1AC - Cap 1NC - DA - Truckers DA - Infrastructure Cap Good 1AR - All 2NR - DA - Infrastructure Cap Good 2AR - Case DA
Apple Valley
4
Opponent: Eden Prairie DT | Judge: Breigh Plat
1AC - Stock 1NC - CP - UBI DA - Inflation DA - Infrastructure 1AR - All 2NR - CP DA - Infrastructure Case 2AR - CP DA Case
Apple Valley
6
Opponent: Lexington AG | Judge: Gordon Krauss
1AC - Heg 1NC - UBI CP DA - Infrastructure Politics Heg Bad 1AR - Condo All 2NR - CP DA Case 2AR - Condo
Blake
1
Opponent: West Bend ER | Judge: Saied Beckford
1AC - Lay 1NC - CP - Space Colonization DA - Emissions DA - Innovation DA - Japan Prolif Case 1AR - ALl 2NR - CP Case 2AR - Both
Blake
4
Opponent: Valley RT | Judge: Javier Hernandez
1AC - Lockean Proviso 1NC - NC - Util DA - Environment K - Psychoanalysis 1AR - Case NC 2NR - K IVI on Util 2AR - IVI on Util
Blake
5
Opponent: Scarsdale DH | Judge: Lawrence Zhao
1AC - Virilio 1NC - T - Appropriation NC - Util CP - Space Colonization Tech Good Cap Good 1AR - Can't read T and Condo pic with contradictory definitions All 2NR - T 1AR shell Case 2AR - 1ar shell T
Blake
Doubles
Opponent: Neenah IH | Judge: Christopher Vincent, Elijah Smith, Saied Beckford
1AC - Set Col 1NC - T - Extra K - Psychoanalysis Case 1AR - All 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
Blake
Octas
Opponent: Scarsdale BS | Judge: Jacob Nails, Sam Anderson, Mike Girouard
1AC - Kant 1NC - K - Settlerism 1AR - Case K 2NR - K Case 2AR - Case K
Blake
Quarters
Opponent: Lexington VM | Judge: Sam Anderson, Kaya Cyz, Chloe Ricks
1AC - Kant 1NC - New Affs Bad K - Settlerism vs Kant 1AR - All 2NR - K Case 2AR - Case K
Blake
Finals
Opponent: Byram Hills AK | Judge: Jonathan Hsu, Jack McKyton, Kate Totz
1AC - Mollow 1NC - T - Framework K - Settlerism Case 1AR - All 2NR - K Case 2AR - Case K
California Invitational Berkeley Debate
2
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake ADi | Judge: Aditya Madaraju
1AC - Capitalism 1NC - T - Extra Case 1AR - All 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
California Invitational Berkeley Debate
6
Opponent: Lovejoy JV | Judge: Saketh Kotapati
1AC - Mining 1NC - CP - EIA Case 1AR - All perfcon 2NR - Case Perfcon 2AR - perf con lol
Churchill Classic
2
Opponent: Strake Jesuit HZ | Judge: Breigh Plat
1AC - Debris 1NC - Theory - Brackets PIC - SSP 1AR - All 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
Contact Information
1
Opponent: na | Judge: na
Contact Information
Glenbrooks
1
Opponent: Lexington AG | Judge: Julian Kuffour
1AC - Heg 1NC - T - Just CP - UBI DA - Reconciliation Heg Bad 1AR - All 2NR - CP DA Case 2AR - All
Glenbrooks
4
Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary
1AC - Big Tech 1NC - T - Unconditional Theory - Brackets CP - Ban LAW deployment DA - Reconciliation 1AR - All OCI on Brackets 2NR - CP DA OCI Case 2AR - OCIRVI
Glenbrooks
5
Opponent: Eagan AE | Judge: Indu Pandey
1AC - Terrorism 1NC - CP - Advantage vs Terror DA - Reconciliation Case 1AR - All 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
Glenbrooks
7
Opponent: Greenhill KD | Judge: Jacob Nails
1AC - Germany 1NC - Theory - Open Source Disclosure T - a CP - Police DA - Econ Case 1AR - All 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
Grapevine
5
Opponent: Marcus JR | Judge: Grant Brown
1AC - Butler 1NC - NC - Util DA - Infrastructure CP - Advantage vs 1AR - Spec Status All 2NR - All 2AR - Spec Status
Grapevine
4
Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: Sreyaash Das
1AC - Pandemics w Tricks 1NC - DA - Infrastructure Case 1AR - Case 2NR - DA Presumption Underview
1AC - COVID Vaccines 1NC - T - Medicines = Plural T - Vaccines CP - Adv vs Vaccines DA - Infrastructure DA - Modi Adventurism Case 1AR - theory - Can't say T ow 1ar theoyr no rvis ci dtd condo all 2NR - theory stuff DA - infrastructure 2AR - cant say t ow 1ar theory no rvis ci dtd condo shell
Greenhill
1
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake OF | Judge: Mauchline, Rachel
1AC - COVID-19 Medicines 1NC - T - Vaccines CP - Advantage vs Vaccines DA - Infrastructure DA - Innovation Case 1AR - Condo All 2NR - CP DA - Infrastructure Case 2AR - Case CP DA
Greenhill
4
Opponent: Peninsula RM | Judge: Adam Torson
1AC - Vaccine Diplomacy 1NC - CP - Orphan Drugs CP - US Theory - Can't read 2 framing mechanisms case 1AR - condo all 2nr - condo infra disad case 2ar - case disad
Greenhill
6
Opponent: Strake Jesuit DL | Judge: Chris Theis
1AC - Kant 1NC - NC - Util v2 CP - US Vaccine Diplomacy DA - Infrastructure v2 Case 1AR - Pandemics Advantage cps must have solvency advocatesCP DA 2nr - all 2ar - cps must have solvency advocates
Greenhill RR
3
Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: Kumail Zaidi, Holden Bukowsky
1AC - Biocolonialism 1NC - T - Framework Theory - Ev Ethics K - Set Col vs Disidentification 1AR - All 2NR - T - Framework 2AR - Case
Greenhill RR
4
Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Austin Broussard, Gerard Grigsby
1AC - Euphoric TRIPS 1NC - T-Reduce T-Medicine CP - Legalize Cannabis DA - Infrastructure Case 1AR - Condo All 2NR - DA Condo Case 2AR - Case DA
Harvard Westlake Debates
3
Opponent: Harker MK | Judge: Tej Gedela
1AC - Mining 1NC - T - Tropicality NC - Kant Dedev Warming Good Spark Debris Good 1AR - All 2NR - Spark 2AR - Spark
Harvard Westlake Debates
1
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake MT | Judge: Vontrez White
1AC - Inequality 1NC - Cap Good Space Col Good 1AR - All 2NR - Space Col Good 2AR - Space Col Good
Harvard Westlake Debates
Quarters
Opponent: Ayala AM | Judge: Danielle Dosch, Tej Gedela, Vishan Chaudhary
1AC - PTD 1NC - T - Extra Case 1AR - T Case 2NR - RVI Case - Debris Good Circumvention 2AR - Case
Harvard Westlake Debates
5
Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Nick Fleming
1AC - PTD 1NC - T - Extra Case 1AR - ALl 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
THE OPEN SOURCE FOR THIS ROUND ISNT WORKING FOR SOmE REASON - I'VE TRIED LIKE 10 TIMES - IF YOU WANT TEH DOC PLS J MESSAGE ME
Heart of Texas
1
Opponent: Austin SFA LS | Judge: Joseph Barquin
1AC - Academic Islamophobia Performance 1NC - Theory - Must Disclose Contact Info T - Framework 1AR - T Case 2NR - T Case 2AR - T Case
Heart of Texas
4
Opponent: Southlake Carroll PK | Judge: Annabelle Long
1AC - Jordan 1NC - T - IP for Medicine K - Settlerism v Jordan US-Russia War Good 1AR - All 2NR - T Case 2AR - Case T
Heart of Texas
5
Opponent: Immaculate Heart AW | Judge: Jeannine Lopez
1AC - CRISPR 1NC - T-Medicine CP - Patent Pools DA - Heg DA - Infra DeDev 1AR - All 2NR - CP DA- Infra Case 2AR - Case CP DA
Heart of Texas
Doubles
Opponent: Wenatchee JK | Judge: Chris Castillo, Derek Hilligoss, Annabelle Long
1AC - "Nearly All" Medicines 1NC - Theory - Must Spec Nearly All CP - Patent Pools DA - CRISPR Terror DA - Infrastructure 1AR - All 2NR - CP Infra Case 2AR - Case Terror DA
Heart of Texas
Octas
Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: JP Stuckert, Kristiana Baez, Dillon Johnson
1AC - Techno-Orientalism 1NC - T - Framework K - Settlerism Theory - Disclosure Case 1AR - All Condo 2NR - Disclosure Condo Case 2AR - Disclosure Case T
Longhorn Classic
2
Opponent: San Mateo ZS | Judge: Breigh Plat
1AC - Berardi 1NC - Theory - Must Spec RTS CP - Police Case 1AR - All 2NR - CP Case 2AR - Case CP
Longhorn Classic
3
Opponent: Coppell ER | Judge: Spencer Orlowski
1AC - Model Minority Myth 1NC - K - Settlerism vs Model Minority CP - Police DA - Inflation Case 1AR - Case K CP 2NR - DA Case 2AR - Case DA
Meadows
1
Opponent: Ardsley KK | Judge: Gabriela Gonzalez
1AC - Deleuze 1NC - NC - Util DA - Infrastructure Case 1AR - All 2NR - DA NC Case 2AR - Case NC DA
Meadows
5
Opponent: Lexington CH | Judge: Jada Stinnett
1AC - Vaccine Imperialism 1NC - CP - Patent Pools PIC - US Vaccine Distribution DA - Infrastructure DA - Terror Case 1AR - Case All 2NR - DA - Infrastructure Case 2AR - Case DA
1AC - Insulin 1NC - T - Nebel K - Settlerism CP - UHC DA - Infrastructure Case 1AR - All Condo 2NR - CP DA Condo Case 2AR - Condo
Meadows
4
Opponent: Marlborough WR | Judge: Lena Mizrahi
1AC - COVID 1NC - T - Vaccines PIC - US Vaccine Diplomacy NC - Kant DA - Infrastructure 1AR - All Condo PICs bad 2NR - CP DA Theory stuff case 2AR - Case CP DA
Palm Classic
2
Opponent: Immaculate Heart EL | Judge: Colton Gilbert
1AC - China 1NC - K - Techno-Orientalism T - "Private" appropriation Case 1AR - T Case 2NR - K Case 2AR - Case K
Palm Classic
4
Opponent: Monta Vista KR | Judge: Colter Heirigs
1AC - Mining 1NC - T - Appropriation CP - EIA CP - Stop Space Race Mining GOod Debris Good Case 1AR - All Condo Intl Fiat Bad 2NR - CP - EIA Condo I-Fiat 2AR - I-Fiat
Palm Classic
6
Opponent: Ayala AM | Judge: Nick Fleming
1AC - Lunar Heritage 1NC - T - Outer Space Case 1AR - ALl 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
Palm Classic
Doubles
Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: Chris Castillo, Derek Hilligoss, Brianna Aaron
1AC - Techno-Orientalism 1NC - T - Framework PIK - Asian Case 1AR - All 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
TFA State
2
Opponent: Tuloso Midway AJ | Judge: Vincent Liu
1AC - Kant 1NC - Theory - TJFs Bad Theory - New Affs Bad DA - Omnibus Package Case 1AR - All 2NR - Theory - TJFs Bad 2AR - THoeyr Case
debateLA Challenge
1
Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Alexandra Mork, Claudia Ribera
1AC - Large Satellites 1NC - T - Tropicality CP - EIA K - Security Case 1AR - ALl Condo 2NR - T Condo Case 2AR - Condo
debateLA Challenge
3
Opponent: Immaculate Heart JL | Judge: Holden Bukowsky, Chris Castillo
1AC - China 1NC - T - Nebel T - Tropicality CP - EIA K - Techno-Orientalism Case 1AR - Condo All 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
Jane is an opp Imagine actually disagreeing with Spark
debateLA Challenge
5
Opponent: Harvard-Westlake AL | Judge: Matt Moorhead, Gerard, Grigsby
1AC - Inequality 1NC - Case 1AR - Case 2NR - Case 2AR - Case
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Contact Information
Tournament: Contact Information | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge: na Pre-Round:
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 1 | Opponent: Austin SFA LS | Judge: Joseph Barquin Interpretation: the resolution should define the division of affirmative and negative ground. To clarify, the aff must defend a world where the member nations of the World Trade Organization have reduced intellectual property protections for medicine.
Resolved” means to enact by law. Words and Phrases ’64 (Words and Phrases; 1964; Permanent Edition) Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.
Medicine is a substance used to treat something Merriam webster ND https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medicineaaditg a substance (such as a drug or potion) used to treat something other than disease WTO is one of three major economic organizations in the world Krueger 2K Anne O. Krueger is a Research Associate in the NBER's Programs on International Trade and Investment and International Finance and Macroeconomics and a professor of economics at Stanford University. “International Economic Organizations, Developing Country Reforms, and Trade” https://web.archive.org/web/20170518033322/http://www.nber.org/reporter/winter00/krueger.html aaditg The three major international economic organizations are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO emerged out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995; it is an arrangement across countries that serves as a forum for negotiations on trading rules as well as a mechanism for dispute settlements in trade issues.(1) By contrast, the World Bank and IMF deal with their member countries one at a time. They have little influence with industrial countries but can affect developing countries during times of economic crisis and when those countries seek additional foreign exchange resources. The origins and evolution of the three organizations are of considerable interest.(2) Perhaps even more important in light of the recent financial crises in Mexico, East Asia, and a few other countries, are the questions that arise about the current and future roles of the IMF and the World Bank. Vote neg: 1 procedural fairness – their interpretation eviscerates predictable limits – all negative strategy is premised off a stable reading of the resolution. The lack of a stable mechanism lets them radically re-contextualize their aff and erase neg ground via perms. Including their advocacy authorizes any methodology or orientation tangentially related to the topic, which renders research burdens untenable. That outweighs and precedes their offense – debate is a game that we’ve all chosen to participate in and requires effective negation. It makes no sense to skew a competitive activity in favor of one side. The frame for evaluating offense is that debate is a game and we’re all here to win – that means procedural questions come first. 2 Movement Building - a 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. TVA – a defend that patents are an Islamophobic extension of western orientalist systems on Southwest Asian countries and that the member nations of the WTO ought to get rid of those patents. c Solvency deficits to the TVA are neg ground – it proves there’s a debate to be had d 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. T first – 1 T indicts your reading of the aff in the first place, so it’s an evaluative mechanism to adjudicating substance of the 1AC. It’s silly nonsensical to leverage the aff against T since it presupposes that the aff is being won. 2 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. 3 Topic ed – we only have 2 months to talk about the topic, but we can learn about the K outside of debate
10/16/21
1 - T - Framework vs Settler Dis-identification
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: Kumail Zaidi, Holden Bukowsky Interpretation: the resolution should define the division of affirmative and negative ground. To clarify, the aff must defend a world where the member nations of the World Trade Organization have reduced intellectual property protections for medicine. Resolved” means to enact by law. Words and Phrases ’64 (Words and Phrases; 1964; Permanent Edition) Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”. Reduce is to diminish Merriam Webster ND https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reduce aaditg to diminish in size, amount, extent, or number
Medicine is a substance used to treat something Merriam webster ND https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medicineaaditg a substance (such as a drug or potion) used to treat something other than disease WTO is one of three major economic organizations in the world Krueger 2K Anne O. Krueger is a Research Associate in the NBER's Programs on International Trade and Investment and International Finance and Macroeconomics and a professor of economics at Stanford University. “International Economic Organizations, Developing Country Reforms, and Trade” https://web.archive.org/web/20170518033322/http://www.nber.org/reporter/winter00/krueger.html aaditg The three major international economic organizations are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO emerged out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995; it is an arrangement across countries that serves as a forum for negotiations on trading rules as well as a mechanism for dispute settlements in trade issues.(1) By contrast, the World Bank and IMF deal with their member countries one at a time. They have little influence with industrial countries but can affect developing countries during times of economic crisis and when those countries seek additional foreign exchange resources. The origins and evolution of the three organizations are of considerable interest.(2) Perhaps even more important in light of the recent financial crises in Mexico, East Asia, and a few other countries, are the questions that arise about the current and future roles of the IMF and the World Bank.
