Opponent: Claudia Taylor AP | Judge: Podnar, Cassandra
1ac inequality 1nc da - warming da - econ 2nr da - warming 2ac case
Coppel
2
Opponent: Plano East IV | Judge: Anaiya Moran
1ac debris 1nc cp - debris da - xi lashout 2nr cpda 2ac case
Coppel
4
Opponent: Carnegie Vanguard SR | Judge: Danielle Colvin
1ac ptd 1nc T - extra da - xi lashout cp - debris 2nr da
Coppel
Quarters
Opponent: Westside SY | Judge: panel
1ac ost 1nc da - water da - warming 2nr warming 2ac case this was a lay round
Glenbrooks
1
Opponent: Durnham RL | Judge: Lauren Woodwall
1ac rawls 1nc util pic - police officers 2nr pic
Glenbrooks
4
Opponent: Lake Highland Prep PS | Judge: Derek Ying
1ac agonism 1nc t - unconditional nc - util da - reconciliation 2nr t
Glenbrooks
5
Opponent: Garland LY | Judge: Coln, Kassie
1ac symbolic extinction 1nc tfw 2nr tfw
Grapevine
1
Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: idk
1ac asian mel 1nc tfw 2nr tfw
Grapevine
3
Opponent: Evergreen SS | Judge: Blake Andrews
1ac impossible bomb 1nc set col 2nr set col
Loyola
3
Opponent: Solebury LN | Judge: idk
1ac evergreening 1nc T - Vaccines NC - Deont DA - FDI 2nr T
Loyola
2
Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: idk
1ac performance 1nc tfw 2nr tfw
Loyola
5
Opponent: Bergen County AK | Judge: Danielle Dorsch
1ac covid 1nc T - Vaccines Theory - Double Spec DA - FDI DA - Hege 2nr Theory - Double Spec
Loyola
Triples
Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: panel
1ac asian mel 1nc TFW Cap 2nr TFW
TOC
2
Opponent: Northland Christian LB | Judge: Bennett Dombcik
1ac china 1nc k - techno-orientalism 2nr k 2ac case
TOC
4
Opponent: Harker DS | Judge: Chao, Isaac
1ac mining 1nc t - appropriation nc - kant t - must have solvency advocate 2nr
UT
2
Opponent: Round Rock Indira Moparthi | Judge: Elmer Yang
1ac inequality and democracy 1nc da - ptx da - oil prices case turns 2nr da - ptx case turns 2ac case
UT
4
Opponent: San Mateo Ailsa Sun | Judge: Samantha McLoughlin
1ac deleuze 1nc nc - util pic - police 2nr nc pic
any
Finals
Opponent: any | Judge: any
)
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 - contact info
Tournament: any | Round: Finals | Opponent: any | Judge: any phone # - 5123005349 email: briann.jeon@gmail.com (contact my phone first you'll get responded to in .2 seconds)
9/4/21
0 - read pls
Tournament: any | Round: 1 | Opponent: any | Judge: any message me for any disclosure things - wiki has become increasingly more difficult w me, treat this as an I meet to all disclosure interps unless u messaged me abt them and i refused
4/23/22
1 - Cap
Tournament: Loyola | Round: Triples | Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: panel They conflate “materialism” with “materiality” – violence is not some amalgamation of signs but is instead about flesh and bone – their project fuels capitalist pedagogy McLaren 10 Peter, UC-Los Angeles and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Purdue University, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy” Cultural Studies = Critical Methodologies 2010 10: 251 Ebert (2009; Ebert and Zavarzadeh, 2008) makes an important distinction between corporeality/materiality and matter/materialism. Materiality is related to objective idealism and refers to the acceptance of an idea in the mind as something real, something that escapes class interests. In this way, avant-garde scholars will deconstruct materialism as merely the effects of tropes and representations. It attempts to create a prefigurative origin for what is essentially an ontology. However, Ebert (2009) argues that this constitutes transforming materialism into materiality, into a contemplative corporeality of difference, purging materialism of its conceptuality and determinate meanings. Matter is turned into signs or the effect of signs or sign power. This has led to the recent interest in the politics of performativity—performing identities, performing pedagogy, performing class, and so on. However, Ebert argues that matter is not synonymous with physical objects; matter exists outside the consciousness of the subject, and it cannot be separated from its production and contradictions in history. Matter is objective reality in history. Ebert and Zavarzadeh (2008) characterize materialism as the objective (transformative) productive activities of humans involving them in social relations; these social relations occur under definite historical conditions that are independent of their will and are shaped by class struggle over the surplus produced by social labor. A materialism that excludes historical processes and operates as a medium of cultural practices is not materialism; it is materiality or what Ebert (2009) refers to as “matterism.” Avant-garde critics who would replace materialism with materiality (through the tropes of supplementarity, spectrality, undecidability, and difference) severely undercut the claim for the objectivity of class interests and ultimately replace class struggle with the struggle over the sign. Like Ebert, David McNally (2001) in his classic Marxist text, Bodies of Meaning, describes the deconstructive efforts of post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida as a form of linguistic idealism. In his critique of anti-fetishistic thought (like that of Marx), that palpates the farthest reach of linguistic meaning, Derrida devalues dialectical critique as useless by disavowing embodied human activity, by ignoring laboring human bodies and rejecting them as metaphysical illusions. When Derrida deals with issues of the economy, he is interested only in capital that begets capital—that is, in credit or fictitious capital. Likewise, in his critique of Saussure, he critiques the notion of a transcendental signified, a universal equivalent or what McNally refers to as meaning’s gold standard (something positive that can exist outside of an endless reference of commodities to other commodities). There is nothing extralinguistic for Derrida, since language suspends all reference to something outside of it. Similarly, for Derrida, money lacks a referent. It is driven by credit and speculation and lacks any material foundations. Derrida deals with fictitious or dematerialized money, money that can be produced without labor, that is, money as an expression of hyperreality. Capital in this view is nothing more than a self-engendering dance on a solipsistic path of self-fecundation. The real is folded into the representation. Derrida (and Baudrillard and others) assimilate the economy (the same one that is throwing people out of their homes and into the streets at present) into their poststructuralist model of language. Contrary to Derrida, Ebert and McNally maintain that value is not a sign freed from its referent; rather, value expresses itself in material form. It must pass through laboring bodies and their history of struggle, through toiling subjects and practical human activity that takes place in an organic social universe of skin, hair, blood, and bone. And capitalism abstracts from these bodies, and commodifies them. The work of McNally and Ebert implodes the limitations of post-structuralist thought in dealing with capitalist exploitation. According to Ebert (2009), revolutionary agents of social transformation act ethically when they attempt to resolve the contradictions of their objective location in relations of exploitation. Capitalist violence often doubles as cultural discourses, and Ebert views popular culture, especially, as a narcosis of violence, predicated on distracting subjects from the central antagonism of capitalist society—the struggles over the surplus labor of the other––thereby producing subjects who cannot grasp the totality of the system. In Ebert’s view, the pedagogical practices developed by the poststructuralist avant-garde theorize experience in relation to trauma, desire, and affective relations in general as if these relations were antiseptically cleaved from relations of class, thereby replacing a conceptual analysis of the social totality with liberating pedagogical narratives grounded in local affective strategies—strategies that serve unwittingly as epistemological covers for economic conditions that help the subject cope with the objective material conditions of capitalist exploitation. This leads ultimately to a de-historicization of social life and draws attention away from the way in which all human beings who populate capitalist societies are implicated in some manner in international class struggles and the social division of labor (see also Zavarzadeh, 2003). Ebert and Zavarzadeh describe this process as a “pedagogy of affect.” They write that The pedagogy of affect piles up details and warns students against attempting to relate them structurally because any structural analysis will be a causal explanation, and all causal explanations, students are told, are reductive. Teaching thus becomes a pursuit of floating details—a version of games in popular culture. Students seem to know but have no knowledge. This is exactly the kind of education capital requires for its new workforce: workers who are educated but nonthinking; skilled at detailed jobs but unable to grasp the totality of the system—energetic localists, ignorant globalists. This pedagogy provides instruction not in knowledge but in savviness—a knowing that knows what it knows is an illusion but is undeluded about that illusion; it integrates the illusion, thereby making itself immune to critique. Savviness is enlightened false consciousness: a consciousness that knows it is false, but its “falseness is already reflexively buffered.” (2008, pp. 107-108) The alternative is to affirm the model of the Communist Party – only the Party can provide effective accountability mechanisms to correct violent tendencies within organizing, educate and mobilize marginalized communities, and connect local struggles to a movement for international liberation. Escalante 18. Alyson Escalante is a Marxist-Leninist. Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist activist. “Party Organizing in the 21st Century. September 2018. https://theforgenews.org/2018/09/21/party-organizing-in-the-21st-century. I would argue that within the base building movement, there is a move towards party organizing, but this trend has not always been explicitly theorized or forwarded within the movement. My goal in this essay is to argue that base building and dual power strategy can be best forwarded through party organizing, and that party organizing can allow this emerging movement to solidify into a powerful revolutionary socialist tendency in the United States. One of the crucial insights of the base building movement is that the current state of the left in the United States is one in which revolution is not currently possible. There exists very little popular support for socialist politics. A century of anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective in convincing even the most oppressed and marginalized that communism has nothing to offer them. The base building emphasis on dual power responds directly to this insight. By building institutions which can meet people’s needs, we are able to concretely demonstrate that communists can offer the oppressed relief from the horrific conditions of capitalism. Base building strategy recognizes that actually doing the work to serve the people does infinitely more to create a socialist base of popular support than electing democratic socialist candidates or holding endless political education classes can ever hope to do. Dual power is about proving that we have something to offer the oppressed. The question, of course, remains: once we have built a base of popular support, what do we do next? If it turns out that establishing socialist institutions to meet people’s needs does in fact create sympathy towards the cause of communism, how can we mobilize that base? Put simply: in order to mobilize the base which base builders hope to create, we need to have already done the work of building a communist party. It is not enough to simply meet peoples needs. Rather, we must build the institutions of dual power in the name of communism. We must refuse covert front organizing and instead have a public face as a communist party. When we build tenants unions, serve the people programs, and other dual power projects, we must make it clear that we are organizing as communists, unified around a party, and are not content simply with establishing endless dual power organizations. We must be clear that our strategy is revolutionary and in order to make this clear we must adopt party organizing. By “party organizing” I mean an organizational strategy which adopts the party model. Such organizing focuses on building a party whose membership is formally unified around a party line determined by democratic centralist decision making. The party model creates internal methods for holding party members accountable, unifying party member action around democratically determined goals, and for educating party members in communist theory and praxis. A communist organization utilizing the party model works to build dual power institutions while simultaneously educating the communities they hope to serve. Organizations which adopt the party model focus on propagandizing around the need for revolutionary socialism. They function as the forefront of political organizing, empowering local communities to theorize their liberation through communist theory while organizing communities to literally fight for their liberation. A party is not simply a group of individuals doing work together, but is a formal organization unified in its fight against capitalism. Party organizing has much to offer the base building movement. By working in a unified party, base builders can ensure that local struggles are tied to and informed by a unified national and international strategy. While the most horrific manifestations of capitalism take on particular and unique form at the local level, we need to remember that our struggle is against a material base which functions not only at the national but at the international level. The formal structures provided by a democratic centralist party model allow individual locals to have a voice in open debate, but also allow for a unified strategy to emerge from democratic consensus. Furthermore, party organizing allows for local organizations and individual organizers to be held accountable for their actions. It allows criticism to function not as one independent group criticizing another independent group, but rather as comrades with a formal organizational unity working together to sharpen each others strategies and to help correct chauvinist ideas and actions. In the context of the socialist movement within the United States, such accountability is crucial. As a movement which operates within a settler colonial society, imperialist and colonial ideal frequently infect leftist organizing. Creating formal unity and party procedure for dealing with and correcting these ideas allows us to address these
consistent problems within American socialist organizing. Having a formal party which unifies the various dual power projects being undertaken at the local level also allows for base builders to not simply meet peoples needs, but to pull them into the membership of the party as organizers themselves. The party model creates a means for sustained growth to occur by unifying organizers in a manner that allows for skills, strategies, and ideas to be shared with newer organizers. It also allows community members who have been served by dual power projects to take an active role in organizing by becoming party members and participating in the continued growth of base building strategy. It ensures that there are formal processes for educating communities in communist theory and praxis, and also enables them to act and organize in accordance with their own local conditions. We also must recognize that the current state of the base building movement precludes the possibility of such a national unified party in the present moment. Since base building strategy is being undertaken in a number of already established organizations, it is not likely that base builders would abandon these organizations in favor of founding a unified party. Additionally, it would not be strategic to immediately undertake such complete unification because it would mean abandoning the organizational contexts in which concrete gains are already being made and in which growth is currently occurring. What is important for base builders to focus on in the current moment is building dual power on a local level alongside building a national movement. This means aspiring towards the possibility of a unified party, while pursuing continued local growth. The movement within the Marxist Center network towards some form of unification is positive step in the right direction. The independent party emphasis within the Refoundation caucus should also be recognized as a positive approach. It is important for base builders to continue to explore the possibility of unification, and to maintain unification through a party model as a long term goal. In the meantime, individual base building organizations ought to adopt party models for their local organizing. Local organizations ought to be building dual power alongside recruitment into their organizations, education of community members in communist theory and praxis, and the establishment of armed and militant party cadres capable of defending dual power institutions from state terror. Dual power institutions must be unified openly and transparently around these organizations in order for them to operate as more than “red charities.” Serving the people means meeting their material needs while also educating and propagandizing. It means radicalizing, recruiting, and organizing. The party model remains the most useful method for achieving these ends. The use of the party model by local organizations allows base builders to gain popular support, and most importantly, to mobilize their base of popular support towards revolutionary ends, not simply towards the construction of a parallel economy which exists as an end in and of itself. It is my hope that we will see future unification of the various local base building organizations into a national party, but in the meantime we must push for party organizing at the local level. If local organizations adopt party organizing, it ought to become clear that a unified national party will have to be the long term goal of the base building movement. Many of the already existing organizations within the base building movement already operate according to these principles. I do not mean to suggest otherwise. Rather, my hope is to suggest that we ought to be explicit about the need for party organizing and emphasize the relationship between dual power and the party model. Doing so will make it clear that the base building movement is not pursuing a cooperative economy alongside capitalism, but is pursuing a revolutionary socialist strategy capable of fighting capitalism. The long term details of base building and dual power organizing will arise organically in response to the conditions the movement finds itself operating within. I hope that I have put forward a useful contribution to the discussion about base building organizing, and have demonstrated the need for party organizing in order to ensure that the base building tendency maintains a revolutionary orientation. The finer details of revolutionary strategy will be worked out over time and are not a good subject for public discussion. I strongly believe party organizing offers the best path for ensuring that such strategy will succeed. My goal here is not to dictate the only possible path forward but to open a conversation about how the base building movement will organize as it transitions from a loose network of individual organizations into a unified socialist tendency. These discussions and debates will be crucial to ensuring that this rapidly growing movement can succeed.
This is a reformulation of classic white Marxism -- socialist organizing must center anti-racist struggle, mandating that allies put their lives on the line for revolutionary anti-capitalism and adopting Black demands as the demands of the entire working class. Ervin 16. Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is an American writer, activist, and black anarchist. “The Progressive Plantation: racism inside white radical social change groups.” 2016. URL: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/01/04/book-review-vulnerability-in-resistance-edited-by-judith-butler-zeynep-gambetti-and-leticia-sabsay. cut by vikas bbyyy Building an Anti-Racist Liberation Support Movement For years it has been known there are some very simple components to an anti-racist tendency on the Left. The type of organization needed must be a "mass" organization working to unite all workers and poor people in common class struggle, but that it must also be able to recognize the duty to support and adopt the special demands of the Black and other non-white peoples as those of the entire working class. It must challenge white supremacy on a daily basis in both white working class communities and radical social change organizations; it must refute racist philosophy and propaganda and must counter racist mobilizations and attacks, with armed self-defense and street fighting, when necessary. The objective of such a mass movement was to win elements of the white working class over to an anti-white supremacy, class-conscious position; to unite the -entire- working class; and to directly confront the right wing. This program, must function in conjunction with pre-existing struggles in communities of color, not as a white Left vanguard dominating the entire movement. So I have never called for a white-led or "white rights" organization like those I have criticized. The cooperation of and solidarity of all workers and poor people is essential for full social revolution, not just its privileged white sector. They must be willing to follow the lead of poor and oppressed workers and activists of color, as was done during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That is something that the white Left has not been able to do and is why they set up their own all-white groups, which in no time at all lapse into liberalism and racial exclusion. As revolutionaries, we must always understand our objective is to overthrow the capitalist state and its rulers, and that we must live the politics we preach. Racism is intolerable. This movement must have the potential to deconstruct the racist capitalist state and construct an entirely new society on anti-authoritarian principles. It has to go beyond white Left campaigns of the past, or it's just empty rhetoric. So I am proposing something different: an anti-racist tendency as a political movement to change society itself. This would be a race and class based revolutionary movement, not content to sit around and read books, elect a few Black politicians or "friends of Labor" to Congress or the State Legislature, write protest letters, circulate petitions, or other such tame liberal reform tactics. It also would not be concerned with white middle class leftist issues like "Nazi youth music", the so-called "vanguard role" of white workers, animal rights, world trade reform and other white rights campaigns. For years, I have asked these white radicals: What about racial profiling, mass imprisonment of Blacks/Latinos and the poor, police murder and brutality, etc. and other hallmarks of a racist society? Why are you not uniting with Black and other non-white peoples? I have never got a satisfactory response to these questions. This proposed campaign I am speaking of is around issues that could also act as a pole of attraction for peoples of color to this movement, because they directly affect them. Further, raising issues of the crushing of the human rights of poor and working people of color, especially the millions of homeless and unemployed in the inner cities could push it further than the agenda of the old civil rights movement, which only tepidly raised issues of racial discrimination and exploitation of the poor to demand reforms of capitalism, but shied away from anything that sounded vaguely like "Socialism". We must be willing to fight in the streets with the poor, racially oppressed and economically down-pressed peoples, because that is who we are. It would take the examples of the early radical labor movements like the IWW, as well as the later Civil Rights/ Black Power movements of the 1960s and the Welfare Rights movement, to show that only direct action tactics of confrontation and militant protest will yield any results at all. We also have to study the examples of the 1992 Los Angeles and 2001 Cincinnati rebellions, which show once again that, while poor people will revolt, there need to be powerful allies extending material aid and resistance information. These allies can also start resistance and support campaigns in the white communities. We need to also show there is an existing mass movement to take it to the next step and spread the insurrection on a long-term basis. For the most part, the Anarchist and Socialist movement still does not even deal with police murder or brutality, poverty, or certain kinds of "uncomfortable" racist issues like criminalization of youth of color, except in a peripheral way as political rhetoric. I have not seen the various Anarchist Black Cross or Anti-Racist Action groups, or the white led Socialist parties deal with the disproportionate imprisonment of Black people in the U.S., (10 times that of white people), the frequent police murders of Black civilians, or the racial profiling of the millions of Black people each year. So, we must also challenge our allies in the Anarchist, anti-globalization movements, and "Occupy Wall Street" movement to both act as true political allies and serve as a source of material support, while still respecting our autonomy. This is why I am continually saying that it is necessary for white workers to defend the democratic rights and gains of non-white workers in the general society, instead of just fighting for white rights on the job and/ or white issues of social advancement. Finally, to be clear this anti-racist movement is a coalition of peoples of color with white allies. But it has to be recognized as a cardinal principle by all, that oppressed peoples have a right to self-determination, including the right to run their own organizations and liberation struggle. Most importantly, inside the anti-racism movement itself the peoples of colour have to take the lead, even if they share it with others. The victims of racism know best how to fight back against it. The Anarchists, Socialists and other white radicals must recognize this and help build a millitant anti-racist group, which would be both a support group for the Black revolution and a mass-organizing center to unite the class of poor peoples and oppressed. It is very important to wrest the mass influence of the racial equality movement out of the hands of the left-liberal Democratic wing of the ruling class. The left liberals like Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton may talk a good fight, but as long as they are not overthrowing Capitalism and smashing the state, they will betray and sabotage the entire struggle against racism. The strategy of the left-liberals is to deflect class consciousness into strictly race consciousness and then call for mere enforcement of the civil rights laws by the federal government. For the most part, they refuse to appeal to class material interests of the U.S. white working and middle classes to support Black rights and as a result allow the right-wing to capitalize unopposed on the latent racist feeling among whites, as well as on their economic insecurity. Jackson did this during his political campaigns, but only to win votes for the Democrats. They do not even try to organize the Black working class poor. The kind of movement I am proposing will step in the breach and attack white supremacy and dismantle the very threads of what hold capitalism together. Without the mass white consensus to the rule of the American state and the system of white skin privilege, capitalism could not continue to function without interruption. Anarchists and Socialists have to stop giving lip service to all this. The way they apply it, "race treason" is a farce, it is just the latest political fad since whites don't have to really be inconvenienced or challenged. However, true anti-racist politics challenge the notion of whites doing anything less than putting their own lives and future on the line for a new society and dismantling a capitalist system which while it brutally oppresses peoples of color, and exploits all of us as working people.
