speakers occupied with public affairs might, Longinus seeks to identify the attachments that serve as the conditions of possibility for corruption. “For surely if our selfish desires were altogether freed from prison, as it were, and let loose upon our neighbors, they would scorch the earth with their evils” (Longinus 1991, 58). The “worst bane” is that nothing is done for its own sake, he argues, but only because it serves as a means to an end (58) – which is close to Nancy's concern about dissolving the political into the “sociotechnical element” of politics. The sublime's inattention to differentiation might be read as a critique of instrumental politics and accumulation. Configured this way, Pascal's wager, like Longinus's sublime and Pseudo-Dionysius's negative theology, displays the presence of something beyond the technical capacities of reason to resolve and reveals the arbitrariness of power as it is exercised in an unequal society. In disorienting its readers, the sublime is a check on hubris rather than the basis for programmatic action. At the very least, the sublime is important for argument research because its use continues, for better or for worse, and exploring the collective psychology underpinning its appeal might be a more effective means of countering its dangerous uses than rational debunking alone allows. O'Gorman's critique is a useful corrective for those who might use the concept as a kind of universal solvent that obviates the need for day-to-day political choices or provisional commitments. But the genius of Pascal's wager as a rhetorical trope is its capacity to remind us that the quotidian decisions of politics, vital as they are, do not exhaust the political itself. What we value in community has no satisfying objective basis, but is something we must deliberate collectively in an age when technological progress makes a literal Night of Fire all too possible.
2/7/22
JF - Case - AT Demil - Doubles - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: Doubles | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: Diana Alvarez, Charles Karcher, Asher Towner Fast nuclear disarmament causes nuclear war because of new tech-~--even if it works, countries will just re-arm and first-strike Miles, 18 – Aaron, physicist and fellow at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served previously as assistant director for Nuclear and Strategic Technologies at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and as a senior policy adviser on Nuclear Deterrence in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 9-10-2018, "Facing the central questions of nuclear disarmament," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/2018/09/facing-the-central-questions-of-nuclear-disarmament/ Why now? Following repeated rounds of deep cuts in US and Russian nuclear arsenals AND offense-defense balance in a numb er of meaningful ways..
Edward and Chomsky is literally making an argument for us – the force behind militarism is the global super-structure that obfuscates information
Method
Norris just says “politicians should be forced to tell the truth and that solves Baudrillard” like that means literally anything or is at all feasible, the ev mentions nothing about debate or right-wing militarism, just says Baudrillard’s work can be dense, which doesn’t mean anything or have a terminal impact with a clear internal link
Their Duvall evidence says insurgents in Afghanistan counter the US through IEDs – that bites the link on the Öberg link: asymmetric tactics within the battlefield creates the demand for images eg Afghanistan made the US invest heavily into maps which is our argument for how they mis-interpret the battlefield and will only succeed in increasing militarism within the US
Durrani is in the context of occupying launchsites, which the affirmative does not access – don’t let them claim global movements unless they can name some that are taking actions similar to what they are doing now
1/24/22
JF - Case - AT Demil - Round 4 - Palm
Tournament: Palm | Round: 4 | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: Scott Brown Fast nuclear disarmament causes nuclear war because of new tech-~--even if it works, countries will just re-arm and first-strike Miles, 18 – Aaron, physicist and fellow at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served previously as assistant director for Nuclear and Strategic Technologies at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and as a senior policy adviser on Nuclear Deterrence in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 9-10-2018, "Facing the central questions of nuclear disarmament," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, https://thebulletin.org/2018/09/facing-the-central-questions-of-nuclear-disarmament/ Why now? Following repeated rounds of deep cuts in US and Russian nuclear arsenals AND offense-defense balance in a numb er of meaningful ways..
Edward and Chomsky is literally making an argument for us – the force behind militarism is the global super-structure that obfuscates information
Method
Norris just says “politicians should be forced to tell the truth and that solves Baudrillard” like that means literally anything or is at all feasible, the ev mentions nothing about debate or right-wing militarism, just says Baudrillard’s work can be dense, which doesn’t mean anything or have a terminal impact with a clear internal link
Their Duvall evidence says insurgents in Afghanistan counter the US through IEDs – that bites the link on the Öberg link: asymmetric tactics within the battlefield creates the demand for images eg Afghanistan made the US invest heavily into maps which is our argument for how they mis-interpret the battlefield and will only succeed in increasing militarism within the US
Durrani is in the context of occupying launchsites, which the affirmative does not access – don’t let them claim global movements unless they can name some that are taking actions similar to what they are doing now
2/13/22
JF - Case - AT Lunar Heritage Sites - Round 5 - Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: 5 | Opponent: Westlake MR | Judge: Joesph Barquin Case
Adv
Moon dust stops moon basing. Niiler 21 Eric Niiler “The Next Big Challenge for Lunar Astronauts? Moon Dust” 08.19.2021 https://www.wired.com/story/the-next-big-challenge-for-lunar-astronauts-moon-dust/ SM AS NASA AND private space companies prepare to send equipment—and eventually astronauts— AND high a rate. It’s something we have been working on to improve.”
The asteroid impact threat is propaganda meant to legitimize continued research into incredibly powerful militarized technologies—turning the debate away from existential threats is the only way to develop peaceful solutions and divorce science from militarization Mellor 07. – (Felicity, PhD Theoretical Physics Newcastle University, Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Aug., 2007), pp. 499-531, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547453, SUSSMAN, PDF) During the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of planetary scientists and astronomers set AND that we could tell in order to guide science towards more peaceful ends.
Framing
The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of capitalism, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over try or die risk calculus. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology. Matheson 17 Calum, Assoc. Prof Communication @ Pitt, “The sublime rhetoric of Pascal’s wager,” Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 0, Iss. 0,0, Sep 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CTPGbVmNAmtvfJPI8Q86/full//ak47 The form of Pascal's wager has been adapted outside of its explicitly religious context. AND age when technological progress makes a literal Night of Fire all too possible.
2/20/22
JF - Case - AT Mining - Round 2 Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker AV | Judge: Ronak Dua Case
Adv 1
No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of AND unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others.
Russia and China say no, or the plan gets watered down. Bahney and Pearl 19 Benjamin Bahney and Jonathan Pearl, 3-26-2019, "Why Creating a Space Force Changes Nothing," BENJAMIN BAHNEY and JONATHAN PEARL are Senior Fellows at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research and contributing authors to Cross Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity. Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/space/2019-03-26/why-creating-space-force-changes-nothing accessed 12/10/21 Adam As Russia and China continue to push forward, U.S. policymakers may AND and does nothing at all to address ground-based antisatellite weapons development.
AND they cut the scoles ev out of context – it’s actually about NASA’s mining projects, not private companies which means they have no internal link.
Reject the team – they specifically cut out the paragraph before that contextualizes this claim, only way to remedy, rejecting the argument is functionally the same because it’s their main internal link and means you vote neg on presumption because the plan does not affect NASA 1AC Scoles 15 Freelance science writer, and a contributing writer at WIRED Science, with articles in places like Popular Science, the New York Times, Scientific American, Vice, Outside, and others., 5-27-2015, "Dust from asteroid mining spells danger for satellites," New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630235-100-dust-from-asteroid-mining-spells-danger-for-satellites/ DD AG IF THE gold mine is too far from home, why not move it nearby AND worry about cascades of collisions like the one depicted in the movie Gravity.
Adv 2
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
Interpretation: The affirmative should not be able to fiat that every state, company, and individual follows the laws of the plan Violation: They do – the affirmative makes it so not only does every country sign the OST, but also that zero countries proceed to break the rules later Standards:
1) Real World – we have evidence about specific scenarios in which countries have announced that they will continue to mine – that takes out all of their offense about being able to create tiny “x country says no scenarios”
2) Negative Ground – we lose any and all scenarios in which some country can’t or won’t follow on because the affirmative says the three words “normal means solves” and gets out of the solvency deficit
They will say that it is unfair – no it’s not. If the negative says that a non-space fairing country like Indonesia says no, you still vote affirmative because they can solve their impacts – our argument is contextualized to some of the larger countries and their evidence also supports that those countries test the water
Normal means has some countries not totally comply and still try to mine in space – it is the affirmative’s role to figure out what the punishment for those actions are
2/20/22
JF - Case - AT Mining - Round 5 - HWL
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: 5 | Opponent: Monta Vista KR | Judge: Skye Spindler Case
Space War
The asteroid impact threat is propaganda meant to legitimize continued research into incredibly powerful militarized technologies—turning the debate away from existential threats is the only way to develop peaceful solutions and divorce science from militarization Mellor 07. – (Felicity, PhD Theoretical Physics Newcastle University, Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Aug., 2007), pp. 499-531, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547453, SUSSMAN, PDF) During the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of planetary scientists and astronomers set AND that we could tell in order to guide science towards more peaceful ends.
Not only is there no space war, there is no territory to wage it on. Virtual constructs of space decide where and how power operates. Ignoring this virtuality, in favor of banning operations in name only, only shifts weaponry from one place to another and guises the horror, violence, and abandonment central to any and all virtual wars. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
China says no they will exploit the resources – official Chinese declaration Xinhua News 19 (Chinese government controlled media, 5-17, Chinese deep space research leads to deeper international cooperation, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-05/07/c_138040362.htm, accessed 8/13/19, jmg) Chinese space experts have strengthened international exchanges in the latest achievements in exploring the moon AND have a strong interest in collaborating with China on the asteroid exploration mission.
No ‘space war’ – Insurmountable barriers and everyone has an interest in keeping space peaceful Dobos 19 (Bohumil Doboš, scholar at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a coordinator of the Geopolitical Studies Research Centre) “Geopolitics of the Outer Space, Chapter 3: Outer Space as a Military-Diplomatic Field,” Pgs. 48-49 TDI Despite the theorized potential for the achievement of the terrestrial dominance throughout the utilization of AND unless some space actor finds a utility in disrupting the arena for others.
Collisions
The management of space debris is rooted in a militarized approach to the future that culminates in the full-spectrum dominance of the globe Reno 20 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “The Wrong Stuff”, chapter 4 of Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness Univ of California Press, Feb 4, 2020 Pg. 127-130)DR 19 Space debris can be dangerous to orbiting vessels and, as such, it represents AND , moreover, cleaning up space debris was linked directly with military objectives.
Russia and China say no, or the plan gets watered down. Bahney and Pearl 19 Benjamin Bahney and Jonathan Pearl, 3-26-2019, "Why Creating a Space Force Changes Nothing," BENJAMIN BAHNEY and JONATHAN PEARL are Senior Fellows at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Global Security Research and contributing authors to Cross Domain Deterrence: Strategy in an Era of Complexity. Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/space/2019-03-26/why-creating-space-force-changes-nothing accessed 12/10/21 Adam As Russia and China continue to push forward, U.S. policymakers may AND and does nothing at all to address ground-based antisatellite weapons development.