Standards: 1 procedural fairness – their interpretation eviscerates predictable limits – all negative strategy is premised off a stable reading of the resolution. The lack of a stable mechanism lets them radically re-contextualize their aff and erase neg ground via perms. Including their advocacy authorizes any methodology or orientation tangentially related to the topic, which renders research burdens untenable. That outweighs and precedes their offense – debate is a game that we’ve all chosen to participate in and requires effective negation. It makes no sense to skew a competitive activity in favor of one side. The frame for evaluating offense is that debate is a game and we’re all here to win – that means procedural questions come first. TVA – Plan: The member nations of the World Trade Organization should eliminate patents on medicines based on Indigenous knowledge from patentability. IPW ‘06 Intellectual Property Watch quoting Debra Harry -- executive director of the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism, and a member of the Paiute tribe in the United States, “Inside Views: Indigenous Groups Tell WIPO, ‘Don’t Patent Our Traditional Knowledge’”, https://www.ip-watch.org/2006/12/06/inside-views-indigenous-groups-tell-wipo-dont-patent-our-traditional-knowledge///pranav - Examples of medicines the plan would affect include reserpine, digitoxin, American ginseng medicines, Qualaquin, Neem, Turmeric, Aspirin, and many others. - The ev cites an actual joint statement from a tribal group - Ev also answers the “what if a company decides to j mass produce” question The joint statement of tribal group says: “Any attempt to develop IPR-based mechanisms to ‘protect’ IK indigenous knowledge actually poses much more threat to our knowledge, as a whole, than it can ever claim to prevent. Rather than protect, the imposition of IPRs over IK actually would serve to facilitate the alienation, misappropriation, and commercialization of IK.” “We believe patent applications that include or are based on IK should be specifically excluded from patentability. In IP terms, we’re sure you understand that these patent claims would fail to meet the test of innovation, novelty or inventiveness. But more importantly for Indigenous peoples, such patent claims should be denied because IK is in the Indigenous domain; that is, it is already under the jurisdiction of Indigenous legal systems, which protect the IK in perpetuity as the inherent and inalienable cultural property of Indigenous peoples. T first – 1 T indicts your reading of the aff in the first place, so it’s an evaluative mechanism to adjudicating substance of the 1AC. It’s silly nonsensical to leverage the aff against T since it presupposes that the aff is being won. 2 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. 3 Topic ed – we only have 2 months to talk about the topic, but we can learn about the K outside of debate 4 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. 5 FX T – conceded violation – independent reason to reject them for limits – infinite possible actions that could lead to the rez which kills predictability and fairness.
9/16/21
1 - T - Framework vs Techno-Orientalism
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: Octas | Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: JP Stuckert, Kristiana Baez, Dillon Johnson Interpretation: the resolution should define the division of affirmative and negative ground. To clarify, the aff must defend a world where the member nations of the World Trade Organization have reduced intellectual property protections for medicine.
Resolved” means to enact by law. Words and Phrases ’64 (Words and Phrases; 1964; Permanent Edition) Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”. WTO is one of three major economic organizations in the world Krueger 2K Anne O. Krueger is a Research Associate in the NBER's Programs on International Trade and Investment and International Finance and Macroeconomics and a professor of economics at Stanford University. “International Economic Organizations, Developing Country Reforms, and Trade” https://web.archive.org/web/20170518033322/http://www.nber.org/reporter/winter00/krueger.html aaditg The three major international economic organizations are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO emerged out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995; it is an arrangement across countries that serves as a forum for negotiations on trading rules as well as a mechanism for dispute settlements in trade issues.(1) By contrast, the World Bank and IMF deal with their member countries one at a time. They have little influence with industrial countries but can affect developing countries during times of economic crisis and when those countries seek additional foreign exchange resources. The origins and evolution of the three organizations are of considerable interest.(2) Perhaps even more important in light of the recent financial crises in Mexico, East Asia, and a few other countries, are the questions that arise about the current and future roles of the IMF and the World Bank. Medicine is a substance used for diagnosis, treatment, mitigation, or prevention of medical condition Hettiarachchi and Wijesinge 21, Charith, and Sanath WijesingheCharith Amidha Hettiarachchi* Visiting Scholar, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Heath, University of Technology Sydney, Australia and Post-Doctoral Scholar, Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka. PhD Researcher, Faculty of Law, school of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia and Lecturer in Law, Department of Legal Studies, The Open University of Sri Lanka. “Food-Medicine Interface and Its Application in International Level, Comparative Jurisdictions and Sri Lankan Legal Context.” World Nutrition 12 (March 31, 2021): 103–11. https://doi.org/10.26596/wn.2021121103-111.//anop The definition of medicine stipulated in Therapeutic Goods Act of 1989 of New South Wales, Australia (Federal Register of Legislation, 2020) and the Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1940 of India and the Medicines Act of 1968 of United Kingdom (Legislation.Gov.UK, 2020) provides a similar meaning to that of the definition embodied in National Medicines Regulatory Authority Act of 2015 of Sri Lanka, irrespective of the different terminology used in those legislations. According to the National Medicines Regulatory Authority Act of 2015 of Sri Lanka, medicine includes ‘any substance or mixture of substances manufactured, sold, offered for sale or represented for use in the diagnosis, treatment, mitigation or prevention of disease, abnormal physical states or the symptoms thereof in man or animal; and restoring, correcting or modifying functions of organs in man or animal; a medicine or combination of medicine ready for use and placed on the market under a special name or in a characteristic form, both patent and non-proprietary preparations; a product made out of medicinal herbal extract; nutraceutical with therapeutic claims; and vaccines and sera, but does not include an Ayurvedic medicine or Homoeopathic medicine’ (Government Publication Bureau, 2015). Therefore, medicine is simply identified as a substance that used for diagnosis, treatment, mitigation or prevention of a medical condition. The Sri Lankan definition of medicine excludes Ayurveda medicines from its scope. Hence, Ayurveda medicines do not come under the purview of National Medicines Regulatory Authority Act of 2015 and but fall in the scope of Ayurveda Act of 1961. Vote Neg: 1 predictable limits – all negative strategy is premised off a stable reading of the resolution. The lack of a stable mechanism lets them radically re-contextualize their aff and erase neg ground via perms. Including their advocacy authorizes any methodology or orientation tangentially related to the topic, which renders research burdens untenable. That outweighs and precedes their offense – debate is a game that we’ve all chosen to participate in and requires effective negation. It makes no sense to skew a competitive activity in favor of one side. The frame for evaluating offense is that debate is a game and we’re all here to win – that means procedural questions come first. 2 Movement Building - a 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.
TVA – a The Vaccine Distribution – you can read an advantage about how IPR in the context of vaccines is used to justify threat construction around China because US pharma companies don’t want to give their secrets for producing vaccines to China in the fear of what they would do w it which is the techno orientalism they talk abt in the 1AC b Read a bio-orientalism aff – analyze the way in which patents are leveraged as an imperial tool to maintain biopolitical control over Asian bodies and defend the elimination of patents. c Solvency deficits to the TVA are neg ground – it proves there’s a debate to be had d 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. This takes out 1AC framing 3 – you can critically engage w the rez as the aff, you j have to defend the topic – we havent’ forced you to defend it in a certain way which solves.
T first – 1 T indicts your reading of the aff in the first place, so it’s an evaluative mechanism to adjudicating substance of the 1AC. It’s silly nonsensical to leverage the aff against T since it presupposes that the aff is being won. 2 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. 3 Topic ed – we only have 2 months to talk about the topic, but we can learn about the K outside of debate 4 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. Drop the Debater – deters future abuse Competing Interpretations - 1 Reasonability causes a race to the bottom because debaters keep being barely reasonable 2 reasonability collapses bc we debate ab the specified briteline anyway
10/18/21
1 - Theory - Brackets
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary Interp: Debater may not modify their evidence. To clarify, debaters may not strikethrough or delete words or characters, replace words with bracketed synonyms, bracket in words for grammatical reasons, edit their evidence for any other reason.
Violation: The NLRB ev is bracketed
Standards: 1 Academic integrity – modifying authors changes argument perception because it forecloses the possibility of authors to represent their own words, killing validity. That outweighs - Your role as an educator mandates that you enforce academic rules – just as a teacher would fail a paper that plagiarized, you should not vote for someone who used altered evidence. Academic rules are A) key to enforcing a norm of honesty instead of lying – this fosters a respectful and fair academic community B) Debate is an academic activity – academic honesty is a rule in every other academic area, so the same standards apply. 2 Ethical irresponsibility - If it is true that these authors have such problematic discourse, you should not be read these authors. Reading the evidence is still an endorsement that the author’s mindset is a cogent explanation of the world, but the author’s mindset are part of their worldview and permeate the advocacy of the affirmative – turns case. c/a paradigm issues
11/21/21
1 - Theory - Cant read 2 frameworks
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Peninsula RM | Judge: Adam Torson Interpretation – the affirmative debater may not read two mechanisms to evaluate offense in the 1AC. To clarify, you cant read a role of the ballot and a framework Violation – they defend util and a rob Pre round prep – it becomes atrocious when you don’t know if your offense will function under their framing which kills argument innovation against their affirmative – cx is too late to check bc pre-round prep is when the majority of 1nc strategic thinking is done. Shiftiness – a 2-1 skew in framing lets them to just reclarify whats offense or not under their framing till the 1AR which means they can de link all negative offense cuz its not part of their offense
Paradigm Issues: Drop the debater – they have a 7-6 rebuttal advantage and the 2ar to make args I can’t respond to, Use competing interps reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since we don’t know your bs meter, No RVIs –illogical – you shouldn’t win for being fair – it’s a litmus test for engaging in substance, Evaluate T before 1AR theory – norms – we only have a couple months to set T norms but can set 1AR theory norms anytime,
9/18/21
1 - Theory - Ev Ethics Paragraph Skipping
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: Kumail Zaidi, Holden Bukowsky Interp: debaters may not skip paragraphs or portions of literature in one piece of evidence and write “they add”. Violation – vats 1 does. Standards – academic integrity – ncentivizes debaters to ignore parts of ev that contradicts what’s cut which is a terrible norm – this is an independent reason to reject them and is the heighest layer – ethics violations frame how debater ought to operate. Education comes first – only terminal impact from debate. Dtd – k2 setting good norms Ci – reasonability causes a race to the bottom where debaters keep being marginally abusive and incentivizes judge intervention No rvi or cross application of case – 1 testing – indicts starting point – illogical u should be able to leverage it 2 logic – u don’t win for proving that ur evidence isn’t cheating – that should be a starting point
9/16/21
1 - Theory - Must Disclose Contact Info
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 1 | Opponent: Austin SFA LS | Judge: Joseph Barquin Interp: all debaters competing at toc-bid distributing tournaments must disclose their contact information on the wiki.
Violation: screenshot proves they don’t have a school on the wiki, so there’s no way to contact them.
Standards: 1 pre-round prep – it’s impossible to construct an effective 1nc if I don’t know what the aff is beforehand – made even harder when I can’t even ask you questions about it – that’s an internal link to clash – independentl o/w bc they’re not even defending the topic– causes poor 1nc engagement which kills education and fairness. 2 no impact turns – I have not mandated that you disclose your arguments – I should be able to contact you before the round – you’ve signed up for a tournament where being able to use the wiki si the norm and you should abide by it Voter for edu – only terminal impact – voter for fairness – only thing in judges’ jurisdiction bc debate is a game
Ci: rtb – keep being marginally abusive, collapses – debate ab briteline Dtd – set a precedent – empirically proven on disclosure arguments No rvis – they’re silly and illogical
10/16/21
1 - Theory - New Affs Bad
Tournament: Blake | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Lexington VM | Judge: Sam Anderson, Kaya Cyz, Chloe Ricks New, un-disclosed affs are a voting issue –
Testing – they make it impossible to adequately test the aff without adequate pre-round prep – favors newness over engagement – disclosure solves their offense – you can break new affs, you just have to disclose the plan text personally or disclose it on the wiki before round I asked – screenshot in doc.
2. Negative ground – they make negative ground concessionary to the goodwill of the aff and results in extremist generics that heavily skew ground in favor of the aff 3. It’s the same hoops indigenous scholarship has to go through in academia to get on an equal playing field which proves it’s an independent link to the k.
No RVIs – rules, incentivizes baiting
12/20/21
1 - Theory - Open Source Disclosure
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: Octas | Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: JP Stuckert, Kristiana Baez, Dillon Johnson Interpretation: Debaters must post links to all previous constructive speech docs read at the tournament at least 30 minutes prior to the round. To clarify, this means you must include all analytics, full text, underlining, and highlighting of all cards as read in round. Violation – Standards – 1 Debate resource inequities—you’ll say people will steal framework justifications or cards, but that’s good—it’s the only way to truly level the playing field for students such as novices in under-privileged programs. Antonucci 5 Michael (Debate coach for Georgetown; former coach for Lexington High School); “eDebate open source? resp to Morris”; December 8; http://www.ndtceda.com/pipermail/edebate/2005-December/064806.htmlnick a. Open source systems are preferable to the various punishment proposals in circulation. It's better to share the wealth than limit production or participation. Various flavors of argument communism appeal to different people, but banning interesting or useful research(ers) seems like the most destructive solution possible. Indeed, open systems may be the only structural, rule-based answer to resource inequities. Every other proposal I've seen obviously fails at the level of enforcement. Revenue sharing (illegal), salary caps (unenforceable and possibly illegal) and personnel restrictions (circumvented faster than you can say 'information is fungible') don't work. This would - for better or worse. b. With the help of a middling competent archivist, an open source system would reduce entry barriers. This is especially true on the novice or JV level. Young teams could plausibly subsist entirely on a diet of scavenged arguments. A novice team might not wish to do so, but the option can't hurt. c. An open source system would fundamentally change the evidence economy without targetting anyone or putting anyone out of a job. It seems much smarter (and less bilious) to change the value of a professional card-cutter's work than send the KGB after specific counter-revolutionary teams. 2 leads to higher quality engagement b/c I know exactly what the neg says which internal link turns the aff b/c it leads to net better discussion. This is especially true given that you did not disclose the offense of the NC—no way I can engage with it or contest it. 3 Evidence ethics – open sour4ce is the only way to verify before round that cards aren’t miscut – full text doesn’t solve since you could have highlighted unethically. That’s a voter – maintaining ethical ev practices is key to being good academics and we should be able to verify you didn’t miscut ev.