9/5/21
1 - TFW
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: idk Interpretation: The affirmative debater must defend the countries of the World Trade Organization reduce intellectual property protections for medicines.. Violation: they don’t. 3 “Resolved” before a colon reflects a legislative forum Army Officer School 4 (5-12, “# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm) The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle Gettysburg and that war the Civil War. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after the word "resolved:"Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor. 4 Debate over a controversial point of action creates argumentative stasis – that’s key to avoid a devolution of debate into competing truth claims which eviscerates the decision-making potential of debate Steinberg and Freeley, 13 David Director of Debate at U Miami, Former President of CEDA, officer, American Forensic Association and National Communication Association. Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric. Advisor to Miami Urban Debate League, Masters in Communication, and Austin, JD, Suffolk University, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, Argumentation and Debate Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, Thirteen Edition Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007.Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose. Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion. 5 Any alternative interpretation is bad because it is un-limiting. The impact is predictable limits-~--specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for 2Ns – open subjects create incentives for avoidance – that overstretches the negative and turns participation. Debate has unique potential to change attitudes and grow critical thinking skills because it forces pre-round internal deliberation on a of a focused, common ground of debate 6 Extra-topicality – even if the affirmative claims to advocate the resolution, they skirt discussion of its instrumental intent by arguing the benefits derived from their contextualized advocacy outweigh. This is a voting issue because we’re forced to win framework just to get back to equal footing – extra topicality also proves the resolution insufficient and explodes aff ground. 7 SSD is good – it forces debaters to consider a controversial issue from multiple perspectives. Non-T affs allow individuals to establish their own metrics for what they want to debate leading to ideological dogmatism. Even if they prove the topic is bad, our argument is that the process of preparing and defending proposals is an educational benefit of engaging it. 8 Small schools disad: under-resourced are most adversely effected by a massive, unpredictable caselist which worsens structural disparities. Inclusion is an independent voter – you can’t debate if you can’t participate which is a prerequisite to accessing their benefits and ensures everyone gains from the activity. 9 Outweighs: A. Even if their method is good, it isn’t valuable if it’s not procedurally debatable – they don’t get access to any of their offense. Even if their method is good for education there’s no reason you vote on it, just as even if exercise is good for soccer players you don’t vote for the team that ran most. B. The best solutions are formed with critical contestation from multiple sides – it’s more likely we make a good liberation strategy if both debaters can engage and test it – link turns their offense. C. Debate is about process not content – we inevitably switch sides, even if it’s arguing against one method with another. The individual ideas we learn, like , aren’t as valuable as learning how to effectively apply those ideas outside of round by engaging in precise discussions instead of just asserting opinions. 10 T is a procedural issue A. T indicts your reading of the aff in the first place, so its an evaluative mechanism to adjudicating substance of the 1AC, thus it is nonsensical to leverage the aff against T since it presupposes that the aff is being won. B. The AC is the starting point for the discussion and I win that that the AC is flawed, then it means that the starting point for evaluating substance is flawed. So, the T determines the value of the debate to begin with. C. Fairness is the evaluative mechanism to determine the better debater regardless of the role of the ballot. Thus, the question is not should we use their role of the ballot, but rather whether or not the way that they presented their offense is good for debate. Absent fairness you don’t know who best met their burden under any role of the ballot. D. T is a question of jurisdiction- judges don’t have the jurisdiction to vote on a non-topical aff that hasn’t met the burden of proof of the resolution. E. That’s a voting issue – destroys advocacy skills – they don’t have to defend their proposal against well-researched objections. AND, tons of screwed up things in the world we can’t fix without advocating for solutions. Also kills fairness. 11 TVA: A Read an 1AC critiquing the WTO B Solvency deficits and turns to the TVA are neg ground – it proves there’s a debate to be had about that aff 12 Competing Interpretations A. Reasonability causes a race to the bottom because debaters keep being barely reasonable B. No briteline to reasonability 11 No RVIs A. Real world applicability- proving that you’re being fair isn’t a reason to vote you up. B. CI: You get an RVI if I read 2 or more shells – solves skew C. it’s your burden to be fair and T—same reason you don’t win for answering inherency or putting defense on a disad.
9/5/21
JF - CP - Debris
Tournament: Coppel | Round: 2 | Opponent: Plano East IV | Judge: CP: The United States federal government should - Establish a national space debris removal program; - Engage the commercial sector in space debris removal; - Establish special funds at the expense of parties who generate debris; - Prioritize transparency in space debris removal. US debris removal solves best — it generates international follow on BUT avoids the downfalls of international cooperation that make solvency impossible. Ansdell ’10 (Megan; is a graduate student at the George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs, focusing on space policy; Active Space Debris Removal: Needs, Implications, and Recommendations for Today’s Geopolitical Environment; https://jpia.princeton.edu/sites/jpia/files/space-debris-removal.pdf; accessed 8/29/19; Julia/MSCOTT)ww pbj VI. US Leadership by Example Need to Initiate Unilateral Action International cooperation in space has rarely resulted in cost-effective or expedient solutions, especially in politically-charged areas of uncertain technological feasibility. The International Space Station, because of both political and technical setbacks, has taken over two decades to deploy and cost many billions of dollars—far more time and money than was originally intended. Space debris mitigation has also encountered aversion in international forums. The topic was brought up in COPUOS as early as 1980, yet a policy failed to develop despite a steady flow of documents on the increasing danger of space debris (Perek 1991). In fact, COPUOS did not adopt debris mitigation guidelines until 2007 and, even then, they were legally non-binding. Space debris removal systems could take decades to develop and deploy through international partnerships due to the many interdisciplinary challenges they face. Given the need to start actively removing space debris sooner rather than later to ensure the continued benefits of satellite services, international cooperation may not be the most appropriate mechanism for instigating the first space debris removal system. Instead, one country should take a leadership role by establishing a national space debris removal program. This would accelerate technology development and demonstration, which would, in turn, build-up trust and hasten international participation in space debris removal. Possibilities of Leadership As previously discussed, a recent NASA study found that annually removing as little as five massive pieces of debris in critical orbits could significantly stabilize the long-term space debris environment (Liou and Johnson 2007). This suggests that it is feasible for one nation to unilaterally develop and deploy an effective debris removal system. As the United States is responsible for creating much of the debris in Earth’s orbit, it is a candidate for taking a leadership role in removing it, along with other heavy polluters of the space environment such as China and Russia. There are several reasons why the United States should take this leadership role, rather than China or Russia. First and foremost, the United States would be hardest hit by the loss of satellites services. It owns about half of the roughly 800 operating satellites in orbit and its military is significantly more dependent upon them than any other entity (Moore 2008). For example, GPS precision-guided munitions are a key component of the “new American way of war” (Dolman 2006, 163-165), which allows the United States to remain a globally dominant military power while also waging war in accordance with its political and ethical values by enabling faster, less costly war fighting with minimal collateral damage (Sheldon 2005). The U.S. Department of Defense recognized the need to protect U.S. satellite systems over ten years ago when it stated in its 1999 Space Policy that, “the ability to access and utilize space is a vital national interest because many of the activities conducted in the medium are critical to U.S. national security and economic well-being” (U.S. Department of Defense 1999, 6). Clearly, the United States has a vested interest in keeping the near-Earth space environment free from threats like space debris and thus assuring U.S. access to space. Moreover, current U.S. National Space Policy asserts that the United States will take a “leadership role” in space debris minimization. This could include the development, deployment, and demonstration of an effective space debris removal system to remove U.S. debris as well as that of other nations, upon their request. There could also be international political and economic advantages associated with being the first country to develop this revolutionary technology. However, there is always the danger of other nations simply benefiting from U.S. investment of its resources in this area. Thus, mechanisms should also be created to avoid a classic “free rider” situation. For example, techniques could be employed to ensure other countries either join in the effort later on or pay appropriate fees to the United States for removal services. Recommendations for Leadership in Space Debris Removal Going forward, the U.S. government should engage the commercial sector in space debris removal. Government contracts with several commercial firms would create a competitive environment, encouraging innovation and cost minimization. Having several companies working on the problem at the same time would also accelerate remediation as several critical orbits could be addressed at once. Furthermore, early investments in a domestic space debris removal industry would give the United States a head start in what may become a critical industry over the coming decades. The aforementioned 2009 International Conference on Orbital Debris Removal, co-hosted by DARPA and NASA, suggests that these two agencies could lead U.S. government efforts in space debris removal. However, it is important to recognize that DARPA and NASA are driven by very different motives: one is a civilian space agency, while the other is a defense research agency. Failure to appreciate these differences when establishing mission requirements could lead to a situation like that of the National Polar Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), where the attempt to combine civil and military requirements into a single satellite resulted in doubling project costs, a launch delay of five years, and ultimately splitting the project into two separate programs (Clark 2010). Furthermore, any system developed through a joint NASA-DARPA partnership would need to be transferred to an operational agency, as both NASA and DARPA are research and development entities. The U.S. Air Force, as it is the primary agency responsible for national security space operations, is a possible option. Funding the development of a national space debris removal system carries risks because, due to the nascent state of the field, detailed cost-benefit estimates have not yet been carried out. The Space Frontier Foundation, however, proposes that the government should establish special funds at the expense of parties who generate debris (Dunstan and Werb 2009). Suggested mechanisms for raising the funds include charging fees for U.S. launches based on the debris potential of the mission, with the size of the fee determined by relevant factors such as the mass of the anticipated debris resulting from the mission and the congestion of the orbit into which the space object is being launched. Satellite manufacturers, operators, and service providers could all share responsibility for payment into such funds. Once debris removal systems are in operation, additional funds could also come from service fees. For example, entities that created debris could pay a specified amount to removal providers in return for the service rendered. Any national space debris removal program must also be kept transparent with ongoing international dialogue in forums such as COPUOS so that other nations can build-up trust in the effectiveness and efficiency of the program. A proven debris removal program will result in more productive discussions in these international forums. VII. Conclusion If the United States and other powerful governments do not take steps now to avert the potentially devastating effects of space debris, the issue risks becoming stalemated in a manner similar to climate change. Given the past hesitation of international forums in addressing the space debris issue, unilateral action is the most appropriate means of instigating space debris removal within the needed timeframe. The United States is well poised for a leadership role in space debris removal. Going forward, the U.S. government should work closely with the commercial sector in this endeavor, focusing on removing pieces of U.S. debris with the greatest potential to contribute to future collisions. It should also keep its space debris removal system as open and transparent as possible to allow for future international cooperation in this field.
1/8/22
JF - DA - Econ
Tournament: BASIS | Round: 1 | Opponent: Claudia Taylor AP | Judge: Podnar, Cassandra The Space Economy is rapidly growing – all thanks goes to the private sector Rana and Sharma 21 Damini Rana works at Delhi Public School RK Puram, Delhi, India and Mritunjay Sharma is an Advisor. JSR Volume 10 Issue 3 2021 “The New Final Frontier: A Case Study Analysis of Private Sector’s Increasing Role in the Space Industry” https://www.jsr.org/hs/index.php/path/article/view/1622aaditg This has drawn tremendous interest from both entrepreneurs and investors, as space became not just an exciting, but also a lucrative, investment. Figure 4 shows how SpaceX’s success has since sparked a rapid increase in private investments in space. From less than US$500 million per year in 2009, private investment in space had grown to over US$5 billion per annum by 2019. 32. Fig. 4. Cumulative private investments. The next section offers an analysis of how the space economy is expected to grow in the future and the role that private investment will continue to play in it. Future Outlook of Space Revenues and Investments The analysis and research provided above clearly indicates that the commercial sector has a much higher impact on the monetary size of the space economy than the government sector. While the government may have started space research, the growth of the space economy is now driven primarily by private sector initiatives. The space economy’s growth looks promising over the next decades, as humans look to leverage the earthoriented opportunities (communications, earth observation, etc.) in the near term and the prospects of mining, space tourism, as well as Moon and Mars expeditions in future. Several organizations have made forecasts of the space economy using slightly different starting points and future assumptions. The Science and Technology Policy Institute 17 has collated and reviewed some of these forecasts, as provided in Table 4 below. According to its report published in 2017, Morgan Stanley estimates that the global space industry could generate more than US$1 trillion in revenue by 2040 33. As per the report, the industry growth in the next 5-7 years is likely to be driven by the launches of LEO satellite constellations and their associated services, while growth after 2026, to a substantial extent, will be determined by what are mentioned as ‘second order impacts’ in the report – essentially this will require the New Space Economy businesses to start pulling their weight from a commercial perspective. Fig. 5. The global space economy (US$ million). It is evident that while the near-term opportunities are satellite-led and relatively well-established, new space opportunities, that is, asteroid mining, space tourism and the colonization of Mars, are novel and riskier, in terms of both economic value and timelines. Significant investments will be required before some of these are realized. Keeping this in view, a forecast was made for space industry revenues till 2040. Investments required to achieve these revenues were also assessed through quantitative regression analysis. A. Space Economy Forecast Till 2040 The historical data for space economy size used earlier in Table 1 was projected forward to forecast the size of the economy till 2040. As per Table 1, the space economy grew at 6.5 from 2005-2019, with the commercial economy growing at 7.3 and the government at 3.9. Significant recent growth can be attributed to the need for more satellites by a rapidly digitizing world. This is a relatively low-hanging fruit for private sector exploitation. However, it is expected that with increasing scale and greater technical challenges to be overcome in non-satellite business, the growth over the next two decades may be lower than what has been witnessed over the last decade. Hence, the following assumptions have been made for the forecast. Annual growth rate of Commercial Economy: 6.5 Volume 10 Issue 3 (2021) ISSN: 2167-1907 www.JSR.org 11 Annual growth rate of Government Economy: 3 The above assumptions led to a forecast for the space economy as per Table 5 below. The above forecast suggests that the space economy will grow from US$424 billion in 2019 to US$1.4 trillion by 2040, at an annualized rate of about 6. The size of the commercial economy by 2040 will be US$1.26 trillion, while the government economy will be US$162 billion. This indicates that the share of the government economy in the total space economy would decline from 20.5 in 2019 to 11.3 in 2040. Private Space Exploration solves recession Sidorov 20 Konstantin Sidorov is chief executive of the London Tech Club. City AM “Need a way out of recession? Look to the stars” https://www.cityam.com/need-a-way-out-of-recession-look-to-the-stars/ 11/23/2020 aaditg “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” These words by President John F. Kennedy are as important today as they were when he spoke in 1962. Asteroid mining may seem like something out of a sci-fi movie, and not the most obvious choice of investment, especially during a global pandemic and recession. But it is exactly these kinds of aspirations that have pushed human endeavour and technological advancement to new heights. The discoveries made along the way to achieving these sky-high goals have become integral parts of our daily lives — and could even help us out of this recession. The economics of space is now a crucial part of the market and no longer only in the realm of government endeavour. Private capital is paving the way for public partnerships. Supply chains in the “new space economy” are accelerating, startups are emerging, and clusters are forming. Old space discovery was defined by the Russian Voshod and Vostok and the US Apollo missions. We have entered a space age defined by private enterprise. Financial firms Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have each conducted their own studies and found the space economy could reach between $1 trillion and $2.7 trillion by the 2040s. That would make it larger than the 2017 GDP of the UK. But are these astronomical figures relevant to people beyond the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson? The answer is a resounding yes. The space sector is made up of a hidden infrastructure which most people do not see but is central to the technology that surrounds us. The strides humankind is making in space are integral to the day-to-day things we take for granted. Space plays an indispensable role in the global economy. The highest grossing sectors — agriculture, mining, transportation, IT, finance, and insurance — all heavily rely on systems and technology developed for space. We know that without satellite observation our navigation and mapping capacity would be significantly reduced. But that is only the start. Satellite data is being harnessed to protect critical infrastructure, and can be used to prevent disasters like the Morandi bridge collapse in Genoa by monitoring and holding critical information to better manage and maintain these types of structures. Given that there are over 80,000 ageing bridges in Canada alone, most with a design life of less than 100 years, the potential impact could be huge. The insurance industry can also be transformed by “mega constellations” — a group of artificial satellites working together as a system to provide permanent global coverage. Insurers are excited about the prospect of increased real-time data on hurricanes, especially the ability to use imagery and analytics to speed up or question claims. Amazon is rolling out plans to launch over 3,200 satellites to over 95 per cent of the Earth’s surface. The initiative is to launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to the unserved communities around the world. Starlink, built by SpaceX, is launching “constellation broadband” to deliver higher-speed internet connections across the world. The volume of space spin-off industries is multiplying every year. NASA has created more than 2,000 inventions that later became widespread products and services. Innovations such as the dialysis machines, CAT scanners and freeze-dried food are all a result of space-related projects. Without investment in space exploration we would be without memory foam or GPS, while an adaptation of the spacesuit upgrade led to the creation of the Nike Air footwear. We are only going to become more dependent on space technologies as AI and the fourth industrial revolution take off. Satellite data and its deep-learning technology are being used to map and monitor solar energy assets for smart city and smart grid initiatives. The AI combines satellite data with other factors such as weather information and local government policies to provide a complete picture of the emissions and financial benefits the technology could bring. And yet, despite these strides, space exploration is still not considered a central part of our everyday lives. That needs to change. Governments must recognise its strategic importance. Consumers must realise how the space industry affects their everyday actions. Investors must consider the value of investment into the sector. Space is key to protecting our people, promoting our global influence, and providing future prosperity.
Recessions cause war – stats support transition wars, resource conflicts, terrorism, and diversionary wars – other authors don’t base their analysis on global studies Royal ’10 Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises”, 2010, Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215PM Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent slates. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level. Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (19) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often-bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (sec also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately. Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level. Copeland's (1996. 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that 'future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, likelihood for conflict increases. as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession lends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg and I less. 2002. p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg. Hess. and Wccrapana. 2004). which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. "Diversionary theory' suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DcRoucn (1995), and Blomberg. Mess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DcRoucn (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of external conflict, such as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created by economic crises. As such, the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views. That causes global nuclear war. Merlini ’11 Cesare, was a nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and is chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Italian Institute for International Affairs (IAI) in Rome, “A Post-Secular World?”, 03-30-2011, Routledge, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/04_international_relations_merlini.pdfPM Two neatly opposed scenarios for the future of the world order illustrate the range of possibilities, albeit at the risk of oversimplification. The first scenario entails the premature crumbling of the post-Westphalian system. One or more of the acute tensions apparent today evolves into an open and traditional conflict between states, perhaps even involving the use of nuclear weapons. The crisis might be triggered by a collapse of the global economic and financial system, the vulnerability of which we have just experienced, and the prospect of a second Great Depression, with consequences for peace and democracy similar to those of the first. Whatever the trigger, the unlimited exercise of national sovereignty, exclusive self-interest and rejection of outside interference would likely be amplified, emptying, perhaps entirely, the half-full glass of multilateralism, including the UN and the European Union. Many of the more likely conflicts, such as between Israel and Iran or India and Pakistan, have potential religious dimensions. Short of war, tensions such as those related to immigration might become unbearable. Familiar issues of creed and identity could be exacerbated. One way or another, the secular rational approach would be sidestepped by a return to theocratic absolutes, competing or converging with secular absolutes such as unbridled nationalism.