And it’s feasible – our ev postates theirs Ho 21, Kenny L. Ho, 6-2021, "THE TECHNOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC FEASIBILITY OF ASTEROID MINING," No Publication, https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/67738tanya Asteroid mining will be technologically feasible in the near future. Three successful asteroid sample AND architecture, detailed in the next subsection, “Economic Benefit and Feasibility.”
Framing
The role of the ballot is to determine whether the 1AC was productive in the debate space - material violence does not go away after the ballot and there's no intrinsic connection between their scholarship and a W - any defense against their method means we win.
The 1AC’s try or die extinction scenario is a form of sublime rhetoric that compels us to endlessly repeat the failed project of Empire through confirmation bias. In the face of the incalculable violence of hyperreality, the only response is to prioritize imperial violence over deterrence-based impacts. Only de-linking existential risk calculus from instrumentality can break the cycle of political tautology. - Instrumentalizing pascal'Jonathan Shell used pascals wager to push people towards disarmament. That same argument was hijacked by Hawks (Cheney) and instrumentalized to produce the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike – the illogicality of nuclear deterrence/US power projection is that you have to be willing to risk being the nuclear “madman” in order to deter. Makes politics paradoxically irrational and dangerous. - If we understand Pascal’s wager subliminally rather than instrumentally/rationally, then high magnitude impacts orient away from calculative logic toward alternative horizons of the social/political and retain a radical possibility. In the face of infinite harm you should risk everything for a different world. Not the continuation of this one. Matheson 17 Calum, Assoc. Prof Communication @ Pitt, “The sublime rhetoric of Pascal’s wager,” Argumentation and Advocacy Vol. 0 , Iss. 0,0, Sep 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CTPGbVmNAmtvfJPI8Q86/full//ak47 The form of Pascal's wager has been adapted outside of its explicitly religious context. AND age when technological progress makes a literal Night of Fire all too possible.
How do they solve satellites? Also their scenario is based on the kessler affect which is super unlikely
The risk of this advantage should be close to 0 -
1 Probability – 0.1 percent chance of a collision. Alexander William Salter, Economics Professor at Texas Tech, ’16, “SPACE DEBRIS: A LAW AND ECONOMICS ANALYSIS OF THE ORBITAL COMMONS” 19 STAN. TECH. L. REV. 221 *numbers replaced with English words The probability of a collision is currently low. Bradley and Wein estimate that the AND , can quickly become significant if future collisions result in runaway debris growth.
2 Time frame – Kessler effect 200 years away. Peter Stubbe, PhD in law @ Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, ’17, State Accountability for Space Debris: A Legal Study of Responsibility for Polluting the Space Environment and Liability for Damage Caused by Space Debris, Koninklijke Brill Publishing, ISBN 978-90-04-31407-8, p. 27-31 The prediction of possible scenarios of the future evolution of the debris p o p AND and such collisions are likely to occur every 5 to 9 years.89
3 Status quo solves – mitigation and remediation compliance growing. Colombo et. al 18—Camilla Colombo, PhD, visiting academic in Spacecraft Engineering within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton; Francesca Letizia, PhD, Space Debris Engineer at ESA Space Debris Office; Mirko Trisolini, PhD, Postdoctoral researcher at the Politecnico di Milano Department of Aerospace Engineering; Hugh Lewis, PhD, Professor within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton (“Space Debris: Risk Mitigation,” from Frontiers of Space Risk: Natural Cosmic Hazards and Societal Challenges, Chapter 5, p 128-136) 5.4 MITIGATION MEASURES The space debris problem is nowadays internationally recognized, therefore AND on its course to reentry in 2028 (see Figure 5.11).
4 Space debris is hype---there are thousands of satellites and only 15 debris collisions ever Mark Albrecht 16, Chairman of the board of USSpace LLC and fmr. head of the National Space Council, “Congested space is a serious problem solved by hard work, not hysteria, 5/9/16, https://spacenews.com/op-ed-congested-space-is-a-serious-problem-solved-by-hard-work-not-hysteria/ There are over a half million pieces of human-made material in orbit around AND marble, and fewer than 15 known collisions. Why do people worry?
Advantage 2
The thesis of our link arguments impact turns the second advantage because the aff relies on western jurdicality into space a metric for resolving violence which only reinstates the violent nature of space colonialism onto the global south
Liberalism in space attempts to consolidate an unprecedented form of empire through making the empire the protectorate of the many through ignoring asymmetrical relations of power – this aporia is significant in liberal astropolitics, with disastrous results. Havercroft and Duvall 9 Raymond D. Duvall is a professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Dr Jonathan Havercroft is Associate Professor in International Political Theory within Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. “Critical Astropolitics: The Geopolitics of Space Control and the Transformation of State Sovereignty: International Relations Theory and the Politics of.” In N. Bormann, and M. Sheehan (Eds.), Securing Outer Space: International Relations Theory and the Politics of (pp. 42-58). Routledge. tjb Liberal-republican astropolitics Over the past twenty-five years, in a series AND of analysis – be used to supplement and refine critical international relations theory?
Solvency
No way to distribute resources – countries lack the tech – that wrecks solvency – neg on presumption Way, Tyler A. (2018) "The Space Gap, Access to Technology, and the Perpetuation of Poverty," International ResearchScape Journal: Vol. 5 , Article 7. Accessed 2-1-20 CSUF JmB Districts Global Positioning Systems (GPS), communications, internet, and weather satellites are some AND sectors. He describes the revenue streams that are generated by the space industry
Normal means has the plan implemented through the Committee on the Peaceful use of Outer Space. Halstead 10—(B.S., Psychology, The University of Alabama; J.D., The University of Alabama School of Law; LL.M., Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University; Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General's Corps). C. Brandon Halstead. 2010. "Prometheus Unbound - Proposal for a New Legal Paradigm for Air Law and Space Law: Orbit Law," Journal of Space Law 36, no. 1, 143-206 The debate on how to distinguish airspace from outer space is as old as the AND , including the establishment of a frontier between outer space and atmospheric space18.
OST Fails Evanoff 17 Kyle Evanoff, Kyle is a research associate in international economics and U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations 10/10/17, "The Outer Space Treaty’s Midlife Funk," Council on Foreign Relations https://www.cfr.org/blog/outer-space-treatys-midlife-funk accessed 12/11/2021 Adam Half a century later, however, the Outer Space Treaty has entered something of AND regime may be untenable over longer timelines, it remains workable for now.
All your solvency advocates assume the aff creates legal institutions and frameworks to create sustainable use of outer space – but you haven’t read an internal link that says simply the declaration of outer space as a global commons does that
1/15/22
JF - Case - AT PTD - Round 2 - Puget Sound
Tournament: Puget Sound | Round: 2 | Opponent: Plano Independent RP | Judge: Alex Sapadin No solvency – SLAPPS means that even if the affirmative is able to create class-action lawsuits they go nowhere or get ridiculed and become more fuel for the climate-denier fire – even if they fail the affirmative plan gets held up in court for years – empirics CLDC, ND (Civil Liberties Defense Center, xx-xx-xxxx, "Anti-SLAPP," https://cldc.org/anti-slapp/, GS) CLDC lawyers have been successful in defending social and climate justice activists and organizations from AND currently leading, and for the activists and organizations targeted by SLAPP bullies.
1/7/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 1 - Palm
Tournament: Palm | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit JW | Judge: Derek Hilligoss We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty). Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture. Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro. Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to. When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/13/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 3 - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 3 | Opponent: Monta Vista KR | Judge: Gabriela Gonzales The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger AND 2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change.
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND coordinat- ing principle of US geo-policy and a new psychosocial reality
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of everyone.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/23/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Double - Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Southlake Carroll PK | Judge: Panel We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
The role of the ballot is to determine the productivity of the 1AC within debate ie they need to prove that there is a connection between their scholarship and the ballot – if not you vote negative on presumption
The internal net benefit is the armchair activism Disad – debate is a mausoleum of theories of power and resistance—ideas that were once alive are now filtered, managed, and expected by the machinations of academia. The proliferation of critical discourse within the debate space gets co-opted by the sign economy and merely circulates within the self-contained deliberation of the debate round. Terminal solvency defense and turn—their resistance is forever buried into the catacombs of empty school rooms. After this debate, we may go get lunch at a fast food joint that uses ingredients produced on the backs of disenfranchised workers in Latin America—they make us complacent by making us forget that we are only producing discourses about discourse in exchange for a ballot and we become complicit with the harms they speak to.
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
The asteroid impact threat is propaganda meant to legitimize continued research into incredibly powerful militarized technologies—turning the debate away from existential threats is the only way to develop peaceful solutions and divorce science from militarization Mellor 07. – (Felicity, PhD Theoretical Physics Newcastle University, Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Aug., 2007), pp. 499-531, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547453, SUSSMAN, PDF) During the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of planetary scientists and astronomers set AND that we could tell in order to guide science towards more peaceful ends.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
4/20/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Doubles - HWL
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Saratoga AG | Judge: Joseph Barquin, Samantha McLoughlin, Indu Pandey The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
The management of space debris is rooted in a militarized approach to the future that culminates in the full-spectrum dominance of the globe Reno 20 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “The Wrong Stuff”, chapter 4 of Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness Univ of California Press, Feb 4, 2020 Pg. 127-130)DR 19 Space debris can be dangerous to orbiting vessels and, as such, it represents AND , moreover, cleaning up space debris was linked directly with military objectives.
Their project of sustainability is only ever possible through homogenization as soldiers with green masks launch wars against those who don’t comply– this mythical construct frames any deviance as scum, creating a spiral of violence against that which refuses the sanitary natural order Bauman 15. Whitney, Department of Religious Studies, Florida International University, Oxford JournalsArts and Humanities Jnl of the American Academy of Religion Volume 83, Issue 4Pp. 1005-1023. “Religion, Ecology, and the Planetary Other: Opening Spaces for Difference.” July 14, 2015 PART II: MIMESIS AND EXCEPTIONALISM: THE WORLD AS SACRIFICIAL STANDING RESERVE. Generalized AND the trans-human, and planetary ethics of the “not yet.”
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/23/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Doubles - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: Doubles | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: Diana Alvarez, Charles Karcher, Asher Towner We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model. The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
The 1AC’s demilitarization strategy presumes a separation between a peaceful civil order and violence that mystifies the ongoing and constitutive violence that makes possible logistics Howell ’18 (Alison, Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university, INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS, 2018 VOL. 20, NO. 2, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310 pg. 117-121) B.M. There is something seemingly intuitive about the concept of “militarization.” Current events seem AND between military and civilian spheres can we avoid this kind of dangerous oversight.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/24/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Octos - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: Octas | Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: Derek Hilligoss, Scott Brown, Morgan Copeland We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND between their scholarship and the ballot – if not you vote negative on production
The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/24/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 1 - HWL
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marlborough JH | Judge: Joshua Michael The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger AND 2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change.