10/18/21
1 - Theory - Open Source v2
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 7 | Opponent: Greenhill KD | Judge: Jacob Nails Interpretation: Debaters must post links to all previous constructive speech docs read at the tournament at least 30 minutes prior to the round on the 2021-2022 NDCA HSLD Wiki. To clarify, this means you must include all analytics, full text, underlining, and highlighting of all cards as read in round. Violation – Screenshots prove they haven’t disclosed anything from this tournament, but I have.
Standards – 1 Debate resource inequities—you’ll say people will steal framework justifications or cards, but that’s good—it’s the only way to truly level the playing field for students such as novices in under-privileged programs. Antonucci 5 Michael (Debate coach for Georgetown; former coach for Lexington High School); “eDebate open source? resp to Morris”; December 8; http://www.ndtceda.com/pipermail/edebate/2005-December/064806.htmlnick a. Open source systems are preferable to the various punishment proposals in circulation. It's better to share the wealth than limit production or participation. Various flavors of argument communism appeal to different people, but banning interesting or useful research(ers) seems like the most destructive solution possible. Indeed, open systems may be the only structural, rule-based answer to resource inequities. Every other proposal I've seen obviously fails at the level of enforcement. Revenue sharing (illegal), salary caps (unenforceable and possibly illegal) and personnel restrictions (circumvented faster than you can say 'information is fungible') don't work. This would - for better or worse. b. With the help of a middling competent archivist, an open source system would reduce entry barriers. This is especially true on the novice or JV level. Young teams could plausibly subsist entirely on a diet of scavenged arguments. A novice team might not wish to do so, but the option can't hurt. c. An open source system would fundamentally change the evidence economy without targetting anyone or putting anyone out of a job. It seems much smarter (and less bilious) to change the value of a professional card-cutter's work than send the KGB after specific counter-revolutionary teams. 2 leads to higher quality engagement b/c I know exactly what the neg says which internal link turns the aff b/c it leads to net better discussion. This is especially true given that you did not disclose the offense of the NC—no way I can engage with it or contest it. 3 Evidence ethics – open source is the only way to verify before round that cards aren’t miscut – full text doesn’t solve since you could have highlighted unethically. That’s a voter – maintaining ethical ev practices is key to being good academics and we should be able to verify you didn’t cheat
Voters – education - only terminal impact from debate – fairness – constitutive of the judge to decide the better debater Drop the debater
Doesn’t make sense because you were abusive out of round. 2. Sets a precedent that debaters cant run unfair arguments because they will be scared to lose. Competing interps
Reasonability causes a race to the bottom because debaters keep being barely reasonable, magnifying abuse. 2. Critical thinking –competing interps promotes in depth argumentation on theory which increases quality of clash. No RVIs
RVIs center the debate on theory instead of substance because it’s the only place the round can be decided. Outweighs on time frame; we only get two months to talk about the topic and on research - where the majority of debate education occurs 2. RVIs discourage checking abuse because debaters will be afraid to lose on theory
11/21/21
1 - Theory - TJFs Bad
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 2 | Opponent: Tuloso Midway AJ | Judge: Vincent Liu Interp: debaters may not read theoretically justified frameworks. To clarify, they must only substantively justify their framework. violation: they did – that’s 1ac 3 a Ground – topic lit under 1 framework isn’t split 50/50, so debaters need phil ground to compensate for uneven split – TJFs kill phil ground as it says only 1 framework is best for debatability and moots all constructive offense – outweighs on fairness bc it’s pre-round – unequal distribution of ground controls the internal link to all in round abuse b phil ed – kills clash on philosophies bc all that matters is theoretical legitimacy—destroys clash and argument testing on moral theories, which is unique to debate. Phil clash outweigh on education because obviously we won’t pass specific policies, but learning philosophies teaches us how to live our quotidian life. Also the only thing unique to LD Fairness is a voter – constitutive of the judge to decide the better debater and constrains decision making. Education is a voter – only portable impact. Drop the debater to deter future abuse
Dtd – deters future abuse Ci – reasonability causes race to bottom and collapse anyway No rvis – baiting – incentivizes better theory debater to bait shells which justifies infinite aff abuse
3/10/22
2 - K - Psychoanalysis vs Rights Discourse
Tournament: Blake | Round: 4 | Opponent: Valley RT | Judge: Javier Hernandez The 1AC’s engagement with human rights is a liberal ruse that secures biopolitical control of the very human those rights constitute – turns the case and makes violence inevitable McNeilly 16 - Kathryn McNeilly's work has been presented widely including as a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Feminist Legal Studies at the University of British Columbia, funded by the County Antrim Grand Jury Bursary, and in conversation with Professor Judith Butler at LSE School of Law in February 2015. In September 2016 McNeilly was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto. McNeilly is a contributor to a number of collaborative research initatives. These include the Northern/Irish Feminist Judgments Project, a venture between academics and legal practitioners which sought to bring a feminist methodology to bear on key cases in Northern/Irish law. In this project Kathryn engaged in a feminist rewriting of the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal decision in Re Family Planning Association for Northern Ireland. McNeilly is also a co-founder of the Reproductive Health Law and Policy Advisory Group, a joint initiative between Queen's University Belfast, Ulster University and Manchester Metropolitan University. The Advisory Group was established to provide expertise and knowledge on policy and legal matters related to reproductive rights and health; to facilitate discussions and knowledge transfer between academics, policy and law makers, health professionals and stakeholder groups; and to provide advice on policy and legal reform. 11 July 2016 “After the Critique of Rights: For a Radical Democratic Theory and Practice of Human Rights”, Springer Law Critique rpg Human rights have a long pedigree within liberalism and liberal thinking, stemming in their development from the work of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century liberal and natural law theorists such as Hobbes and Locke (Shapiro 1989, pp. 80–150; Moyn 2012, pp. 21–24). By virtue of this pedigree human rights enshrine liberal protection of the individual from oppressive state interference, and foreground a particularly liberal approach to personhood. The subject of liberal human rights is a bounded individual who possesses their life, liberty and security as property which should be protected from external interference, in doing so reflecting the wider imperatives of a capitalist economy (MacPherson 1962, pp. 2–4). Critical engagements with human rights have highlighted the way in which such a perception of liberal subjectivity enshrined within human rights forecloses wider relations of intersubjectivity and embodiment which characterise our existence as subjects. For example, Anna Grear has demonstrated how the unitary subject of law foregrounded within liberalism serves to advance ‘an abstract, socially decontextualised, hyper-rational, wilful individual systemically stripped of particularities, complexities and materiality’ (2007, p. 522). Costas Douzinas has also critiqued the atomisation of liberal human rights discourse, stating that human rights, as a special type of recognition, come into existence and can be exercised only in common with others… Rights do not find their limits in others and community, as liberal theory claims. On the contrary, if the function of rights is to give rise to reciprocal recognitions, they presuppose the existence of others and of community. (2000, pp. 286–287) In this respect, human rights problematically further bounded, as opposed to intersubjective, ideas of the individual which are conceptually one-dimensional and cohere with liberal, capitalist regimes. This critique of the bounded and atomised individual underpinning liberal human rights has also been linked to critique of the concept of the ‘human’ which has come to drive the idea of rights in the modern period. Human rights in contemporary liberal discourse are presented as inalienable rights that all possess by virtue of their basic humanity. Not only is the human subject a bounded individual, in being presented as a largely taken-for-granted concept, the ‘human’ within liberal human rights forecloses how, as Wendy Brown has highlighted, rights do not just attach to a natural human subject ‘but rather produce and regulate the subjects to whom they are assigned’ (2004, p. 459). A related critique has been levelled by Sokhi-Bulley (2012) who characterises rights as tools of governmentality, where individuals govern themselves through rights. Human rights cannot be perceived as possessions of a pre-existing human subject, but are a fundamental part of creating such subjects and restrictive ideas of the ‘human’. Many critical engagements with human rights have highlight the gendered, Western and ableist parameters of the liberal idea of humanity which human rights have served to reinforce throughout most of the twentieth century, and have sought to rework such ideas (Bunch 1990; Mutua 1995; Lloyd 2007). The ‘human’ in liberal human rights discourse has been critiqued, therefore, in its foreclosing of relations of power governing which lives can be perceived as human and in encouraging subjects to encounter themselves and others through dominant discourses of ‘humanity’. Indeed, liberal human rights can be problematised more generally as operating to reify existing regimes of power, rendering human rights impotent in staging a more radical challenge for those on the margins. In the modern period human rights have become increasingly tied to state and have, it has been argued, been co-opted by state agendas and their maintenance of power relations beneficial to dominant elites. Zigon (2014), for example, has asserted that human rights are fundamentally limited ‘as a language for radically progressive politics’. Zigon (2014) elaborates that, ‘every repetition of rights language further solidifies this necessary link between rights and the state-systemic-matrix’. For Zigon, while strategic usage of rights by radical politics may have short term utility, in the long run the historically accumulated limitations this language carries with it significantly decreases possibilities for imagining, articulating, and ultimately acting in ways to address these issues, abuses, and injustices that go beyond the current configuration of the state-systemic-matrix. (2014) Following such critique, the intertwining of contemporary human rights discourse and the state has been perceived as restricting human rights to operate within the given order of institutional power. The language of human rights and key human rights concepts such as ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’, in this view, retain an interpretation which coheres with current relations of power and offer limited possibilities to be used in a way that facilitates more than a limited shift in such relations. A further problematic element of liberal human rights in the modern period has been the way in which the politics of human rights often closes off political debate and engagement through an excessive pursuit of consensus. In Douzinas’ terms, ‘rights belong to the consensual domain of politics’ (2007, p. 107). For example, the creation of treaties and key international human rights documents are frequently described in terms of consensus achieved through reasoned dialogue and discussion between states and their conflicting interests, values and cultural perspectives (Cerna 1994, pp. 740–742; Merry 2006, pp. 42–44; Morsink 1999). The legitimacy and authority of the international human rights framework is bolstered by the fact that its treaties, conventions and other declarations have been consensually produced (Donnelly 2013, pp. 57–60). At the local level human rights are also often viewed as facilitating consensual outcomes between competing parties through rational discussion or, indeed, through forced consensus where human rights serve to close down political debate (Ignatieff 2001, p. 300). This focus on consensus in liberal human rights has been critiqued as obscuring key elements such as the messiness and unpredictability of the politics of rights, the ineradicable nature and importance of political disagreement and the performativity of the practice of rights (Zivi 2012, pp. 24–42). The alternative is not a new mode of politics but a “NO” to the affirmative. This intervention forces subjects to re-evaluate their complicity with tropes of enjoyment. We can endorse the implementation of the 1AC but reject its rhetorical investments – working through specific fantasmic demands is necessary to create a more effective politics. Lundberg 12 (Christian, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC, Chapel Hill, “On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains”, Cultural Studies 26.2-3) Laclau's On Populist Reason provides an elegant account of demand as the fundamental unit of the political, and by extension of politics as a field of antagonism. Laclau's basic goal is to define the specificity of populist reason, or, to give an account of populism as ‘special emphasis on a political logic which, is a necessary ingredient of politics tout court’, of ‘Populism, quite simply, as a way of constructing the political’ (Laclau 2005, p. 18). Here, a focus on demands replaces a now prevalent approach focused on various taxonomies of populism (which Laclau diagnoses as hopelessly unsystematic) with a more formal account of the political based on the logic of demands, which in turn provides a way of thinking about the political as the space of demand and politics as a practice of working through specific demands. Demands serve a number of functions that derive from the split between the universal and the particular that Laclau relies upon. Demands articulate a specific political claim at the level of the particular, and also imply a more generalized relationship to hegemony in the register of the universal. On this logic, demands represent the hegemonic order, creating an implicit picture of how it functions and might change. Simultaneously, demands create possible lines of equivalential affinity between others also making demands on the hegemonic order. Thus, the demand is more fundamental than the group, in that the operation of the split demand inaugurates all ‘the various forms of articulation between a logic of difference and a logic of equivalence’ that animate the social affinities that give groups their coherence (Laclau 2005, p. 20). The logic of the demand is in turn the logic of equivalence, and equivalence is as important for how it animates a group identity, as it is in positing claims on a hegemonic order. Although Laclau owes a significant debt to Freud and Lacan, it is not clear that his theory of demand is explicitly crafted from psychoanalytic categories. For example, how central is enjoyment to Laclau's relatively formal account of the demand? As Glynos and Stavrakakis have argued, there is a ‘complete and conspicuous absence in Laclau's work of Lacanian categories such as fantasy, and, perhaps more importantly, jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p. 202). Glynos and Stavrakakis claim that there is ‘to their knowledge no reference in Laclau's work to the concept of jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p. 209). On Populist Reason contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance as worked out by Copjec, which Laclau summarizes by saying: there is no achievable jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and hegemony is nothing more than the investment in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us. The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar, they are simply identical. (Laclau 2005, p. 109) There is an elegance to Laclau's point about enjoyment, provided that enjoyment is reducible to a set of logical forms. This presupposition makes the lack of talk about jouissance in Laclau's work understandable. If jouissance and hegemony are identical, one does not need Lacan to say something that might be said more elegantly with Gramsci. Jouissance is simply hegemonic investment, an elevation of an object or identity to the level of a thing or a universal. Despite occasional caveats to the contrary, the greatest virtues of Laclau's version of the political stem from his relentlessly persistent application of a formal, almost structural account of the political. And, as is the case with many well executed structuralist accounts, Laclau's system can elegantly incorporate caveats, objections to and oversights in the original system by incorporating them into the functioning of the structure – jouissance can easily be read as nothing more than hegemony in this account without changing the original coordinates of the system too drastically. Yet, enjoyment provides one particularly difficult stumbling block for a dedicated formal account. To start with, enjoyment is never quite as ‘achievable’ as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless enjoyment of one's own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a subject in either finding a grounding or consummating an authoritative account of its coherence. This ‘uselessness’ defines the operation of jouissance. Thus, for example, when Lacan suggests that ‘language is not the speaking subject’ in the Seminar on Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures of signification (Lacan 1977). Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the grist mill of the speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is prefigured by logics of structure, meaning and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance. Following Glynos and Stavrakakis's suggestion, one might press the question of the relationship between the demand and jouissance as a way of highlighting the differences that a purely Lacanian reading of demand might make for Laclau's understanding of politics. Framing enjoyment as equivalent with hegemony, Laclau identifies the fundamental ‘split’ in psychoanalytic theory between the universal and the particular demands of a group. Framing the split in this way, and as the privileged site of the political, Laclau occludes attention to another split: namely, the split within a subject, between the one who enters an equivalential relationship and the identitarian claim that sutures this subject into a set of linkages. This too is a site of enjoyment, where a subject identifies with an external image of itself for the sake of providing its practices of subjectivity with a kind of enjoyable retroactive coherence. The demand is relevant here, but not simply because it represents and anticipates a change in the social order or because it identifies a point of commonality. Here the demand is also a demand to be recognized as a subject among other subjects, and given the sanction and love of the symbolic order. The implication of this argument about the nature of enjoyment is that the perverse dialectic of misfirings, failure and surpluses in identity reveals something politically dangerous in not moving beyond demand. Put another way: not all equivalences are equally equivalent. Some equivalences become fetishes, becoming points of identification that eclipse the ostensible political goal of the demand. To extend the line of questioning to its logical conclusion, can we be bound to our equivalential chains? Freud, Lacan and the demand Demand plays a central role in Freud's tripartite scheme for the human psyche specifically in the formation of the ego. Although this scheme does not exercise the same hold over psychoanalytic thinking that it once did, the question of the ego still functions as an important point of departure for psychoanalytic thinking as a representative case of the production of the subject and identity. Even for critics of ‘ego psychology’, the idea of the ego as a representation of the ‘I’ of the human subject is still significant – the main question is what kind of analytical dispositions one takes towards the ego, the contingencies of its emergence and its continuing function. Despite the tendency of some commentators to naturalize Freud's tripartite schema of the human psyche, Freud's account of the ego does not characterize the ego as pre-existent or automatically given. Although present in virtually every human subject, the ego is not inevitably present: the ego is a compensatory formation that arises in the usual course of human development as a subject negotiates the articulation and refusal of its needs as filtered through demand. Hypothetically a ‘subject’ whose every need is fulfilled by another is never quite a subject: this entity would never find occasion to differentiate itself from the other who fulfils its every need. As a mode of individuation and subjectification, egos are economies of frustration and compensation. This economy relies on a split in the Freudian demand, which is both a demand to satiate a specific need and a demand for addressee to provide automatic fulfilment of need generally. The generative power of the demand relies on this split and on fact that some demands will be refused. This economy of need and frustration works because refusal of a specific need articulated as a demand on another is also a refusal of the idea that the addressee of the demand can fulfil all the subject's needs, requiring a set of individuation compensatory economic functions to negotiate the refusal of specific demands. ‘Ego’ is nothing more than the name for the contingent economy of compensatory subjectification driven by the repetition and refusal of demands – the nascent subject presents wants and needs in the form of the demand, but the role of the demand is not the simple fulfilment of these wants and needs. The demand and its refusal are the fulcrum on which the identity and insularity of the subject are produced: an unformed amalgam of needs and articulated demands is transformed into a subject that negotiates the vicissitudes of life with others. Put in the metaphor of developmental psychology, an infant lodges the instinctual demands of the id on others but these demands cannot be, and for the sake of development, must not be fulfilled. Thus the logic of the pop-psychology observation that the incessant demands of children for impermissible objects (‘may I have a fourth helping of dessert’) or meanings that culminate in ungroundable authoritative pronouncements (the game of asking a never-ending ‘whys’) are less about satisfaction of a request than the identity producing effects of the distanciating parental ‘no’. In ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, Freud argues: If … demands meet with no satisfaction, intolerable conditions arise … At that point … the ego begins to function. If all the driving force that sets the vehicle in motion is derived from the id, the ego … undertakes the steering, without which no goal can be reached. The instincts in the id press for immediate satisfaction at all costs, and in that way they achieve nothing or even bring about appreciable damage. It is the task of the ego to guard against such mishaps, to mediate between the claims of the id and the objections of the external world. (Freud 1986, p. 22) Later works move this theory from the narrow bounds of the parent/child relationship to a broader social relationship which was continually constituting and shaping the function of the ego – this is a theme of works such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, as well as Civilization and its Discontents. The latter repeats the same general dynamics of ego formation as ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, but moves the question beyond individual development towards the entirety of social relations. For Freud, the inevitability of conflicts between an individual and the social whole is simply one of the facts of life among other people. Life with others inevitably produces blockages in the individual's attempts to fulfil certain desires – some demands for the fulfilment of desires must be frustrated. This blockage produces feelings of guilt, which in turn are sublimated as a general social morality. Here frustration of demand is both productive in that it authorizes social moral codes, and civilization as mode of functioning, though it does so at the cost of imposing a constitutively contested relationship with social mores (Freud 1989). Though there are many places to begin thinking the Freudian demand in Lacan, one of the best places to start is an almost accidental Lacanian rumination on demands. Confronted by student calls to join the movement of 1968 Lacan famously quipped: ‘as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!’ Framing the meaning of his response requires a treatment of Lacan's theory of the demand and its relationship to hysteria as an enabling and constraining political subject position. Lacan's theory of the demand picks up at Freud's movement outward from the paradigmatic relationships between the parent/child and individual/civilization towards a more general account of the subjects, sociality and signification. The infrastructure supporting this theoretical movement transposes Freud's comparatively natural and genetic account of development to a set of metaphors for dealing with the subject's entry into signification. Lacan's goal is to rearticulate Freudian development processes as metaphors for a theory of the subject's production within signification. In Lacanian terms, what is at stake in this transposition is a less naturalized account of the subject by privileging supplementary practices of enjoyment that give a subject coherence as an agent, not in the sense of an ultimate ontological grounding, but rather as a mode of enjoying the repetition of retroactive totalities that name and produce subjects. This process is most famously worked out in Lacan's famous ‘Mirror Stage’ which details the trauma of the subject's insertion into the symbolic order, and the way that this constitutive dislocation generates the jouissance that sustains the production of subjectivity (Lacan 1982a). Looking in the mirror, Lacan's hypothetical infant does not yet have a concept of a unified self, puzzled by the fact that when it moves the image of the child in the mirror also moves. From the child in the mirror, Lacan infers the existence of two ‘I's underwriting processes of subjectivization: an ‘ideal I’, a statuesque projection of what it means to be an ‘I’ (in this case the image of the child) and a phenomenological experience of ‘I-ness’. Lacan treats the dialectic of misidentification in the mirror as a constant and constitutive performance of subjectivity as opposed to a specific developmental stage (Wilden 1982). In this interpretation, the child in the mirror stage is a metaphor for the constant production of the subject as a performance of the self in relation to a constitutive gap between the Symbolic and the subject, and the articulation of subjectivity as a category serves to repress the trauma produced in the margin between a nascent subject, its alienation from a projected external identity, and within the structure of signification. The paradoxical effect of this mode of subject formation is that not only does the child ‘discover’ that she is the child in the mirror, it also experiences a disorienting distance between itself and its image. Despite this fact, the child requires the an external image such as the one in the mirror to impose a kind of unity on its experience – the image of the other child provides an imaginary framing, a retroactive totality or a kind of narrative about what it means to be a self. The paradox of subjectivity lies in the simultaneity of identifying with an image of one's self that is given by a specific location within the symbolic order and the simultaneous alienation produced by the image's externality. Thus, the assumption of a frame for identity cannot ever completely effective, or, a subject is never completely comfortable inhabiting subjectivity – there is always an impossible gap between an experience of alienated subjectivity, a prefigured given image of one's subjectivity and the experience of being produced by the Symbolic. There is a famous Lacanian aphorism that holds that ‘the signifier represents a subject for another signifier’ (Lacan 1977, p. 142). This formulation of the subject's relation to language inverts the conventional wisdom that ontologically pre-given subjects use language as an instrument to communicate their subjective intentions. Signifiers are constituted by their difference, and subjects come into being in negotiating their entry into this realm of difference. Instead of articulating subjective states through language, subjects are articulated through language, within the differential space of signification. The paradoxical implication of this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. The mirror stage marks the excess of the demand as a mode of subject formation. Subjects assume the identity as subjects as a way of accommodating to the demand placed on them by the symbolic, and as a node for producing demands on the symbolic, or, of being recognized as a subject (Lacan 1982a, p. 4). Here jouissance is nothing more than the useless enjoyment of one's own subjectivity, surplus produced in negotiating a difficult gap between the phenomenological and ideal ‘I's, produced by a failure in relation between Lacan's phenomenological I and the Symbolic. Both the site of subject production and the site where this subject fills out an identity by investing in equivalential linkages and common demands are sites of enjoyment. In this sense, perhaps there is an excess of jouissance that remains even after the reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the self that produces the conditions of possibility for investment, the defining point for Laclau's reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This specific site of excess, where the subject negotiates the terms on a non-relationship with the symbolic is the primary site splitting need, demand and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a precursor to demand. Demand is the filtering of the need through signification, but as Sheridan notes ‘there is no adequation between need and demand’ (Sheridan 1982). The same type of split that inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, though in this case the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of ever fully articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Since there is no adequation, the specificity of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfil the demand. This impossibility points to the paradoxical nature of demand: namely that the demand is less a way of addressing need than a call for love and recognition by this other. ‘In this way’, writes Lacan, ‘demand annuls (aufheht) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced (sich erniedrigt) to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love’ (Lacan 1982b, p. 286). The difficulty is that the Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the symbolic – the mirror stage marks the constitutive split between the subject and the Symbolic. This paradoxical split, namely the structural impossibility of fulfilling demands, resonates with the logic of the Freudian demand in that the frustration of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that ‘desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second’ (Lacan 1982b, p. 287). How might this subtraction occur? The answer to this question requires an account of the Other as seemingly omnipotent, and as simultaneously unable to fulfil demands. This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift which it does not have, namely the gift of love: It will seem odd, no doubt, that in opening up the immeasurable space that all demand implies, namely, that of being a request for love …. Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other … having no universal satisfaction … It is this whim that introduces the phantom of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is installed. (Lacan 1982c, p. 311) Transposed to the realm of political demands, this framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. In the classical iteration and contemporary critical theories that inherit its spirit, there is a presupposition that a demand is a way of exerting agency, and that the more firmly that the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the more firmly one lodges a demand the more desperately one clings to the legitimate ability of an institution to fulfil it. Thus, demands ought to reach a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a response should produce a re-evaluation of the economy of demand and desire. In analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare.
12/19/21
2 - K - Psychoanalysis vs Suffering Reps
Tournament: Blake | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Neenah IH | Judge: Christopher Vincent, Elijah Smith, Saied Beckford The 1AC’s project of recognition only brings the suffering of others into the round so that they can profit from the ballot. This the same logic that created their impacts in the first place and serve to completely erase the fact that all of us are complicit within mass systems of death. Abbas 10 /Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophy at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pg. Pg. 2-5 2010 This book is haunted by this murder—murder that is not merely the end of life but the giving up of living suffering to dead suffering. In Bachmann’s novel, “Ich”—a self-proclaimed unknown woman— personifies the entwinement of the suffering of speech and the speech of suffering. This weave baffles those schemes of managing human suffering whose arbitrary claims about what suffering is and how it matters in society form the basis of our lives and the relations that allow us to live. These schemes determine, rank, and organize the meaning, status, and worth of our hurt—and, then, grant us the consolations when they “empower” us to represent and express it. The novel is a chronicle as much of a death foretold—to wit, the “murder” announced at the end—as of death as it is suffered, as it comes to be, dynamic, demanding, exacting, reliant on life and the living. All the woman perhaps seeks is love, one imagines, looking to the men who signify fatal injunctions she receives as stone inscriptions in a dream, “Live and be amazed,” “To write is to be amazed,” and “Kill the Beloved.” In love, she is thwarted by those she desires, unable to inhabit spaces that supposedly promise safety, and even less willing to abandon them, at a loss of affirmations of happiness that affirm only others—for what lies would that take in a world that burns both inside and outside of her? Her “unknownness” is not accidental—it is just a sign that pages upon pages of being with her and her pain will still ironically require the declaration of murder to let the rest of us off the hook. For the more adventurous of us, yes, there is the mystery: who and what has died? Is the dying over and done with now? But as if the declaration of murder was not closure enough, in yet another gesture of assurance, Bachmann herself dies in exactly the way she writes Ich’s death. Both entwined narratives must be brought to a close, or at least be done with, so a story can be told, once and for all. What is the loss signified in this need? What exhaustion of suffering does this clarity of death attest to? What passing of the capacity to suffer are these gratuitous closures mocking? “Ich” may be Vienna itself—who knows?—in search of love and longevity, waiting for life to resurge, is left capable of very little, not unlike what happens to human beings when wars that annihilate them may be easier to bear than wars waged through them—these wars that are supposed to bring them consolation, secure them, and allow them to continue living through and across death. When this happens, even the universe forgets to keep count of how it was supposed to recalibrate itself for the death of one being; at the same time as modern constitutions, laws, and “human” rights—all assurances, as such, of something—ultimately are permissions to us to let humanity be, not demand too much from it. In opposition to these artifacts of modern politics and the subterfuges they provide for a material engagement with suffering, the novel is composed of half-written letters, incomplete conversations, reverberating phone hang-ups, the rush and blush of desire and rejection, dizzying monologues, italicized prayers, stubborn to-do lists, fragments of poetry, and snapshots of our everyday trials. Also present are figments and ghosts of those with whom both Ich and Bachmann have learnt to live, speak, make sense of words, and give their senses to the world in acts of sacrifice. Such is the artistry of this novel that attempts to redeem and reclaim the human, without ever allowing the aesthetic confusion and assemblage to become merely an artistic device in the hands of a master artificer. The vulnerability is not fragile or self-important, and it is amazing how the story of this woman gets told without the paradoxical misstep of objectifying the character, for even in so much “objective” distance—there are no claims to familiarity, not even names—and in this ultimate act of dispossession, the willing reader will find herself most present, most intimate. Bachmann’s Malina, in its artifice and its tempting of fate, in its trauma and its committed representations, is a homage to life as lived by those who love and who suffer life, its glories, and its indignities.1 Here, the space of the personal and the private would only criminally be separated from all the brutalities and violations that happen in a world where the culprit and the savior are the same. This is the familiar world where we are counted on to “feel” the pain of ailing capital and to save it as it rehearses its tricky death routine only to come back alive and stronger. Shockingly, we are much less capable of seeing ourselves in those who die everyday as they give up parts of their bodies and beings—their vital living labor—to the deadness that is capital. Any wonder, then, that in the recent economic crisis, capital took the character of an injured victim at the hands of “big government,” “bad people,” “greed,” among other villains, and any resistance to immediately rescuing Wall Street was framed by many as a moral wrong comparable to the cruelty and godlessness of letting a bleeding man die. There are numerous deceits in this story but only one irony: as if capital was not already “dead” labor! Materialist Overtures Might the story of our suffering be similar? That is, it is on the suffering of the needful subjects of liberalism, imperialism, and colonialism that edifices of society as we know it are built—edifices that claim their vital health as they reek of dead suffering and extract the labor of our senses. And that, in then seeking to save these constructions, we commit the gravest inhumanity when we cease to have any senses left for the living suffering. In every pathos that we offer up to liberal society can be found a clue to our lost senses—senses that have lost their way, forgetting where to look, what to look for, how to smell, how the dead call on us, how being tickles, how freedom tastes, what love sounds like, what intimacy suffering allows and asks for, and where a memory enters us. The limits of the political, then, are not reliant on epistemic assessment but are experienced