1/15/22
JF - DA - Water
Tournament: Coppel | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Westside SY | Judge: panel Climate change exacerbates existing water shortages World Meteorological Organization 10/5 (World Meteorological Organization, 5-10-2021, "Wake up to the looming water crisis, report warns," World Meteorological Organization, https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wake-looming-water-crisis-report-warns) VS Geneva 5 October 2021 - Water-related hazards like floods and droughts are increasing because of climate change. The number of people suffering water stress is expected to soar, exacerbated by population increase and dwindling availability. But management, monitoring, forecasting and early warnings are fragmented and inadequate, whilst global climate finance efforts are insufficient according to a new multi-agency report. The State of Climate Services 2021: Water highlights the need for urgent action to improve cooperative water management, embrace integrated water and climate policies and scale up investment in this precious commodity which underpins all the international goals on sustainable development, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. “Increasing temperatures are resulting in global and regional precipitation changes, leading to shifts in rainfall patterns and agricultural seasons, with a major impact on food security and human health and well-being,” says World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas. “This past year has seen a continuation of extreme, water-related events. Across Asia, extreme rainfall caused massive flooding in Japan, China, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan and India. Millions of people were displaced, and hundreds were killed. But it is not just in the developing world that flooding has led to major disruption. Catastrophic flooding in Europe led to hundreds of deaths and widespread damage,” he said. “Lack of water continues to be a major cause of concern for many nations, especially in Africa. More than two billion people live in water-stressed countries and suffer lack of access to safe drinking water and sanitation,” he told the official high-level launch event. “We need to wake up to the looming water crisis,” said Prof. Taalas. The report was coordinated by WMO and contains input from more than 20 international organizations, development agencies and scientific institutions. It is accompanied by a Story Map. Water-related hazards and stress Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) trends of the past 20 years (2002-2021) According to figures cited in the report, 3.6 billion people had inadequate access to water at least one month per year in 2018. By 2050, this is expected to rise to more than five billion. In the past 20 years, terrestrial water storage – the summation of all water on the land surface and in the subsurface, including soil moisture, snow and ice – has dropped at a rate of 1cm per year. The biggest losses are occurring in Antarctica and Greenland, but many highly populated lower latitude locations are experiencing significant water losses in areas that are traditionally providing water supply, with major ramifications for water security. The situation is worsening by the fact that only 0.5 of water on Earth is useable and available freshwater. Water-related hazards have increased in frequency over the past 20 years. Since 2000, flood-related disasters have risen by 134 compared with the two previous decades. Most of the flood-related deaths and economic losses were recorded in Asia, where end-to-end warning systems for riverine floods require strengthening. The number and duration of droughts also increased by 29 over this same period. Most drought-related deaths occurred in Africa, indicating a need for stronger end-to-end warning systems for drought in that region. Companies such as Moon Express plan to mine on the moon for water – legislation has already created an incentive and legalization of extraction of space resources. Basulto ’15 Dominic Basulto, 11-18-2015, "How property rights in outer space may lead to a scramble to exploit the moon’s resources," Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/11/18/how-property-rights-in-outer-space-may-lead-to-a-scramble-to-exploit-the-moons-resources/?tid=usw_passupdatepgakhileshp This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation known as the SPACE Act of 2015 (The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act), which recognizes and promotes the rights of U.S. companies to engage in the exploration and extraction of space resources from asteroids and other celestial bodies. That’s a huge win for private space exploration companies, especially for companies with upcoming plans to tap into the economic potential of the moon. That’s because the legislation, in its definition of “space resources,” is sufficiently broad to include resources found on the lunar surface. In short, the moon could now be in play for some of America’s most innovative space exploration companies. One of those companies is Moon Express, a privately funded commercial space company with an audacious plan to mine the surface of the moon. As Bob Richards, co-founder and CEO of Moon Express, told me, minerals and water found on the moon would be technically classified as a “space resource” according to Title IV of the SPACE Act, which defines “space resource” simply as “an abiotic resource in situ in outer space.” “The key to unlocking the economic potential of the moon is the water on the moon,” Richards said. “Water is the ‘oil of the solar system,’ and can be used to create rocket fuel that changes the economics of space resources, not just on the moon, but throughout the solar system. So our initial goal is to locate and learn how to mine and stockpile the water on the moon. We’re effectively after our first gusher.” And it’s not just Moon Express interested in finding water on the moon. Mining the moon for water has attracted the attention of Shackleton Energy Resources, which suggests that there are billions of tons of water ice on the poles of the moon that might be converted into rocket fuel. Moreover, NASA has two different mission concepts for extracting water from the lunar surface. If there’s ever going to be human lunar colony, then finding water on the moon is going to be a priority. It’s just cheaper and easier to have a source of water on the moon than it is to bring water to the moon. In introducing the SPACE Act legislation for a vote Monday night, House Majority Leader (R-Calif.) Kevin McCarthy invoked the inspiring examples of both Kitty Hawk and Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier and cited the extraordinary innovation already happening around commercial space exploration: With this law, I have great hope for the future of space exploration. You know, whenever I visit the Mojave Air and Spaceport, where so many of our advancements are happening, I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that the future is now… Upon the firm foundation of the SPACE Act, I know they and others will lead us far and that our limits are only bounded by what we can imagine as we continue our journey to the stars. When it comes to outer space, however, there’s the matter of a pesky little document known as the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, to which the United States is a signatory. The Outer Space Treaty indirectly suggests that commercial space companies don’t own the rights to any resources they find in outer space. The treaty states that no “celestial body” is subject to “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” The SPACE Act of 2015 carefully skirts this issue by specifically making a disclaimer that the United States “does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body.” Clever, right? If there’s no U.S. sovereign claim, then the Outer Space Treaty can’t be applicable to private U.S. companies that assert a similar type of claim. When asked about a hypothetical example in which a Chinese company or even the Chinese government might contest the rights of a U.S. company to space resources, Richards suggests that the SPACE Act would provide a sufficient legal basis. “It’s hard to imagine what challenge China or any other country could mount against this U.S. legislation, which is about rights to materials obtained, not territory, and is really just codifying principles and rights already in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that have been demonstrated by multinational activities on the moon as applicable to the private sector.” Nearly 50 years ago, of course, we didn’t know anything about the economic potential of space and nobody was seriously talking about humans as an interplanetary species. Certainly, there were not any private companies angling for a piece of the action. Space exploration was solely the preserve of sovereign governments and we referred to astronauts as the “envoys of mankind.” The prevailing sentiment, as expressed in the Outer Space Treaty, was that outer space should belong to all of humanity, not just the first nation to venture into space and plant a flag on the surface of a celestial body. What’s happening now, in essence, is a sea change in how we think about outer space. To convince private commercial space exploration companies to invest millions of dollars, there have to be economic incentives involved. In short, financial backers of these companies have to be able to realize a profit from their investments if innovation is going to happen. That’s the reality. Richards cites the rights of fishing boats in international waters as an economic template for the SPACE Act, “The ships are owned by companies flying flags of nations under which laws they are bound: they have a right to peacefully fish in international waters that they don’t own; but they have a right of ownership of the fish once obtained.” The fishing analogy is a useful one. It suggests that we’re simply extending the same economic principles used on Earth to the moon and beyond, not creating new principles. Seafaring nations are now spacefaring nations. Moon Express even refers to the moon as “the eighth continent,” suggesting that people should think about the moon the same way they think about the other seven continents on the planet. And Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company, refers to the “off-planet economy.” Throughout the annals of exploration, there have always been commercial incentives. Would the untapped economic potential of America have been possible without similar types of incentives? One example cited by backers of the SPACE Act is the Homestead Act of 1862, which paved the way for Americans to search for gold and timber. Governments they say, have an important role to play here by passing legislation that catalyzes, rather than stifles, growth and innovation. For supporters of the SPACE Act, the year 2017 looms large. That’s exactly 50 years since the passage of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. And it’s also the deadline for winning the $30 million Google Lunar X-PRIZE. If privately owned companies are going to be landing on the surface of the moon within the next 24 months, they are going to want assurances that their innovative efforts now are going to have an economic payoff later. Asteroid mining solves water access – only NEAs are sufficiently proximate and hydrated Tillman 19 (Nola Taylor, has been published in Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, Scientific American, New Scientist, Science News (AAS), Space.com, and Astrobiology magazine, BA in Astrophysics) “Tons of Water in Asteroids Could Fuel Satellites, Space Exploration,” Space, 9/29/2019) JL recut by VS When it comes to mining space for water, the best target may not be the moon: Entrepreneurs' richest options are likely to be asteroids that are larger and closer to Earth. A recent study suggested that roughly 1,000 water-rich, or hydrated, asteroids near our planet are easier to reach than the lunar surface is. While most of these space rocks are only a few feet in size, more than 25 of them should be large enough to each provide significant water. Altogether, the water locked in these asteroids should be enough to fill somewhere around 320,000 Olympics-size swimming pools — significantly more than the amount of water locked up at the lunar poles, the new research suggested. Because asteroids are small, they have less gravity than Earth or the moon do, which makes them easier destinations to land on and lift off from. If engineers can figure out how to mine water from these space rocks, they could produce a source of ready fuel in space that would allow spacecraft designers to build refuelable models for the next generation of satellites. Asteroid mining could also fuel human exploration, saving the expense of launching fuel from Earth. In both cases, would-be space-rock miners will need to figure out how to free the water trapped in hydrated minerals on these asteroids. "Most of the hydrated material in the near-Earth population is contained in the largest few hydrated objects," Andrew Rivkin, an asteroid researcher at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Research Laboratory in Maryland, told Space.com. Rivkin is the lead author on the paper, which estimated that near Earth asteroids could contain more easily accessible water than the lunar poles. According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, more than 5,200 of the objects launched into space are still in orbit today. While some continue to function, the bulk of them buzz uselessly over our heads every day. They carry fuel on board, and when they run out, they are either lowered into destructive orbits or left to become space junk, useless debris with the potential to cause enormous problems for working satellites. Refueling satellites in space could change that model, replacing it with long-lived, productive orbiters. "It's easier to bring fuel from asteroids to geosynchronous orbit than from the surface of the Earth," Rivkin said. "If such a supply line could be established, it could make asteroid mining very profitable." Hunting for space water from the surface of the Earth is challenging because the planet's atmosphere blocks the wavelength of light where water can be observed. The asteroid warming as it draws closer to the sun can also complicate measurements. Instead, Rivkin and his colleagues turned to a class of space rocks called Ch asteroids. Although these asteroids don't directly exhibit a watery fingerprint, they carry the telltale signal of oxidized iron seen only on asteroids with signatures of water-rich minerals, which means the authors felt confident assuming that all Ch asteroids carry this rocky water. Based on meteorite falls, a previous study estimated that Ch asteroids could make up nearly 10 of the near-Earth objects (NEOs). With this information, the researchers determined that there are between 26 and 80 such objects that are hydrated and larger than 0.62 miles (1 km) across. Right now, only three NEOs have been classified as Ch asteroids, although others have been spotted in the asteroid belt. Most NEOs are discovered and observed at wavelengths too short to reveal the iron band that marks the class. Carbon-rich asteroids, which include Ch asteroids and other flavors, are also darker than the more common stony asteroids, making them more challenging to observe. Although Ch asteroids definitely contain water-rich minerals, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will always be the best bet for space mining. It comes down to risk. Would an asteroid-mining company rather visit a smaller asteroid that definitely has a moderate amount of water, or a larger one that could yield a larger payday but could also come up dry? "Whether getting sure things with no false positives, like the Ch asteroids, is more important or if a greater range of possibilities is acceptable with the understanding that some asteroids will be duds is something the miners will have to decide," Rivkin said. In addition to estimating the number of large, water-rich asteroids might be available, the study also found that as many as 1,050 smaller objects, roughly 300 feet (100 meters) across, may also linger near Earth. Their small bulk will make them easier to mine (and) because their low gravity will require less fuel to escape from, but they will produce less water overall, and Rivkin expects that the handful of larger space rocks will be the first targets. "It seems likely that the plan for these companies will be to find the largest accessible asteroid with mineable material with the expectation that it will be more cost-effective than chasing down a large number of smaller objects," Rivkin said. "How 'accessible' and 'mineable material' and 'cost-effective' are defined by each company is to be seen." Water insecurity causes hydro-political conflict escalation which goes nuclear Harvey 8/17 (Fiona, the Guardian's environment correspondent, won the Foreign Press Association award for Environment Story of the Year and the British Environment and Media Awards journalist of the year) “Global water crisis will intensify with climate breakdown, says report,” The Guardian, 8/17/2021 JL recut by VS Mark’s words should be a call to attention, and a call to action. The plight of farmers in Australia illustrates a larger reality: As planetary temperatures continue to increase and rainfall patterns shift due to human-caused climate disruption, our ability to grow crops and have enough drinking water will become increasingly challenged, and the outlook is only going to worsen. The most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned of increasingly intense droughts and mass water shortages around large swaths of the globe. But even more conservative organizations have been sounding the alarm. “Water insecurity could multiply the risk of conflict,” warns one of the World Bank’s reports on the issue. “Food price spikes caused by droughts can inflame latent conflicts and drive migration. Where economic growth is impacted by rainfall, episodes of droughts and floods have generated waves of migration and spikes in violence within countries.” Meanwhile, a study published in the journal Global Environmental Change, looked at how “hydro-political issues” — including tensions and potential conflicts — could play out in countries expected to experience water shortages coupled with high populations and pre-existing geopolitical tensions. The study warned that these factors could combine to increase the likelihood of water-related tensions — potentially escalating into armed conflict in cross-boundary river basins in places around the world by 74.9 to 95 percent. This means that in some places conflict is practically guaranteed. These areas include regions situated around primary rivers in Asia and North Africa. Noted rivers include the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, the Nile, and the Ganges-Brahmaputra. Consider the fact that 11 countries share the Nile River basin: Egypt, Burundi, Kenya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All told, more than 300 million people already live in these countries, — a number that is projected to double in the coming decades, while the amount of available water will continue to shrink due to climate change. For those in the US thinking these potential conflicts will only occur in distant lands — think again. The study also warned of a very high chance of these “hydro-political interactions” in portions of the southwestern US and northern Mexico, around the Colorado River. Potential tensions are particularly worrisome in India and Pakistan, which are already rivals when it comes to water resources. For now, these two countries have an agreement, albeit a strained one, over the Indus River and the sharing of its water, by way of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty. However, water claims have been central to their ongoing, burning dispute over the Kashmir region, a flashpoint area there for more than 60 years and counting. The aforementioned treaty is now more strained than ever, as Pakistan accuses India of limiting its water supply and violating the treaty by placing dams over various rivers that flow from Kashmir into Pakistan. In fact, a 2018 report from the International Monetary Fund ranked Pakistan third among countries facing severe water shortages. This is largely due to the rapid melting of glaciers in the Himalaya that are the source of much of the water for the Indus. To provide an idea of how quickly water resources are diminishing in both countries, statistics from Pakistan’s Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry from 2018 show that water availability (per capita in cubic meters per year) shrank from 5,260 in 1951, to 940 in 2015, and are projected to shrink to 860 by just 2025. In India, the crisis is hardly better. According to that country’s Ministry of Statistics (2016) and the Indian Ministry of Water Resources (2010), the per capita available water in cubic meters per year was 5,177 in 1951, and 1,474 in 2015, and is projected to shrink to 1,341 in 2025. Both of these countries are nuclear powers. Given the dire projections of water availability as climate change progresses, nightmare scenarios of water wars that could spark nuclear exchanges are now becoming possible.
1/8/22
JF - K - Techno-Orientalism
Tournament: TOC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Northland Christian LB | Judge: Bennett Dombcik The 1ACs descriptions of a rising China repeat the racialized tropes of Yellow Peril through the lens of techno-Orientalism which frames Asians as sub-human, unfeeling aliens whose technological success, geographic location, or large population size pose a threat to Western political ordering – none of these threats are “real” but are instead self-produced Anglo-Anxiety Siu and Chun 20 – * Associate Professor Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Chinese Diaspora, Cultural Citizenship, Cultural Politics of Food, Diaspora / Transnationalism; Asians in the Americas, Ethnography PhD, Anthropology, Stanford University, MA, Anthropology, Stanford University, BA, Anthropology, minor in Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies, 19-2020 recipient of The Catherine and William L. Magistretti Graduate Fellowship, B.A. in Politics and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Lok, Claire, Yellow Peril and Techno-orientalism in the Time of Covid-19: Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and Techno-Economic Warfare, Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 23, Number 3, October 2020, pp. 421-440 (Article), DKP Yellow Peril and Techno-Orientalism The term yellow peril emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to Japan’s arrival to the geopolitical stage as a formidable military and industrial contender to the Western powers of Europe and the United States.9 The concept was further elaborated and given a tangible racial form through Sax Rohmer’s series of novels and films that provided the early content for the social imaginary of “yellow peril” along with its personification in the character of Dr. Fu Manchu, the iconic supervillain archetype of the Asian “evil criminal genius,” and his cast of minions.10 Strikingly, Dr. Fu Manchu’s characterization as evil, criminal, and genius continues to inform the racial trope of the Asian scientist spy; and more recently, we may add to the list the bioengineer, the CFO, the international graduate student, to name just a few. Moreover, the notion of the non-differentiable “yellow” masses continues to function as a homogenizing and dehumanizing device of Asian racialization, which makes possible the transference of Sinophobia to Asian xenophobia. In its inherent attempt to construct a racial other, “yellow peril” is more a projection of Western fear than a representation of an Asian object/subject, and in this sense, it may be better understood as a repository of racial affect that can animate a myriad of representational figures, images, and discourses, depending on context. Indeed, the images and discourses of yellow peril have surfaced multiple times throughout the twentieth century, capturing a multitude of ever-shifting perceived threats that range from the danger of military intrusion (i.e., Japanese Americans during WWII), economic competition (i.e., Chinese laborers in the late nineteenth century, Japan in the 1980s), Asian moral and cultural depravity (i.e., non-Christian heathens, Chinese prostitutes, opium smokers), to biological inferiority (i.e., effeminacy, disease carriers). As Colleen Lye observes, “the incipient ‘yellow peril’ refers to a particular combinatory kind of anticolonial and anti-West nationalism, in which the union of Japanese technological advance and Chinese numerical mass confronts Western civilization with a potentially unbeatable force.”11 Arguably, the yellow peril of today represents heightened Western anxieties around China’s combined forces of population size, global economic growth, and rapid technological-scientific innovation—all of which emerge from a political system that is considered ideologically oppositional to ours. The current context, we suggest, is best understood through the lens of techno-Orientalism. When the idea of techno-Orientalism first appeared in David Morley and Kevin Robins’s analysis of why Japan occupied such a threatening position in Western imagination in the late 1980s, techno-Orientalism offered a framework to make sense of the technologically imbued racist stereotypes of Japan/the Japanese that were emerging within the context of Western fears and anxieties around Japan’s ascendancy as a technological global power. They proposed that if technological advancement has been crucial to Western civilizational progress, then Japan’s technological superiority over the West also signals a critical challenge to Western hegemony, including its cultural authority to control representations of the West and its “others.” They claimed that the shifting balance in global power—the West’s loss of technological preeminence—has induced an identity crisis in the West. In response, techno-Orientalism, in which “idioms of technology become structured into the discourse of Orientalism,” is produced in large part to discipline Japan and its rise to techno-economic power.12 The United States, for instance, externalized its anxiety into xenophobic projections of Japan as a “culture that is cold, impersonal, and machine-like” in which its people are “sub-human” and “unfeeling aliens.”13 Techno-Orientalism, born from the “Japan Panic,” was effectively consolidated through and around political-economic concerns that frame Japanese and, by extension, Asian techno-capitalist progress as dangerous and dystopian. Extending Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism,14 techno-Orientalism marks a geo-historical shift where the West no longer has control over the terms that define the East—the “Orient”—as weak, inferior, and subordinate to the West. It marks a shift not only in political-economic power but also in cultural authority. Techno-Orientalism, then, is the expressive vehicle (cultural productions and visual representations) by which Western and Eastern nations articulate their fears, desires, and anxieties that are produced in their competitive struggle to gain technological hegemony through economic trade and scientific innovation.15 Analogous to Japan’s position in the late 1980s, China currently figures into the techno-Orientalist imaginary as a powerful competitor in mass production, a global financial giant, and an aggressive investor in technological, infrastructural, and scientific developments. At the same time, the increasing purchasing power of China provokes American fear of a future global market that is economically driven by Chinese consumptive desires and practices. It is this duality—the domination of both production and consumption across different sectors of the techno-capitalist global economy—that undergirds American anxieties of a sinicized future.16 Further amplifying these anxieties around Chinese techno-economic domination is our imagination of China/the Chinese as the ultimate yellow peril, whose state ideology is oppositional to that of the United States and whose unmatched population size combined with its economic expansion and technological advancements may actually pose a real challenge to U.S. global hegemony. We turn now to examine how the ideology of yellow peril is manifesting in the current context of techno-Orientalism, beginning first with an analysis of the racial trope of “Chinese as contagion” and its connection to anti-Asian aggression. We’ll read multiple quotes from the 1AC that supercharge the link – the unhighlighted text in the Bowman evidence says that China has QUOTE “commit not to place any weapons in outer space” END QUOTE and passed international treaties saying they will not militarize space. The 1AC has already passed – just not by Western powers, but no matter what Asians do the West sees them as a threat – QUOTE “Beijing “probably intends to pursue additional anti-satellite weapons” END QUOTE –The West uses peaceful Chinese treaties and development as REASON to militarize and then gets surprised when China tries to build a deterrent, justifying FURHTER development
The implementation of the AFF packaged through racist representations cause material violence. Reps matter more than the plan – we are scholars not policymakers. Atlanta is the latest example, but the past year has shown a one-to-one correlation with rhetoric that paints Asian governments as threatening and physical, sexual, and verbal assault of Asians around the world as a result. The 1AR’s claims of “Our Threats Real” is not responsive to the criticism – its not a question about the truth value of the representations but rather the proximate impact embedded in power which extends into material violence Siu and Chun 20 – * Associate Professor Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Chinese Diaspora, Cultural Citizenship, Cultural Politics of Food, Diaspora / Transnationalism; Asians in the Americas, Ethnography PhD, Anthropology, Stanford University, MA, Anthropology, Stanford University, BA, Anthropology, minor in Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies, 19-2020 recipient of The Catherine and William L. Magistretti Graduate Fellowship, B.A. in Politics and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. Lok, Claire, Yellow Peril and Techno-orientalism in the Time of Covid-19: Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and Techno-Economic Warfare, Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 23, Number 3, October 2020, pp. 421-440 (Article), DKP In the early weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States, President Trump put out many mixed messages, but he remained consistent with one—that China was to blame for the spread of the virus. Repeatedly, he insisted on calling the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus,” despite mounting public criticism against the racialization of the deadly pathogen. Many noted the inflammatory nature of this anti-Asian rhetoric. During this same period, reports ranging from verbal abuse to intimidation to physical assault against people of Asian descent documented the sudden rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States and globally. According to Human Rights Watch, an Asian woman in Brooklyn, New York, suffered a racially motivated acid attack, and in Texas, a Burmese American man and his two children were stabbed by a man who claimed he thought the family was “Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.”1 The Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council in the United States reported over one thousand cases of anti-Asian incidents in a two-week period in March 2020.2 Outside the United States, a Singaporean student in the United Kingdom was violently kicked and punched by an angry group of men after they uttered, “we don’t want your coronavirus in our country” (my emphasis).3 In Australia, a survey taken by the community group Asian Australian Alliance recorded a total of 178 reports of anti-Asian incidents in two weeks, ranging from racial slurs to physical assault.4 Though President Trump has dropped the “Chinese virus” for “kung flu” and tweeted on March 23 that “It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community . . . the spreading of the virus is NOT their fault,” it seems that Sinophobia and racial violence against Asian Americans have been unleashed. Make no mistake, as long as President Trump continues to take a confrontational stance, using the rhetoric of blame against China with the intention to punish it with new sanctions, tariffs, and even the cancellation of U.S. debt obligations,5 the racial aggressions against Asian Americans will continue to rise, if not intensify. By now, it is widely accepted that the novel coronavirus emerged first in Wuhan, and scientists believe that the zoonotic disease might have jumped from animals to humans at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a wet market where vegetables, seafood, meat, and a small number of exotic wildlife were sold. Despite this, on April 30, President Trump casually offered a new theory, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted: that COVID had originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses a biosafety level-4 lab, and that the virus might have “leaked” from that lab. The implicit suggestion is that China had either intentionally bioengineered the novel coronavirus to cause massive destruction, thereby attributing malice, or carelessly leaked the virus due to scientific negligence, thereby attributing incompetence. In either case, these kinds of unsubstantiated speculations work to further stoke anger and disdain against the Chinese state. More disturbingly, they traffic in the idea of China as a biotechnology threat, resonating with pre-existing filmic representations of futuristic dystopian worlds. The immediate and unqualified responses from the scientific community reveal the danger of these potentially incendiary speculations. Responding swiftly, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a press release the morning of April 30 stating that “The Intelligence Community . . . concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified . . . ” (my emphasis).6 Within days, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci, attested that the virus “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”7 These assertions sought to extinguish any attribution of malice to the Chinese state. Even with firm contestation, however, the very invocation of the idea of biotechnology warfare has tapped into and perhaps even fueled our existing techno-Orientalist anxieties. As the COVID pandemic story transpires in real time, engulfing the entire global community, taking unexpected twists and turns, making divergences and transgressions, we have become increasingly aware that the layers of entanglements cannot be easily parsed out, nor will we know anytime soon how and when the story will end. We offer a query into how we might assess and make sense of the intensifying Sinophobia and xenophobia in this current context. To do so, we must resist the temptation to confine our analysis to the narrow parameters of the pandemic. Rather, we insist on examining the rise of anti-Asian aggression within the concomitant vectors of the pandemic, the escalation of the U.S.-China trade war, and the growing concerns about cyber- and techno-security. Here we assert that the ideology of yellow peril set within a techno-Orientalist imaginary is powerfully animating the racial form and racial affect mediating the multiple terrains of public health, technology, global trade, and national security. While it is tempting to treat this historical conjuncture as extraordinary, it is crucial that we situate the current unfolding within the long history of Asian racialization, one that indexes the abiding tension between the political impetus to define national belonging and the shifting economic imperatives of the nation-state.8
The Contemporary Racial Repertoire of the “China/Chinese” Threat The outbreak of the pandemic could not have had worse timing (as if it could be timed), but timing is critically important here. Its emergence amid the ongoing intensive trade war between the United States and China is significant in that the prevailing tensions between the two countries and the discourses of Chinese unfair trade competition, scientific espionage, and technological surveillance frame the reception of the pandemic. One may argue that President Trump’s insistence on blaming China for the spread of the deadly virus is yet another tactic in his administration’s sustained attempt to quell China’s economic power at the same time that it provides a foil to distract from—and a scapegoat to blame for—the economic and public health crisis in which we find ourselves. At this particular juncture, we unfortunately have been inundated with media coverage of a plethora of accusations and actions launched against China and Chinese Americans. Within the past two years, we have witnessed the implementation of trade sanctions and tariffs against China, the removal of prominent Chinese American scientists from research institutions, and the severing of nationwide economic transactions with certain China-based telecommunications corporations, with Huawei Technologies Company being the most notable. All these have been advanced in the name of national security. The discursive formation and the representational devices that have been used to justify these state directives play a critical role in constructing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as culprit and as America’s enemy number one. These constructions, some of which will be examined in this essay, are layered upon one another, each building and elaborating on the last, and each invoking and simultaneously inciting a different set of anxieties that lie within the broader repertoire of China/ Chinese as threat. Indeed, the inundation of media about China makes it difficult, if not impossible, to decipher truth from falsehood, myth from reality, rhetoric from evidence. Our task here is not to weigh the truth-value of these representations but to treat them as ongoing contests embedded in power and to draw out their material effects. It is worth noting that while the explicit target of U.S. state aggression has been the mainland Chinese state or the PRC, the actual effects are much more wide-ranging and extend into everyday aggressions against all those who present as East Asian American. In our examination of the variegated representations of China/Chinese, we suggest that the longstanding ideology of “yellow peril” remains not just pertinent, but extremely forceful in constructing a multifaceted repertoire of Chinese state threat and, by extension, of Chinese/Asian American threat. What is particular about this recent iteration of yellow peril is its configuration through the lens of techno-Orientalism, a framework that is primarily used to examine the explicitly fictional genres of novels, videogames, and films but that we now assert as being actively deployed in this current historical conjuncture.