The inevitability of the Kessler syndrome reveals that this debate is only a question of whether we reinvest in the future that is already arriving or let capital collapse in on itself. Reno 2018 (Joshua Ozias Reno, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. PhD from the University of Michigan, “Making Time with Amateur Astronomers and Orbital Space Debris: Attunement and the Matter of Temporality” in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 4–18)DR 19 For one thing, space debris is potentially dangerous to spacecraft. Space debris is AND and deformation not unlike what conventional archaeologists encounter amid the Earth’s beguiling surface.
The aff’s invocation of a cosmopolitan transnational worldview derives from modern conception of the human as self-authoring, sovereign, and rational driver of human progress. Calls for cosmopolitan orientations legitimate those already in possession of global capacity to define the global order, reproducing and intensifying a bifurcated global citizenship on the lines of Man. Jabri 11 Vivienne Jabri is a professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College - London. “Cosmopolitan politics, security, political subjectivity.” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 18, No 4. P 625-644. The cosmopolitan worldview is narrated across regions and cultures, so that a term that AND as sources of security and the latter as distinct sources of threat.11
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean Baudrillard, “Present Considerations: The Uncertainty of All Value Systems” xx-xx-1998, GS) It’s also the parody of political emancipation. Is capitalism for you the cold monster AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/15/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 2 - Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker AV | Judge: Ronak Dua We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
The role of the ballot is to determine the productivity of the 1AC within debate ie they need to prove that there is a connection between their scholarship and the ballot – if not you vote negative on production
Their role of the ballot has no role of the negative – there is nothing to disprove or no arguments to be had negating, in their world the negative offers a counterplan and hopes that it reveals militarism better – there is also no metric of what revealing militarism looks like or how a judge can possibly determine what the “better” or “worse” revealing and breaking down of militarism looks like – it also links to the armchair activism Disad because debate becomes a question of analyzing rather than attempting change which only locks in all of their impacts
The internal net benefit is the armchair activism Disad – debate is a mausoleum of theories of power and resistance—ideas that were once alive are now filtered, managed, and expected by the machinations of academia. The proliferation of critical discourse within the debate space gets co-opted by the sign economy and merely circulates within the self-contained deliberation of the debate round. Terminal solvency defense and turn—their resistance is forever buried into the catacombs of empty school rooms. After this debate, we may go get lunch at a fast food joint that uses ingredients produced on the backs of disenfranchised workers in Latin America—they make us complacent by making us forget that we are only producing discourses about discourse in exchange for a ballot and we become complicit with the harms they speak to.
The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
The incessant productivity of hegemony is a drive toward its own destruction. hegemonic power has surpassed the domain of being referentially related to any material reality and can now only identify with the image of its own destruction. Pope 7. Professor of Language at York University, Pope, “Baudrillard’s Simulacrum: Of War, Terror, and Obituaries,” October 2007, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies: Volume 4, Number 3 Many of the obituaries printed some variance of the following quote: “It is AND logic, while engaging in the realm of challenge and the collusive relation.
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/20/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 2 - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 2 | Opponent: Northwood AA | Judge: Ben Cortez The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger AND 2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change.
Don’t you realize? You’ve missed the bus – repression through expression is the new mode of domination – the fact that you can speak with such vindictiveness despite not being able to close line five shows the will to secure your stance in the political battle against climate change fought on the sidelines – they have separated the progressive stance into a social modality – to vote greener and change the way we debate through education – this is the form that Chell and BP take when creating eco-footprints – the offload onto the consumer – onto a judge – just cut cars out of your life after this round and we can fix the impacts! Galloway 07. Alexander Galloway, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, Radical Illusion (A Game Against), Games and Culture 2:4, pg. 385 There exist causes from whose nature some effect does not follow. There exist causes AND . It occasions real human worlds by allowing them to come to be.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/23/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 2 - Puget Sound
Tournament: Puget Sound | Round: 2 | Opponent: Plano Independent RP | Judge: Alex Sapadin Academia de-fangs their radicalism—they preach to the choir and maintain interpassivity Occupied UC Berkeley 9 (The Necrosocial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC; http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/, 11/19 shree) He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative governance, AND all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls.
Policy debate turns the discussion to train us to see world in a backdrop for capitalist extraction all under the guise of saving the environment while homogenizing the rest of the world into the logic that we all have to save it – that presupposition that the Earth is ours to save mirrors the logic of the political economy wherein nature is always-already condemned to its intelligibility as an extractable value – the 1AC is a Bezos, Musk, and Branson fever dream not one of sustainability for sustainability but sustainability for profitability Wallis, ’20 (Jason James Wallis, “The Holocene Simulacrum,” 10-27-2020, Educational Philosophy and Theory, GS) A central argument of Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production (1975) pertains to AND productivity and restlessness commensurate with the logic of capitalism (Larsen, 2010).
Power demands legality – the 1AC accepts Western common law’s understanding of itself – one in which power is willed into existence through faith. Their ideals crystallize the authority power requires to function. Comaroff and Comaroff 07. John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at at Harvard, and Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies also at Harvard, “Law and disorder in the postcolony,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144 Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As AND sovereign authority, power demands an architecture of legalities. Or their simulacra.
Nuclear war is an outdated fear – nuclear spread is either impossible or is already everywhere Baudrillard 95. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: The Precession of Simulacra, pg. 37-40 The simultaneity of two events in the month of July 1975 illustrated this in a striking manner: the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet supersatellites, apotheosis of peaceful coexistence - the suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and conversion to the Roman alphabet. The latter signifies the "orbital" instantiation of an abstract and modelized system of signs, into whose orbit all the once unique forms of style and writing will be reabsorbed. The satellization of language: the means for the Chinese to enter the system of peaceful coexistence, which is inscribed in their heavens at precisely the same time by the linkup of the two satellites. Orbital flight of the Big Two, neutralization and homogenization of everyone else on earth. Yet, despite this deterrence by the orbital power - the nuclear or molecular code - events continue at ground level, misfortunes are even more numerous, given the global process of the contiguity and simultaneity of data. But, subtly, they no longer have any meaning, they are no longer anything but the duplex effect of simulation at the summit. The best example can only be that of the war in Vietnam, because it took place at the intersection of a maximum historical and "revolutionary" stake, and of the installation of this deterrent authority. What meaning did this war have, and wasn't its unfolding a means of sealing the end of history in the decisive and culminating historic event of our era? Why did this war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic? Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system. Nothing of the sort occurred. Something else, then, took place. This war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful coexistence. It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence. The nonintervention of China obtained and secured after many years, Chinas apprenticeship to a global modus vivendi, the shift from a global strategy of revolution to one of shared forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to political alternation in a system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking - Washington relations): this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA pulled out of Vietnam but won the war. And the war ended "spontaneously" when this objective was achieved. That is why it was deescalated, demobilized so easily. This same reduction of forces can be seen on the field. The war lasted as long as elements irreducible to a healthy politics and discipline of power, even a Communist one, remained unliquidated. When at last the war had passed into the hands of regular troops in the North and escaped that of the resistance, the war could stop: it had attained its objective. The stake is thus that of a political relay. As soon as the Vietnamese had proved that they were no longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion, one could let them take over. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had proved itself, it could be trusted. It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of "savage" and archaic precapitalist structures. Same scenario in the Algerian war. The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism of the adversaries - which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of labor between two adversaries (who may even consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations. "The North Vietnamese were advised to countenance a scenario for liquidating the American presence in the course of which, of course, one must save face." This scenario: the extremely harsh bombardments of Hanoi. Their untenable character must not conceal the fact that they were nothing but a simulacrum to enable the Vietnamese to seem to countenance a compromise and for Nixon to make the Americans swallow the withdrawal of their troops. The game was already won, nothing was objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage. The moralists of war, the holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged: the war is no less atrocious for being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same, and the dead and former combatants are worth the same as in other wars. This objective is always fulfilled, just like that of the charting of territories and of disciplinary sociality. What no longer exists is the adversity of the adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological seriousness of war. And also the reality of victory or defeat, war being a process that triumphs well beyond these appearances. In any case, the pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates us today AND a minimal point, of a reversion of energies toward a minimal threshold).
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption
1/7/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 2 - UNLV
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 2 | Opponent: Penninsula KN | Judge: Pranav Vijayan The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger AND 2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change.
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of everyone.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/6/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 3 - HWL
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harker AS | Judge: Leah Clark-Villanueva The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger AND 2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change.
The aff’s invocation of a cosmopolitan transnational worldview derives from modern conception of the human as self-authoring, sovereign, and rational driver of human progress. Calls for cosmopolitan orientations legitimate those already in possession of global capacity to define the global order, reproducing and intensifying a bifurcated global citizenship on the lines of Man. Jabri 11 Vivienne Jabri is a professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College - London. “Cosmopolitan politics, security, political subjectivity.” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 18, No 4. P 625-644. The cosmopolitan worldview is narrated across regions and cultures, so that a term that AND as sources of security and the latter as distinct sources of threat.11
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/23/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 3 - UNLV
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 3 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit KP | Judge: Yoyo Lei We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty). Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture. Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro. Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to. When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/6/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 4 - Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: 4 | Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: River Cook We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND between their scholarship and the ballot – if not you vote negative on production
The internal net benefit is the armchair activism Disad – debate is a mausoleum of theories of power and resistance—ideas that were once alive are now filtered, managed, and expected by the machinations of academia. The proliferation of critical discourse within the debate space gets co-opted by the sign economy and merely circulates within the self-contained deliberation of the debate round. Terminal solvency defense and turn—their resistance is forever buried into the catacombs of empty school rooms. After this debate, we may go get lunch at a fast food joint that uses ingredients produced on the backs of disenfranchised workers in Latin America—they make us complacent by making us forget that we are only producing discourses about discourse in exchange for a ballot and we become complicit with the harms they speak to. The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND coordinat- ing principle of US geo-policy and a new psychosocial reality
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/20/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 4 - Palm
Tournament: Palm | Round: 4 | Opponent: McNeil AG | Judge: Scott Brown We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model. The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
The 1AC’s demilitarization strategy presumes a separation between a peaceful civil order and violence that mystifies the ongoing and constitutive violence that makes possible logistics Howell ’18 (Alison, Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university, INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS, 2018 VOL. 20, NO. 2, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310 pg. 117-121) B.M. There is something seemingly intuitive about the concept of “militarization.” Current events seem AND between military and civilian spheres can we avoid this kind of dangerous oversight.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/13/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 5 - Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: 5 | Opponent: Westlake MR | Judge: Joesph Barquin The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
The role of the ballot is to determine the productivity of the 1AC within debate ie they need to prove that there is a connection between their scholarship and the ballot – if not you vote negative on production
Their role of the ballot has no role of the negative – there is nothing to disprove or no arguments to be had negating, in their world the negative offers a counterplan and hopes that it reveals militarism better – there is also no metric of what revealing militarism looks like or how a judge can possibly determine what the “better” or “worse” revealing and breaking down of militarism looks like – it also links to the armchair activism Disad because debate becomes a question of analyzing rather than attempting change which only locks in all of their impacts
The internal net benefit is the armchair activism Disad – debate is a mausoleum of theories of power and resistance—ideas that were once alive are now filtered, managed, and expected by the machinations of academia. The proliferation of critical discourse within the debate space gets co-opted by the sign economy and merely circulates within the self-contained deliberation of the debate round. Terminal solvency defense and turn—their resistance is forever buried into the catacombs of empty school rooms. After this debate, we may go get lunch at a fast food joint that uses ingredients produced on the backs of disenfranchised workers in Latin America—they make us complacent by making us forget that we are only producing discourses about discourse in exchange for a ballot and we become complicit with the harms they speak to.