relationally and aesthetically as a question of the nature of our very being—the degree to which our senses contest the imposed modes of the presence and absence of suffering is the degree to which we are political This claim of mine is rooted in the particular contrivances of time and space with which liberalism and capitalism substantiate their various subjections, something I deal with in detail throughout the book. Perhaps a brief example of the historically specific nature of this picture of the political will suffice here. During and after World War I, a peculiar profession gained some popularity: at the same time as circles of paranormal investigation and séances took off, creative ways of making the dead appear became fruitful occupations. A photographer by the name of William Hope was “considered by believers and supporters to be a true master of the art of producing spirits on ordinary photographic plates.”2 He brought a few photographers together to do this in earnest, creating and trading in “spirit photographs” that depicted the dead cohabiting with the living, capturing on photographic plates what could perhaps be kept from being forgotten. These photos and their very possibility are us, in a way, picturing the range of life and living that we deal with everyday, in no way quite comprehended by the instrumental and utilitarian relation to suffering and death that suffuse a society that produces death prolifically (and also opens up the question of the terms on which our labors will relate to this production). This is a first clue to my book’s partiality to the aesthetic—as signifying artistic creation but also perception and sensing on which the artistry is premised—as the locus of a materialist response to various political philosophies that find their power (even in their declared departures from religion) in an unclaimed or declaimed crafting of the character of suffering that then becomes the nonnegotiable truth and currency. There has to be a way out of religion’s primordial claim on the domain of suffering and secular modernity’s mimicry of that move by objectifying and playing god with it, trading in its lives and deaths. This would involve a recovery of aesthetics as encompassing the activities of the suffering, hoping, transforming, and creating body. The aesthetic, as a pivot for my recuperated materialism, is a holistic domain of cognition, sensation, and perception—beyond Alexander Baumgarten’s insistence that however bountiful the senses when they dabble in the world, their retrieval remains inferior and supplementary to reason—and of the insertion, fragmentary or wholesome, of our bodies and minds (and permutations thereof) in the world. It follows that suffering can encompass being and becoming to embrace our experience of the extant world and possible other worlds that can be constructed (or not) out of this one. The alternative is not a new mode of politics but a “NO” to the affirmative. This intervention forces subjects to re-evaluate their complicity with tropes of enjoyment. We can endorse the implementation of the 1AC but reject its rhetorical investments – working through specific fantasmic demands is necessary to create a more effective politics. Lundberg 12 (Christian, Assoc. Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC, Chapel Hill, “On Being Bound to Equivalential Chains”, Cultural Studies 26.2-3) Laclau's On Populist Reason provides an elegant account of demand as the fundamental unit of the political, and by extension of politics as a field of antagonism. Laclau's basic goal is to define the specificity of populist reason, or, to give an account of populism as ‘special emphasis on a political logic which, is a necessary ingredient of politics tout court’, of ‘Populism, quite simply, as a way of constructing the political’ (Laclau 2005, p. 18). Here, a focus on demands replaces a now prevalent approach focused on various taxonomies of populism (which Laclau diagnoses as hopelessly unsystematic) with a more formal account of the political based on the logic of demands, which in turn provides a way of thinking about the political as the space of demand and politics as a practice of working through specific demands. Demands serve a number of functions that derive from the split between the universal and the particular that Laclau relies upon. Demands articulate a specific political claim at the level of the particular, and also imply a more generalized relationship to hegemony in the register of the universal. On this logic, demands represent the hegemonic order, creating an implicit picture of how it functions and might change. Simultaneously, demands create possible lines of equivalential affinity between others also making demands on the hegemonic order. Thus, the demand is more fundamental than the group, in that the operation of the split demand inaugurates all ‘the various forms of articulation between a logic of difference and a logic of equivalence’ that animate the social affinities that give groups their coherence (Laclau 2005, p. 20). The logic of the demand is in turn the logic of equivalence, and equivalence is as important for how it animates a group identity, as it is in positing claims on a hegemonic order. Although Laclau owes a significant debt to Freud and Lacan, it is not clear that his theory of demand is explicitly crafted from psychoanalytic categories. For example, how central is enjoyment to Laclau's relatively formal account of the demand? As Glynos and Stavrakakis have argued, there is a ‘complete and conspicuous absence in Laclau's work of Lacanian categories such as fantasy, and, perhaps more importantly, jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p. 202). Glynos and Stavrakakis claim that there is ‘to their knowledge no reference in Laclau's work to the concept of jouissance’ (Glynos and Stavrakakis 2006, p. 209). On Populist Reason contains a brief discussion of the concept of jouissance as worked out by Copjec, which Laclau summarizes by saying: there is no achievable jouissance except through radical investment in an objet petit a. But the same discovery (not merely an analogous one) is made if we start from the angle of political theory. No social fullness except through hegemony; and hegemony is nothing more than the investment in a partial object, of a fullness which will always evade us. The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar, they are simply identical. (Laclau 2005, p. 109) There is an elegance to Laclau's point about enjoyment, provided that enjoyment is reducible to a set of logical forms. This presupposition makes the lack of talk about jouissance in Laclau's work understandable. If jouissance and hegemony are identical, one does not need Lacan to say something that might be said more elegantly with Gramsci. Jouissance is simply hegemonic investment, an elevation of an object or identity to the level of a thing or a universal. Despite occasional caveats to the contrary, the greatest virtues of Laclau's version of the political stem from his relentlessly persistent application of a formal, almost structural account of the political. And, as is the case with many well executed structuralist accounts, Laclau's system can elegantly incorporate caveats, objections to and oversights in the original system by incorporating them into the functioning of the structure – jouissance can easily be read as nothing more than hegemony in this account without changing the original coordinates of the system too drastically. Yet, enjoyment provides one particularly difficult stumbling block for a dedicated formal account. To start with, enjoyment is never quite as ‘achievable’ as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being the consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is a supplement to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan frames jouissance as a useless enjoyment of one's own subjectivity that supplements the fundamental failings of a subject in either finding a grounding or consummating an authoritative account of its coherence. This ‘uselessness’ defines the operation of jouissance. Thus, for example, when Lacan suggests that ‘language is not the speaking subject’ in the Seminar on Feminine Sexuality, lodging a critique of structural linguistics as a law governing speech, jouissance is understood as something excessive that is born of the failure of structures of signification (Lacan 1977). Language is not the speaking subject precisely because what is passed through the grist mill of the speech is the result of a misfiring of structure as much as it is prefigured by logics of structure, meaning and utility. Therefore the interpretive difficulty for a structuralist account of enjoyment: the moment that the fact of enjoyment is recoded in the language of structure, the moment that it is made useful in a logic of subjectivization is precisely the moment where it stops being jouissance. Following Glynos and Stavrakakis's suggestion, one might press the question of the relationship between the demand and jouissance as a way of highlighting the differences that a purely Lacanian reading of demand might make for Laclau's understanding of politics. Framing enjoyment as equivalent with hegemony, Laclau identifies the fundamental ‘split’ in psychoanalytic theory between the universal and the particular demands of a group. Framing the split in this way, and as the privileged site of the political, Laclau occludes attention to another split: namely, the split within a subject, between the one who enters an equivalential relationship and the identitarian claim that sutures this subject into a set of linkages. This too is a site of enjoyment, where a subject identifies with an external image of itself for the sake of providing its practices of subjectivity with a kind of enjoyable retroactive coherence. The demand is relevant here, but not simply because it represents and anticipates a change in the social order or because it identifies a point of commonality. Here the demand is also a demand to be recognized as a subject among other subjects, and given the sanction and love of the symbolic order. The implication of this argument about the nature of enjoyment is that the perverse dialectic of misfirings, failure and surpluses in identity reveals something politically dangerous in not moving beyond demand. Put another way: not all equivalences are equally equivalent. Some equivalences become fetishes, becoming points of identification that eclipse the ostensible political goal of the demand. To extend the line of questioning to its logical conclusion, can we be bound to our equivalential chains? Freud, Lacan and the demand Demand plays a central role in Freud's tripartite scheme for the human psyche specifically in the formation of the ego. Although this scheme does not exercise the same hold over psychoanalytic thinking that it once did, the question of the ego still functions as an important point of departure for psychoanalytic thinking as a representative case of the production of the subject and identity. Even for critics of ‘ego psychology’, the idea of the ego as a representation of the ‘I’ of the human subject is still significant – the main question is what kind of analytical dispositions one takes towards the ego, the contingencies of its emergence and its continuing function. Despite the tendency of some commentators to naturalize Freud's tripartite schema of the human psyche, Freud's account of the ego does not characterize the ego as pre-existent or automatically given. Although present in virtually every human subject, the ego is not inevitably present: the ego is a compensatory formation that arises in the usual course of human development as a subject negotiates the articulation and refusal of its needs as filtered through demand. Hypothetically a ‘subject’ whose every need is fulfilled by another is never quite a subject: this entity would never find occasion to differentiate itself from the other who fulfils its every need. As a mode of individuation and subjectification, egos are economies of frustration and compensation. This economy relies on a split in the Freudian demand, which is both a demand to satiate a specific need and a demand for addressee to provide automatic fulfilment of need generally. The generative power of the demand relies on this split and on fact that some demands will be refused. This economy of need and frustration works because refusal of a specific need articulated as a demand on another is also a refusal of the idea that the addressee of the demand can fulfil all the subject's needs, requiring a set of individuation compensatory economic functions to negotiate the refusal of specific demands. ‘Ego’ is nothing more than the name for the contingent economy of compensatory subjectification driven by the repetition and refusal of demands – the nascent subject presents wants and needs in the form of the demand, but the role of the demand is not the simple fulfilment of these wants and needs. The demand and its refusal are the fulcrum on which the identity and insularity of the subject are produced: an unformed amalgam of needs and articulated demands is transformed into a subject that negotiates the vicissitudes of life with others. Put in the metaphor of developmental psychology, an infant lodges the instinctual demands of the id on others but these demands cannot be, and for the sake of development, must not be fulfilled. Thus the logic of the pop-psychology observation that the incessant demands of children for impermissible objects (‘may I have a fourth helping of dessert’) or meanings that culminate in ungroundable authoritative pronouncements (the game of asking a never-ending ‘whys’) are less about satisfaction of a request than the identity producing effects of the distanciating parental ‘no’. In ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, Freud argues: If … demands meet with no satisfaction, intolerable conditions arise … At that point … the ego begins to function. If all the driving force that sets the vehicle in motion is derived from the id, the ego … undertakes the steering, without which no goal can be reached. The instincts in the id press for immediate satisfaction at all costs, and in that way they achieve nothing or even bring about appreciable damage. It is the task of the ego to guard against such mishaps, to mediate between the claims of the id and the objections of the external world. (Freud 1986, p. 22) Later works move this theory from the narrow bounds of the parent/child relationship to a broader social relationship which was continually constituting and shaping the function of the ego – this is a theme of works such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, as well as Civilization and its Discontents. The latter repeats the same general dynamics of ego formation as ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, but moves the question beyond individual development towards the entirety of social relations. For Freud, the inevitability of conflicts between an individual and the social whole is simply one of the facts of life among other people. Life with others inevitably produces blockages in the individual's attempts to fulfil certain desires – some demands for the fulfilment of desires must be frustrated. This blockage produces feelings of guilt, which in turn are sublimated as a general social morality. Here frustration of demand is both productive in that it authorizes social moral codes, and civilization as mode of functioning, though it does so at the cost of imposing a constitutively contested relationship with social mores (Freud 1989). Though there are many places to begin thinking the Freudian demand in Lacan, one of the best places to start is an almost accidental Lacanian rumination on demands. Confronted by student calls to join the movement of 1968 Lacan famously quipped: ‘as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!’ Framing the meaning of his response requires a treatment of Lacan's theory of the demand and its relationship to hysteria as an enabling and constraining political subject position. Lacan's theory of the demand picks up at Freud's movement outward from the paradigmatic relationships between the parent/child and individual/civilization towards a more general account of the subjects, sociality and signification. The infrastructure supporting this theoretical movement transposes Freud's comparatively natural and genetic account of development to a set of metaphors for dealing with the subject's entry into signification. Lacan's goal is to rearticulate Freudian development processes as metaphors for a theory of the subject's production within signification. In Lacanian terms, what is at stake in this transposition is a less naturalized account of the subject by privileging supplementary practices of enjoyment that give a subject coherence as an agent, not in the sense of an ultimate ontological grounding, but rather as a mode of enjoying the repetition of retroactive totalities that name and produce subjects. This process is most famously worked out in Lacan's famous ‘Mirror Stage’ which details the trauma of the subject's insertion into the symbolic order, and the way that this constitutive dislocation generates the jouissance that sustains the production of subjectivity (Lacan 1982a). Looking in the mirror, Lacan's hypothetical infant does not yet have a concept of a unified self, puzzled by the fact that when it moves the image of the child in the mirror also moves. From the child in the mirror, Lacan infers the existence of two ‘I's underwriting processes of subjectivization: an ‘ideal I’, a statuesque projection of what it means to be an ‘I’ (in this case the image of the child) and a phenomenological experience of ‘I-ness’. Lacan treats the dialectic of misidentification in the mirror as a constant and constitutive performance of subjectivity as opposed to a specific developmental stage (Wilden 1982). In this interpretation, the child in the mirror stage is a metaphor for the constant production of the subject as a performance of the self in relation to a constitutive gap between the Symbolic and the subject, and the articulation of subjectivity as a category serves to repress the trauma produced in the margin between a nascent subject, its alienation from a projected external identity, and within the structure of signification. The paradoxical effect of this mode of subject formation is that not only does the child ‘discover’ that she is the child in the mirror, it also experiences a disorienting distance between itself and its image. Despite this fact, the child requires the an external image such as the one in the mirror to impose a kind of unity on its experience – the image of the other child provides an imaginary framing, a retroactive totality or a kind of narrative about what it means to be a self. The paradox of subjectivity lies in the simultaneity of identifying with an image of one's self that is given by a specific location within the symbolic order and the simultaneous alienation produced by the image's externality. Thus, the assumption of a frame for identity cannot ever completely effective, or, a subject is never completely comfortable inhabiting subjectivity – there is always an impossible gap between an experience of alienated subjectivity, a prefigured given image of one's subjectivity and the experience of being produced by the Symbolic. There is a famous Lacanian aphorism that holds that ‘the signifier represents a subject for another signifier’ (Lacan 1977, p. 142). This formulation of the subject's relation to language inverts the conventional wisdom that ontologically pre-given subjects use language as an instrument to communicate their subjective intentions. Signifiers are constituted by their difference, and subjects come into being in negotiating their entry into this realm of difference. Instead of articulating subjective states through language, subjects are articulated through language, within the differential space of signification. The paradoxical implication of this reversal is that the subject is simultaneously produced and disfigured by its unavoidable insertion into the space of the Symbolic. The mirror stage marks the excess of the demand as a mode of subject formation. Subjects assume the identity as subjects as a