It’s not just Atlanta, Anti-Asian hate crimes continuing to spike – their rhetoric is literally killing people Westervelt 2/21 – Eric, “Anger And Fear As Asian American Seniors Targeted In Bay Area Attacks,” npr, 2/2 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/12/966940217/anger-and-fear-as-asian-american-seniors-targeted-in-bay-area-attacks, DKP Business and civil rights groups in California are demanding action after a recent surge of xenophobic violence against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area left one person dead and others badly injured. The brazen, mostly daylight assaults have rattled nerves in communities ahead of Friday's Lunar New Year holiday. Just last week in San Jose, a 64-year-old grandmother was assaulted and robbed of cash she'd just withdrawn from an ATM for Lunar New Year gifts. Surveillance cameras have captured many of the attacks, including one against a 91-year-old man in Oakland's Chinatown, who was hospitalized with serious injuries after being shoved to the ground by a man who walked up behind him. In January, a 52-year-old Asian American woman was shot in the head with a flare gun, also in Chinatown. Later in the month, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee was going for a morning walk in his San Francisco neighborhood. Surveillance cameras captured a man running at him full speed and smashing his frail body to the pavement. Ratanapakdee died of his injuries two days later. A 19-year-old man has been charged with murder and elder abuse. "These attacks taking place in the Bay Area are part of a larger trend of anti-Asian American/Pacific Islander hate brought on in many ways by COVID-19, as well as some of the xenophobic policies and racist rhetoric that were pushed forward by the prior administration," says Manju Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, a coalition of California community-based groups.
The alternative is to reject the AFF in favor of an epistemic rejection of Area Studies that define knowledge production through mapping the external world as unstable, hostile and target. Only de-centering knowledge production from the self can solve inevitable conflict and orientalist violence Chow 6 (Rey, Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University, April 2006, “Age of the World as Target”, Rey Chow Reader) APS recut aaditg Among the most important elements in war, writes karl von Clausewitz, are the “moral elements.”32 From the United States’ point of view, this phrase does not seem at all ironic. Just as the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq in the first few years of the twenty-first century were justified as benevolent acts to preserve the united States and the rest of the world against “the axis of evil,” “weapons of mass destruction,” and the like, so were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki considered pacific acts, acts that were meant to save lives and save civilization in a world threatened by German Nazism. (Though, by the time the bombs were dropped in Japan, Germany had already surrendered.) even today, some of the most educated, scientifically knowledgeable members of U.S. society continue to believe that the atomic bomb was the best way to terminate the hostilities.33 And, while the media in the united States are quick to join the media elsewhere in reporting the controversies over Japan’s refusal to apologize for its war crimes in Asia or over France’s belatedness in apologizing for the Vichy government’s persecution of the Jews, no U.S. head of state has ever visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or expressed regret for the nuclear holocaust.34 In this—its absolute conviction of its own moral superiority and legitimacy—lies perhaps the most deeply ingrained connection between the foundation myth of the United States as an exceptional nation and the dropping of the atomic bombs (as well as all the military and economic interventions the united States has made in nationalist struggles in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle east since the Second World War).35 even on occasions such as Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and September 11, 2001, when the united States had to recognize that it was just part of the world (and hence could be attacked like any other country), its response was typically that of reasserting U.S. exceptionalism—This cannot happen to us! We are unique, we cannot be attacked!—by ferociously attacking others. In the decades since 1945, whether in dealing with the Soviet union, the People’s republic of China, north korea, vietnam, and countries in Central America, or during the gulf Wars, the united States has been conducting war on the basis of a certain kind of knowledge production, and producing knowledge on the basis of war. War and knowledge enable and foster each other primarily through the collective fantasizing of some foreign or alien body that poses danger to the “self” and the “eye” that is the nation. once the monstrosity of this foreign body is firmly established in the national consciousness, the decision makers of the u.S. government often talk and behave as though they had no choice but war. War, then, is acted out as a moral obligation to expel an imagined dangerous alienness from the united States’ self-concept as the global custodian of freedom and democracy. Put in a different way, the “moral element,” insofar as it produces knowledge about the “self” and “other”—and hence the “eye” and its “target”—as such, justifies war by its very dichotomizing logic. Conversely, the violence of war, once begun, fixes the other in its attributed monstrosity and affirms the idealized image of the self. In this regard, the pernicious stereotyping of the Japanese during the Second World War—not only by u.S. military personnel but also by social and behavioral scientists—was simply a flagrant example of an ongoing ideological mechanism that had accompanied Western treatments of non-Western “others” for centuries. In the hands of academics such as geoffrey gorer, writes Dower, the notion that was collectively and “objectively” formed about the Japanese was that they were “a clinically compulsive and probably collectively neurotic people, whose lives were governed by ritual and ‘situational ethics,’ wracked with insecurity, and swollen with deep, dark currents of repressed resentment and aggression.”37 As Dower points out, such stereotyping was by no means accidental or unprecedented: The Japanese, so “unique” in the rhetoric of World War Two, were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during the conquest of the new World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the united States, the agitation against Chinese immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century. These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly reinforced by nineteenthcentury Western science. In the final analysis, in fact, these favored idioms denoting superiority and inferiority transcended race and represented formulaic expressions of Self and Other in general.38 The moralistic divide between “self” and “other” constitutes the production of knowledge during the U.S. occupation of Japan after the Second World War as well. As Monica Braw writes, in the years immediately after 1945, the risk that the united States would be regarded as barbaric and inhumane was carefully monitored, in the main by cutting off Japan from the rest of the world through the ban on travel, control of private mail, and censorship of research, mass media information, and other kinds of communication. The entire occupation policy was permeated by the view that “the united States was not to be accused; guilt was only for Japan”:39 As the occupation of Japan started, the atmosphere was military. Japan was a defeated enemy that must be subdued. The Japanese should be taught their place in the world: as a defeated nation, Japan had no status and was entitled to no respect. People should be made to realize that any catastrophe that had befallen them was of their own making. until they had repented, they were suspect. If they wanted to release information about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and nagasaki, it could only be for the wrong reasons, such as accusing the united States of inhumanity. Thus this information was suppressed.40 As in the scenario of aerial bombing, the elitist and aggressive panoramic “vision” in which the other is beheld means that the sufferings of the other matters much less than the transcendent aspirations of the self. And, despite being the products of a particular culture’s technological fanaticism, such transcendent aspirations are typically expressed in the form of selfless universalisms. As Sherry puts it, “The reality of Hiroshima and nagasaki seemed less important than the bomb’s effect on ‘humankind’s destiny,’ on ‘humanity’s choice,’ on ‘what is happening to men’s minds,’ and on hopes (now often extravagantly revived) to achieve world government.” On Japan’s side, as yoneyama writes, such a “global narrative of the universal history of humanity” has helped sustain “a national victimology and phantasm of innocence throughout most of the postwar years.” going one step further, she remarks: “The idea that Hiroshima’s disaster ought to be remembered from the transcendent and anonymous position of humanity . . . might best be described as ‘nuclear universalism.’ once the relations among war, racism, and knowledge production are underlined in these terms, it is no longer possible to assume, as some still do, that the recognizable features of modern war—its impersonality, coerciveness, and deliberate cruelty—are “divergences” from the “antipathy” to violence and to conflict that characterize the modern world.43 Instead, it would be incumbent on us to realize that the pursuit of war—with its use of violence—and the pursuit of peace—with its cultivation of knowledge—are the obverse and reverse of the same coin, the coin that I have been calling “the age of the world target.” rather than being irreconcilable opposites, war and peace are coexisting, collaborative functions in the continuum of a virtualized world. More crucially still, only the privileged nations of the world can afford to wage war and preach peace at one and the same time. As Sherry writes, “The united States had different resources with which to be fanatical: resources allowing it to take the lives of others more than its own, ones whose accompanying rhetoric of technique disguised the will to destroy.”44 From this it follows that, if indeed political and military acts of cruelty are not unique to the united States—a point which is easy enough to substantiate—what is nonetheless remarkable is the manner in which such acts are, in the united States, usually cloaked in the form of enlightenment and altruism, in the form of an aspiration simultaneously toward technological perfection and the pursuit of peace. In a country in which political leaders are held accountable for their decisions by an electorate, violence simply cannot—as it can in totalitarian countries—exist in the raw. even the most violent acts must be adorned with a benign, rational story. It is in the light of such interlocking relations among war, racism, and knowledge production that I would make the following comments about area studies, the academic establishment that crystallizes the connection between the epistemic targeting of the world and the ‘‘humane’’ practices of peacetime learning. From Atomic Bombs to Area Studies As its name suggests, area studies as a mode of knowledge production is, strictly speaking, military in its origins. Even though the study of the history, languages, and literatures of, for instance, ‘‘Far Eastern’’ cultures existed well before the Second World War (in what Edward W. Said would term the old Orientalist tradition predicated on philology), the systematization of such study under the rubric of special geopolitical areas was largely a postwar and U.S. phenomenon. In H. D. Harootunian’s words, ‘‘The systematic formation of area studies, principally in major universities, was . . . a massive attempt to relocate the enemy in the new configuration of the Cold War.’ As Bruce Cumings puts it: It is now fair to say, based on the declassified evidence, that the American state and especially the intelligence elements in it shaped the entire field of postwar area studies, with the clearest and most direct impact on those regions of the world where communism was strongest: Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and East Asia.’ In the decades after 1945, when the United States competed with the Soviet Union for the power to rule and/or destroy the world, these regions were the ones that required continued, specialized super-vision; to this list we may also add Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. As areas to be studied, these regions took on the significance of target fields— fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary for the perpetuation of the United States’ political and ideological hegemony. In the final part of his classic Orientalism, Said describes area studies as a continuation of the old European Orientalism with a different pedagogical emphasis: No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and ‘applies’ his science to the Orient, or anywhere else. This is the specifically American contribution to the history of Orientalism, and it can be dated roughly from the period immediately following World War II, when the United States found itself in the position recently vacated by Britain and France. Whereas Said draws his examples mainly from Islamic and Middle Eastern area studies, Cumings provides this portrait of the East Asian target field: The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) was the first ‘‘area’’ organization in the U.S., founded in 1943 as the Far Eastern Association and reorganized as the AAS in 1956. Before 1945 there had been little attention to and not much funding for such things; but now the idea was to bring coe ntemporary social science theory to bear on the non-Western world, rather than continue to pursue the classic themes of Oriental studies, often examined through philology. . . . In return for their severance, the Orientalists would get vastly enhanced academic resources (positions, libraries, language studies)—and soon, a certain degree of separation which came from the social scientists inhabiting institutes of East Asian studies, whereas the Orientalists occupied departments of East Asian languages and cultures. This implicit Faustian bargain sealed the postwar academic deal. A largely administrative enterprise, closely tied to policy, the new American Orientalism took over from the old Orientalism attitudes of cultural hostility, among which is, as Said writes, the dogma that ‘the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).’Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘objective’’ production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special ‘‘areas’’ became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target. In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits of higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war— if, for instance, the ability to translate a diffcult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes —is it a surprise that it is doomed to fail in its avowed attempts to ‘‘know’’ the other cultures? Can ‘‘knowledge’’ that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare’s accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign ‘‘self ’’/‘‘eye’’—the ‘‘I’’—that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just that— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber— such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter— will never receive the attention that is due to them. ‘‘Knowledge,’’ however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences. This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, area studies has been, since its inception, haunted by ‘‘the absence of a definable object’’—and by ‘‘the problem of the vanishing object.’’ AND, you should be skeptical of their evidence – their research model proscribes a violent model that privileges Western research practices. Voting AFF incentivizes the perpetuation of exclusion as a norm and rewards and makes us feel good about psychic violence built upon standards created by hetero-cis-white-men. Barkin and Sjoberg 21 – *J. Samuel, Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance in the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, PhD in IR at Columbia University, Laura, British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London, Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, Ph.D., University of Southern California School of International Relations; J.D. Boston College Law School J. Samuel and Laura, “The Queer Art of Failed IR?,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2021, Vol. 0(0) 1–17, DOI: 10.1177/0304375421989572, DKP We argue that knowledge cumulation in IR is a fantasy reified by paradigmatic clusters and the mimicry of research standards and practices in the natural sciences (e.g., Elman and Elman, 2001, 2003). The “evidence” of “knowledge cumulation” in IR comes as much from the ritualized practice of research behavior as it does from any “true” or genuine notion of knowledge cumulation. One has “succeeded” in the enterprise of IR by cumulating knowledge, and the work of “successful” scholars is by definition cumulated knowledge. Cumulation of knowledge as a standard of success is a condition of possibility for the desirability of success in the field. That ritualized practice at once is institutionalized as success and institutionalizes the need for research success, reified and reproduced by hiring, tenure, merit raise, and promotion standards. This ritualization is a signifier that what counts as knowledge in the field, in particular research programs and more generally, is performative (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1990; Weber, 1998)—where standards are set by their utterance and repetition rather than by some external “objective” standards of (narrowly) good science or (more broadly) good research (Baudrillard, 1991; Shepherd, 2008; Williams, 2003). Scholars iterate and reify standards of measurement of knowledge in each piece of scholarship which “succeeds” in the field, and these iterations make it a paradox for scholars to both occupy the methodological, epistemological, and political space that falls outside of inherited standards and succeed. Outside -the -mainstream work’s underrepresentation in the places understood to be publishing “success” is overdetermined, and the correlation between mimicry of traditional scholarship and “success” of critical scholars a given. We mean “performative” in the sense that Judith Butler uses it (Butler, 1990, 1993), particularly as she talks about it going hand in hand with a Foucauldian notion of disciplining,8 where “performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability—a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” which resonate as “ritualized production” (Butler, 1993, p. 60). This frames performativity as a “specific modality of power as discourse” (Butler, 1993, p. 139) where the politics of the signification and the politics of the sign meet, an act of territoralization, of production, of installation—which does not have to be alone, singular, or unidirectional. Since performatives are their own referent (Butler, 1993, p. 159), they proliferate as manifestations of the power underlying them and interact relatively on the basis of that relative power. In this context, “performances” are actions and events, iterations and reifications, and context-specific, which “bring a subject into being” relationally.9 To escape the recursive, performative loop of “disciplinary success,” we argue that it is important to see the possibility that knowledge cumulation is not, and should not be, a given in IR research. Instead, we argue that the idea itself is an inherited empty signifier with unspoken content which governs the production of what we understand as disciplinary IR. Traditionally, the idea of knowledge cumulation is firmly grounded in a neopositivist understanding of social science, in which the role of theory is to collate observed empirical regularities across cases or what Waltz calls laws (Waltz, 1979). While this interpretation is critiqued in most critical IR, “cumulation,” in that work, becomes a term without clear conceptual content. The paradigmatization of IR theorizing distracts from a particular theory’s internal conditions of possibility by introducing incompatible conditions of possibility drawn from an inherited disciplinary sociology of what knowledge is and how it works. As such, any acknowledgment of the idea of cumulativity from within specific exercises in reflexive IR creates the grounds for necessary failure within those exercises. The simultaneous rejection of traditional “cumulation” and continued performance of acts of cumulation can be understood by seeing the ways that silence frames cumulation in critical IR. We learn from feminist theorists that the unspoken is as important as if not more important than what is spoken (Charlesworth, 1999; Kronsell, 2006), coming from attention to how IR’s others are omitted, excluded, kept out, and not mentioned (Agathangelou and Ling, 2004; Tickner, 1988). We argue that IR’s silences tell us more about the state of knowledge cumulation in the discipline than looking for standards that tell us what we do know. Accordingly, we ask on principle what any given research program does not take account of and how accounting for those omissions could changes analysis. We focus on both visible omissions (like the concepts that a research program fails to incorporate) and invisible omissions. Invisible omissions are those that are unhearable by a research program— normally left out or ignored by both the researchers that form the core of the research program and their critics (Butler, 2001; Edkins et al., 2012; Hansen, 2000). By “unhearable,” we mean either that the omitted content falls outside of the boundaries set for dialog or is assumed by all stakeholders to be by definition irrelevant (for deeper analyses see MacKinnon, 2006; Spivak, 1988). Unlike its visible omissions—variables that its scholars and their critics have added to, re-operationalized, expanded on, or suggested the inclusion of—invisible omissions are often not treated as omissions at all within particular scholarly boundaries.10 The discipline’s “collective” standards for knowledge production, then, can be understood as constituted by social performances of dominance rather than founded on some given or objective notions of what science should be. Rather than being objective judgments of quality, statements like “this is good science” and “these results are robust” are signs without referents used to discipline (Baudrillard, 1995). The invisible disciplining nature of the performative standards of knowledge cumulation is part of the story of Butler’s understanding of performativity. The other part is attention to who is excluded by claims to knowledge cumulation (generally as well as in specific paradigmatic situations), what is left out, and on what axes. These disciplinary standards (both in the conventional and Foucauldian sense) make invisible their own impossibility and their related necessary failure. For example, a submission to a traditional IR journal in the United States or Western Europe which makes an interesting argument, but is not in the format of, methodologically acceptable to, inclusive of the same forms of evidence traditionally used in, and good science to that journal’s traditional reviewers is unlikely to succeed in getting published.11 This will generally be justified with reference to the “quality” of the piece, and rarely if ever will questions of sex, race, gender, class, and other axes of exclusion be discussed as producers of the standards that then exclude on “quality” where “quality” has been set up in a way that excludes all performances of scholarship which are not mimicry of a particular Western, liberal model (Paolini, 1999).12 Even editors and reviewers who note the exclusionary effect of these standards will often mourn that and move on, imagining the only possible alternative being lacking standards, and seeing such a lack of standards as more insidious than the exclusionary effects of using certain sets of standards. “Knowledge cumulation” then becomes a set of reified and artificial standards rather than a journey for truth or interest. The answer to this quagmire is sometimes a liberal politics of inclusion (e.g., Nedal and Nexon, 2018)—how do “we” get more women, more minorities, and more people from underrepresented places in the world to be able to meet the standards of good scholarship in the field? That liberal politics of inclusion, while well-intended, can be read as a (subtle, perhaps accidental) expansion of the violence it (formally) seems to abate. It fails to question the utility of the existing standards of good scholarship and assumes that those currently excluded would be happy to change the form, shape, and/ or nature of their scholarship to fit within the (unquestioned/unquestionable) mold of good scholarship, either loosely or strictly understood. As Puar (2006) argues, liberal “inclusion” to absorb the other within can be as violent as if not more so than exclusion even as it appears progressive. That violence is the reproduction of naturalized, bounded identities when identities are liminal and messy when not policed (e.g., Agathangelou, 2013; Haritaworn et al., 2013; Scott, 2013). The bounded nature of IR inclusion excludes liminality, messiness, and outsideness (e.g., Malksoo, 2012). Expanding the boundaries of IR to include any given particular excluded work maintains an illusion of stability, hiding what is unstable; it maintains an illusion of certainty, hiding what is in doubt; it maintains an illusion of coherence, hiding the rebellious, the failed, and that which remains outside (e.g., Sjoberg, 2017). Queer theorizing of the liminality involved in unstable sex/gender identities shows that even that which is presumed to be the most primordial (sex identity) is really liminality hiding under supposed definition (e.g., Weber, 2016a). Translated to thinking about inhabitability, this theorizing suggests that the apparent safety of (constituting then occupying) inhabitable space hides liminality and uncertainty, and perhaps danger, under its supposed (empirical and normative) clarity (Haritaworn et al., 2014). Therefore, “all the repressive and reductive strategies of power systems are already present in the internal logic of the sign,” such “that violence is an inevitable byproduct of signification” (Baudrillard, 1981). In this way, not only do traditional standards of knowledge make invisible their own impossibility, they hide the violence of IR’s denials of failure and continued insistence on traveling failed paths despite the condemnation of failure and the privileging of success. IR’s continued recursive enactment of its settled “standards” despite their obvious failure and exclusiveness makes invisible the raced, classed, and sexed impacts of those standards and their apparent objectivity. Baudrillard’s work provides a path for navigating this disjuncture between signs (IR’s “standards”) and referents (the fantastic notion that “good scholarship” exists objectively) (Baudrillard, 1975). He argues that “only ambivalence, as a rupture of value… sustains a challenge to the legibility, the false transparency of the sign… questions the evidence of the use value of the sign (rational decoding) and of its exchange value (the discourse of communication).” This ambivalence, Baudrillard argues, “brings the political economy of the sign to a standstill; it dissolves the respective definitions of symbol and referent” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 150).