The colonization of space is a part of a technoscientific development where technology becomes the sedimentation of hyperreality – the status quos attempt for space development is a colonial romanticism, an image of a future of a terraformed Mars – these representations are philosophical and ideological simulacrum of space developments not for the survival of the human but for the survival of capital – NASA has invaded the social imaginaries of consciousness which has become another iteration of that libertarian imaginary Genovese, T. R. (2017). The new right stuff: Social imaginaries of outer space and the capitalist accumulation of the cosmos (Doctoral dissertation, Northern Arizona University) Accessed 10/3/2021 CSUF JmB The discussion of human futures is a difficult topic with which to engage. Within AND we must do it with soul, with heart, and with joy.
Climate adaptation is not a strategy of resistance to climate change it is a corporate strategy meant to continue to shift the image of them “going green” all while they continue to burn and extract fossil fuels – the 1AC is a corporate hegemony a desire to change the narrative of global reduction of emissions to localized adaptation – that obscures the structural causes of climate change Nyberg, D., and Wright, C. (2019, July). Making climate change fit for capitalism: the corporate translation of climate adaptation. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2019, No. 1, p. 12618). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management. Accessed 10/6/21 CSUF JmB For government and industry, the idea of climate adaptation and building resilience to climate AND growth (Sovacool and Linnér, 2016; Wright and Nyberg, 2015).
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/20/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 5 - HWL
Tournament: Harvard-Westlake | Round: 5 | Opponent: Monta Vista KR | Judge: Skye Spindler The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
International cooperation over debris is an ideological smokescreen for neoconservative practices and capital fixes – debris risk is incalculable and their collision cascade arguments are a fantasy, but their modelling practice secures a social fantasy of threat that enables imperial transcendence. Ormord, 12 (James, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, “Beyond world risk society? A critique of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society thesis as a framework for understanding risk associated with human activity in outer space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2013, volume 31, pages 727 – 744) Prior to the Iridium–Cosmos collision experts placed the odds of two objects larger AND 2009); see also Swyngedouw (2007) on catastrophism and climate change.
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
Their project of sustainability is only ever possible through the creation of a coherent nature, docile to humanity – this mythical construct frames any deviance as scum, creating a spiral of violence against that which refuses the sanitary natural order Bauman 15. Whitney, Department of Religious Studies, Florida International University, Oxford JournalsArts and Humanities Jnl of the American Academy of Religion Volume 83, Issue 4Pp. 1005-1023. “Religion, Ecology, and the Planetary Other: Opening Spaces for Difference.” July 14, 2015 PART II: MIMESIS AND EXCEPTIONALISM: THE WORLD AS SACRIFICIAL STANDING RESERVE. Generalized AND the trans-human, and planetary ethics of the “not yet.”
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/16/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 5 - Palm
Tournament: Palm | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harker RM | Judge: Ben Erdmann We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
The role of the ballot is to determine the productivity of the 1AC within debate ie they need to prove that there is a connection between their scholarship and the ballot – if not you vote negative on production
Their role of the ballot has no role of the negative – there is nothing to disprove or no arguments to be had negating, in their world the negative offers a counterplan and hopes that it reveals militarism better – there is also no metric of what revealing militarism looks like or how a judge can possibly determine what the “better” or “worse” revealing and breaking down of militarism looks like – it also links to the armchair activism Disad because debate becomes a question of analyzing rather than attempting change which only locks in all of their impacts
The internal net benefit is the armchair activism Disad – debate is a mausoleum of theories of power and resistance—ideas that were once alive are now filtered, managed, and expected by the machinations of academia. The proliferation of critical discourse within the debate space gets co-opted by the sign economy and merely circulates within the self-contained deliberation of the debate round. Terminal solvency defense and turn—their resistance is forever buried into the catacombs of empty school rooms. After this debate, we may go get lunch at a fast food joint that uses ingredients produced on the backs of disenfranchised workers in Latin America—they make us complacent by making us forget that we are only producing discourses about discourse in exchange for a ballot and we become complicit with the harms they speak to.
The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
The incessant productivity of hegemony is a drive toward its own destruction. hegemonic power has surpassed the domain of being referentially related to any material reality and can now only identify with the image of its own destruction. Pope 7. Professor of Language at York University, Pope, “Baudrillard’s Simulacrum: Of War, Terror, and Obituaries,” October 2007, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies: Volume 4, Number 3 Many of the obituaries printed some variance of the following quote: “It is AND logic, while engaging in the realm of challenge and the collusive relation.
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/20/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 5 - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake KD | Judge: Aryan Jasani The affirmative is caught in an exaltation of use-value that perpetuates capitalism Baudrillard 76 (Jean, Prof of Phil at EGS, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy, trans David Miller) The central idea is that the economy which governs our societies results from a misappropriation of the fundamental human principle, which is a solar principle of expenditure. Bataille's thought goes, beyond proper political economy (which in essence is regulated through exchange value), straight to the metaphysical principle of economy. Bataille's target is utility, in its root. Utility is, of course, an apparently positive principle of capital: accumulation, investment, depreciation, etc. But in fact it is, on Bataille's account, a principle of powerlessness, an utter inability to expend. Given that all previous societies knew how to expend, this is, an unbelievable deficiency : it cuts the human being off from all possible sovereignty. All economics are founded on that which no longer can, no longer knows how to expend itself, on that which is incapable of becoming the stake of a sacrifice. It is therefore entirely residual, it is a limited social fact; and it is against economy as a limited social fact that Bataille wants to raise expenditure, death, and sacrifice as total social facts--such is the principle of general economy. The principle of utility (use value) blends with the bourgeoisie, with this capitalist class whose definition for Bataille (contrary to Marx) is negative: it no longer knows how to expend. Similarly, the crisis of capital, its increasing mortality and its immanent death throes, are not bound, as in the work of Marx, to a history, to dialectical reversals, but to this fundamental law of the inability to expend, which give capital over to the cancer of production and unlimited reproduction. There is no principle of revolution in Bataille's work: "The terror of revolutions has only done more and more (de mieux en mieux) to subordinate human energy to industry." There is only a principle of sacrifice-the principle of sovereignty, whose diversion by the bourgeoisie and capital causes all human history to pass from sacred tragedy to the comedy of utility. This critique is a non-Marxist critique, an aristocratic critique; because it aims at utility, at economic finality as the axiom of capitalist society. The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology: a critique of exchange value, but an exaltation of use value-and thus a critique, at the same time, of what made the almost delirious greatness of capital, the secular remains of its religious quality: investment at any price, even at the cost of use value. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of being pre or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital-all that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is. What remains uncertain in the work of Bataille (but without a doubt this uncertainty cannot be alleviated), is to know whether the economy (capital), which is counterbalanced on absurd, but never useless, never sacrificial expenditures (wars, waste . ..), is nevertheless shot through with a sacrificial dynamic. Is political economy at bottom only a frustrated avatar of the single great cosmic law of expenditure? Is the entire history of capital only an immense detour toward its own catastrophe, toward its own sacrificial end? If this is so, it is because, in the end, one cannot not expend. A longer spiral perhaps drags capital beyond economy, toward a destruction of its own values; the alternative is that we are stuck forever" in this denial of the sacred, in the vertigo of supply, which signifies the rupture of alliance (of symbolic exchange in primitive societies) and of sovereignty. Bataille would have been impassioned by the present evolution of capital in this era of floating currencies, of values seeking their own level (which is not their transmutation), and the drift of finalities (which is neither sovereign uselessness nor the absurd gratuitousness of laughter and death). But his concept of expenditure would have permitted only a limited analysis : it is still too economic, too much the flip side of accumulation, as transgression is too close to the inverse figure ofprohibition.4 In an order which is no longer that of utility, but an aleatory order of value, pure expenditure, while retaining the romantic charm of turning the economic inside out, is no longer sufficient for radical defiance -it shatters the mirror of market value, but is powerless against the shifting mirror of structural value. Bataille founds his general economy on a "solar economy" without reciprocal exchange, on the unilateral gift that the sun makes of its energy : a cosmogony of expenditure, which he deploys in a religious and political anthropology . But Bataille has misread Mauss: the unilateral gift does not exist. This is not the law of the universe. He who has so well explored the human sacrifice of the Aztecs should have known as they did that the sun gives nothing, it is necessary to nourish it continually with human blood in order that it shine. It is necessary to challenge the gods through sacrifice in order that they respond with profusion. In other words, the root of sacrifice and of general economy is never pure and simple expenditure-or whatever drive pulsion of excess that supposedly comes to us from nature-but is an incessant process of challenge Wfi. The "excess of energy" does not come from the sun (from nature) but from a continual higher bidding in exchange-the symbolic process that can be found in the work of Mauss, not that of the gift (that is the naturalist mystique into which Bataille falls), but that of the counter-gift . This is the single truly symbolic process, which in fact implies death as a kind of maximal excess-but not as individual ecstasy, always as the maximal principle of social exchange. In this sense, one can reproach Bataille for having "naturalized" Mauss (but in a metaphysical spiral so prodigious that the reproach is not really one), and for having made symbolic exchange a kind of natural function of prodigality, at once hyper-religious in its gratuitousness and much too close still, a contrario, to the principle of utility and to the economic order that it exhausts in transgression without ever leaving behind. It is "in the glory of death" d hauteur de mort that one rediscovers Bataille, and the real question posed remains: "How is it that all men have encountered the need and felt the obligation to kill living beings ritually? For lack of having known how to respond, all men have remained in ignorance of that which they are." There is an answer to this question beneath the text, in all the interstices of Bataille's text, but in my opinion not in the notion of expenditure, nor in this kind of anthropological reconstruction that he tries to establish from the "objective" data of his day: Marxism, biology, sociology, ethnology, political economy, the objective potential of which he tries to bring together nevertheless, in a perspective which is neither exactly a genealogy, nor a natural history, nor a Hegelian totality, but a bit of all that. But the sacred imperative is flawless in its mythic assertion, and the will to teach is continually breached by Bataille's dazzling vision, by a "subject of knowledge" always "at the boiling point." The consequence of this is that even analytic or documentary considerations have that mythic force which constitutes the sole-sacrificial-force of writing.