way of accommodating to the demand placed on them by the symbolic, and as a node for producing demands on the symbolic, or, of being recognized as a subject (Lacan 1982a, p. 4). Here jouissance is nothing more than the useless enjoyment of one's own subjectivity, surplus produced in negotiating a difficult gap between the phenomenological and ideal ‘I's, produced by a failure in relation between Lacan's phenomenological I and the Symbolic. Both the site of subject production and the site where this subject fills out an identity by investing in equivalential linkages and common demands are sites of enjoyment. In this sense, perhaps there is an excess of jouissance that remains even after the reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This remainder may even be logically prior to hegemony, in that it is a useless but ritually repeated retroactive act of naming the self that produces the conditions of possibility for investment, the defining point for Laclau's reduction of jouissance to hegemony. This specific site of excess, where the subject negotiates the terms on a non-relationship with the symbolic is the primary site splitting need, demand and desire. Need approximates the position of the Freudian id, in that it is a precursor to demand. Demand is the filtering of the need through signification, but as Sheridan notes ‘there is no adequation between need and demand’ (Sheridan 1982). The same type of split that inheres in the Freudian demand inheres in the Lacanian demand, though in this case the split does not derive from the empirical impossibility of fulfilling demands as much as it stems from the impossibility of ever fully articulating needs to or receiving a satisfactory response from the Other. Since there is no adequation, the specificity of the demand becomes less relevant than the structural fact that demand presupposes the ability of the addressee to fulfil the demand. This impossibility points to the paradoxical nature of demand: namely that the demand is less a way of addressing need than a call for love and recognition by this other. ‘In this way’, writes Lacan, ‘demand annuls (aufheht) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced (sich erniedrigt) to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love’ (Lacan 1982b, p. 286). The difficulty is that the Other cannot, by definition, ever give this gift: the starting presupposition of the mirror stage is the constitutive impossibility of comfortably inhabiting the symbolic – the mirror stage marks the constitutive split between the subject and the Symbolic. This paradoxical split, namely the structural impossibility of fulfilling demands, resonates with the logic of the Freudian demand in that the frustration of demand produces the articulation of desire. Thus, Lacan argues that ‘desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second’ (Lacan 1982b, p. 287). How might this subtraction occur? The answer to this question requires an account of the Other as seemingly omnipotent, and as simultaneously unable to fulfil demands. This sentiment animates the crucial Lacanian claim for the impossibility of the other giving a gift which it does not have, namely the gift of love: It will seem odd, no doubt, that in opening up the immeasurable space that all demand implies, namely, that of being a request for love …. Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regards to the Other … having no universal satisfaction … It is this whim that introduces the phantom of omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the other in which his demand is installed. (Lacan 1982c, p. 311) Transposed to the realm of political demands, this framing of demand reverses the classically liberal presupposition regarding demand and agency. In the classical iteration and contemporary critical theories that inherit its spirit, there is a presupposition that a demand is a way of exerting agency, and that the more firmly that the demand is lodged, the greater the production of an agential effect. The Lacanian framing of the demand sees the relationship as exactly the opposite: the more firmly one lodges a demand the more desperately one clings to the legitimate ability of an institution to fulfil it. Thus, demands ought to reach a kind of breaking point where the inability of an institution or order to proffer a response should produce a re-evaluation of the economy of demand and desire. In analytic terms, this is the moment of subtraction, where the manifest content of the demand is stripped away and the desire that underwrites it is laid bare. The result of this ‘subtraction’ is that the subject is in a position to relate to its desire, not as a set of deferrals, avoidances or transposition, but rather as an owned political disposition. As Lacan frames it, this is a dialectical process, where at each moment the subject is either learning to reassert the centrality of its demands, or where it is coming to terms with the impotence of the other as a satisfier of demands: But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love and the test of desire that development is ordered …. Clinical experience has shown us that this test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not he has a real phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it. (Lacan 1982b, p. 311) Thus, desire both has general status and a specific status for each subject. In other words, it is not just the mirror that produces the subject and its investments, but the desire and sets of proxy objects that cover over this original gap. As Easthope puts it: Lacan is sure that everyone's desire is somehow different and their own – lack is nevertheless my lack. How can this be if each of us is just lost in language … passing through demand into desire, something from the real, from the individual's being before language, is retained as a trace enough to determine that I desire here and there, not anywhere and everywhere. Lacan terms this objet petit a … petit a is different for everyone; and it can never be in substitutes for it in which I try to refind it. (Easthope 2000, pp. 94–95) The point of this disposition is to bring the subject to a point where they might ‘recognize and name’ their own desire, and as a result to become a political subject in the sense of being able to truly argue for something without being dependent on the other as a support for or organizing principle for political identity. This naming is not about discovering a latently held but hidden interiority, rather it is about naming a practice of political subjectivization that is not solely oriented towards or determined by the locus of the demand, determined by the contingent sets of coping strategies that orient a subject towards others and a political order. As Lacan argues, this is the point where a subject becomes a kind of new presence, or in the register of this essay, a new political possibility: ‘That the subject should come to recognize and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given …. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world’ (Lacan 1988, pp. 228–229). Alternatively, subjects can stay fixated on the demand, but in doing so they forfeit the possibility of desire, or as Fink argues: ‘later, however, Lacan comes to see that an analysis … that … does not go far enough in constituting the subject as desire leaves him or her stranded at the level of demand … unable to truly desire’ (Fink 1996, p. 90). What does this have to do with hysteria? A politics defined by and exhausted in demands is definitionally a hysterical politics. The hysteric is defined by incessant demands on the other at the expense of ever articulating a desire which is theirs. In the Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, for example, Lacan argues that the hysteric's demand that the Other produce an object is the support of an aversion towards one's desire: ‘the behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centred on the object, in so far as this object, das Ding, is, as Freud wrote somewhere, the support of an aversion’ (Lacan 1997, p. 53). This economy of aversion explains the ambivalent relationship between hysterics and their demands. On one hand, the hysteric asserts their agency, even authority over the Other. Yet, what appears as unfettered agency from the perspective of a discourse of authority is also simultaneously a surrender of desire by enjoying the act of figuring the other as the one with the exclusive capability to satisfy the demand. Thus the logic of ‘as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!’ At the register of manifest content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a kind of surrender. As a relation of address hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a claim for change. The limitation of the students’ call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought, but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its framing of the master. Here the fundamental problem of democracy is not in articulating resistance over and against hegemony, but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire. The difficulty in thinking hysteria is that it is both a politically effective subject position in some ways, but that it is politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at least a politics of interruption: imagine a world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed. Politics would be an impossibility, with no site for contest or reappropriation and everything simply the working out of a structure. Hysteria is a site of interruption, in that hysteria represents a challenge to our hypothetical system, refusing straightforward incorporation by its symbolic logic. But, stepping outside this hypothetical non-polity, hysteria is net politically constraining because the form of the demand, as a way of organizing the field of political enjoyment requires that the system continue to act in certain ways to sustain its logic. Thus, though on the surface it is an act of symbolic dissent, hysteria represents an affective affirmation of a hegemonic order, and therefore a particularly fraught form of political subjectivization.
12/19/21
2 - K - Settlerism vs Dis-identification
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: Kumail Zaidi, Holden Bukowsky The 1AC is invested in a death drive to perfection that inevitably comes out of the gratuitous violence of Indigenous people. The state operates through a drive of eradicating the otherness of the other, which is constitutive of Native genocide. Young 17 (Bryanne Huston, Doctoral Student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "Killing the Indian in the Child: Materialities of Death and Political Formations of Life in the Canadian Indian Residential School System," pp. 48-55) NIJrecut anop Whiteness, the Child, and the Logics of Futurity Against the politicized topographies and temporalities of indigeneity and race, I now move into a consideration of the contributions of psychoanalytic theory to the questions of politics and time presented thus far. The kinds of questions psychoanalysis is interested in asking, the registers upon which it performs analysis, and its unique emphasis on temporality, language, and difference provide an excellent conceptual apparatus through which we might begin to trouble/problematize stable, taken-for-granted oppositions between psychic and social, personal and political, self and other. Freud’s interest in time is evident in his work on the uncanny, and in his inaugural work on what we might now call trauma studies and conditions we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For Freud, this theory of hysteria introduces a provocative temporality in which traumatic events reoccur, flashing up in perfect replication of themselves, as though happening again and again. In his diagnosis of so-called shell-shocked soldiers returning from World War I, Freud was keenly aware that time did not always progress along an even plane. Though Freud’s analysis of trauma is captivating and critically rich, it is not within my purview here to take on the full extent of this scholarship. Instead, what is most salient to my analysis are the capacities of psychoanalytic theory to move critique outside and beyond prevailing notions of time and narratives of progress that only mean moving forward. This chapter writes from a stance that views it as imperative that scholarship reaches beyond, and thinks outside, the paradigms that invented it. Psychoanalytic theory, with its idiosyncratic temporal logics—particularly in conjunction with Foucauldian theory—offers a productive and robust way to critique the continuing primacy of normative disciplines whose chronologics have historically warranted a politics that kills in the name of life. Such an approach allows us to hold in productive tension any definition of “the political” as stable and finite, with—as in the case of liberal political philosophy—the legally constructed “person” as its primary epistemological unit. This conceptual capacity of psychoanalysis, in turn, allows us to politicize a form of life and modality of corporeal personhood hitherto constructed as what, in Bataillean parlance, we might call colonialism’s accursed share—colonialism’s pure waste. Additionally, psychoanalytic notions of the death drive, whose proper movement is explicitly circular, allows us to begin to locate the child within logics of futurity, onto which is laminated a kind of indelible whiteness. For the purpose of my analysis I engage Lacanian psychoanalysis, limiting myself to a consideration of the structure of the drives and to a Lacanian conceptualization of language, and its role in the formation of self and the suturing of the psyche to sociality. Freud, as Teresa De Lauretis (2008) emphasizes, elaborated the death drive between the First and Second World Wars, in a Europe living “under the shadow of death and the threat of biological and cultural genocide” (1). Situating her analysis of the death drive in the contemporary moment, De Lauretis points to this contextual, historical darkening, writing: “I wonder whether our epistemologies can sustain the impact of the real … If I return to Freud’s notion of an unconscious death drive, it is because it conveys the sense and the force of something in human reality that resists discursive articulation as well as political diplomacy, an otherness that haunts the dream of a common world” (9). Using psychoanalysis as reading practice, Freud’s suspicion that human life, both individual and social, is compromised from the beginning by something that undermines it, works against it, is (darkly?) generative. The death drive indicates a tension bordering psychic and libidinal relations, which marks Freud’s radical break with Cartesian rationality and points to a negativity that counteracts the optimistic affirmations of human perfectability. This dimension of radical negativity cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, nor is it entirely something the body does on its own. Theorized as the destruction drive, the antagonism drive, or sometimes, simply “the drive,” it is impossible to escape. In psychoanalytic theory, therefore, particularly in the clinical setting, the objective is not to overcome the drive, but rather to come to terms with it, in what Slovenian Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek (1989) calls “its terrifying dimension” (4). It is a fundamental axiom of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that attempts to abolish the drive antagonism are precisely the source of totalitarian temptation. Žižek writes: “The greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension” (5). So it is that one of Canada’s greatest atrocities— the genocide of its First Peoples—took place in the name of Canada itself, that sought progress and unification as a single body politic with claims on a shared futurity. The fulfillment of this destiny relied upon the negation of the other, the bad race, the dangerous race, the race that stood outside the purview of the norm and had no share in its time-zone, the ones called to live in the between space—as nobody. As the relatively more benign civilization policies failed to convert Aboriginal forms of life into separate but civilized, Christian communities on reserves, the federal government intensified its tactics. Policies became more aggressive. As these more aggressive policies (such as enfranchisement) also failed, the federal government intensified its tactics once again, escalating the stakes and the strategies towards the horizon of assimilation. This ‘doubling down’ in the face of failure is a primary trace effect of the death drive, and indeed, it is not unreasonable to argue that the federal government Indian policy has, since confederation, been death driven. Because the aim of fully eradicating the otherness of the other can only fail—in Freudian parlance, it cannot be mastered—the trajectory of the aiming turns in a circularity, orbiting around that which can never be had: perfection. Caught in death drive circularity, the aiming towards the objective (i.e. a unified body politic) authorizes, and indeed recruits, escalating violence in the interest of—finally—closing the open. For Žižek, this compulsive ‘doubling-down’ in the face of failure to arrive at the impossible horizon of perfection tips towards totalitarian temptation, which, he tells us, is implicated in the drive to unify a singular body politic, a new man without antagonistic tension. The drive aims for the return to a moment of unity before the intrusion of language and the entrance of the subject into what Lacan calls the Symbolic—the universe of symbols in which all human subjects share. Because this economy of signifiers operates through a modality of difference by association, on the premise that language does not reflect or carry within it universal a priori meaning, spirit, or Truth, signifiers are always and already sliding along a chain of signification that is never truly fixed. Rather, for Lacan, meaning is constructed through quilting points, durable concepts that affix ideas to their signifiers and which, in their durability, structure entire fields of meaning. For Lacan, subjects are formed by their entrance into this system of sliding difference from a pre-linguistic state retroactively constructed through nostalgic affective associations with unity, perfection, and completion. The loss or lack occurs in the imaginary, the order of presence and absence, and is formalized in the symbolic. This is experienced by the subject as a loss of that to which she/he can never again return, but for which she/he perpetually yearns, and toward which she/he perpetually moves. The circularity of movement toward this impossible horizon is precisely the movement of the drive. It is my argument that the concept of “the Indian” is a quilting point through which the field of politics in Canada is sutured into signification, a durable concept that organizes the meaning of nation, citizen, sovereignty, and subjecthood. Further, the hypoxic vision of national unity and a harmonious white(ned) citizenry is a movement propelled by the drive, a circularity impelled by the belief that what is lacking in the present can be made good in the future—an imaginary that activates/harnesses a kind of libidinal energy that is, by its very nature, inexhaustible. It matters, in the instance of the Canadian Indian Residential Schools and their mandate, that before child subjects enter into the structuration of language/the Symbolic, their bodies are already marked as disprized, abject, inscribed into the signification for, and, I argue, as, loss itself. As I have argued above, reading through psychoanalytic theory facilitates a conceptualization of subject-formation that includes the role of signification in the contouring of subject/ivities. This analytic rubric is importantly brought to bear in my analysis of “the child” the Canadian Indian Residential School System announces into presence: a child fundamentally and constitutively tied to a death whose temporal structure is always deferred, always impartial, always unfolding, and yet always still to be. Indeed, even in circumstances in which her/his mode of being in the world is not a deliberate practice of making- spectral, “the child” remains a