Endorsing the inclusion of nontraditional perspectives, classifying and categorizing them, and assuming inclusion’s possibility may all have violent impacts (for discussions of the violences of inclusion see Haritaworn et al., 2013, 2014; Mbembe, 2019). Moving of the signification “knowledge” from any referent to which it was originally tied makes method and research performances of scholarship, rather than (the illusive) scholarship itself. If “research” is a performance of scholarship, “standards” for research serve to disguise the fantastic nature of knowledge cumulation. As such, there is no space for liminality, uncertainty, change, inadequacy, and failure in structural rather than passing senses. Yet looking beyond the discourse of certainty, those pervade IR. A Baudrillardian ambivalence toward research programs and their truth statements can reveal the recursivity of IR’s standards of knowledge cumulation. This is because condemnation or rejection of any given research program and its truth statements endorses its assumptions about truth, as well as some of its assumptions about what the international arena is and how it works. As such, the idea that IR knowledge cumulation can be nothing but fantasy is straightforward. If the reification of standards of knowledge cumulation is a signification divorced from a referent, where the recovery of the referent is conceptually and practically impossible, then knowledge cumulation is and will always remain an empty signifier. The only question is how that empty signifier directs and is directed. We suggest that, in IR, more often than not, knowledge cumulation directs and is directed by discursive seduction. In Baudrillard’s words, seduction is “that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from its truth” (Baudrillard, 19911979, p. 54). What makes a discourse of knowledge, of science, and of progress seductive “is its very appearance: the aleatory, meaningless, or ritualistic and meticulous circulation of signs on the surface, its inflections and its nuances. All of this effaces the content value of meaning, and this is seductive” (Baudrillard, 19911979, p. 54). Therefore, if there could be an interpretive discourse of knowledge cumulation that reached truth value, that truth value would be selfdefeating, since “the meaning of an interpretive discourse, by contrast, has never seduced anyone.” This is the fundamental contradiction, in Baudrillard’s terms, that makes standards for knowledge cumulation in IR internally impossible. He explains that “every interpretive discourse wants to get beyond appearances; this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse” (Baudrillard, 19911979, p. 54). As such, what is left in/of the failed discourse can only be the fantastic, and pretensions to success hollow. Inhabiting a Failure of a Discipline The need for success and the denial of failure depend on two things: first, both success and failure existing and being identifiable; and second, presuming a particular normative relationship between success and failure. In IR, as we discussed above, scholars are thought of as successes or failures according to a complicated metric of disciplinary prestige based on publication outlet, “scientific standards,” and perception of the change that they have caused in the discipline. Work is characterized as successful or failed based on whether it contributes to knowledge cumulation. The discipline itself is understood as successful or failed based on the aggregation of those measures. On these terms, the emptiness of disciplinary standards and the impossibility of knowledge cumulation make every piece of scholarship and every scholar in IR a failure and the discipline along with them.13 To us, the identification of success/failure is impossible. Still, we focus our approach to “disciplinary IR” around questioning the second assumption, that the normative relationship between success and failure is such that success is good and desirable and failure is bad. Failure has been insufficiently explored in disciplinary IR, both in thinking about the disciplinary enterprise and in thinking about the world “out there” which we purport to study.14 Here, we look to theorize the “upside” of the failure of the disciplinary enterprise of IR. It is, after all, failure that Baudrillard called for, in different words—a willingness to drop commitment to and passion for a certain end in the recognition that both that end and its opposite are empty signifiers. Queer theorists have suggested that this sort of failure—failure to live up to expectations which were messy, detached, or a priori untenable—might be worth celebrating (Halberstam, 2011). We build on these two understandings to embrace failure in IR. Often failure is thought about as either a final end (something has failed), as a stumbling block on a path to success (if at first you do not succeed, try, try again), or as a miscalibration (we thought this was success, but really it is failure instead). With Jack Halberstam, we suggest a normative reinterpretation. Rather than seeing failure as an end point, or as a stopping point on the way to success, it can be seen as itself a politics, “a category levied by the winners against the losers” and “a set of standards that ensure all future radical ventures will be measured as cost-ineffective” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 184). Halberstam uses the example of reproductive success. Inherited wisdom has suggested for a significant amount of time that people should have children—that a heterosexual marriage with biological offspring is the ideal of success in one’s personal life. That could be taken at face value: success (measured in biological offspring to still-married heterosexual, cissexual parents) is to be valued, and failure (measured in some other reproductive result) is to be devalued. Or the very normative value attached to reproductive success is itself a weapon, where associating failure with non-reproduction is a category levied against the losers by the winners. Redefining all reproductive results as successful or changing which reproductive results are measured as successful does not change the weaponized, normalizing character of the concept of success. This is a metaphor for IR’s disciplinary sociology, but it is also directly applicable to IR’s epistemological and methodological engagement with non-heteronormativity Applied to IR, the normalization of “success” as the thing to which all (researchers) should aspire reifies membership in the categories of “successful” and “failed” and provides the “successful” with a powerful weapon to continue to exclude, put down, and delegitimize the “unsuccessful.” The “winners” are by definition in a normatively superior position compared to the “losers” despite the emptiness of the signification of each category. Understanding individual pieces of work, individual scholars, or research paradigms as failed (a foil to successful) is a categorization wielded by those who have already been classified as successful to achieve and perpetuate the exclusion of those whom they can constitute as inferior. In this way, research success is a category IR’s winners wield against its losers to perpetuate their position as winners, consciously or unconsciously, against a background of a disciplinary IR where the standards for research were created largely by white, heterosexual cis-men and remain largely undisturbed despite the intellectual and representational diversification of IR research and IR scholars. Failure as a category in IR scholarship serves to “reinscribe and renormalize standards of ‘research success’ which remain unchanged, unchangeable, and regressive” (Halberstam, 2011). The scholarship that makes unconventional claims to knowledge cumulation (or no claim to knowledge cumulation) not only fails but constitutes its researchers as failures—which becomes recursive when “we tend to blame each other or ourselves for the failures of the social structure we inhabit, rather than critiquing the structures… themselves” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 35, citing Kipnes, 2004). In Halberstam’s view, it is the system that privileges success, that is, the problem, and failing within it is an emancipatory possibility which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 2). Realizing the caging nature of the boundaries of disciplinary success, it is possible to think that failure might be perceived as something to celebrate and strive toward rather than something which should inspire shame. Halberstam suggests that “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, and more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 2–3). In Halberstam’s view, it is only when the norms and metrics by which we aspire to success become both politicized and problematized that freedom becomes possible. It is not failing that we as scholars or as people need to learn to do—we fail all the time. As Halberstam notes, failure is endemic in life and work as “to live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately die,” despite denial, resistance, and constructs of success (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 186–187). Instead of needing to learn to fail, we argue, we need to learn to embrace failure, particularly the collective failure of the enterprise of “disciplinary IR” to achieve or approximate “knowledge cumulation” generally or the aspirations of particular research programs specifically.
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JF - T - Extra
Tournament: Coppel | Round: 4 | Opponent: Carnegie Vanguard SR | Judge: Danielle Colvin 1 Interp – Unjust refers to a negative action – it means contrary. Black Laws No Date "What is Unjust?" https://thelawdictionary.org/unjust/Elmer Contrary to right and justice, or to the enjoyment of his rights by another, or to the standards of conduct furnished by the laws. The Last line of 1AC Babcock definitively proves the violation – the aff creates things external to the resolution like limited use of private property, tradable property rights, and the creation of a management regime in outer space Babcock 19 Hope M. Babcock, Professor Babcock served as general counsel to the National Audubon Society from 1987-91 and as deputy general counsel and Director of Audubon’s Public Lands and Water Program from 1981-87. Previously, she was a partner with Blum, Nash and Railsback, where she focused on energy and environmental issues, and an associate at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby and MacRae where she represented utilities in the nuclear licensing process. From 1977-79, she served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy and Minerals in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Professor Babcock has taught environmental and natural resources law as a visiting professor at Pace University Law School and as an adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Catholic University, and Antioch law schools. Professor Babcock was a member of the Standing Committee on Environmental Law of the American Bar Association, and served on the Clinton-Gore Transition Team, 2019, Syracuse Law Review, https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2201 simha The PTD offers both an approach for managing an open access commons and a gap-filling tool until a regulatory regime is adopted.507 The doctrine is based on the idea that the “sovereign holds certain common properties in trust in perpetuity for the free and unimpeded use of the general public.”508 The public’s right to access and use trust resources is never lost, and neither the government nor private individuals can alienate or otherwise adversely affect those resources unless for a comparable public purpose.509 The resources the doctrine protects “have long been part of a ‘taxonomy of property’ that recognizes the division of natural wealth into private and public property.”510 “The doctrine places on governments ‘an affirmative, ongoing duty to safeguard the long-term preservation of those resources for the benefit of the general public,’”511 thus limiting the sovereign’s power on behalf of both present and future individuals.512 It directs the government to manage trust resources for public benefit, not private gain.513 It applies to private as well as public resources and is used to preserve the public’s access to CPRs.514 Government agencies have the non-rescindable power to revoke uses of trust resources that are inconsistent with the doctrine.515 This effectively places a permanent easement over trust resources that burdens their ownership with an overriding public interest in the preservation of those resources.516 However, trust resources can be alienated in favor of private ownership, if the alienation will still serve the public’s interest in those resources and not interfere with trust uses of the remaining land.517 The PTD, therefore, protects the “people’s common heritage,”518 just as Article 11 of the Moon Treaty protects outer space as part of the common heritage of mankind.519 The doctrine also appears to be infinitely malleable. Original uses of the doctrine were restricted to only that “aspect of the public domain below the low-water mark on the margin of the sea and the great lakes, the waters over those lands, and the waters within rivers and streams of any consequence,”520 and covered only traditional uses of those lands, like fishing and navigation.521 Over time, the scope and application of the doctrine broadened to protect more public resources and different uses.522 Thus, the doctrine expanded to protect new trust resources, such as dry sand beaches, inland lakes, groundwater, dry riverbeds, and wildlife,523 and passive uses of those resources, like scientific study.524 The original link to navigable water and tidelands disappeared.525 Supporters of the doctrine successfully advocated that it be applied to “wildlife, parks, cemeteries, and even works of fine art,”526 while arguing more recently its application to the atmosphere.527 A doctrine that imposes a perpetual duty on the sovereign to preserve trust resources, prevents their alienation for private benefit, assures public access to them, and can be invoked by anyone seems particularly useful as a management tool in outer space.528 The fact that public access to trust resources is so central to the doctrine makes it reflective, not contradictory, of international space law’s bar against appropriation of outer space and of the principle of space being the “province of all mankind.”529 It avoids the problems of alienation and exclusion associated with any of the management approaches associated with some form of private property and requires neither the creation of a new administrative authority nor the presence of a close-knit group of like-minded people.530 Members of the public, both rich and poor, can invoke and enforce the doctrine as easily as the sovereign.531 It is cost effective to the extent that no separate apparatus is required to implement it, and the doctrine has shown itself to be highly adaptable and innovative as different needs arise.532 It could also fill the gap in international law with respect to managing celestial property. Therefore, of all the management approaches studied here, the PTD seems the most suited to keep order in space until a regulatory regime is imposed. However, the doctrine provides no incentives for development of trust resources; rather, it might be used to limit or curtail that development, making it an imperfect, perhaps even counter-productive solution by itself to the extent that such development might be beneficial.533 Modifying the doctrine to allow limited use of private property management approaches, like tradable development claims, might buffer that effect—a form of overlapping hybridity between one type of property, a commons, and a management regime from another, private property, enabled by application of the PTD. Here's another recutting of babcock that proves they require a ton of steps external to the plan Babcock 19 (, H., 2019. THE PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE, OUTER SPACE, AND THE GLOBAL COMMONS: TIME TO CALL HOME ET. online Lawreview.syr.edu. Available at: https://lawreview.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/H-Babcock-Article-Final-Document-v2.pdf#page=67 Accessed 15 December 2021 Professor Babcock served as general counsel to the National Audubon Society from 1987-91 and as deputy general counsel and Director of Audubon’s Public Lands and Water Program from 1981-87. Previously, she was a partner with Blum, Nash and Railsback, where she focused on energy and environmental issues, and an associate at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Leiby and MacRae where she represented utilities in the nuclear licensing process. From 1977-79, she served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy and Minerals in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Professor Babcock has taught environmental and natural resources law as a visiting professor at Pace University Law School and as an adjunct at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Catholic University, and Antioch law schools. Professor Babcock was a member of the Standing Committee on Environmental Law of the American Bar Association, and served on the Clinton-Gore Transition Team.)-rahulpenu Definitions of space sustainability The Secure World Foundation defines space sustainability as “ensuring that all humanity can continue to use outer space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefit.”39 It is also described as “the ability of all humanity to continue to use outer space for peaceful purposes and socioeconomic benefit over the long term.” It is proposed that, read together, these broad definitions take as their premise that: (1) all humanity thus far is using space for peaceful purposes and for socioeconomic benefit; (2) this use is threatened; (3) measures must be taken to protect it; and (4) all humanity currently possesses the ability, in the sense of having a skill or the capacity, to ensure space sustainability for peaceful purposes. Under this conceptualization, the negative effect of not using space sustainably is primarily economic.40 Bearing in mind the governmental origins of space exploitation, where market economics did not play a primary role in decision making, the growing focus on the economic perspective in space affairs acknowledges Carolyn Deere’s opinion that problems emerge in the international domain from an absence of powerful economic interests.41 Of course, as more space applications are developed, economic interests become more prevalent in that market protectionism then underlies the rationales for many positions taken. Space sustainability is also conceptualized as defining good behavior, its boundaries, and disincentives for negative behavior in space.42 Space sustainability then becomes a much more limited political concept calling for specific measures to strengthen norms.43 Some notable examples follow: An International Code of Conduct—the European Union proposed a non-binding voluntary code whose purpose is “security, safety, sustainability” for all space activities providing for general measures on space operations and space debris.44 The Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of UNCOPUOS working group objective of establishing guidelines for the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. Proposed International Civil Aviation Organization for Space—the establishment of an international organization focused on space safety and the establishment of binding safety standards similar to the International Civil Aviation Organization.45 Industry efforts for a global space situational awareness database Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Transparency and Confidence Building Measures. Depending on the forum for discussion and in line with the previously mentioned initiatives, the concept of space sustainability is also used interchangeably with the following: (1) space security, which entails access to space and freedom from threats;46 (2) space stability addressing space situational awareness;47 (3) space safety, which is protection from all unreasonable levels of risk (primarily protection of humans or human activities);48 and (4) responsible uses of space.49 These all reflect the two components of space sustainability as described by the founder of Secure World Foundation: “the first is the physical environment, which includes management of space debris, electromagnetic and physical crowding and congestion, and space weather.... The second component is the political environment, and includes promoting stability and preventing conflict between nations.”50 Bearing this in mind and notwithstanding the potential confusion caused by the interchangeability of terms used, at the core of all proposals conceptualizing space sustainability or related concepts are the notions that: (1) space assets are kept safe and secure, and that the assets are not harmed or interfered with; (2) peaceful space activities continue as free from purposeful/intentional or unintentional harmful interference; (3) the space environment is preserved for peaceful uses; and (4) international cooperative efforts are required. These four points are understood to be the current core conditions for and of space sustainability. It must be acknowledged that space sustainability, in this context, is severed from the ecological roots of sustainable development. Rationale for space sustainability The proposed baseline conditions for the current conception for space sustainability coincide with Gallagher’s analysis of the logic for space cooperation as “Space Governance for Global Security” where all space actors seek “to secure the space domain for peaceful use; to protect space assets from all hazards; and to derive maximum value from space for security, economic, civil, and environmental ends.”51 Based on this understanding, the current conception of and rationale for space sustainability ties more clearly to global security than to sustainable development. This logic emphasizes that “the more different countries, companies, and individuals depend on space for a growing array of purposes, the more they need equitable rules, shared decision-making procedures, and effective compliance mechanisms to maximize the benefits that they all can gain from space, while minimizing risks from irresponsible space behaviors or deliberate interference with legitimate space activities.”52 While it is acknowledged that such a need exists, the difficulty in reaching agreement on how to bring it about is one reason why some states are more focused on producing a dialogue on long-term sustainability. This is seen in the proliferation of reports outlining best practices and options that enhance sustainability through increased information sharing, as well as a focus on technical issues rather than on the creation of any new legal regimes. To minimize some of the risks of non-sustainable space use, Weeden53 proposes a three-pillar technical approach to space sustainability: (1) debris mitigation; (2) debris removal; and (3) space traffic management. This is conjoined with an immediate need for data in support of conjunction assessment and collision avoidance. This emphasis on data sharing/collection includes enabling research into potential solutions to the problem of space debris, and enhancing transparency and cooperation among states. Weeden also suggests that this narrow approach to space sustainability serves both to educate space actors about the severity of the space debris problem and to provide stability to reduce the likelihood of conflict. A common approach to data also serves as verification for a potential code of conduct in space, setting the stage for future space governance models. These proposals follow the logic of sustainability for global security. While this logic is in line with the dominant conceptualization of benefit sharing and freedom of outer space, the position taken in this article is that it does not adequately speak to sustainability from the perspective of aspirant space states. To do so requires a significantly broader discussion and solutions aimed towards aligning space law and policy with the sustainable development paradigm, if understood as being an inclusive paradigm and not focused on the individualistic/self-interested nature of the current conception of sustainable development. A systemic, sustainable development law approach calls for a conscious engagement with the web of overlapping social, environmental, cultural, and legal frameworks, as well as cultural considerations, economic policies, expectations, players, and interests.54 Bearing in mind current U.S. space policy,55 such a broad overarching objective may not be achievable as part of the dialogue on the “Long Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities,” but U.S. policy regarding preservation of the space environment nevertheless offers insights because international initiatives congruent with it are likely to garner the most support. Schrogl56 proposed that sustainability is rendered to threats and risks to satellite operations. This approach acknowledges the intersection of multiple issue areas: environment, security, mobility, knowledge, resources, and energy. This intersection of issue areas is more akin to the wider discourse of sustainability development of and on the Earth, and prompts a discussion of value to emerging and aspirant space actors. Otherwise, the dominant conceptualization of space sustainability removes any focus upon providing for the needs of those not among the most advanced space nations. This problem is highlighted in Peter and Rathgeber’s definition of space sustainability: Sustainable space activities can be seen as activities (in space, from space, through space and towards space) that meet the needs of the present space actors without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs of performing space related operations safely.57 Peter and Rathgeber claim that the emergence of new institutional space actors, particularly from the south, is putting a greater pressure on the space environment and that the participation of the south in space sustainability efforts is unsatisfactory.58 Yet, the role of less-advanced nations in sustainability initiatives is more so on the receiving end in that advanced nations seek to engage newcomers to space during the early phase of the development of future directives and codes of conduct for sustainable space activities; that is, not really to seek their input, but to ensure compliance by the less-advanced nations.59 Their space activities are judged as either threats to or consistent with space sustainability, rather than as part of articulating the content of space sustainability.60 This indicates that, for national space programs of established space nations, a truly international focus on space sustainability is not a priority. It is interesting to note, at this juncture in the discussion, a fundamental provision proposed by a group of developing states during the development of the U.N. Space Benefits Declaration.61 (1) All States should pursue their activities in Outer Space with due regard to the need to preserve Outer Space, in such a way as not to hinder its continued utilization and exploration. (2) States should pay attention to all aspects related to the protection and preservation of the Outer Space environment, especially those potentially affecting the Earth’s environment. (3) States with relevant space capabilities and with programs for the utilization and exploration of outer space should share with developing countries on an equitable basis the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for the proper development of programs oriented to the more rational utilization and exploration of Outer Space.62 Paragraph 3 is fundamental and truly revealing when read in the light of the analysis of Schrogl.63 Schrogl claims that the declaration takes up the problem of space debris, which might endanger future space utilization to a significant extent. However, he also states that “the wish of the Developing countries to be informed about debris prevention measures voiced. . . is reasonable but actually needs no mentioning since these technological developments are discussions and documented publicly to the greatest extent.”64 2 Violation – a The Aff is a positive action – it creates a new concept for Space i.e. the treating of Space under the public trust doctrine b the aff creates a new property rights regime to manage private property claims 3 Standards – a Limits – making the topic bi-directional explodes predictability – it means that Aff’s can both increase non-exist property regimes in space AND decrease appropriation by private actors – makes the topic untenable. b Ground – wrecks Neg Generics – we can’t say appropriation good since the 1AC can create new views on Outer Space Property Rights that circumvent our Links since they can say “Public Trust” approach solves. Independently - the Plan is both Extra-T - since it establishes a new property rights regime AND Effects-T - since the creation of new property rights regimes ISNT INTRINSICALLY a reduction on Private Property in Space, it involves actions like creating a governance system AND redistribution/cooperation which is the I/L to their advantages - both of which are voters for Limits and Predictability – independently their plan text allows them to delink out of all core generics like space mining good or bad since you can just shift the way that private property rights works Fairness is a voting issue because debates a game and needs fair rules to evaluate it and educations a voting issue because it’s the only reason for why this activity is useful in the first place 4 TVA – just defend that space appropriation is bad. a Topicality is Drop the Debater – it’s a fundamental baseline for debate-ability. b Use Competing Interps – 1 Topicality is a yes/no question, you can’t be reasonably topical and 2 Reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention and a race to the bottom of questionable argumentation. c No RVI’s - 1 Forces the 1NC to go all-in on Theory which kills substance education, 2 Encourages Baiting since the 1AC will purposely be abusive, and 3 Illogical – you shouldn’t win for not being abusive.
1/8/22
ND - CP - Police
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Durnham RL | Judge: Lauren Woodwall CP Text: A just government should recognize the unconditional right of workers to strike with the exception of police officers.