The subversiveness of a strategy of resistance can only be effective if it begins with the object and deconstructing the metaphysics of value. Baudrillard 1 (professor of phil at EGS, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, pg. 75shree) This is why use-value fetishism is indeed more profound, more “mysterious” than the fetishism of exchange value. The mystery of exchange value and the commodity can be unmasked, relatively —it has been since Marx — and raised to consciousness as a social relation. But value in the case of use value is enveloped in total mystery, for it is grounded anthropologically in the (self-) “evidence” of a naturalness, in an unsurpassable original reference. This is where we discover the real “theology” of value — in the order of finalities: in the “ideal” relation of equivalence, harmony, economy and equilibrium that the concept of utility implies. It operates at all levels: between man and nature, man and objects, man and his body, the self and others. Value becomes absolutely self-evident, la chose la plus simple. Here the mystery and cunning (of history and of reason) are at their most profound and tenacious. If the system of use value is produced by the system of ex¬change value as its own ideology — if use value has no autonomy, if it is only the satellite and alibi of exchange value, though system-atically combining with it in the framework of political economy —then it is no longer possible to posit use value as an alternative to exchange value. Nor, therefore, is it possible to posit the “restitution” of use value, at the end of political economy, under the sign of the “liberation of needs” and the “administration of things” as a revolu¬tionary perspective. Every revolutionary perspective today stands or falls on its ability to reinterrogate radically the repressive, reductive, rationalizing meta-physic of utility. All critical theory depends on the analysis of the object form.’0 This has been absent from Marxist analysis. With all the political and ideological consequences that this implies, the result has been that all illusions converged on use value, idealized by oppos¬ition to exchange value, when it was in fact only the latter’s natur¬alized form.
Using capitalist metaphors to describe social conditions reinforces corporatization of education and normalizes inequitable power structures. Kip Austin Hinton 15, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, “Should We Use a Capital Framework to Understand Culture? Applying Cultural Capital to Communities of Color,” Equity and Excellence in Education, 48(2), 299-319, 2015. Influence of an Economic Metaphor on Communities of Color It makes sense for a AND , we may find more relevant and more ethical ways to theorize culture.
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND to feed, clothe, shelter, and absorb the waste of everyone.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
Put away your general hyperreality answers—reality can exist, our K is about the disappearance of its metaphysical principle Baudrillard 5 (Jean, Prof of Phil at EGS, Intelligence of Evil, p 18-9shree) That which is real exists; that is all we can say (but existence AND But neither things nor people obey a reality principle or a moral imperative.
Denying that reality exists metaphysically doesn’t translate to violence Baudrillard 5 (Jean, Prof of Phil at EGS, Intelligence of Evil, p 22-3shree) Any question of reality, of its obviousness and its principle, is deemed unacceptable AND a parallel universes once the dividing line of the Universal has been crossed.
1/23/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - Round 5 - UNLV
Tournament: UNLV | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit EP | Judge: Diana Alvarez We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND , but we continue to live under the eye of its operational model.
The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty). Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND become a central means of establishing and expanding a militarized national security culture. Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro. Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to. When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/7/22
JF - K - Baudrillard - UNLV - Octos
Tournament: UNLV | Round: Octas | Opponent: Portola AS | Judge: Nick Fleming, Yoyo Lei, Claudia Ribera We begin with a brief history of warfare, its disappearance and the reappearance of military informatics, logistics and digitalization. Warfare does not disappear for the desire of an ethical field of relations, but simply because it is obsolete. The reappearance of warfare is perpetual upgrading, a battlespace in potentia that predetermines all liberal guises of resistance. Warfare is not an event, it does not take place in some traditional understanding of ‘the happening of events,’ rather warfare is the Archimedean point that produces not just armies, weapons and tactics, but the real world itself. The 1AC’s fantasy of demilitarization, like the crossbows of the Great Italian Wars, is outdated. Warfare is all we know. Öberg 19. Dan Öberg, Associate Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, his research focuses on the ontology of war, critical military studies and the thought of Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Battlefield,” The Disorder of Things, January 13th, 2019, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/13/requiem-for-the-battlefield/, ar If we look closely, we see that the real world begins, in the AND between their scholarship and the ballot – if not you vote negative on production
The affirmative is invested in a will to transparency and global modus venvindi which seeks the maximization of norms and satellization of the planet through the installation of a universal security apparatus. Their cooperation over the peaceful use of space succumbs to an understanding of war as reality that expands the operational function of liquidation beyond the atmosphere. Be skeptical of their attachment to transparency, empirical reality, and necessity of security as the search for mastery normalizes an impulse to conquer alterity and produces the very conditions for its collapse. Baudrillard 83 (Jean Baudrillard, who is he really. Simulations translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman 1983)DR 19
The "space race" played exactly the same role as the nuclear race. AND to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty).
Their faith in satellites locks in global crises – suturing space to warfare locks out alternative futures in favor of fantasies of existential threat that make their impacts inevitable. Masco, 12 (Joseph, Prof. of Anthropology @ U. of Chicago, “The End of Ends” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Fall 2012), pp. 1107-1124) In an extreme age, we might well ask: what are the possibilities for AND coordinat- ing principle of US geo-policy and a new psychosocial reality
Cap collapsing now – most recent ev IMT 21 (World Perspectives 2021: a global epoch of revolution is being prepared https://www.marxist.com/a-worldwide-epoch-of-revolution-is-being-prepared.htm International Marxist Tendency 30 July 2021 Accessed 8-13-2021) CSUF JmB + meza Work Week The nature of perspectives The present document, which should be read in conjunction with AND the phenomenon of Trumpism. in Brazil we saw the rise of Bolsonaro.
Collapse creates sustainable living Powers ’11 (William is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. He has worked for more than a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, and Washington.) World Policy Journal, "Finding Enough: Confessions of a secular missionary," Project Muse, AM) In October 2011, I visited the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of International Affairs AND nor of another. It traverses all discourses without them wanting it to.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean, Ex-Prof of Media and Philosophy @ EGS, Paroxysm, p 60shree) JB: The paradox of liberation is that the people liberated are never the ones AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
2/13/22
ND - Case - AT Abolition - Round Octos - USC
Tournament: USC | Round: Octas | Opponent: Troy Independent AP | Judge: Joseph Barquin, Noah Christiansen, Kristiana Baez The affirmative misreads Heitzeg and puts the cart before the horse – color-blind racism gets codified through the prison industrial complex ie the affirmative cannot solve for racism unless they can answer the question “why are people racist” – anything else makes structures inevitable, Stockdale reads green AC Heitzeg, 2008 – St. Catherine University Professor of Sociology and Critical Studies of Race and Ethnicity Rose M. Brewer, is a sociologist and the Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor AND pedagogies for change that the current situation will be transformed for social justice.
We’ll concede Robinson ’16 – but that frames your ballot because if we either win that the affirmative sustains structures of capital you vote negative because they will only continue to produce their own impacts
Collapse is good—
Prevents extinction from environmental destruction Speth ‘8 (James Gustave, Served as President Jimmy Carter’s White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations’ largest agency for international development Prof at Vermont law school. Former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University . Former Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law. .Former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black JD, Yale. The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Gigapedia, 6-9) But the much larger and more threatening impacts stem from the economic activity of those AND modern capitalism, in each case seeking to identify the transformative changes needed.
Prevents runaway warming which causes extinction. Li 10, (Dr. Minqi, Assistant Professor Department of Economics, University of Utah, “The 21st Century Crisis: Climate Catastrophe or Socialism” Paper prepared for the David Gordon Memorial Lecture at URPE Summer Conference 2010 JH) The global average surface temperature is now about 0.8C (0.8 AND of the means of production and society-wide planning (Section 6).
AND “a” means singular – this isn’t a topicality argument, but a solvency claim that they cannot fix global structures of capitalism with only a singular government recognizing the right to strike Dictionary.com No Date (“Definition of A,” No Publication, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/a) Definition of a (Entry 2 of 13) 1—used as a function word before singular nouns when the referent is unspecified
First ev they read about inequality is a buzzfeed article about squidgame – the card does not say that the public is ready to fight capitalism, rather that the public is ready to watch international shows: this can be turned as part of a broader argument about the way they get information: they need Netflix to tell them that capitalism is bad. The impact is the depersonalization of violence: they view themselves as above the violence of inequality, not realizing that going to a high school that costs more than the average American house hold makes in a year is part of the way people settle their moral equilibriam: reading this affirmative settles Harvard-West lake’s moral equilibriam which allows them to continue the system of violent extraction that they support
AT Lingis
a) Ev just says a gap can lead to a marginalization of democracy but doesn’t describe a terminal
b) No impact to climate change was substantiated so a 1ar would be new – just says the rich may struggle to reverse but doesn’t prove anything
AT Greenhouse
a) this is just in the context of trade workers/unions, not all workers writ large – also no real terminal impact
AT Pope
a) is about social disunity not necessarily people earning less than one another but being disunited that would still exist in the aff because ppl like jeff bezos will still be much wealtheir than the avg person
b) Cribb cites alt causes such as political economic and religious divides which they cant resolve
AT Richter
a) doesn’t substantiate that economic decline really implicates war
b) the K turns this – structural violence perpetuates economic inequality
some more turns here
Unions don’t solve inequality – they’re too weak and tons of alt causes Epstein 20 Richard A. Epstein Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow @ the Hoover Institution. "The Decline Of Unions Is Good News." https://www.hoover.org/research/decline-unions-good-news So what then could justify this inefficient provision? One common argument is that unions AND within a given firm have been compromised by higher wages to union workers.
Shutdowns
The incessant productivity of hegemony is a drive toward its own destruction. American hegemonic power has surpassed the domain of being referentially related to any material reality and can now only identify with the image of its own destruction. Pope 7. Professor of Language at York University, Pope, “Baudrillard’s Simulacrum: Of War, Terror, and Obituaries,” October 2007, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies: Volume 4, Number 3 Many of the obituaries printed some variance of the following quote: “It is AND this logic, while engaging in the realm of challenge and the collusive relation
Solvency
The affirmative cannot solve for their own impacts: they say that government shutdowns are bad, so workers should be able to strike, which prevents them. The issue is that workers striking shuts down the government because people stop working ie if workers ever exercise their right to strike it causes all of their impacts.
1) They do not have a piece of evidence saying that the RTS is key to solve income inequality. Even if their ev is right that income inequality writ large is bad they dont resovle a large enough portion. Read their uniqueness evidence it cites education and healthcare.
2) Their argument about income inequality is about the global differences between states wealth and average incomes. Even if there is an increase in income in some sectors, that doesnt mean the disparities b/w the countries get resolved.