notoriously ambivalent, slippery signifier. This plasticity—differently stated, this over-abundant availability of “the child” as concept—takes on an interesting significance within political thought, functioning not as that which is politicized, but as the signifier in whose name the political mobilizes itself. In this way, the child functions as the absolute outside to political thought and the logics of its temporality, functioning instead to condition its possibilities and organize, from beyond its borders, its spatial and temporal limits. An example of this conceptualization of the child as signifier—and certainly one of the more provocative articulations of this phenomena in the contemporary neoliberal moment—is the polemic Lee develops in his monograph No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. For Edelman, the Child—in its conflation with the kind of futurity toward which the teleology of (neo)liberal discourse is mobilized—is not simply important to contemporary politics, but is that which “serves to regulate political discourse itself” (ii). Indeed, as Edelman points out, “the figural Child alone embodies the citizen as ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed. For the social exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a national freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself” (ii). In Edelman’s polemic, it goes without saying that the figural child is a white child and that children of colour, children of mixed heritage, Indian children—within the Ideological State Apparatus of the Indian Residential Schools—far from carrying the over-abundant significance Edelman so adeptly parses, signify on only the most spectral of registers. This child, I argue, as a kind of spectral(ized) partial subject, instantiates a subjectivity simultaneously over-exposed to the political and over-determined by the word of the law, while barely accorded even the status of bare life. This is a subject that is hailed into a circularity of misrecognition in a relationship with death that is virtually inescapable. This relationship with death is the suture that connects this subject to the social. Edelman’s argument does not address racialized formations of self-hood, but is no less relevant to the argument I seek to develop here. Indeed, it is perhaps all the keener in what it omits—which is the child of color. This omission points to the level of signification and the way in which the whitened child is effortlessly lifted from the problematically raced body—the body whose racialized status is found problematic. This fantasy of purification through signification speaks, in ways that are eloquent and disturbing in equal measure, precisely the fantasy of the Canadian Indian Residential School System: that the body of the Indian could be left behind in a transcendent movement away from the vexatious quagmire posed by the Indian body toward the realm of what Kantian philosophy calls pure spirit, the realm of whiteness, purity, and hypoxic visions of what Edelman calls, “a national freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself” (ii). This fantasy of corporeal abandonment points to the latent desire of Western philosophical thought that seeks, through the disavowal of bodily finitude and a fetishization of the logos, access to purity of form, a fantasy that relegates, leaves trapped, the sometimes racialized, sometimes feminized other, mired in flesh and finitude from which it is allowed no escape. The Indigenous person, we remember from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, is imagined as always already outside the teleology of history, already extinct. This way of understanding difference, through the rubric of historical progress, remains central to liberal and neoliberal political thought, economic practices, and policies in the current moment. Prising the child away from the Indian, meanwhile, continues to have important implications in the way we imagine colonial forms, not only of life, but also of death. Their strategy of disidentification is codeword for whiteness – it’s the lexicon of settler colonial violence Grande 2K (Sandy, Associate Professor of Education at UConnecticut, “American Indian geographies of identity and power: At the crossroads of indigena and mestizaje,” Harvard Education Review, Issue Number, No. 4, pp. 492-493)vikas Discussion The forces of identity appropriation, cultural encroachment, and corporate commodification pressure American Indian communities to employ essetialist tactics and construct relatively fixed notions of identity, and to render the concepts of fluidity and transgression highly problematic. It is evident from the examples above that the notion of fluid boundaries has never worked to the advantage of Indigenous peoples: federal agencies have invoked the language of fluid or unstable identities as the rationale for disman-tling the structures of tribal life and creating greater dependency on the U.S. government; Whitestream America has seized its message to declare open season on Indians, thereby appropriating Native lands, culture, spiritual practices. history, and literature; and Whitestream academics have now eployed the language of postmodern fluidity to unwittingly transmute centu-ries of war between Indigenous peoples and their respective nation-states into a "genetic and cultural dialogue" (Valle andTorres, 1995, p. 141). Thus, in spite of its aspirations to social justice, the notion of a new cultural democracy based on the ideal of mestizaje represents a rather ominous threat to American Indian communities. In addition, the undercurrent of fluidity and sense of displacedness that permeates, if not defines, mestizaje runs contrary to American Indian sensibilities of connection to place, land, and the Earth itself. Consider, for exam-ple, the following statement on the nature of critical subjectivity by Peter Mc-Laren: The struggle for critical subjectivity is the struggle to occupy a space of hope — a liminal space, an intimation of the anti-structure, of what lives in the in-between zone of undecidedability — in which one can work toward a praxis of redemption.... A sense of atopy has always been with me, a resplendent placelessness, a feeling of living in germinal formlessness.... I cannot find words to express what this border identity means to me. All I have are what Georgres Bastille (1988) calls mots glissants (slippery words). (1997, pp. 18-14) McLaren speaks passionately and directly about the crisis of modern society and the need for a "praxis of redemption." As he perceives it, the very possibility of redemption is situated in our willingness not only to accept but to flourish in the "liminal" spaces, border identities, and postcolonial hybridities that are inherent in postmodern life and subjectivity. In fact, McLaren perceives the fostering of a "resplendent placelessness" itself as the gateway to a more just, democratic society. While American Indian intellectuals also seek to embrace the notion of transcendent subjectivities, they seek a notion of transcendence that remains rooted in historical place and the sacred connection to land. Consider, for example, the following commentary by Deloria (1992) on the centrality of place and land in the construction of American Indian subjectivity: Recognizing the sacredness of lands on which previous generations have lived and died is the foundation of all other sentiment. Instead of denying this di-mension of our emotional lives, we should be setting aside additional places that have transcendent meaning. Sacred sites that higher spiritual powers have chosen for manifestation enable us to focus our concerns on the specific form of our lives.... Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and prac-tices because they represent the presence of the sacred in our lives. They prop-erly inform us that we arc not larger than nature and that we have responsibili-ties to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. This lesson must be learned by each generation. (pp. 278, 281) Gross misunderstanding of this connection between American Indian subjectivity and land, and, more importantly, between sovereignty and land has been the source of numerous injustices in Indian country. For instance, I be-lieve there was little understanding on the part of government officials that passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978) would open a Pandora's box of discord over land, setting up an intractable conflict between property rights and religious freedom. American Indians, on the other hand, viewed the act as a invitation to return to their sacred sites, several of which were on government lands and were being damaged by commercial use. As a result, a flurry of lawsuits alleging mismanagement and destruction of sacred sites was filed by numerous tribes. Similarly, corporations, tourists, and even rock climbers filed suits accusing land managers of unlawfully restricting access CO public places by implementing policies that violate the constitutional separation between church and state. All of this is to point out that the critical pro-ject of mestizaje continues to operate on the same assumption made by the U.S. government in this instance, that in a democratic society, human subjec-tivity — and liberation for that matter — is conceived of as inherently rights-based as opposed to land-based. To be fair, I believe that both American Indian intellectuals and critical theorists share a similar vision — a time, place. and space free of the compulsions of Whitestream, global capitalism and the racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia it engenders. But where critical scholars ground their vision in Western conceptions of democracy and justice that presume a "liberated" self. American Indian intellectuals ground their vision in conceptions of sov-ereignty that presume a sacred connection to place and land. Thus, to a large degree, the seemingly liberatory constructs of fluidity, mobility, and trangression are perceived not only as the language of critical subjectivity, but also as part of the fundamental lexicon of Western imperialism. Deloria (1999) writes: Although the loss of land must be seen as a political and economic disaster of the first magnitude, the real exile of the tribes occurred with the d6struction of ceremonial life (associated with the loss of land) and the failure or inability of white society to offer a sensible and cohesive alternative to the traditions which Indians remembered. People became disoriented with respect to the world in which they lived. They could not practice their old ways, and the new ways which they were expected to learn were in a constant state of change because they were not a cohesive view of the world but simply adjustments which whites were making to the technology they had invented. (p. 247). In summary, insofar as American Indian identities continue to be defined and shaped in interdependence with place, the transgressive mestizaje functions as a potentially homogenizing force that presumes the continued exile of tribal peoples and their enduring absorption into the American "democratic" Whitestream. The notion of mestizaje as absorption is particularly problematic for the Indigenous peoples of Central and South America, where the myth of the mestizaje (belief that the continent's original cultures and inhabitants no longer exist) has been used for centuries to force the in-tegration of Indigenous communities into the national mestizo model (Van Cott, 1994). According to Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1992), the myth of mestiza-je has provided the ideological pretext for numerous South American gov-ernmental laws and policies expressly designed to strengthen the nation-state through incorporation of all "non-national" (read "Indigenous") ele-ments into the mainstream. Thus, what Valle and Torres (1995) previously describe as "the continent's unfinished business of cultural hybridization" (p. 141), Indigenous peoples view as the continents' long and bloody battle to absorb their existence into the master narrative of the mestizo. While critical scholars do construct a very different kind of democratic solidarity that disrupts the sociopolitical and economic hegemony of the dominant culture around a transformed notion of mestizaje (one committed to the destabilization of the isolationist narratives of nationalism and cul-tural chauvinism), I argue that any liberatory project that does not begin with a clear understanding of the difference of American lndianness will, in the end, work to undermine tribal life. Moreover, there is a potential danger that the ostensibly "new" cultural democracy based upon the radical mes-tizaje will continue to mute tribal differences and erase distinctive Indian identities. Therefore, as the physical and metaphysical borders of the post-modern world become increasingly fluid, the desire of American Indian communities to protect geographic borders and employ "essentialist" tactics also increases. Though such tactics may be viewed by critical scholars as highly problematic, they are viewed by American Indian intellectuals as a last line of defense against the steady erosion of tribal culture, political sover-eignty, Native resources, and Native lands. The tensions described above indicate the dire need for an Indigenous, revolutionary theory that maintains the distinctiveness of American Indians as tribal peoples of sovereign nations (border patrolling) and also encour-ages the building of coalitions and political solidarity (border crossing). In contrast to critical scholars McLaren and Kris Gutierrez (1997), who admon-ish educators to develop a concept of unity and difference as political mobili-zation rather than cultural authenticity, I urge American Indian intellectuals to develop a language that operates at the crossroads of unity and difference and defines this space in terms of political mobilization and cultural authen-ticity, thus expressing both the interdependence and distinctiveness of tribal peoples. The alternative is to refuse the affirmative’s endorsement of settler political selfhood. This isn’t “reject the aff”—it’s a micro-political process that destabilizes the settler psyche by breaking down the coherence of settler colonialism built through repetition. Debate is an ethical affirmation of a certain ideology. Voting neg forces a confrontation of the genocidal settlement, destabilizing the settler subject—that comes prior to evaluating the settler truth claims of the aff. Henderson 15 Henderson, Phil. (2015). Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(1), 40–56. doi:10.1080/2201473x.2015.1092194 JParkrecut anop At a distance, the duplicity here is quite strange. Lines are drowned, forests are cut, nets are stolen, because settlers know reflexively that they have a right – duty even – to shape the vacant land according to their collective and individual needs. Yet, the very things which they seek to remove should prove the falsity of terra nullius, as they evidence indigenous presence. The settler subject is able to gloss the violence of his actions so easily, however, because he is ultimately the product of, and dependent upon, a series of power relations that actively disappear indigenous peoples as active sovereign bodies. Within the psychosocial order of settler sovereignty, supported by the settler imago, these acts are understood as progressive or represent an adherence to the law, and become unreadable to the settler for what they are: the latest in a series of dispossessive acts. Destabilizing a dispossessive subject Not only does the concept of the spatial imago allow us to interrogate the formation of the settler as a subject, it also provides a powerful analytical tool to explain the extreme vitriolic reactions that indigenous peoples constantly face from settlers. Many point to racism as 10 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 the source of such reactions, and this is not without cause, as settlers have long imbibed a sense of racial and cultural superiority – particularly toward indigenous peoples. Despite these prejudices, however, Wolfe notes that the ‘primary motive’ of settler colonialism’s domination ‘is not race’ but ‘access to territory’. 63 Thus, inasmuch as the settler colonial imago validates access to territory by occluding indigenous sovereignty, the ongoing presences on and claims to the land by indigenous peoples trouble the settler imago and induce panic in settler subjects. Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces, settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their daily life – in all its banality – is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’ beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown writes, in the ‘loss of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66 Threatened with this ‘loss of containment’, the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown’s thesis to the settler colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic – this rabid and insatiable anger – is always already at the core of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression ‘even after indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening’. 68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the maintenance of settler colonialism’s imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject – further development and entrenchment of the settler colonial imago – is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers are also always already in a psychically defensive position – that is, the settler’s offensive position on occupied land is sustained through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the subject’s reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this requires averting attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the hill’. 70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical outbursts’. Such is the case when settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire’s energy into an obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-disciplining colonial subject’. 73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the subject’s arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my account apart from Rifkin’s. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’ of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus, the process of subject formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of settler colonialism can be subverted – creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler colonial history and culture, to decanter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the ‘repetitive practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-politics of resistance’, which historically 12 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure. Today, we can draw similar inspiration from the variety of tactics used in movements like Idle No More. From flash mobs in major malls, to round dances that block city streets, and even projects to rename Toronto locations, Idle No More is engaged in a series of micro-political projects across Turtle Island.80 The micro-politics of the movement strengthen indigenous subjects and their spatialities, while leaving an indelible imprint in the settler psyche. Predictably, rage and resentment were provoked in some settlers;81 however, Idle No More also drew thousands of settler-allies into the streets and renewed conversations about the necessity of nation-to-nation relationships. With settler colonial spaces disrupted and a relationship of domination made impossible to ignore, in the tradition of centuries of indigenous resistance, Idle No More put the settler subject into serious flux once more.
The interp is that you should evaluate the 1AC as an object of study a Sociogeny – debate may not spill over to political change but it has the potential to reproduce affirmations and negations that trigger neurohcmeical responses via reward and punishment mechanisms privilege certain research methods as valuable in the way debaters view the world. b Objectivity – consequence based plan focus shifts the focus of debate from our investments in settler colonialism to a plan text, which is incoherent because debate is a communicative activity and their inter sidesteps discussions of genocide.