Police strikes are the blue flu and allow for power grabbing through fearmongering and public pressure – that shores up police authority and legitimizes brutality Grim 20 Andrew Grim, 7-1-2020, Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is at work on a dissertation on anti-police brutality activism in post-WWII Newark. "Perspective," Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/01/what-is-blue-flu-how-has-it-increased-police-power/ww dl What is the “blue flu,” and why might it strike New York City police? This weekend, officers from the New York City Police Department are rumored to be planning a walkout to protest calls to defund the police. This builds on a similar tactic used by police in Atlanta less than a month ago. On June 16, Fulton County District Attorney, Paul L. Howard Jr. announced that Garrett Rolfe, the Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, would face charges of felony murder and aggravated assault. That night, scores of Atlanta Police Department officers caught the “blue flu,” calling out sick en masse to protest the charges against Rolfe. Such walkouts constitute, in effect, illegal strikes — laws in all 50 states prohibit police strikes. Yet, there is nothing new about the blue flu. It is a strategy long employed by police unions and rank-and-file officers during contract negotiations, disputes over reforms and, like in Atlanta, in response to disciplinary action against individual officers. The intent is to dramatize police disputes with municipal government and rally the citizenry to their side. But the result of such protests matter deeply as we consider police reform today. Historically, blue flu strikes have helped expand police power, ultimately limiting the ability of city governments to reform, constrain or conduct oversight over the police. They allow the police to leverage public fear of crime to extract concessions from municipalities. This became clear in Detroit more than 50 years ago. In June 1967, tensions arose between Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), which represented the city’s 3,300 patrol officers. The two were at odds primarily over police demands for a pay increase. Cavanagh showed no signs of caving to the DPOA’s demands and had, in fact, proposed to cut the police department’s budget. On June 15, the DPOA escalated the dispute with a walkout: 323 officers called in sick. The number grew over the next several days as the blue flu spread, reaching a height of 800 absences on June 17. In tandem with the walkout, the DPOA launched a fearmongering media campaign to win over the public. They took out ads in local newspapers warning Detroit residents, “How does it feel to be held up? Stick around and find out!” This campaign took place at a time of rising urban crime rates and uprisings, and only a month before the 1967 Detroit riot, making it especially potent. The DPOA understood this climate and used it to its advantage. With locals already afraid of crime and displeased at Cavanagh’s failure to rein it in, they would be more likely to demand the return of the police than to demand retribution against officers for an illegal strike. The DPOA’s strategy paid off. The walkout left Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin feeling “practically helpless.” “I couldn’t force them to work,” he later told The Washington Post. Rather than risk public ire by allowing the blue flu to continue, Cavanagh relented. Ultimately, the DPOA got the raises it sought, making Detroit officers the highest paid in the nation. This was far from the end of the fight between Cavanagh and the DPOA. In the ensuing months and years, they continued to tussle over wages, pensions, the budget, the integration of squad cars and the hiring of black officers. The threat of another blue flu loomed over all these disputes, helping the union to win many of them. And Detroit was not an outlier. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the blue flu was a ubiquitous and highly effective tactic in Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, Newark, New York and many other cities. In most cases, as author Kristian Williams writes, “When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government’s long term interest in diminishing the rank and file’s power.” But each time a city relented to this pressure, they ceded more and more power to police unions, which would turn to the strategy repeatedly to defend officers’ interests — particularly when it came to efforts to address systemic racism in police policies and practices. In 1970, black residents of Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood raised an outcry over the “hostile sadistic treatment” they experienced at the hands of white police officers. They lobbied Mayor Peter F. Flaherty to assign more black officers to their neighborhood. The mayor agreed, transferring several white officers out of the North Side and replacing them with black officers. While residents cheered this decision, white officers and the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented them, were furious. They slammed the transfer as “discrimination” against whites. About 425 of the Pittsburgh Police Department’s 1,600 police officers called out sick in protest. Notably, black police officers broke with their white colleagues and refused to join the walkout. They praised the transfer as a “long overdue action” and viewed the walkout as a betrayal of officers’ oath to protect the public. Nonetheless, the tactic paid off. After several days, Flaherty caved to the “open revolt” of white officers, agreeing to halt the transfers and instead submit the dispute to binding arbitration between the city and the police union. Black officers, though, continued to speak out against their union’s support of racist practices, and many of them later resigned from the union in protest. Similar scenarios played out in Detroit, Chicago and other cities in the 1960s and ’70s, as white officers continually staged walkouts to preserve the segregated status quo in their departments. These blue flu strikes amounted to an authoritarian power grab by police officers bent on avoiding oversight, rejecting reforms and shoring up their own authority. In the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit walkout, a police commissioner’s aide strongly criticized the police union’s strong-arm tactics, saying “it smacks of a police state.” The clash left one newspaper editor wondering, “Who’s the Boss of the Detroit Police?” But in the “law and order” climate of the late 1960s, such criticism did not resonate enough to stir a groundswell of public opinion against the blue flu. And police unions dismissed critics by arguing that officers had “no alternative” but to engage in walkouts to get city officials to make concessions. Crucially, the very effectiveness of the blue flu may be premised on a myth. While police unions use public fear of crime skyrocketing without police on duty, in many cases, the absence of police did not lead to a rise in crime. In New York City in 1971, for example, 20,000 officers called out sick for five days over a pay dispute without any apparent increase in crime. The most striking aspect of the walkout, as one observer noted, “might be just how unimportant it seemed.” Today, municipalities are under immense pressure from activists who have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of black men and women. Some have already responded by enacting new policies and cutting police budgets. As it continues, more blue flus are likely to follow as officers seek to wrest back control of the public debate on policing and reassert their independence. These strikes strengthen unions that contribute to increased violence, and protection of misconduct Serwer 6/24 Serwer, Adam. “Bust the Police Unions.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 24 June 2021, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/bust-the-police-unions/619006/ recut ww dl Police unions found that they had new leverage at the bargaining table. In contract negotiations with cities, they sought not merely higher pay or better benefits, but protections for officers accused of misconduct. At this, they proved remarkably successful. Reviewing 82 active police-union contracts in major American cities, a 2017 Reuters investigation found that a majority “call for departments to erase disciplinary records, some after just six months.” Many contracts allow officers to access investigative information about complaints or charges against them before being interrogated, so they can get their stories straight. Some require the officer’s approval before making information regarding misconduct public; others set time limits on when citizens can file complaints. A 2017 Washington Post investigation found that since 2006, of the 1,881 officers fired for misconduct at the nation’s largest departments, 451 had been reinstated because of requirements in union contracts. For many police unions, enacting and enforcing barriers to accountability became a primary concern. In 2014, in San Antonio, the local police union was willing to accept caps on pay and benefits as long as the then–city manager abandoned her efforts to, among other reforms, prevent police from erasing past misconduct records. The damage that these types of provisions have done is hard to overstate. In one recent study, the economist Rob Gillezeau of the University of Victoria found that after departments unionized, there was a “substantial increase” in police killings of civilians. Neither crime rates nor the safety of officers themselves was affected. The provisions do more than simply protect bad actors. They cultivate an unhealthy and secretive culture within police departments, strengthening a phenomenon known as the code of silence. In a 2000 survey of police officers by the National Institute of Justice, only 39 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “Police officers always report serious criminal violations involving abuse of authority by fellow officers.” That leads to endless amounts of racist violence and the bolstering of the prison industrial complex. Chaney and Ray 13, Cassandra (Has a PhD and is a professor at LSU. Also has a strong focus in the structure of Black families) , and Ray V. Robertson (Also has a PhD and is a criminal justice professor at LSU). "Racism and police brutality in America." Journal of African American Studies 17.4 (2013): 480-505. SMdo I really need a card for this Racism and Discrimination According to Marger (2012), “racism is an ideology, or belief system, designed to justify and rationalize racial and ethnic inequality” (p. 25) and “discrimination, most basically, is behavior aimed at denying members of particular ethnic groups’ equal access to societal rewards” (p. 57). Defining both of these concepts from the onset is important for they provide the lens through which our focus on the racist and discriminatory practices of law enforcement can occur. Since the time that Africans African Americans were forcibly brought to America, they have been the victims of racist and discriminatory practices that have been spurred and/or substantiated by those who create and enforce the law. For example, The Watts Riots of 1965, the widespread assaults against Blacks in Harlem during the 1920s (King 2011), law enforcement violence against Black women (i.e., Malaika Brooks, Jaisha Akins, Frankie Perkins, Dr. Mae Jemison, Linda Billups, Clementine Applewhite) and other ethnic women of color (Ritchie 2006), the beating of Rodney King, and the deaths of Amadou Diallo in the 1990s and Trayvon Martin more recently are just a few public examples of the historical and contemporaneous ways in which Blacks in America have been assaulted by members of the police system (King 2011; Loyd 2012; Murch 2012; Rafail et al. 2012). In Punishing Race (2011), law professor Michael Tonry’s research findings point to the fact that Whites tend to excuse police brutality against Blacks because of the racial animus that they hold against Blacks. Thus, to Whites, Blacks are viewed as deserving of harsh treatment in the criminal justice system (Peffley and Hurwitz 2013). At first glance, such an assertion may seem to be unfathomable, buy that there is an extensive body of literature which suggests that Black males are viewed as the “prototypical criminal,” and this notion is buttressed in the media, by the general public, and via disparate sentencing outcomes (Blair et al. 2004; Eberhardt et al. 2006; Gabiddon 2010; Maddox and Gray 2004; Oliver and Fonash 2002; Staples 2011). For instance, Blair et al. (2004) revealed that Black males with more Afrocentric features (e.g., dark skin, broad noses, full lips) may receive longer sentences than Blacks with less Afrocentric features, i.e., lighter skin and straighter hair (Eberhardt et al. 2006). Shaun Gabiddon in Criminological Theories on Race and Crime (2010) discussed the concept of “Negrophobia” which was more extensively examined by Armour (1997). Negrophobia can be surmised as an irrational of Blacks, which includes a fear of being victimized by Black, that can result in Whites shooting or harming an AfricanAmerican based on criminal/racial stereotypes (Armour 1997). The aforementioned racialized stereotypical assumptions can be deleterious because they can be used by Whites to justify shooting a Black person on the slightest of pretense (Gabiddon 2010). Finally, African-American males represent a group that has been much maligned in the larger society (Tonry 2011). Further, as victims of the burgeoning prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and enduring racism, the barriers to truly independent Black male agency are ubiquitous and firmly entrenched (Alexander 2010; Chaney 2009; Baker 1996; Blackmon 2008; Dottolo and Stewart 2008; Karenga 2010; Martin et al. 2001; Smith and Hattery 2009). Thus, racism and discrimination heightens the psychological distress experienced by Blacks (Robertson 2011; Pieterse et al. 2012), as well as their decreased mortality in the USA (Muennig and Murphy 2011). Police Brutality Against Black Males According to Walker (2011), police brutality is defined as “the use of excessive physical force or verbal assault and psychological intimidation” (p. 579). Although one recent study suggests that the NYPD has become better behaved due to greater race and gender diversity (Kane and White 2009), Blacks are more likely to be the victims of police brutality. A growing body of scholarly research related to police brutality has revealed that Blacks are more likely than Whites to make complaints regarding police brutality (Smith and Holmes 2003), to be accosted while operating driving a motorized vehicle (“Driving While Black”), and to underreport how often they are stopped due to higher social desirability factors (TomaskovicDevey et al. 2006). Interestingly, data obtained from the General Social Survey (GSS), a representative sample conducted biennially by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for the years 1994 through 2004, provide further proof regarding the acceptance of force against Blacks. In particular, the GSS found Whites to be significantly (29.5 ) more accepting of police use of force when a citizen was attempting to escape custody than Blacks when analyzed using the chi-squared statistical test (p The average Southern policeman is a promoted poor White with a legal sanction to use a weapon. His social heritage has taught him to despise the Negroes, and he has had little education which could have changed him….The result is that probably no group of Whites in America have a lower opinion of the Negro people and are more fixed in their views than Southern policeman. (Myrdal 1944, pp. 540–541) Myrdal (1944) was writing on results from a massive study that he undertook in the late 1930s. He was writing at a time that even the most conservative among us would have to admit was not a colorblind society (if one even believes in such things). But current research does corroborate his observations that less educated police officers tend to be the most aggressive and have the most formal complaints filed against them when compared to their more educated counterparts (Hassell and Archbold 2010; Jefferis et al. 2011). Tonry (2011) delineates some interesting findings from the 2001 Race, Crime, and Public Opinion Survey that can be applied to understanding why the larger society tolerates police misconduct when it comes to Black males. The survey, which involved approximately 978 non-Hispanic Whites and 1,010 Blacks, revealed a divergence in attitudes between Blacks and Whites concerning the criminal justice system (Tonry 2011). For instance, 38 of Whites and 89 of Blacks viewed the criminal justice system as biased against Blacks (Tonry 2011). Additionally, 8 of Blacks and 56 of Whites saw the criminal justice system as treating Blacks fairly (Tonry 2011). Perhaps most revealing when it comes to facilitating an environment ripe for police brutality against Black males, 68 of Whites and only 18 of Whites expressed confidence in law enforcement (Tonry 2011). Is a society wherein the dominant group overwhelming approves of police performance willing to do anything substantive to curtail police brutality against Black males? Police brutality is not a new phenomenon. The Department of Justice (DOJ) office of Civil Rights (OCR) has investigated more than a dozen police departments in major cities across the USA on allegations of either racial discrimination or police brutality (Gabbidon and Greene 2013). To make the aforementioned even more clear, according to Gabbidon and Greene (2013), “In 2010, the OCR was investigating 17 police departments across the country and monitoring five settlements regarding four police agencies” (pp. 119–120). Plant and Peruche (2005) provide some useful information into why police officers view Black males as potential perpetrators and could lead to acts of brutality. In their research, the authors suggest that since Black people in general, and Black males in particular, are caricatured as aggressive and criminal, police are more likely to view Black men as a threat which justifies the disproportionate use of deadly force. Therefore, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that police officers’ decisions to act aggressively may, to some extent, be influenced by race (Jefferis et al. 2011). The media’s portrayals of Black men are often less than sanguine. Bryson’s (1998) work in this area provides empirical evidence that the mass media that has been instrumental in portraying Black men as studs, super detectives, or imitation White men and has a general negative effect on how these men are regarded by others. Such characterizations can be so visceral in nature that “prototypes” of criminal suspects are more likely to be African-American (Oliver et al. 2004). Not surprisingly, the more Afrocentric the African-American’s facial features, the more prone he or she is expected to be deviant (Eberhardt et al. 2006). Interestingly, it is probable that less than flattering depictions of Black males on television and in news stories are activating pre-existing stereotypes possessed by Whites as opposed to facilitating their creation. According to Oliver et al. (2004), “it is important to keep in mind that media consumption is an active process, with viewers’ existing attitudes and beliefs playing a larger role in how images are attended to, interpreted, and remembered” (p. 89). Moreover, it is reductionist to presuppose that individual is powerless in constructing a palatable version of reality and is solely under the control of the media and exercises no agency. Lastly, Peffley and Hurwitz (2013) describe what can be perceived as one of the more deleterious results of negative media caricatures of Black males. More specifically, the authors posit that most Whites believe that Blacks are disproportionately inclined to engage in criminal behavior and are the deserving on harsh treatment by the criminal justice system. On the other hand, such an observation is curious because most urban areas are moderate to highly segregated residentially which would preclude the frequent and significant interaction needed to make such scathing indictments (Bonilla-Silva 2009). Consequently, the aforementioned racial animus has the effect of increased White support for capital punishment if questions regarding its legitimacy around if capital punishment is too frequently applied to Blacks (Peffley and Hurwitz 2013; Tonry 2011). Ultimately, erroneous (negative) portrayals of crime and community, community race and class identities, and concerns over neighborhood change all contribute to place-specific framing of “the crime problem.” These frames, in turn, shape both intergroup dynamics and support for criminal justice policy (Leverentz 2012).
11/20/21
ND -- DA -- PTX
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep PS | Judge: Derek Ying Reconciliation passes now – it’s in the senate, but Manchin and Sinema are tentative about the legislation that passed the House. Snell 11/19 Kelsey, Congressional correspondent for NPR, “The House passes a $2 trillion spending bill, but braces for changes in the Senate”, 11-19-2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/19/1056833510/the-house-passes-a-2-trillion-spending-bill-but-braces-for-changes-in-the-senate//pranav The House voted on near-party lines Friday morning to approve a roughly $2 trillion social and climate spending package, ending months of squabbles among Democrats over the details of the far-reaching measure. The vote was 220-213, with one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, joining all Republicans in opposition. The legislation is meant to fulfill many of President Biden's promises during the 2020 campaign, including plans to address climate change and provide a stronger federal safety net for families and low-income workers. "We have the Built Back Better bill that is historic, transformative and larger than anything we have ever done before," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on the House floor. "If you're a parent, a senior, a child, a worker, if you are an American ... this bill's for you and it is better." House Democrats overcame internal divisions over the cost and scope of the spending package, but the fight will continue as the bill heads to the Senate for revisions. The vote was delayed after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., spoke all through the night — for more than eight hours. His speech decried Democrats' spending plans, but also veered to subjects including China and border security. "Never in American history has so much been spent at one time," he said. "Never in American history will so many taxes be raised and so much borrowing be needed to pay for all this reckless spending." Biden praised House passage of the bill, noting it was the second time in two weeks that the chamber moved two "consequential" pieces of his legislative agenda, referencing the new infrastructure law. He described the vote as a "giant step forward in carrying out my economic plan to create jobs, reduce costs, make our country more competitive, and give working people and the middle class a fighting chance." What's in the measure The legislation includes: $550 billion to address climate change through incentives and tax breaks; funding to extend the expanded, monthly child tax credit for one year; housing assistance, including $150 billion in affordable housing expenditures; expansions to Medicaid and further assistance to reduce the cost of health care premiums for plans purchased under the Affordable Care Act; four weeks of paid family and medical leave; funding for universal pre-K for roughly 6 million 3- and 4-year-olds; a provision to allow Medicare Parts B and D to negotiate prices directly with drug manufacturers on certain drugs and cap out-of-pocket spending for seniors at $2,000 per year; a $35 cap on monthly insulin expenses. The spending is mostly offset with taxes on the wealthy and corporations, including: a 5 surtax on taxpayers with personal income above $10 million, and an additional 3 added on income above $25 million; a 15 minimum tax on corporate profits of large corporations that report more than $1 billion in profits; a 1 tax on stock buybacks; a 50 minimum tax on foreign profits of U.S. corporations. House Democrats unite after months of fighting Moderate Democrats ultimately voted for the legislation after concerns that estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office would show the measure to be more costly than leaders have projected. Ultimately, the CBO found the bill would cost the federal government $367 billion over the next decade, "not counting any additional revenue that may be generated by additional funding for tax enforcement." Many Democrats, including the White House, argue that when that is taken into account, the measure would pay for itself. Members of the fiscally moderate New Democrat Coalition endorsed the legislation ahead of the final cost estimates. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., said the official estimates don't take into account extra revenue from increased tax enforcement — or the broader economic benefits of the legislation. "When discussing the importance of the bill, we also have to talk about the costs that would be incurred if we don't pass this bill," Schneider said on a call with reporters. "The cost of inaction is simply too high, and it can only be headed off if we act now." For progressive Democrats, the vote fulfills a promise from Biden and House leaders not to neglect policies that have energized the left wing of their party. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus set aside major demands throughout the negotiations, including more spending and plans for aggressive changes to the nation's health care system, in order to reach an agreement that satisfied the full caucus. Senate hurdles could drag on for weeks The House vote is just the latest step in a lengthy process that will almost certainly involve further changes to the bill. Centrist Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have each expressed concerns about the House version of the legislation. Manchin is particularly opposed to a provision that would provide four weeks of paid family and medical leave for most workers. Sinema's objections are less clear but Democrats need both lawmakers on board in order for the legislation to pass. It is unclear how long it would take for senators to work out their disagreements and finalize the legislation. Once that work is done, the Senate would have to start a lengthy process to vote on the bill using the budget reconciliation process that would allow the bill to be passed in the Senate with 50 votes, rather than the 60 votes needed for most legislation. Pelosi told reporters on Thursday that Senate staff have already completed a necessary step to ensure the legislation meets the basic requirements to avoid a Republican filibuster. But the process still has several steps, including a series of unlimited amendment votes known as a vote-a-rama. Biden PC is key to getting democratic skeptics on board, but it’s tentative Cochrane and Weisman 11/05 Emily Cochrane - correspondent based in Washington. She has covered Congress since late 2018, focusing on the annual debate over government funding and economic legislation, ranging from emergency pandemic relief to infrastructure, Jonathan Weisman - congressional correspondent, veteran Washington journalist and author of the novel “No. 4 Imperial Lane” and the nonfiction book “
Semitism
: Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” His career in journalism stretches back 30 years, “Live Updates: House Democrats Push Toward Votes on Biden’s Agenda”, 11-05-2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/05/us/biden-spending-infrastructure-bill//pranav At the White House, Mr. Biden called on lawmakers to pass the legislation. “I’m asking every House member, member of the House of Representatives, to vote yes on both these bills right now,” the president said. Spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, Democrats labored to overcome concerns among moderates about the cost and details of a rapidly evolving, $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate plan and push it through over unified Republican opposition. They also hoped to clear a Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — the largest investment in the nation’s aging public works in a decade — for Mr. Biden’s signature. Top Democratic officials said they were confident they could complete both measures by day’s end, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her team continued to haggle with holdouts. Several moderates were pushing for more information about the cost of the sprawling plan, including a nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper responsible for calculating the fiscal impact of the 2,135-page legislation. “I think everyone’s waiting for the C.B.O. to do their job,” said Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, speaking to reporters on Friday morning as he left Ms. Pelosi’s office, where White House officials were also meeting on next steps. But Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, said the cost estimate would not be ready by the end of the day, and a person familiar with the discussions said a score from the budget office was weeks away from completion. “We’re working on it,” Mr. Hoyer said. Ms. Pelosi spent much of the day on Thursday buttonholing lawmakers on the House floor to try to corral support for the social policy bill, which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives. Mr. Biden and members of his cabinet worked the phones to win over Democratic skeptics. With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could afford to lose as few as three votes from their side. As Democrats labored to unite their members behind the bill, Republicans sought to wreak procedural havoc on the House floor, forcing a vote to adjourn the chamber that leaders held open for hours to buy time for their negotiations. While the Senate approved the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in August, the measure has stalled as progressives have repeatedly refused to supply their votes for it until there is agreement on the other bill. Business lobbying backlash ensures Sinema flips – empirics prove she doesn’t like similar bills Duda ’21 Jeremy, Prior to joining the Arizona Mirror, he worked at the Arizona Capitol Times, where he spent eight years covering the Governor's Office and two years as editor of the Yellow Sheet Report, “Business groups urge Kelly, Sinema to oppose pro-union PRO Act”, 08-30-2021, https://www.azmirror.com/2021/08/30/business-groups-urge-kelly-sinema-to-oppose-pro-union-pro-act///pranav Business groups publicly called on Democratic U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose a sweeping piece of pro-organized labor legislation that would wipe out Arizona’s “right-to-work” law that prohibits mandatory union membership. At a press conference at the office of the Arizona chapter of the Associated General Contractors near the state Capitol on Monday, leaders of several business groups warned that the Protecting the Right to Organize Act — or PRO Act, as it’s more commonly known — would undermine Arizona’s recovery from the economic slump it faced last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, undermine the “gig economy,” jeopardize secret ballots in union organization votes, give unions access to confidential employee information and strip Arizonans of their right not to join a union. The bill would allow unions to override right-to-work laws and collect union dues from non-members who still benefit from collective bargaining. It would also prohibit company-sponsored meetings to urge employees against unionizing, define most independent contractors as employees, protect employees who are attempting to unionize from being fired and allow unions to engage in secondary strikes in support of other striking workers, among other provisions. “We want to thank and tell Senator Sinema and Senator Kelly that we appreciate them for not signing on as co-sponsors to the PRO Act, because if they were to change their opinions, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will put this up for a vote,” said Danny Seiden, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Kelly and Sinema are two of only three Senate Democrats, along with Virginia’s Mark Warner, who haven’t co-sponsored the bill or thrown their public support behind it. Kelly last month told the Huffington Post that he opposes the independent contractor provision, but that he supports the “overall goals” of the legislation. Sinema is widely known as a holdout on the Democratic side and hasn’t supported the PRO Act, but spokesman Pablo Sierra-Carmona indicated that she hasn’t made up her mind, and that she won’t do so unless and until it comes up for a vote in the Senate. They lash out against Reconciliation – it will includes similar provisions FURCHTGOTT-ROTH 10/09 Diana, former acting assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University, “Democrats can't pass the PRO Act, so it's buried in the reconciliation bill”, 10-09-2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/575992-dems-cant-pass-the-pro-act-so-its-buried-in-the-reconciliation-bill//pranav Union membership has been declining for decades as workers find better uses than union dues for their hard-earned dollars. But union bosses and their supporters are trying to change the law to force hard-working Americans into unions. How? Through the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), a bill that would expand the power of union leaders at the expense of workers. After sailing through the House, the PRO Act now appears stalled in the Senate and Democrats are trying to slip some PRO Act provisions into a massive reconciliation bill. American workers are wise to turn down union membership. Union pension plans are in trouble. In 2020, the Labor Department listed 121 union plans in critical status, defined as less than 65 percent funded, and 61 in endangered status, with less than 80 percent funded. Unions desperately need new workers to join, because they pay contributions for many years without withdrawing money. Most recently, Amazon workers in Alabama resoundingly rejected efforts by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store International Union to organize their plant, with more than 70 percent of workers voting against the union. The union’s plan was in critical status between 2015 and 2019, and the Labor Department informed the plan’s administrators that it had to be reorganized by reducing benefits and increasing contributions. Union leaders and their allies on Capitol Hill believe the way to increase membership after decades of decline is to pass elements of the PRO Act through reconciliation. Unlike the PRO Act, which needs 60 votes in the Senate to enable it to move to President Biden’s desk for signature, the reconciliation bill, which deals with taxes and spending, needs only a simple majority. So via a massive reconciliation bill, congressional Democrats are trying to move some labor union provisions of the PRO Act by arguing they are actually revenue raisers. Reconciliation is k2 stopping existential climate change – warming is incremental and every change in temperature is vital Higgins 8/16 Trevor, Senior Director, Domestic Climate and Energy, “Budget Reconciliation Is the Key to Stopping Climate Change”, 08-16-2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2021/08/16/502681/budget-reconciliation-key-stopping-climate-change///pranav The United States is suffering acutely from the chaotic changes in climate that scientists now directly attribute to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. The drought, fires, extreme heat, and floods that have already killed hundreds this summer across the continent and around the world are a tragedy—and a warning of worsening instability yet to come. However, this week, the Senate initiated an extraordinary legislative response that would set the world on a different path. Enacting the full scope of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda would put the American economy to work leading a global transition to clean energy and stabilizing the climate. A look at what’s coming next through the budget reconciliation process reveals a ray of hope that is easy to miss amid the fitful negotiations of recent months: At long last, Congress is on the verge of major legislation that would build a more equitable, just, and inclusive clean energy economy. This is our shot to stop climate change. Building a clean energy future must start now Until the global economy stops polluting the air and instead starts to draw down the emissions of years past, the world will continue to heat up, blundering past perilous tipping points that threaten irreversible and catastrophic consequences. Stemming the extent of warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius rather 2 degrees or worse will reduce the risk of crossing such tipping points or otherwise exceeding the adaptive capacity of human society. Every degree matters. Stabilizing global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius starts with cutting annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to half of peak levels by 2030. This isn’t about temporary offsets or incremental gains in efficiency—it’s about the rapid adoption of scalable solutions that will work throughout the world to eliminate global net emissions by 2050 and sustain net-negative emissions thereafter. Building this better future will tackle climate change, deliver on environmental justice, and create good jobs. It will give us a shot to stop the planet from continuously warming. It will alleviate the concentrated burdens of fossil fuel pollution, which are concentrated in systemically disadvantaged, often majority Black and brown communities. It will empower American workers to compete in the global clean energy economy of the 21st century. There is no time to lose in the work of building a clean energy future.