3) Their link evidence says they increase incomes by 2-5 which is woefully inefficient to solve, their are massive differences between these countries i.e their uniqueness evidence cites other countries having a 16x difference, that minor increase is insufficient to solve
Ill LBL solvency ev –
burns
- Not about the right to strike in all cases
- Makes a perception argument and says that unions can do their work “through the threat of union- ization “
Richman card doesnt actually make a spillover claim in the evidence or the part they've highlighted
Nolan ev - not reading a CP so irrelevant
Framing
The standard is to prefer form arguments first – if we win a claim that the affirmative shouldn’t have been brought into debate at all that comes before any of their impact scenarios because it directs the logic behind them
AND there’s a Strategic Cover Disad to their model– the use of fiat to overcome links means people are able to outweigh thinks like being racist with their extinction impacts – that means even if they are right that things spill out of debate and they can make a difference you still vote negative because they create neo-conservatives like Kyle Rove, Ted Cruz or Neal Katyeal – even if you don’t believe that they will make bad people, at the very least they won’t have the opportunity to test them which is a terminal solvency deficit to their model
None of their death is bad standards are an answer to our arguments about the nature of their extinction impacts
Governments consistently don’t use utilitarianism or realism – only our theory of power explains why the US was in Vietnam despite knowing it was a losing war and the public being against it
Prison strikes rarely achieves significant reforms, no matter how big or long the strike is – be doubtful how the aff is any different Christie Thompson is a staff writer. Her work has been published by outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, ProPublica, and The Atlantic, 9/1/2016 – “Do Prison Strikes Work?”, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/09/21/do-prison-strikes-work//bread On Sept. 9, prisoners across the country stopped showing up for their work AND It’s too soon to tell what the impact of their protests might be.
2. Even Norway’s prisons are immoral and counterproductive — and if that’s possible in the U.S., so is abolition. McLeod 19 — Allegra M. McLeod, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, former Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow and Staff Attorney at the Immigration Justice Project holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and a J.D. from Yale University 2019 (“Envisioning Abolition Democracy,” Harvard Law Review, Volume 132, April 10th, Available Online at https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/1613-1649_Online.pdf, Accessed 06-10-2020, p. 1642) While some of what is most abhorrent in prison-based punishment is associated with AND be best allocated to beautifying prisons rather than radically reducing reliance upon them.
3. By taking the prison itself for granted, the aff’s reformist discourse precludes emancipatory alternatives to the carceral system. Davis 3 — Angela Y. Davis, Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Founder of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Humboldt University (Germany), 2003 (“Introduction: Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?,” Are Prisons Obsolete?, Published by Open Media, ISBN 1583225811, p. 20-21) Over the last few years the previous absence of critical positions on prison expansion in AND of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.
Solvency
4. Vote Neg on presumption: allowing prisoners to strike doesn’t mean that there will be radical reforms in wages and
5. No solvency: Alt causes: the prison industrial complex includes broken, racist court systems; corrupt policing; prison wages and conditions are minuscule solving for racial injustice and structural violence, at best they get solving like 5 of structural violence, and even then, prio structural violence
6. Anything short of abolition can’t “solve” mass incarceration. Dubler and Lloyd 20 — Joshua Dubler, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester, holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University, and Vincent W. Lloyd, Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Villanova University, holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California-Berkeley, 2020 (“Why Not Prison Abolition?,” Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, Published by Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780190949174, p. ebook) What would it take to truly “end mass incarceration”? As a thought AND path we have ventured, no reform agenda is capable of that.29
FW
7. Framework — the role of this debate should be about the development of movements to challenge institutional racism—whether or not the aff’s reform is good or bad is secondary to how reforms comes in to be Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law 2010, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a writer. “New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” ProQuest ebrary, pp. 221-224 The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made AND We run the risk of winning isolated battles but losing the larger war.
1/6/22
ND - Case - AT Prison Strikes - Round 6 - USC
Tournament: USC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Marlborough EW | Judge: Ben Cortez Prison strikes rarely achieves significant reforms, no matter how big or long the strike is – be doubtful how the aff is any different Christie Thompson is a staff writer. Her work has been published by outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, ProPublica, and The Atlantic, 9/1/2016 – “Do Prison Strikes Work?”, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/09/21/do-prison-strikes-work//bread On Sept. 9, prisoners across the country stopped showing up for their work AND It’s too soon to tell what the impact of their protests might be. 2. Even Norway’s prisons are immoral and counterproductive — and if that’s possible in the U.S., so is abolition. McLeod 19 — Allegra M. McLeod, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, former Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow and Staff Attorney at the Immigration Justice Project holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and a J.D. from Yale University 2019 (“Envisioning Abolition Democracy,” Harvard Law Review, Volume 132, April 10th, Available Online at https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/1613-1649_Online.pdf, Accessed 06-10-2020, p. 1642) While some of what is most abhorrent in prison-based punishment is associated with AND be best allocated to beautifying prisons rather than radically reducing reliance upon them.
3. By taking the prison itself for granted, the aff’s reformist discourse precludes emancipatory alternatives to the carceral system. Davis 3 — Angela Y. Davis, Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Founder of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Humboldt University (Germany), 2003 (“Introduction: Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?,” Are Prisons Obsolete?, Published by Open Media, ISBN 1583225811, p. 20-21) Over the last few years the previous absence of critical positions on prison expansion in AND of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.
Solvency
4. Vote Neg on presumption: allowing prisoners to strike doesn’t mean that there will be radical reforms in wages and
5. No solvency: Alt causes: the prison industrial complex includes broken, racist court systems; corrupt policing; prison wages and conditions are minuscule solving for racial injustice and structural violence, at best they get solving like 5 of structural violence, and even then, prio structural violence
6. Anything short of abolition can’t “solve” mass incarceration. Dubler and Lloyd 20 — Joshua Dubler, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester, holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University, and Vincent W. Lloyd, Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Villanova University, holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California-Berkeley, 2020 (“Why Not Prison Abolition?,” Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, Published by Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780190949174, p. ebook) What would it take to truly “end mass incarceration”? As a thought AND path we have ventured, no reform agenda is capable of that.29
FW
7. Framework — the role of this debate should be about the development of movements to challenge institutional racism—whether or not the aff’s reform is good or bad is secondary to how reforms comes in to be Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law 2010, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a writer. “New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” ProQuest ebrary, pp. 221-224 The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made AND We run the risk of winning isolated battles but losing the larger war.
1/6/22
ND - K - Abolition - Round 2 - USC
Tournament: USC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Marlborough ED | Judge: Kristiana Baez The prison system is irredeemable and intrinsically anti-black -- only abolition can challenge racialized criminalization Roberts 19 (Dorothy E. Roberts -- George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology + University of Pennsylvania; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights + University of Pennsylvania Law School; Professor of Africana Studies and Professor of Sociology + University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, “The Supreme Court 2018 Term”, “Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism”, Number I, Volum 133, November 2019, pgs. 12-40) The United States stands out from all nations on Earth for its reliance on caging AND eradicate prisons by addressing these needs and problems in radically different ways.264
There is no reform of making prison conditions better – the Prison-Industrial Complex itself is the product of liberal reforms — any strategy that accepts institutionalized state violence can only perpetuate it. Rodríguez 19 — Dylan Rodríguez, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Chair of the Academic Senate at the University of California-Riverside, holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California-Berkeley, 2019 (“Abolition as Praxis of Human Being: A Foreword,” Harvard Law Review, Volume 132, April 10th, Available Online at https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/1575-1612_Online.pdf, Accessed 03-23-2020, p. 1600-1602) As an alternative, the ongoing present tense of normalized and legally sanctioned carceral torture AND system might actually hinder the more substantial transformation American criminal justice needs.”90
Their focus on prison labor, proven by HRW ’19 allowing prison labours to publicize their conditions, as a part of the prison industrial complex is a diversionary tactic that normalizes broader forms of population control utilized by neoliberal governments. This is not a semantic point – this mindset informs of how they view non-prison labor and replicates class based racism. Ertel 15 - JACOB ERTEL Jacob Ertel is a graduate of Oberlin College (Oberlin), where he studied Political Economy. Ertel was an organizer for Students for a Free Palestine (SFP), an affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), on the Oberlin campus. AUGUST 10, 2015 https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/10/do-we-need-to-rethink-the-prison-industrial-complex/ As a rhetorical tool, the notion of the PIC has been central in galvanizing AND movement and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
There’s no single explanation for the rise of mass incarceration besides carceral logic itself Wang 18 — Jackie Wang, Radcliffe Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, interviewed by M. Buna, freelance writer, 2018 (“Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang,” LA Review of Books, May 13th, Available Online at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/carceral-capitalism-conversation-jackie-wang/, Accessed 06-28-2020) Do you envision Carceral Capitalism becoming part of the ever-expanding curriculum for teaching AND environment. I hope that Carceral Capitalism will spark conversations and organizing efforts.
The Alternative is to BURN DOWN institutions of governance and reform—fantasies of civil participation fail to resist the violence executed by the state and accommodate its continuation through a belief that the system can be corrected. Abolition as an insurgent politics is a refusal to negotiate and seek recognition from the state in order to lead to change. Abraham’18 (Katherine Kelly Abraham Burn it Down: Abolition, Insurgent Political Praxis, and the Destruction of Decency,” Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics 1, no. 2 April 2018)JP This journal calls for abolition, a call implicitly asserting that contemporary sociopolitical and economic AND very political violence that insures its core function, operation, and maintenance.
1/6/22
ND - K - Abolition - Round 6 - USC
Tournament: USC | Round: 6 | Opponent: Marlborough EW | Judge: Ben Cortez The prison system is irredeemable and intrinsically anti-black -- only abolition can challenge racialized criminalization Roberts 19 (Dorothy E. Roberts -- George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology + University of Pennsylvania; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights + University of Pennsylvania Law School; Professor of Africana Studies and Professor of Sociology + University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, “The Supreme Court 2018 Term”, “Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism”, Number I, Volum 133, November 2019, pgs. 12-40) The United States stands out from all nations on Earth for its reliance on caging AND eradicate prisons by addressing these needs and problems in radically different ways.264
There is no reform of making prison conditions better – the Prison-Industrial Complex itself is the product of liberal reforms — any strategy that accepts institutionalized state violence can only perpetuate it. Rodríguez 19 — Dylan Rodríguez, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Chair of the Academic Senate at the University of California-Riverside, holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California-Berkeley, 2019 (“Abolition as Praxis of Human Being: A Foreword,” Harvard Law Review, Volume 132, April 10th, Available Online at https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/1575-1612_Online.pdf, Accessed 03-23-2020, p. 1600-1602) As an alternative, the ongoing present tense of normalized and legally sanctioned carceral torture AND system might actually hinder the more substantial transformation American criminal justice needs.”90
Their focus on prison labor, proven by HRW ’19 allowing prison labours to publicize their conditions, as a part of the prison industrial complex is a diversionary tactic that normalizes broader forms of population control utilized by neoliberal governments. This is not a semantic point – this mindset informs of how they view non-prison labor and replicates class based racism. Ertel 15 - JACOB ERTEL Jacob Ertel is a graduate of Oberlin College (Oberlin), where he studied Political Economy. Ertel was an organizer for Students for a Free Palestine (SFP), an affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), on the Oberlin campus. AUGUST 10, 2015 https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/10/do-we-need-to-rethink-the-prison-industrial-complex/ As a rhetorical tool, the notion of the PIC has been central in galvanizing AND movement and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
There’s no single explanation for the rise of mass incarceration besides carceral logic itself Wang 18 — Jackie Wang, Radcliffe Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, interviewed by M. Buna, freelance writer, 2018 (“Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang,” LA Review of Books, May 13th, Available Online at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/carceral-capitalism-conversation-jackie-wang/, Accessed 06-28-2020) Do you envision Carceral Capitalism becoming part of the ever-expanding curriculum for teaching AND environment. I hope that Carceral Capitalism will spark conversations and organizing efforts.
The Alternative is to BURN DOWN institutions of governance and reform—fantasies of civil participation fail to resist the violence executed by the state and accommodate its continuation through a belief that the system can be corrected. Abolition as an insurgent politics is a refusal to negotiate and seek recognition from the state in order to lead to change. Abraham’18 (Katherine Kelly Abraham Burn it Down: Abolition, Insurgent Political Praxis, and the Destruction of Decency,” Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics 1, no. 2 April 2018)JP This journal calls for abolition, a call implicitly asserting that contemporary sociopolitical and economic AND very political violence that insures its core function, operation, and maintenance.
1/6/22
ND - K - Baudrillard - Round 3 - USC
Tournament: USC | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake KD | Judge: Deven Cooper Capitalism has far surpassed your concept of labor – transferring into the final stage of development, far beyond all exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi®. The affirmative’s optimism of strike’s usefulness is forever misplaced and re-invested into systems of capitalism. Cline ’11 (Alex Cline, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, July 2011, "Statues Of Commodus – Death and Simulation in the Work of Jean Baudrillard," https://baudrillardstudies.ubishops.ca/statues-of-commodus-death-and-simulation-in-the-work-of-jean-baudrillard/, GS) Jean Baudrillard is widely considered to be one of the first post-Marxist philosophers AND objective conceptions of revolution that ignored subjectivity and desire, agency and hierarchy.
The affirmative is caught in an exaltation of use-value that perpetuates capitalism Baudrillard 76 (Jean, Prof of Phil at EGS, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy, trans David Miller) The central idea is that the economy which governs our societies results from a misappropriation of the fundamental human principle, which is a solar principle of expenditure. Bataille's thought goes, beyond proper political economy (which in essence is regulated through exchange value), straight to the metaphysical principle of economy. Bataille's target is utility, in its root. Utility is, of course, an apparently positive principle of capital: accumulation, investment, depreciation, etc. But in fact it is, on Bataille's account, a principle of powerlessness, an utter inability to expend. Given that all previous societies knew how to expend, this is, an unbelievable deficiency : it cuts the human being off from all possible sovereignty. All economics are founded on that which no longer can, no longer knows how to expend itself, on that which is incapable of becoming the stake of a sacrifice. It is therefore entirely residual, it is a limited social fact; and it is against economy as a limited social fact that Bataille wants to raise expenditure, death, and sacrifice as total social facts--such is the principle of general economy. The principle of utility (use value) blends with the bourgeoisie, with this capitalist class whose definition for Bataille (contrary to Marx) is negative: it no longer knows how to expend. Similarly, the crisis of capital, its increasing mortality and its immanent death throes, are not bound, as in the work of Marx, to a history, to dialectical reversals, but to this fundamental law of the inability to expend, which give capital over to the cancer of production and unlimited reproduction. There is no principle of revolution in Bataille's work: "The terror of revolutions has only done more and more (de mieux en mieux) to subordinate human energy to industry." There is only a principle of sacrifice-the principle of sovereignty, whose diversion by the bourgeoisie and capital causes all human history to pass from sacred tragedy to the comedy of utility. This critique is a non-Marxist critique, an aristocratic critique; because it aims at utility, at economic finality as the axiom of capitalist society. The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology: a critique of exchange value, but an exaltation of use value-and thus a critique, at the same time, of what made the almost delirious greatness of capital, the secular remains of its religious quality: investment at any price, even at the cost of use value. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of being pre or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital-all that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is. What remains uncertain in the work of Bataille (but without a doubt this uncertainty cannot be alleviated), is to know whether the economy (capital), which is counterbalanced on absurd, but never useless, never sacrificial expenditures (wars, waste . ..), is nevertheless shot through with a sacrificial dynamic. Is political economy at bottom only a frustrated avatar of the single great cosmic law of expenditure? Is the entire history of capital only an immense detour toward its own catastrophe, toward its own sacrificial end? If this is so, it is because, in the end, one cannot not expend. A longer spiral perhaps drags capital beyond economy, toward a destruction of its own values; the alternative is that we are stuck forever" in this denial of the sacred, in the vertigo of supply, which signifies the rupture of alliance (of symbolic exchange in primitive societies) and of sovereignty. Bataille would have been impassioned by the present evolution of capital in this era of floating currencies, of values seeking their own level (which is not their transmutation), and the drift of finalities (which is neither sovereign uselessness nor the absurd gratuitousness of laughter and death). But his concept of expenditure would have permitted only a limited analysis : it is still too economic, too much the flip side of accumulation, as transgression is too close to the inverse figure ofprohibition.4 In an order which is no longer that of utility, but an aleatory order of value, pure expenditure, while retaining the romantic charm of turning the economic inside out, is no longer sufficient for radical defiance -it shatters the mirror of market value, but is powerless against the shifting mirror of structural value. Bataille founds his general economy on a "solar economy" without reciprocal exchange, on the unilateral gift that the sun makes of its energy : a cosmogony of expenditure, which he deploys in a religious and political anthropology . But Bataille has misread Mauss: the unilateral gift does not exist. This is not the law of the universe. He who has so well explored the human sacrifice of the Aztecs should have known as they did that the sun gives nothing, it is necessary to nourish it continually with human blood in order that it shine. It is necessary to challenge the gods through sacrifice in order that they respond with profusion. In other words, the root of sacrifice and of general economy is never pure and simple expenditure-or whatever drive pulsion of excess that supposedly comes to us from nature-but is an incessant process of challenge Wfi. The "excess of energy" does not come from the sun (from nature) but from a continual higher bidding in exchange-the symbolic process that can be found in the work of Mauss, not that of the gift (that is the naturalist mystique into which Bataille falls), but that of the counter-gift . This is the single truly symbolic process, which in fact implies death as a kind of maximal excess-but not as individual ecstasy, always as the maximal principle of social exchange. In this sense, one can reproach Bataille for having "naturalized" Mauss (but in a metaphysical spiral so prodigious that the reproach is not really one), and for having made symbolic exchange a kind of natural function of prodigality, at once hyper-religious in its gratuitousness and much too close still, a contrario, to the principle of utility and to the economic order that it exhausts in transgression without ever leaving behind. It is "in the glory of death" d hauteur de mort that one rediscovers Bataille, and the real question posed remains: "How is it that all men have encountered the need and felt the obligation to kill living beings ritually? For lack of having known how to respond, all men have remained in ignorance of that which they are." There is an answer to this question beneath the text, in all the interstices of Bataille's text, but in my opinion not in the notion of expenditure, nor in this kind of anthropological reconstruction that he tries to establish from the "objective" data of his day: Marxism, biology, sociology, ethnology, political economy, the objective potential of which he tries to bring together nevertheless, in a perspective which is neither exactly a genealogy, nor a natural history, nor a Hegelian totality, but a bit of all that. But the sacred imperative is flawless in its mythic assertion, and the will to teach is continually breached by Bataille's dazzling vision, by a "subject of knowledge" always "at the boiling point." The consequence of this is that even analytic or documentary considerations have that mythic force which constitutes the sole-sacrificial-force of writing.
The subversiveness of a strategy of resistance can only be effective if it begins with the object and deconstructing the metaphysics of value. Baudrillard 1 (professor of phil at EGS, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, pg. 75shree) This is why use-value fetishism is indeed more profound, more “mysterious” than the fetishism of exchange value. The mystery of exchange value and the commodity can be unmasked, relatively —it has been since Marx — and raised to consciousness as a social relation. But value in the case of use value is enveloped in total mystery, for it is grounded anthropologically in the (self-) “evidence” of a naturalness, in an unsurpassable original reference. This is where we discover the real “theology” of value — in the order of finalities: in the “ideal” relation of equivalence, harmony, economy and equilibrium that the concept of utility implies. It operates at all levels: between man and nature, man and objects, man and his body, the self and others. Value becomes absolutely self-evident, la chose la plus simple. Here the mystery and cunning (of history and of reason) are at their most profound and tenacious. If the system of use value is produced by the system of ex¬change value as its own ideology — if use value has no autonomy, if it is only the satellite and alibi of exchange value, though system-atically combining with it in the framework of political economy —then it is no longer possible to posit use value as an alternative to exchange value. Nor, therefore, is it possible to posit the “restitution” of use value, at the end of political economy, under the sign of the “liberation of needs” and the “administration of things” as a revolu¬tionary perspective. Every revolutionary perspective today stands or falls on its ability to reinterrogate radically the repressive, reductive, rationalizing meta-physic of utility. All critical theory depends on the analysis of the object form.’0 This has been absent from Marxist analysis. With all the political and ideological consequences that this implies, the result has been that all illusions converged on use value, idealized by oppos¬ition to exchange value, when it was in fact only the latter’s natur¬alized form.
Fear of cyberattacks creates global resilience networks built around Orientalist behavior modification Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko 19. Nick Dyer-Witheford is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario and Svitlana Matviyenko is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication. “Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism.” March 2019. cut by vikas bbyyy This is not the place for a detailed examination of the political economy of " AND use of cyberweaponry, in counterinsurgency operations, domestic surveillance, and digital strikes
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean Baudrillard, “Present Considerations: The Uncertainty of All Value Systems” xx-xx-1998, GS) It’s also the parody of political emancipation. Is capitalism for you the cold monster AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/6/22
ND - K - Baudrillard - Round Octos - USC
Tournament: USC | Round: Octas | Opponent: Troy Independent AP | Judge: Joseph Barquin, Noah Christiansen, Kristiana Baez Of the Cheshire Cat there remains only the Smile.
Of the dream only a memory trace.
Of the real there remains only the virtual.
And of the Other only a spectral form
We begin with a brief history of debate, its disappearance and reappearance as a militaristic game of informatics, logistics, and digitization – everything outside a reassured order must be destroyed through forms of asymmetrical violence paraded around as a fight – this is the key analysis the 1AC misses, by framing themselves as a disruption of the repetition of debate they breathe life back into fundamentally reactionary forces – the same way Louisville created the PRL or Ryan Wash created a massive conservative movement against debate – this card turns AC Meiner Baudrillard 81 (Jean, Professor of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 24-25 shree) These staged presidential assassinations are revealing because they signal the status of all negativity in AND the mortal blows of simulation, even and especially if they are revolutionary.