11/21/21
ND -- T -- Unconditional
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep PS | Judge: Derek Ying Interpretation: Unconditional means not conditional or limited. – to clarify, the affirmative must defend the right of all workers to strike at any time. Merriam Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unconditional)//ww pbj not conditional or limited Violation: they say with the exception of police officers Standards: 1 Limits – allows an aff infinite permutations of arbitrary conditions like no striking for medical workers, not if it causes harm, or only for a certain duration. Explosion of aff ground makes neg prep burden impossible, either killing neg ground or forcing the neg to read generics that barely link, always letting aff win. Force the 1AR to read a definition card with a clear list of when its okay to put conditions and what they are – otherwise, its arbitrary and you should vote neg since they can’t put a clear limit on the topic. Our interp solves – it establishes a clear bright-line for that gives the neg a chance to predict and prepare for every aff ahead of time. 2 Precision – not defending the text of the resolution justifies the affirmative doing away with random words in the resolution which a means they’re not within the topic which is a voter for jurisdiction since you can only vote affirmative on the resolution and this debate never should have happened, b they’re unpredictable and impossible to engage in so we always lose 3 Ground – kills neg ground since they can pre-empt all neg strategy which makes all condition PICs not competitive and kills all links to the DA since they’ll just condition it like the Health Workers DA, destroys engagement and advocacy skills
Drop the Debater – 1 sets a precedent that debaters wont be abusive 2 DTA is the same since you drop the aff
Voters: 1 Fairness – constitutive to the judge to decide the better debater, only fairness is in your jurisdiction because it skews decision making 2 Education – the only portable education from debate that we care about
Competing Interps: 1 reasonability on t is incoherent: you’re either topical or you’re not – it’s impossible to be 77 topical, links to all limits offense 2 functionally the same as reasonability – we debate over a specified briteline which is a counter interp 3 judge intervention – judge has to intervene on what’s reasonable, creates a race to the bottom where debaters exploit judge tolerance for questionable argumentation.
No RVIs 1 illogical for you to get offense just for being fair – it’s the 1ac’s burden 2 baiting - rvi’s incentivize debaters to read abusive positions to win off theory 3 discourages checking abuse since debaters will be afraid to lose on theory
11/21/21
SO - DA - FDI
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Solebury LN | Judge: FDI is expected to recover but is tentative – uncertainties from pandemic and economic recovery UNCTAD 7/21, 6-21-2021, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development "Global foreign direct investment set to partially recover in 2021 but uncertainty remains," UNCTAD, https://unctad.org/news/global-foreign-direct-investment-set-partially-recover-2021-uncertainty-remains//anop Looking ahead, global FDI flows are expected to bottom out in 2021 and recover some lost ground with an increase of 10 to 15 (Figure 2). “This would still leave FDI some 25 below the 2019 level. Current forecasts show a further increase in 2022 which, at the upper bound of projections, bring FDI back to the 2019 level,” said UNCTAD’s director of investment and enterprise, James Zhan. Figure 2 - Foreign direct investment outflows, top 20 home economies, 2017 and 2018 (Billions of dollars) Figure 2 - Foreign direct investment outflows Source: UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2021. Prospects are highly uncertain and will depend on, among other factors, the pace of economic recovery and the possibility of pandemic relapses, the potential impact of recovery spending packages on FDI, and policy pressures. The relatively modest recovery in global FDI projected for 2021 reflects lingering uncertainty about access to vaccines, the emergence of virus mutations and the reopening of economic sectors. “Increased expenditures on both fixed assets and intangibles will not translate directly into a rapid FDI rebound, as confirmed by the sharp contrast between rosy forecasts for capex and still-depressed greenfield project announcements,” Mr. Zhan said. The FDI recovery will be uneven. Developed economies are expected to drive global growth in FDI, both because of strong cross-border mergers and acquisitions (MandA) activity and large-scale public investment support. FDI inflows to Asia will remain resilient as the region has stood out as an attractive destination for international investment throughout the pandemic. A substantial recovery of FDI to Africa and to Latin America and the Caribbean is unlikely in the near term. The plan decreases foreign direct investment from negative signals – turns case Kogan 11, Lawrence A Lawrence A. Kogan is founder and Managing Attorney of The Kogan Law Group, P.C., a New York City–based multidisciplinary professional services firm specialized in identifying and addressing emerging regulatory, policy and trade risks posed to multinational company assets, operations and supply-chains. (2011), "Commercial High Technology Innovations Face Uncertain Future Amid Emerging “BRICS” Compulsory Licensing and IT Interoperability Frameworks" San Diego International, https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091andcontext=ilj//anop Similarly, the enactment of national laws and regulations promoting the availability and flexible use by governments of a compulsory licensing mechanism as an exception or limitation to the patent right to secure foreign companies’ patented high technologies at less than their fair market value can increase economic risks and result in acts of regulatory arbitrage and protectionist opportunism by home country as well as foreign companies operating pursuant to divergent business models. The security of property rights has been placed into question where compulsory licenses have been issued or threatened against foreign patented high technologies. Studies have shown that a corresponding reduction in the flow of knowledge-based foreign direct investment (FDI) will follow.81 82 The practice of compulsory licensing comes with a price: the temporary or permanent deprivation of some part of a patent owner’s right to exclude disrupts the investment-backed expectation of the property right. In the future, pharmaceutical companies and other industries dependent upon intellectual property rights may mistrust licensing nations’ promises to protect and enforce patent rights, not to mention copyrights, and trademarks. As a result, industries that find the security of property rights lacking in a given nation may avoid engaging in foreign direct investment with that nation. Because foreign direct investment (FDI) is a major potential source of economic growth for recipient nations, the loss of such investment resources arising from compulsory licensing practices could force developing nations to pay a particularly heavy cost for providing needed medicines for its citizens.83 While government patent policy by itself is an incomplete measurement of a country’s market and investment friendliness, it is generally agreed that such legal protections reflect a country’s interest in fostering business and technology development. Through effective deterrence of imitation, “patents reduce the costs of enforcing contracts and at the same time increase the expected returns on FDI and licensing, which will have a positive effect on technology transfer. Patent rights encourage technology transfer by providing owners with legal certainty.”84 Consequently, the passage of IP laws that do not include a provision for compulsory licensing, for example, may favorably signal to foreign investors that a government is willing to allow strategic business decisions without undue interference and ensure more transparent and unbiased application of commercial laws with the prospect of reduced government corruption.85 “There is little doubt that developing countries who issue compulsory licenses also face additional risks in attracting global capital. Particularly, for MDC’s middle developing countries, a compulsory license can trigger the loss of significant FDI.”86 If patent ownership rights indicate to prospective investors a firm’s proper regard for its intellectual property security, then surely a company’s willingness to engage in a foreign market where the government has decided to adopt or enforce anti-patent measures will convey negative signals to the investment community about the company, the quality of its management, and the strength and economic value of its patents and associated projected revenue streams. Just as the sale of a product through a low-status selling channel of a product can signal a diminution in brand status to the consumer, exposure of a patent to an uncertain legal environment can signal that the firm may not consider the patent to be as valuable as others believe. Even the threat of an ‘anti-patent’ such as a compulsory license can impair firm equity, thereby reducing the attractiveness of a country as an investment partner. Any firm calculating its returns from FDI will have to account for the possibility of these signaling-based losses.87 FDI is key to long term economic stability – it dictates future investments and industries Susic et al 17 I Susic1 , M Stojanovic-Trivanovic2 and M Susic3 1University of Business Studies, Jovan Ducic Street, No 23A, 78000 Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2 Independent University Banjaluka, Veljka Mladjenovica Street No 12E, 78000 Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina 3Enterprise Fructa Trade – Kort, Marije Bursac Street No 70, 74400 Derventa, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2017 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 200 012019. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/200/1/012019/pdf//anop Foreign direct investments (FDI) represent such a form of investment in which foreign investor keeps the ownership right, provides the control and the management of the firm in which they invested the funds, in order to achieve long-term interests. These investments are the most important instrument of foreign capital inflow because they represent a direct inflow from abroad, i.e. direct inflow of the capital in the economic system of the host country. Foreign direct investment, as a form of international capital mobility, represents an important contributor to more efficient activities in the economy. They provide faster exit to the international market and as the aftermath are ensuring improved the living standard of the society. Evaluation of investment efficiency is the basis for making investment decisions from one country to another, which will consequently lead to improvement of the economy. Foreign investments are a key development factor in the modern economy, and jointly with the trade, represent the most important leverage of an enterprise, organization of production, supplying goods and services on a global scale. FDI are supporting the companies in organizing production on a global scale, providing an efficient supply of raw materials, energy, labor as the input, and are facilitating the placement of products and services as the output in the most important markets in a profitable way. On the basis of such activities, the companies can on optimal way use its advantages in technology, expertise, and economies of scale. Developing countries having high state debt and unfavorable economic situation show huge interest in gaining as higher foreign investments as possible. It has been especially important after bank loans and various financial aid ceased to arrive in some countries. Countries in transition, aiming to integrate into the world economic system, can overcome negative economic tendencies with the help of international capital inflow. Developed countries, faced with a financial crisis, have been also interested in an increased inflow of foreign capital, since the foreign investments are the most important element of development strategies in general. With foreign direct investment is not coming just the capital from one country to another, but also the investment package containing new technologies, managerial skills and new markets. In addition, bearing higher risks, FDIs are significantly increasing the opportunities for making profits. Foreign direct investments are autonomous transactions of long-term capital movements, motivated by economic interests, with the profit at the first place.\ Continued recession causes war – stats support transition wars, resource conflicts, terrorism, and diversionary wars – other authors don’t base their analysis on global studies Royal ’10 Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises”, 2010, Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215PM Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent slates. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level. Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (19) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often-bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (sec also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately. Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level. Copeland's (1996. 2000) theory of trade expectations suggests that 'future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, likelihood for conflict increases. as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession lends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg and I less. 2002. p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg. Hess. and Wccrapana. 2004). which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. "Diversionary theory' suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DcRoucn (1995), and Blomberg. Mess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DcRoucn (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economic-security debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of external conflict, such as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created by economic crises. As such, the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views.
9/5/21
SO - DA - Hege
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 5 | Opponent: Bergen County AK | Judge: Danielle Dorsch America’s maintaining hegemony and countering China’s rise through “counter-punching” strategies, but sustained innovation and private sector investment are key – reject “US declining now” args – the US has historically punched over its weight whenever it’s challenged Harr 8/3 Scott, Army Special Forces Officer and Ph.D. Candidate at the Helms School of Government, Liberty University. He holds an undergraduate degree in Arabic Language Studies from West Point and a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Affairs from Liberty University. A trained Arabic and Farsi speaker with over four years of cumulative deployment time in the Middle East, his work has been featured in The Diplomat, RealClearDefense, The Strategy Bridge, Modern War Institute, Military Review, The National Interest, and Joint Force Quarterly among other national security-focused venues, “By Avoiding Arms Races, America Can Counter China’s Rise”, 08-03-2021, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/avoiding-arms-races-america-can-counter-chinaE28099s-rise-191094//pranav Rather than falling into the power projection arms race “trap“ that China desires, U.S. competitive strategies addressing China should adopt a framework based on “counter-punching.” As its name suggests, the counterpunch incorporates both defensive (“counter”) and offensive (“punch”) elements. Additionally, it is an adaptive maneuver that requires disciplined understanding and controlled strength that, effectively employed, offers better alternatives towards protecting and preserving U.S. power in the face of challenges from China. The defensive element of an American counterpunch towards China involves adopting military restraint and a revamped examination of deterrence. Classic deterrence strategy involves presenting the credible threat of force to adversaries to create undesirable risks for would-be aggressors. The key to deterrence, as Kenneth Waltz famously argued, is determining how much deterrence is “enough” to dissuade aggressors. That is, deterrence does not necessarily require the presentation of power projection assets capable of completely destroying an adversary, but only enough assets to make the risks of aggressive behavior not worth the projected losses involved. Seen in this light, a strategy that diligently examines how much deterrence is “enough” potentially eliminates the impulse to sustain the ever-increasing stakes in costly arms races while, critically, offering a chance to reinvest excess “deterrence” resources into areas that will preserve and protect U.S. power. The national resources freed up by foregoing an arms race with China represent the potent offensive element of the counterpunch. These resources can be reinvested in other areas such as the private sector which, besides being the hallmark of American prosperity and thus the critical reason for protecting American power in the first place, has historically played a decisive role in the United States’ successful war efforts. Buoyed by a strong and vibrant private sector where the United States remains a desirable global hub for innovation and technology, the needed capabilities for war (or intense competition) can be adaptively produced and rapidly called forward to tip the competitive (or combative) scales towards victory when required. Of course, the “punch” loses its effectiveness without clearly articulated triggers for employment. If China seeks to induce the United States into an uncontrolled arms race, then the current U.S. obsession with China—which seems to interpret every Chinese action in any sphere as a threat requiring a U.S. response—must be viewed as very encouraging in Beijing. An effective U.S. counterpunch requires clearly defined red lines that regulate and set behavior expectations between great powers and indicate when a Chinese competitive action warrants a U.S. response. Detractors of the counterpunch framework will immediately note the call for military restraint and interpret it as a reactive recipe for military weakness at precisely a time requiring proactive military strength. But military restraint does not imply weakness any more than eating fewer calories implies malnutrition. It simply means making smarter decisions that play to U.S. strengths and away from Chinese strategy. It also entails properly viewing the risks inherent in competition with China. The counterpunch skeptic incorrectly perceives greater risks in short-term military restraint (traded for economic investment and fortification) than in long-term arms races (traded for potential economic collapse). The counterpunch skeptic also fails to appreciate the United States’ historic strengths in adopting this approach. In fact, America has demonstrated exceptional skill as an adaptive counter-puncher—reacting and adapting to adversity and setbacks to rise above them and create positive effects preserving U.S. power and ideas. U.S. institutions have counter-punched their way to success in the political (from the failed Articles of Confederation to the Constitution), social (from abhorrent slavery to civil rights), and military (from disastrous Pearl Harbor to WWII victory) arenas to produce the stable and prosperous nation that exists today. As John Mearsheimer points out, China has the population size and economic capacity (the “sinew of power”) to pose unique and unprecedented challenges to U.S. power. Additionally, wasteful military exploits—often employed as a means of competing with rivals—have contributed to bringing down world powers again and again throughout history. China understands this apparent axiom and has woven its truth into its competitive strategy to displace the United States as the world’s preeminent power in the twenty-first century. U.S. competitive strategy against China must, therefore, resist the powerful (but seemingly prudent) urge to continually increase the stakes projecting power against China. Rather, the United States needs to adopt a disciplined counterpunch framework focused on protecting and preserving (not projecting) power. This framework leverages the elements of a successful counterpunch: it demonstrates a superior understanding of adversary strategy (China’s desire to economically exhaust the United States with power projection), it leverages smart defensive elements (adopting only “enough” deterrence to influence China’s actions), and it fortifies conditions of economic strength to ensure offensive actions can be brought to bear when required in competition or conflict (re-investing resources into a globally-leading private sector). Employing a counterpunch framework asks Americans to trust its institutions—which is a difficult task in the face of a rising China. But the ask is not for blind trust. As a country with less than one-sixth of the world’s population, the United States as a superpower has been punching above its weight for decades and has historically counter-punched successfully to muster adaptive and superlative responses whenever challenged with adversity. America must follow these historical impulses to remain a superpower in the twenty-first century. The 1AC’s reduction of IPP for vaccines is America “handing over its crown jewels” to competing nations by disincentivizing record setting innovation that causes spillover to other fields and destroys American hegemony. Iancu 8/11 Andrei, American-Romanian engineer and intellectual property attorney, who served as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office from 2017 to 2021, “Biden is trying to undermine America's world-leading IP protections”, https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/11/biden-is-trying-to-undermine-americas-world-leadin///pranav In May of this year, the Biden administration announced its support for a proposal at the World Trade Organization that would allow other countries to seize American intellectual property on COVID-19 technologies, including vaccines. On cue, those countries promptly modified their ask. Whereas the original proposal called for the waiver to last a limited number of years, the new proposal makes the waiver effectively permanent. And why not? If America is willing to hand over its crown jewels, it might as well demand to keep them forever. As a former Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, I know that America’s world-leading IP protections laid the foundation for our economic success and technological prowess. And as an immigrant from a communist nation, I know all too well how disrespect for private property rights undermines innovation and saps economic vitality. Since the Founding Fathers, Americans have understood that private property extends well beyond land, buildings, factories, and machines. The real source of America’s power and promise are ideas. Walls, locks, or guards can protect physical property, but the implementation of ideas — new songs, artificial intelligence, or medicines — requires special protections and trust in the rule of law. That’s why the Founders included intellectual property rights in the Constitution — in the form of an “exclusive right” for authors and inventors — to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Indeed, this is the only time the word “right” appears in the Constitution (amendments aside). The Founders knew that only the rule of law, and our respect for it, can protect and enable the development of these ideas. Yet, President Biden undermined that respect by signaling his support for the appropriation of America’s intangible assets. In doing so, he jeopardized America’s uniquely successful intellectual property system. The history of our nation — indeed, much of the history of the world — since 1789 has been the revolution in knowledge led by American ingenuity in agriculture, industry, medicine, and information technology. Progress like this does not just happen. Indeed, it didn’t, for the millennia of the entire human history until our nation’s founding a couple of hundred years ago! It’s not a coincidence that the last two centuries of uninterrupted, IP-driven innovation — up to and including the miraculous creation in a record time of the Covid vaccines themselves — began when one nation finally committed itself to protect intangible assets as much as physical property. The reason is simple: knowledge is cumulative. Every new discovery becomes the basis for new research. The revolutionary mRNA technology behind Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines is, in fact, an evolutionary iteration of previous — patented — breakthroughs over the last two decades. Sen. Bernie Sanders, among others, turns up his nose at all this science, history, and progress. Like President Biden, he supports waiving vaccine patents because, he says, “We need a people’s vaccine, not a profit vaccine.” Ignore for a moment that many companies have agreed to sell their vaccines at non-profit prices for the duration of the pandemic, or that the vaccines are completely free for all patients at pharmacies nationwide, or that the federal government pays $19.50 per Pfizer dose, about $15 per Moderna dose, and $10 for the Johnson and Johnson shot — less than the cost of a pizza for medicines that are saving millions of lives and restoring our economy. Instead, focus on the fact that intellectual property protections enabled the creation of “people’s vaccines” in the first place. The choice isn’t between cheap vaccines and even cheaper vaccines — it’s between shots that are protected by strong IP laws or no shots at all. The same goes for every industry. If President Biden doesn’t protect the IP behind new vaccines, investors and inventors will ask, what other technologies are next? Will similar takings be imposed on climate change technologies, for example? Food processing? Essential semiconductor technologies? Companies will scale back investments in medical devices, microchips, energy, and everything in between if they think the U.S. Government might waive IP protection after the fact so that others may copy their inventions with impunity. Of immediate concern is the need for more treatments for Covid-19, especially as the pandemic keeps raging with new variants. Knowing that their IP may be appropriated as soon as it is developed, private industry — especially start-ups and smaller businesses that depend heavily on outside capital — may not invest the resources necessary to develop these new technologies that are desperately needed right now. Here’s the reality: remove patents and other forms of intellectual property, and private-sector investment in innovation dries up. The government will then try to step in to fill the gap, inefficiently as always. Like the taking of factories to nationalize industry, this taking of intellectual property is effectively the nationalization of our innovation economy. The result will be the same as in every other socialist regime that nationalized its industries: the kind of poverty, corruption, and misery that my family escaped from decades ago. American innovation has cured diseases, enabled human flight, led to the development of computers, and made our nation the envy of the world. Waiving intellectual property rights could forfeit it all. Only U.S. hegemony prevents global instability---alternatives can't maintain peace Haass, 17 - President of the Council on Foreign Relations (Richard, "Who Will Fill America’s Shoes?," Project Syndicate, 6-24-2017, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-leadership-successor-to-america-by-richard-n~-~-haass-2017-06) Still, a shift away from a US-dominated world of structured relationships and standing institutions and toward something else is under way. What this alternative will be, however, remains largely unknowable. What we do know is that there is no alternative great power willing and able to step in and assume what had been the US role. China is a frequently mentioned candidate, but its leadership is focused mostly on consolidating domestic order and maintaining artificially high economic-growth rates to stave off popular unrest. China’s interest in regional and global institutions seems designed mostly to bolster its economy and geopolitical influence, rather than to help set rules and create broadly beneficial arrangements. Likewise, Russia is a country with a narrowly-based economy led by a government focused on retaining power at home and re-establishing Russian influence in the Middle East and Europe. India is preoccupied with the challenge of economic development and is tied down by its problematic relationship with Pakistan. Japan is held back by its declining population, domestic political and economic constraints, and its neighbors’ suspicions. Europe, for its part, is distracted by questions surrounding the relationship between member states and the European Union. As a result, the whole of the continent is less than the sum of its parts – none of which is large enough to succeed America on the world stage. But the absence of a single successor to the US does not mean that what awaits is chaos. At least in principle, the world’s most powerful countries could come together to fill America’s shoes. In practice, though, this will not happen, as these countries lack the capabilities, experience, and, above all, a consensus on what needs doing and who needs to do it. Goes nuclear---extinction Thomas H. Henricksen 17, emeritus senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, 3/23/17, “Post-American World Order,” http://www.hoover.org/research/post-american-world-order The tensions stoked by the assertive regimes in the Kremlin or Tiananmen Square could spark a political or military incident that might set off a chain reaction leading to a large-scale war. Historically, powerful rivalries nearly always lead to at least skirmishes, if not a full-blown war. The anomalous Cold War era spared the United States and Soviet Russia a direct conflict, largely from concerns that one would trigger a nuclear exchange destroying both states and much of the world. Such a repetition might reoccur in the unfolding three-cornered geopolitical world. It seems safe to acknowledge that an ascendant China and a resurgent Russia will persist in their geo-strategic ambitions. What Is To Be Done? The first marching order is to dodge any kind of perpetual war of the sort that George Orwell outlined in “1984,” which engulfed the three super states of Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania, and made possible the totalitarian Big Brother regime. A long-running Cold War-type confrontation would almost certainly take another form than the one that ran from 1945 until the downfall of the Soviet Union. What prescriptions can be offered in the face of the escalating competition among the three global powers? First, by staying militarily and economically strong, the United States will have the resources to deter its peers’ hawkish behavior that might otherwise trigger a major conflict. Judging by the history of the Cold War, the coming strategic chess match with Russia and China will prove tense and demanding—since all the countries boast nuclear arms and long-range ballistic missiles. Next, the United States should widen and sustain willing coalitions of partners, something at which America excels, and at which China and Russia fail conspicuously. There can be little room for error in fraught crises among nuclear-weaponized and hostile powers. Short- and long-term standoffs are likely, as they were during the Cold War. Thus, the playbook, in part, involves a waiting game in which each power looks to its rivals to suffer grievous internal problems which could entail a collapse, as happened to the Soviet Union.
9/5/21
SO - NC - Deont
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Solebury LN | Judge: First, Practical Reason exists— A An agent’s will acts on a law that it gives to itself. If pleasure were a law, then you would straightaway do the pleasurable act, but since you’re autonomous, you can reason about taking the action. Thus a condition of action is that the will is self-determined. Without practical reason, moral reason and action could not exist Korsgaard “Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant” by Christine M. Korsgaard “Now I’m going to argue that that sort of willing is impossible. The first step is this: : to conceive of yourself as the cause of your actions is to identify with the principle of choice on which you act. A rational will is a self-conscious causality, and a self-conscious causality is aware of itself as a cause. To be aware of yourself as a cause is to identify yourself with something in the scenario that gives rise to the action, and this must be the principle of choice. For instance, suppose you experience a conflict of desire: you have a desire to do both A and B, and they are incompatible. You have some principle that favors A over B, so you exercise this principle, and you choose to do A. In this kind of case, you do not regard yourself as a mere passive spectator to the battle between A and B. You regard the choice as yours, as the product of your own activity, because you regard the principle of choice as expressive, or representative, of yourself. You must do so, for the only alternative to identifying with the principle of choice is regarding the principle of choice as some third thing in you, another force on a par with the incentives to do A and to do B, which happened to throw in its weight in favor of A, in a battle at which you were, after all, a mere passive spectator. But then you are not the cause of the action. Self-conscious or rational agency, then, requires identification with the principle of choice on which you act.” (123) Second, a rational will must set ends with reciprocal constraints— A Anything else justifies that someone could impede your ability to achieve your end in the first place and would restrict self-sufficiency, the root cause of action, which also means reason contains end-based framework. Engstrom, Stephen “Universal Legislation As the Form of Practical Knowledge. University of Pittsburgh, ND I’ll begin with the case of natural justice. Since this obligation is founded on the practical knowledge of self-sufficiency as an end, and since self-sufficiency, according to its very idea, can never be augmented, but only restricted, by the actions of others, the maxim we have to consider is one prescribing action that restricts others’ self-sufficiency. This restriction can be more precisely characterized, however, as the limitation of what Kant calls outer freedom. For as I’ll now try to explain, outer freedom is just what self-sufficiency requires, as a negative condition, in relation to others. Kant describes outer freedom as an “independence from the necessitating power of choice of another” (MS237). In other words, outer freedom lies in the independence of one’s capacity to pursue one’s ends from hindrance to its exercise stemming from the power of choice of 19another. That one’s capacity to pursue one’s ends can be subject to such hindrance from another is, of course, clear. Where diverse persons share a practical world, where in other words they are present together in the world in such a way that it’s possible for any one of them both to know what action another of them intends and also to act in ways that prevent or hinder that action (or, as we might also say, where mutual recognition and mutual influence are possible), the outer freedom of one such person is limited to the extent that another chooses to prevent or to hinder the former’s action and succeeds in the attempt. Where a person’s actions constitute such hindrances they can accordingly be described—to borrow a phrase from Kant—as “assaults on the freedom... of others” (G430).19 Now since the material ends a person pursues in acting are all united in the fundamental end of happiness, generically conceived, outer freedom amounts to independence from hindrances by others to one’s pursuit of that basic end. Thus any assault on this freedom, to the extent that it’s successful, is a limitation of a person’s capacity to realize this end. And since this capacity is just what self-sufficiency consists in, this freedom is nothing other than the independence from other persons requisite for self-sufficiency, and it can therefore be regarded, in a negative sense, as self-sufficiency itself in relation to others. Given the preceding considerations, it’s a straightforward matter to see how a maxim of action that assaults the freedom of others with a view to furthering one’s own ends results in a contradiction when we attempt to will it as a universal law in accordance with the foregoing account of the formula of universal law. Such a maxim would lie in a practical judgment that deems it good on the whole to act to limit others’ outer freedom, and hence their self-sufficiency, their capacity to realize their ends, where doing so augments, or extends, one’s own outer freedom and so also one’s own self-sufficiency. 20Now on the interpretation we’ve been entertaining, applying the formula of universal law involves considering whether it’s possible for every person—every subject capable of practical judgment—to share the practical judgment asserting the goodness of every person’s acting according to the maxim in question. Thus in the present case the application of the formula involves considering whether it’s possible for every person to deem good every person’s acting to limit others’ freedom, where practicable, with a view to augmenting their own freedom. Since here all persons are on the one hand deeming good both the limitation of others’ freedom and the extension of their own freedom, while on the other hand, insofar as they agree with the similar judgments of others, also deeming good the limitation of their own freedom and the extension of others’ freedom, they are all deeming good both the extension and the limitation of both their own and others’ freedom. These judgments are inconsistent insofar as the extension of a person’s outer freedom is incompatible with the limitation of that same freedom. B If we are under that authority of reason, we act since we reason action is good. Actions can only be good because we have rationally chosen them. Respecting someone as a rational being means respecting their right to make decisions on their actions. That forbids infringing on other’s freedoms because it undermines value to action in the first place because every agent must be able to attribute value to an end. Anything else fails to attribute value to an action – making it impossible to determine moral action.
Thus, the standard is respecting a system of inner and outer freedom Prefer:
Action Theory: Only reason can explain why we take transitional action to an overall end. For example, setting the end of tea provides me a reason to unify the necessary actions to produce tea, like getting a pot, filling it with water, etc. Any other explanation fails since it can’t give meaning to why we take transitioning action – freezing action. 2 Impacts— a. That’s a side constraint on the AC—ethics is a guide to action so it must appeal to a structure of action. b. Bindingness—reason is intrinsic to actions since only it can provide value to transitioning action, which justifies universality 2. Presume freedom since it allows each of us to pursue our individual search for ethics so the NC co-opts every reason your framework is good, but adds an additional side constraint. This also serves as a tiebreaker
Offense 1 Negates, reducing intellectual property violates rights to property Riccardo Pozzo 06 January 2006, "Immanuel Kant on intellectual property," https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250048266_Immanuel_Kant_on_intellectual_property WW DL *We do not endorse the author’s gendered language Corpus mysticum, opus mysticum, propriété incorporelle, proprietà letteraria, geistiges Eigentum. All these terms mean intellectual property, the existence of which is intuitively clear because of the unbreakable bond that ties the work to its creator. The book belongs to whomever has written it, the picture to whomever has painted it, the sculpture to whomever has sculpted it; and this independently from the number of exemplars of the book or of the work of art in their passages from owner to owner. The initial bond cannot change and it ensures the author authority on the work. Kant writes in section 31/II of the Metaphysics of Morals: “Why does unauthorized publishing, which strikes one even at first glance as unjust, still have an appearance of being rightful? Because on the one hand a book is a corporeal artifact (opus mechanicum) that can be reproduced (by someone in legitimate possession of a copy of it), so that there is a right to a thing with regard to it. On the other hand a book is also a mere discourse of the pub 1 Lecturer (Full Professor) of History of Philosophy at University of Verona. Article received on oct/ 06 and approuved for publication on dec/06. 12 Trans/Form/Ação, São Paulo, 29(2): 11-18, 2006 lisher to the public, which the publisher may not repeat publicly without having a mandate from the author to do so (praestatio operae), and this is a right against a person. The error consists in mistaking one of these rights for the other” (Kant, 1902, t.6, p.290). The corpus mysticum, the work considered as an immaterial good, remains property of the author on behalf of the original right of its creation. The corpus mechanicum consists of the exemplars of the book or of the work of art. It becomes the property of whoever has bought the material object in which the work has been reproduced or expressed. Seneca points out in De beneficiis (VII, 6) the difference between owning a thing and owning its use. He tells us that the bookseller Dorus had the habit of calling Cicero’s books his own, while there are people who claim books their own because they have written them and other people that do the same because they have bought them. Seneca concludes that the books can be correctly said to belong to both, for it is true they belong to both, but in a different way. The peculiarity of intellectual property consists thus first in being indeed a property, but property of an action; and second in being indeed inalienable, but also transferable in commission and license to a publisher. The bond the author has on his work confers him a moral right that is indeed a personal right. It is also a right to exploit economically his work in all possible ways, a right of economic use, which is a patrimonial right. Kant and Fichte argued that moral right and the right of economic use are strictly connected, and that the offense to one implies inevitably offense to the other. In eighteenth-century Germany, the free use came into discussion among the presuppositions of a democratic renewal of state and society. In his Supplement to the Consideration of Publishing and Its Rights, Reimarus asked writers “instead of writing for the aristocracy, to write for the tiers état of the reader’s world.” (Reimarus, 1791b, p.595). He saluted with enthusiasm the claim of disenfranchising from the monopoly of English publishers expressed in the American Act for the Encouragement of Learning of May 31, 1790. Kant, however, was firm in embracing intellectual property. Referring himself to Roman Law, he asked for its legislative formulation not only as patrimonial right, but also as a personal right. In Of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing, he considered the moral faculties related to intellectual property as an “inalienable right (ius personalissimum) always himself to speak through anyone else, the right, that is, that no one may deliver the same speech to the public other than in his (the author’s) name” (Kant, 1902, t.8, p.85). Fichte went farther in the Demonstration of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing. He saw intellectual property as a part of his metaphysical construction of intellectual activity, which was based on the principle that thoughts “are not transmitted hand to hand, they are not paid with shining cash, neither are they transmitted to us if we take home the book Trans/Form/Ação, São Paulo, 29(2): 11-18, 2006 13 that contains them and put it into our library. In order to make those thoughts our own an action is still missing: we must read the book, meditate – provided it is not completely trivial – on its content, consider it under different aspects and eventually accept it within our connections of ideas” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411).
9/5/21
SO - T - Vaccines
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 3 | Opponent: Solebury LN | Judge: idk Interpretation: The affirmative debater must defend reducing intellectual property protections for substances that treat diseases. To clarify, they may not defend substances that prevent diseases.
Violation: They defend vaccines
Medicines treat diseases Webster (Merriam Webster is America's leading and most-trusted provider of language information, accessed on 6-30-21, Merriam Webster, "Definition of MEDICINE,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medicine)// ww pbj Definition of medicine 1a: a substance or preparation used in treating disease cough medicine Treatment is different than prevention Pflanzer 20 (Lydia Ramsey Pflanzer is a healthcare editor for Business Insider. She joined Business Insider in 2015 after graduating from Northwestern University, 4-29-2020, accessed 6/30/21, "Scientists are racing to discover ways to treat and prevent coronavirus. Here's the difference between a treatment and a vaccine.," Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/whats-the-difference-between-a-vaccine-and-a-treatment-2020-4)//ww pbj Vaccines are used to prepare the body's immune system to fight off infections. They work by giving the body a small taste of what the virus is like so that way it can produce antibodies that fight off an intruding virus, ideally keeping people from falling ill. Some vaccines protect better than others, and they're typically administered across broad populations. There are vaccines for some infectious diseases, like the flu, smallpox, measles, and chickenpox. But others, like HIV and hepatitis C, don't have vaccines that protect against them. Vaccines that protect against two other deadly outbreaks, MERS and SARS, have yet to be approved after the outbreaks subsided. There are more than 70 potential coronavirus vaccines in the works, with a number in early human trials. Drugmakers are looking into ways to produce the billions of doses that might be needed to suppress the pandemic. Read more: There are more than 70 potential coronavirus vaccines in the works. Here are the top efforts to watch, including the 16 vaccines set to be tested in people this year. FILE - In this March 2020 photo provided by Gilead Sciences, a vial of the investigational drug remdesivir is visually inspected at a Gilead manufacturing site in the United States. Given through an IV, the medication is designed to interfere with an enzyme that reproduces viral genetic material. (Gilead Sciences via AP) FILE - In this March 2020 photo provided by Gilead Sciences, a vial of the investigational drug remdesivir is visually inspected at a Gilead manufacturing site in the United States. Given through an IV, the medication is designed to interfere with an enzyme that reproduces viral genetic material. (Gilead Sciences via AP) Associated Press Treatments, on the other hand, are meant to do just that: treat COVID-19, helping patients sickened by the virus survive and recover more quickly. Treatments for disease are there to lessen symptoms and ultimately improve the outcomes of a particular disease. Sometimes, medications can be used preventatively. For instance, patients with high cholesterol might be prescribed a medication called a statin to prevent heart attacks. Some potential coronavirus treatments are being studied to see if they can prevent people from contracting the virus in the first place. For COVID-19, researchers are testing everything from antimalarial medications to antivirals, to even common heartburn medications in hospitalized patients with the hopes that more patients will survive severe forms of the illness and potentially recover faster. Some are looking at ways to use patients' own bodies to fight the virus with antibody treatments. Standards: 1 Limits – they explode the topic to include tons of substances that prevent disease rather than treat them like soap, medical supplies, or food and make it so there is no unified neg generics. The aff still gets the core of the topic lit: they get medicine, innovation, and global inequality. Explosion of aff ground makes neg prep burden impossible, either killing neg ground or forcing the neg to read generics that barely link, always letting aff win. Force the 1AR to read a definition card with a clear list of what’s included and excluded – otherwise, vote neg since they can’t put a clear limit on the topic. Our interp solves – it establishes a clear bright-line for that gives the neg a chance to predict and prepare for every aff ahead of time. At best, the aff’s extra-T still links to all our offense since they can get extra-T advantages to solve disads and defend whatever they want, magnifying limits. 2 Precision – not defending the text of the resolution justifies the affirmative doing away with random words in the resolution which a means they’re not within the topic which is a voter for jurisdiction since you can only vote affirmative on the resolution and this debate never should have happened, b they’re unpredictable and impossible to engage in so we always lose
Drop the Debater – 1 sets a precedent that debaters wont be abusive 2 DTA is the same since you drop the aff
Voters: 1 Fairness – constitutive to the judge to decide the better debater, only fairness is in your jurisdiction because it skews decision making 2 Education – the only portable education from debate that we care about
DTD: 1 it drops the whole AC so dta is the same thing. 2 deters future abuse since wins and losses determine the activity’s direction.
Competing Interps: 1 reasonability on t is incoherent: you’re either topical or you’re not – it’s impossible to be 77 topical, links to all limits offense 2 functionally the same as reasonability – we debate over a specified briteline which is a counter interp 3 judge intervention – judge has to intervene on what’s reasonable, creates a race to the bottom where debaters exploit judge tolerance for questionable argumentation.
No RVIs 1 illogical for you to get offense just for being fair – it’s the 1ac’s burden 2 baiting - rvi’s incentivize debaters to read abusive positions to win off theory 3 discourages checking abuse since debaters will be afraid to lose on theory
9/5/21
SO - Theory - Double Spec
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 5 | Opponent: Bergen County AK | Judge: Danielle Dorsch Interpretation: The affirmative debater may specify either a member nation or medicine; to clarify they can do one, but not both. Violation: they specify both Standards: 1 Limits – affirmatives gets infinite permutations of every medicine and every member nation which creates a huge caselist. That results in shallow debates that skirts clash and pushes argumentation to the fringes to find broad theses that disagree with everything. This prevents rigorous argument testing – anyone can skim a Wikipedia article, but the process of clash is unique to debate. 2 Ground – double spec destroys offense on strength of link – we lose the innovation DA, inequality DA, econ DAs, and health diplomacy DA, destroys CPs since they wouldn’t be competitive – kills testing of the 1AC and creates an unfair division of ground – kills fairness and advocacy skills TVA – defend the US or covid waivers