"If the matrix were to make a movie about the matrix, The Matrix is surely the movie it would make"—we think this is true of the 1ac's relationship to debate. The move towards authentic radical theory within the cemetery walls of the Western university merely engenders a semiotic fantasy of radicalism paving over very real conditions of violent colonialism, pain, and death in order to make this space possible. We will be very clear here. Debate is not a home. Debate never will be. Anarchist News 10. “The University, Social Death, and the Inside Joke,” http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100220181610620 Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does AND interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or anything."56
The affirmative is caught in an exaltation of use-value that perpetuates capitalism Baudrillard 76 (Jean, Prof of Phil at EGS, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy, trans David Miller) The central idea is that the economy which governs our societies results from a misappropriation of the fundamental human principle, which is a solar principle of expenditure. Bataille's thought goes, beyond proper political economy (which in essence is regulated through exchange value), straight to the metaphysical principle of economy. Bataille's target is utility, in its root. Utility is, of course, an apparently positive principle of capital: accumulation, investment, depreciation, etc. But in fact it is, on Bataille's account, a principle of powerlessness, an utter inability to expend. Given that all previous societies knew how to expend, this is, an unbelievable deficiency : it cuts the human being off from all possible sovereignty. All economics are founded on that which no longer can, no longer knows how to expend itself, on that which is incapable of becoming the stake of a sacrifice. It is therefore entirely residual, it is a limited social fact; and it is against economy as a limited social fact that Bataille wants to raise expenditure, death, and sacrifice as total social facts--such is the principle of general economy. The principle of utility (use value) blends with the bourgeoisie, with this capitalist class whose definition for Bataille (contrary to Marx) is negative: it no longer knows how to expend. Similarly, the crisis of capital, its increasing mortality and its immanent death throes, are not bound, as in the work of Marx, to a history, to dialectical reversals, but to this fundamental law of the inability to expend, which give capital over to the cancer of production and unlimited reproduction. There is no principle of revolution in Bataille's work: "The terror of revolutions has only done more and more (de mieux en mieux) to subordinate human energy to industry." There is only a principle of sacrifice-the principle of sovereignty, whose diversion by the bourgeoisie and capital causes all human history to pass from sacred tragedy to the comedy of utility. This critique is a non-Marxist critique, an aristocratic critique; because it aims at utility, at economic finality as the axiom of capitalist society. The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology: a critique of exchange value, but an exaltation of use value-and thus a critique, at the same time, of what made the almost delirious greatness of capital, the secular remains of its religious quality: investment at any price, even at the cost of use value. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of being pre or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital-all that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is. What remains uncertain in the work of Bataille (but without a doubt this uncertainty cannot be alleviated), is to know whether the economy (capital), which is counterbalanced on absurd, but never useless, never sacrificial expenditures (wars, waste . ..), is nevertheless shot through with a sacrificial dynamic. Is political economy at bottom only a frustrated avatar of the single great cosmic law of expenditure? Is the entire history of capital only an immense detour toward its own catastrophe, toward its own sacrificial end? If this is so, it is because, in the end, one cannot not expend. A longer spiral perhaps drags capital beyond economy, toward a destruction of its own values; the alternative is that we are stuck forever" in this denial of the sacred, in the vertigo of supply, which signifies the rupture of alliance (of symbolic exchange in primitive societies) and of sovereignty. Bataille would have been impassioned by the present evolution of capital in this era of floating currencies, of values seeking their own level (which is not their transmutation), and the drift of finalities (which is neither sovereign uselessness nor the absurd gratuitousness of laughter and death). But his concept of expenditure would have permitted only a limited analysis : it is still too economic, too much the flip side of accumulation, as transgression is too close to the inverse figure ofprohibition.4 In an order which is no longer that of utility, but an aleatory order of value, pure expenditure, while retaining the romantic charm of turning the economic inside out, is no longer sufficient for radical defiance -it shatters the mirror of market value, but is powerless against the shifting mirror of structural value. Bataille founds his general economy on a "solar economy" without reciprocal exchange, on the unilateral gift that the sun makes of its energy : a cosmogony of expenditure, which he deploys in a religious and political anthropology . But Bataille has misread Mauss: the unilateral gift does not exist. This is not the law of the universe. He who has so well explored the human sacrifice of the Aztecs should have known as they did that the sun gives nothing, it is necessary to nourish it continually with human blood in order that it shine. It is necessary to challenge the gods through sacrifice in order that they respond with profusion. In other words, the root of sacrifice and of general economy is never pure and simple expenditure-or whatever drive pulsion of excess that supposedly comes to us from nature-but is an incessant process of challenge Wfi. The "excess of energy" does not come from the sun (from nature) but from a continual higher bidding in exchange-the symbolic process that can be found in the work of Mauss, not that of the gift (that is the naturalist mystique into which Bataille falls), but that of the counter-gift . This is the single truly symbolic process, which in fact implies death as a kind of maximal excess-but not as individual ecstasy, always as the maximal principle of social exchange. In this sense, one can reproach Bataille for having "naturalized" Mauss (but in a metaphysical spiral so prodigious that the reproach is not really one), and for having made symbolic exchange a kind of natural function of prodigality, at once hyper-religious in its gratuitousness and much too close still, a contrario, to the principle of utility and to the economic order that it exhausts in transgression without ever leaving behind. It is "in the glory of death" d hauteur de mort that one rediscovers Bataille, and the real question posed remains: "How is it that all men have encountered the need and felt the obligation to kill living beings ritually? For lack of having known how to respond, all men have remained in ignorance of that which they are." There is an answer to this question beneath the text, in all the interstices of Bataille's text, but in my opinion not in the notion of expenditure, nor in this kind of anthropological reconstruction that he tries to establish from the "objective" data of his day: Marxism, biology, sociology, ethnology, political economy, the objective potential of which he tries to bring together nevertheless, in a perspective which is neither exactly a genealogy, nor a natural history, nor a Hegelian totality, but a bit of all that. But the sacred imperative is flawless in its mythic assertion, and the will to teach is continually breached by Bataille's dazzling vision, by a "subject of knowledge" always "at the boiling point." The consequence of this is that even analytic or documentary considerations have that mythic force which constitutes the sole-sacrificial-force of writing.
K comes first—The subversiveness of a strategy of resistance can only be effective if it begins with the object and deconstructing the metaphysics of value. Baudrillard 1 (professor of phil at EGS, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, pg. 75shree) This is why use-value fetishism is indeed more profound, more “mysterious” than the fetishism of exchange value. The mystery of exchange value and the commodity can be unmasked, relatively —it has been since Marx — and raised to consciousness as a social relation. But value in the case of use value is enveloped in total mystery, for it is grounded anthropologically in the (self-) “evidence” of a naturalness, in an unsurpassable original reference. This is where we discover the real “theology” of value — in the order of finalities: in the “ideal” relation of equivalence, harmony, economy and equilibrium that the concept of utility implies. It operates at all levels: between man and nature, man and objects, man and his body, the self and others. Value becomes absolutely self-evident, la chose la plus simple. Here the mystery and cunning (of history and of reason) are at their most profound and tenacious. If the system of use value is produced by the system of ex¬change value as its own ideology — if use value has no autonomy, if it is only the satellite and alibi of exchange value, though system-atically combining with it in the framework of political economy —then it is no longer possible to posit use value as an alternative to exchange value. Nor, therefore, is it possible to posit the “restitution” of use value, at the end of political economy, under the sign of the “liberation of needs” and the “administration of things” as a revolu¬tionary perspective. Every revolutionary perspective today stands or falls on its ability to reinterrogate radically the repressive, reductive, rationalizing meta-physic of utility. All critical theory depends on the analysis of the object form.’0 This has been absent from Marxist analysis. With all the political and ideological consequences that this implies, the result has been that all illusions converged on use value, idealized by oppos¬ition to exchange value, when it was in fact only the latter’s natur¬alized form.
Charity Cannibalism DA—we become addicted to the feeling of solving ethical crises, causing us to artificially construct more—snowballs to extinction Baudrillard 94 (Jean, ex-Prof of Sociology at Paris X, “The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71shree) We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' 'autre monde. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race. No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends – calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness. Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.
The aff is another instantiation of the white hyper real – it becomes another analytical encounter with whiteness and the world which just opens up more forms of liberal recognition politics Gillespie 17 (John Gillespie, “On the Prospect of Weaponized Death”, Propter Nos, 2:1, 2017) It is this fact that permits black death to be subsumed in simulations by each AND the semiotics of the white hyper-reality. White Disneyland stays intact.
When confronted with the ethical injunction of the aff, respond with “I would prefer not to”—vote neg on presumption Baudrillard 98 (Jean Baudrillard, “Present Considerations: The Uncertainty of All Value Systems” xx-xx-1998, GS) It’s also the parody of political emancipation. Is capitalism for you the cold monster AND Marcuse. Decidedly, freedom isn’t simple, and liberation even less so.
1/6/22
P - New Affs Bad - Round 2 - Cal
Tournament: Cal | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harker AV | Judge: Ronak Dua 1 A Interpretation: Debaters must disclose previously run constructive positions – all cases, off cases and theory arguments – at least 30 minutes before the round – yes the wiki is down but you could have came to the room to exchange emails. This means providing proper citations for all evidence including first three and last three words and tags as well as all advocacy texts and framework arguments. B Violation: They didn’t show up to the room to tell me the aff C Prefer— 1 Quality engagement—disclosure allows in-depth preparation before the round which checks back against unpredictable positions - allows for reciprocal engagement 2 Predictability – it’s a norm to disclose on the wiki and respond to disclosure questions; even if they read the same aff, it means Im unsure what to prep pre-round D Voters— Fairness is a voter—debate is a competitive activity that requires objective evaluation. Education is a voter—it’s intrinsic to debate.
2/20/22
P - New Affs Bad - Round 2 - Peninsula
Tournament: Peninsula | Round: 2 | Opponent: Northwood AA | Judge: Ben Cortez Our interpretation is that you must disclose on the NDCA 2021-2022 HS LD Wiki 30 minutes prior to the round or telling me the aff 30 minutes before the debate – This means providing proper citations for all evidence including first three and last three words and tags as well as all advocacy texts and framework arguments.
Violation: They didn’t – SS below
Nor did they show up in the NSDA campus 30 minutes before the round to tell me the aff (time is in est)
1) Skews neg prep and clash. Reading a new aff forces the neg to read core generics that don’t negate large portions of the aff and it makes debate harder for the negative
2) Surprises are ableist – two warrants. First is anxiety – reading new arguments leads to panic from debaters as they scramble to find new arguments to read. It justifies panic attacks in and out of round that make debate impossible and deter black and brown participation. The second warrant is short-circuiting thoughts. They’re gonna say on the spot thinking is good, we are turning it right now. Its ableist because not everyone has the same processing speed and disclosing the aff 30 minutes for the round at the very least solves for preparation
3) Hard debate isn’t better debate, its ableist – they assume busting out a new aff is good for competition, but it only serves them. They justify everyone constantly breaking new affs to one-up each other in debates
4) Quality engagement—disclosure allows in-depth preparation before the round which checks back against unpredictable positions - allows for reciprocal engagement
5) Predictability – it’s a norm to disclose on the wiki and respond to disclosure questions; even if they read the same aff, it means Im unsure what to prep pre-round
6) Turns all of their research and ethical education arguments - they don’t care about scholarship they just care about the game.