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2 - K - Settlerism vs Kant
Tournament: Blake | Round: Octas | Opponent: Scarsdale BS | Judge: Jacob Nails, Sam Anderson, Mike Girouard Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose. Kant’s knowing subject is modeled as the norm of the ideal settler and serve hierarchal structures of settler colonialism Stoneman 18, Betty. Dept. of Philosophy, 561 S. Kilgo Circle, Emory University The Epistemological and Ethical Functions of Kant’s Binary and Foucault’s Critique of Critique of the Binary. June 7, 2018. https://bettystoneman.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/the-epistemological-and-ethical-functions-of-kants-binary-and-foucaults-critique-of-critique-of-the-binary//recut anop Conclusion Kant’s hierarchical ordering of human groups along a gradation of sub-A status based on the binary of A and non-A serves both epistemological and ethical functions for him. A is taken as the epistemological and ethical starting point, the center of the epistemological and ethical universe. It is from the position of A, that all sub-As are conceptualized as objects of knowledge and all sub-As’ actions are ethically prescribed. Sub-As are known and sub-As’ actions are ethical only in relation to A; only insofar as sub-As fit into A’s self-referential schema. Foucault’s critique of critique of the binary offers us a way to conceptualize Kant’s critique of the knowing subject. Kant’s critique of the knowing subject, I suggest, sets up and maintains a coherent structure to Kant’s ordered hierarchy. Foucault, despite his critique of critique, actively reproduces the very structure that he is critiquing. In a longer paper, I would further pursue the epistemological and ethical functions of Kant’s binary, as well as Foucault’s critique of critique of the binary, through Sylvia Wynter’s perspective. Due to space limitations, I will conclude by offering the suggestion that my reading of Kant is compatible with Wynter’s perspective. Wynter, while utilizing Foucault’s work, offers us a further critique of critique. She argues that intellectuals of the modern episteme “continue to articulate, in however radically oppositional a manner, the rules of the social order and its sanctioned theories.”20 It is no less true today than it was in the classical episteme that “subjects … normatively know Self, Other, as well as their social, physical, and organic worlds, in the adaptively true terms needed for the production and reproduction not only of their then supernaturally legitimated genre of being human, but as well for that of the hierarchical social structures in whose intersubjective field that genre of the human could have alone realized itself.”21 Wynter states, “we continue to know our present order of social reality, and rigorously so, in the adaptive ‘truth-for’ terms needed to conserve our present descriptive statement.”22 My suggestion, aligned with Wynter’s perspective, is that Kant’s use of teleological principles, the knowing subject, and the binary are all conservation truths. They are taken as truth because they conserve, produce, and reproduce the coherent structure. Moreover, Foucault, may be radically challenging this structure by challenging the knowing subject. However, as a critique of critique, Foucault is still operating within the same structure, and thus, is adaptively reproducing the structure. Foucault’s critique of the knowing subject is a critique founded in and of the knowing subject as a European, white, man. The 1AC’s Kantian articulation of rationality is a justification for Native genocide—Kantian ethics view indigenous people as children, absent of Western liberal ideas and thus sanctioned to violence and exclusion Rollo 18, Toby. Toby Rollo, BA (UBC), MA (Victoria), PhD (Toronto) Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Lakehead University “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child.” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 60–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1199826.//anop The contemporary construction of native peoples as feral children has not changed much from its articulation by the social contract theorists. Since then, however, the settler colonial homology of civilizational progress has accrued a veneer of academic and scientific legitimacy that bears mention. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a stages view of progress coalesced in the philosophical work of Kant, Hegel, Mill, and Comte that explicitly premised historical, biological, and sociological understandings of cultural evolution on the development of the child. In his formative essay, ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’, for example, Kant argues the Enlightenment is marked by ‘man’s release from his self incurred immaturity’. 78 The terms in which he defines immaturity are telling: ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’. 79 Kant’s notion of immaturity preserves virtually unaltered the political/childhood binary born in Greek and Roman antiquity and it is central to his vision, and subsequent visions, of civilizational progress. The German word translated here as immaturity (sometimes as ‘tutelage’) is unmündikeit, which has as its root mund, or mouth, and connotes the ability to speak for oneself.80 While man exists in a state of immaturity – without speech – we are merely ‘passive citizens’. 81 Kant and his contemporaries are often criticized for espousing racist positions at the same time as they celebrate the timeless and universal nature of human rights. The issue here is the timelessness and universality of the process of maturation. The medieval homology heavily informs Kant’s view that ‘children ought to be educated, not for the present, but for a possibly improved condition of man in the future; that is, in a manner which is adapted to the idea of humanity and the whole destiny of man’. 82 Independence must be learned, according to Kant, lest one end up like the Indigenous peoples of what is now Tahiti, ‘who remain children all their lives’. 83 He argued that the absence of a civil state indicates a lack of, or rejection of, reason and a threat to civilized people which justifies pre-emptive ‘hostile action’. 84 Like Vitoria, he sanctions violence against Indigenous peoples who, as ‘immature children’, violate the dictates of reason, as manifest in their rejection of private property and liberal rights.85 The identical homology is carried through in the work of John Stuart Mill, who wrote in On Liberty and elsewhere that Indigenous societies, which are to be considered children, have no rights to bodily integrity or freedom from violence.86 Mehta perfectly summarizes the colonial mandate expressed by Mill and others in the context of colonial India: ‘India is a child for which the empire offers the prospect of legitimate and progressive parentage and toward which Britain, as a parent, is similarly obligated and competent.’ 87 I Settler colonialism is deeply engrained in Western culture and is reflected through universalist theory—their universalist Enlightenment philosophy is a justification for assimilation and extermination of Indigenous peoples John Hinkinson 12 – Editor at Arena, an Australian maganzine. “Why Settler Colonialism?” Arena. 2012. https://arena.org.au/why-settler-colonialism/ JJNrecut anop Settler colonialism as a practice is a subset of colonial history, one where the colonial relationship converts into a very specific cultural practice. It is where the ‘settler culture’ seeks a permanent place in the colonial setting and, as such, enters an unrelenting cultural logic of misrecognition and blindness towards the cultural other, issuing in acts of objective cruelty and cultural destruction. Because this relationship is based in cultures, which are prior to the individual (while simultaneously forming the individual), it is a relationship that is especially difficult to put aside. Empirically speaking, there are many such examples in history, many arising in the period of Western Empire associated with modernity and expansionism in the New World. Settler colonialism as a field illuminates the history of these myriad examples while bridging into accounts of contemporary expressions of the settler phenomenon, from the continued cultural suppression arising out of nineteenth-century Empire (in Africa, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, for example) to twentieth-century expressions in Palestine. If settler colonialism is to develop as a field of critical study it needs to include but go far beyond empirical accounts simply framed by an ethic of cultural justice. To do this it is necessary to develop a theory and account of how settler colonialism as a practice is based culturally. And this will require a broader frame of reference than the specific localities of settler-colonial practice, a broader frame that shows how this phenomenon is an effect of power based in attitudes to other cultures more generally. For it is arguable that the settler-colonial attitude derives from a widespread cultural politics set within a larger frame, one which the world today assumes, rather than reflexively knows or seeks to reform. This is to speak of a continuing imperialist attitude expressed in a view of other cultures that has little respect for those cultures’ core assumptions. There are crude expressions of this lack of cultural empathy, but there are also ‘high’ expressions, such as those embodied in the universalist philosophy of the West. For high universalism, the emancipatory principle is argued to be beyond all specific cultures and, as such, superior to all of them. Recent US adventures in the Middle East come to mind, where the invocation of ‘freedom’ has become a sign of disrespect for the complex cultures of the region. Imposed ‘freedom’ has devastating effects. Common to these expressions is a deep cultural blindness associated with modernity that is unable to view other cultures empathically or engage them in informed, reciprocal cultural interchange. Rather, knowledge of such cultures has predominantly developed instrumentally as a means to domination. These relations of cultural power at a more general level both generate the settler colonial relationship and reflexively feed off its effects. As John Gray remarks in his Black Mass, the Enlightenment is responsible for many racist policies, especially towards colonized peoples. Enlightenment philosophers have a special responsibility, as is seen in the case of Locke: John Locke was a Christian committed to the idea that humans are created equal, but he devoted a good deal of intellectual energy to justifying the seizure of the lands of indigenous people in America.(8) Other philosophers, including Kant, are mired in much the same logic. The goal of equality within a universal civilization was the prospect, but this could only be achieved by the peoples of the colonies ‘giving up their own ways of life and adopting European ways’.(9) If they did not willingly give up their ways of life, extermination, an idea that was widespread, might be entertained. This was not merely a Nazi policy. When H. G. Wells asked himself about the fate of ‘swarms of black and yellow and brown people who do not come into the needs of efficiency’, he replied: ‘Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go’.(10) John Gray goes on: Nazi policies of extermination … drew on powerful currents in the Enlightenment and used as models policies in operation in many countries, including the world’s leading liberal democracy. Programmes aiming to sterilize the unfit were under way in the United States. Hitler admired these programmes and also admired America’s genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples: he ‘often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination — by starvation and uneven combat — of the “Red Savages” who could not be tamed by captivity’.(11) If there is any doubt about the crucial role of settler colonialism in the power effects of the West one should turn to the recent book by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands.(12) Here the author confirms that the various plans constructed by Hitler and the Nazi regime for the mass starvation of the Slavs and the Final Solution of the Jews of Eastern Europe were based on settler-colonial assumptions, in particular as expressed in the example of the United States and the conquest of the Native American peoples. Hitler’s plan (the Generalplan Ost) to colonize the Ukraine breadbasket was one that sought to turn back the clock of industrialization in the Soviet Union, deliberately starve unwanted millions of people, introduce German settlers up to the Urals, enslave Slavs where they were deemed to be essential for economic production and push the Jews of Eastern Europe beyond the Urals into Asia. While the plan was quickly frustrated in its detail by the resistance of the Soviets, Hitler’s plan is nevertheless illustrative of crucial background assumptions and elaborations of notions of ‘development’. For Hitler, Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, ‘in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America’. As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.(13) As suggestive as this material may be, the point is not that of equating the United States with the Nazis. Rather it is to make the more important ethical point about Western powers and Western culture: they are interwoven with practices that take settler colonialism for granted, practices that arguably define the underside of modernity. Systems of knowledge serve to institute and replicate settler colonialism — the human is a storytelling species and knowledge systems are always already being chartered through the replication of sociogenic codes Wynter and McKittrick 15. Sylvia Wynter is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University. Katherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts. (Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Duke University Press, 2015) vikas To resolve the aporia of this cognitive dilemma, I turn again to Césaire’s proposed new and hybrid bios / mythoi science of the Word. Here because, as he proposed, and as earlier cited, the study of the Word / the mythoi will now determine the study of the bios / of the brain, and this will thereby enable us to gain an external (demonic ground) perspective on the always already storytellingly chartered / encoded discursive formations / aesthetic fields, as well as of, co- relatedly, our systems of knowledge. And, with this gain insight into how these systems of knowledge, each together with its genre- specific “truth of solidarity,” all institute and stably replicate our genres of being hybridly human with the also communitarian viability of each respective societal order. Yet with all of the above—including, in macro terms, the instituting of our contemporary secular and “single model” liberal (now neoliberal) monohumanist Western / Westernized transnational world system—what again must be emphasized is that the respective “truths” of their knowledge systems are always already prespecified by our storytellingly chartered sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life / death, its Word and / or Bateson- type “descriptive statement” as rigorously discursively elaborated by its “status quo system of learning” and its overall epistemological order. This order circularly ensures that each such genre- specific regime / program of truth, will law- likely function to semantically- neurochemically induce the performative enactment of our ensemble of always already role- allocated individual and collective behaviors within the reflexly and subjectively experienced terms of a cognitively closed, thereby genre- specific and fictively eusocializing, autonomously functioning, higher- level living autopoietic system. Cosmogonies of Our Planetary Life and Our Chartered Codes of Symbolic Life and Symbolic Death: Fictively Induced Modes of Inter- Altruistic Kin Recognition and Auto- Instituted Pseudospeciated Mode of Kind KM: Here Wynter elaborates on storytelling beginnings and cosmogonies. She returns to her extension of Frantz Fanon’s conception of our being hybridly human, both bios and mythoi, in order to address the unsolved phenomenon of human consciousness. She explores how our chartering / encoding genre- specific cosmogonies provide the narrative source of our fictively eusocializing subjectivities, thus enabling us to be reborn- through- initiation as always already sociogenically encoded inter- altruistically kin- recognizing members of each referent- we. At the same time, however, the law- like reification of each fictively induced and subjectively experienced order of consciousness of each referent- we is, itself, absolutized by what Wynter identifies as the law of cognitive closure. SW: Fanon put forward the idea of our skin / masks, thereby of the hybridity of our being human, in 1952. Crick and Watson cracked the genetic code in 1953. Now, I argue that Fanon’s masks enact a “second set of instructions”: that of the sociogenic code of symbolic life / death. Further, within the overall enactment of each such “second set of instructions,” the ism of gender is itself—while only one member class—a founding member class. Gender is a founding member because in order to auto- institute ourselves as subjects of a genre- specific referent- we, we must, first, co- relatedly and performatively enact each such code’s “second set of instructions” at the familial level, in terms of our gender roles. We know of this brilliant concept of the performative enactment of gender from Judith Butler.60 I am suggesting that the enactments of such gender roles are always a function of the enacting of a specific genre of being hybridly human. Butler’s illuminating redefinition of gender as a praxis rather than a noun, therefore, set off bells ringing everywhere! Why not, then, the performative enactment of all our roles, of all our role allocations as, in our contemporary Western / Westernized case, in terms of, inter alia, gender, race, class / underclass, and, across them all, sexual orientation? All as praxes, therefore, rather than nouns. So here you have the idea that with being human everything is praxis. For we are not purely biological beings! As far as the eusocial insects like bees are concerned, their roles are genetically preprescribed for them. Ours are not, even though the biocentric meritocratic iq bourgeois ideologues, such as the authors of The Bell Curve, try to tell us that they / we are.61 So the question is: What are the mechanisms, what are the technologies, what are the strategies by which we prescribe our own roles? What is common to all are cosmogonies and origin narratives. The representations of origin, which we ourselves invent, are then retroactively projected onto an imagined past. Why so? Because each such projection is the shared storytelling origin out of which we are initiatedly reborn. In this case we are no longer, as individual biological subjects, primarily born of the womb; rather, we are both initiated and reborn as fictively instituted inter- altruistic kinrecognizing members of each such symbolically re- encoded genre- specific referent- we. This is to say we are all initiatedly reborn—renatus in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Christian term—to subjectively experience ourselves as subjects of the same encoded symbolic life kind. Why this imperative? Because for all genre- specific subjects who are reborn from the same eusocializing origin myth and / or cosmogony, their genetically encoded individual biological life and its attendant imperative of naked self- preservation must at the same time be, via initiation, aversively experienced as symbolic death. 62 This is the concomitant condition of inducing in all subjects the mimetic desire for the group- collective symbolic life of its genre- specific referent- we, its fictive mode of pseudospeciated kind. The centrality of the ritually initiated and enacted storytelling codes, and thus their positive / negative, symbolic life / death semantically- neurochemically activated “second set of instructions,” emerges here: these codes are specific to each kind. The positive verbal meanings attributed to their respective modes of kind are alchemically transformed into living flesh, as its members all reflexly subjectively experience themselves, in the mimetically desirable, because opiate-rewarded, placebo terms of that mode of symbolic life prescribed by the storytelling code. This at the same time as they subjectively experience their former “born of the womb” purely biological life as mimetically aversive, because they are doing so in now opiate- reward- blocked symbolic death, nocebo terms.63 For the preservation of which of these lives, then, do you think wars are fought? In the wake of the answer to the above, we see our chartering cosmogonies as being isomorphic with what we now define as our “cultures”— in both cases we are talking about our hybrid sociogenic codes and their “second set of instructions.” These are codes that are even able to override where necessary—this with respect to our auto- instituted, non– genetically restricted fictive modes of eusociality—the first set of instructions of our own dna (unlike as is the case with all other primates). The logical corollary is this: our modes of auto- institution, together with their initiatory rituals of rebirth—as iconized by the ritual of Christian baptism—are indispensable to the enacting of the human as the only living species on Earth who is the denizen of its third and hybrid bios / mythoi level of existence! Our mode of hybrid living being alone—this together with our also hitherto always genre- specific bios / mythoi enacted orders of supraindividual consciousness—is thereby to arrive on the scene all at once! With the Big Bang of the biomutational Third Event! So you see now why we still can’t solve the problem of consciousness? In spite of the most dedicated efforts of natural scientists, brain scientists, and philosophers? For what becomes clear here is that our human orders of consciousness / modes of mind cannot exist outside the terms of a specific cosmogony. Therefore, human orders of consciousness / modes of mind cannot preexist the terms of the always already mythically chartered, genre- specific code of symbolic life / death, its “second set of instructions” and thus its governing sociogenic principle— or, as Keith Ward puts it, its nonphysical principle of causality.64 To give an example: here we are, we are talking and thinking. We are, in fact, reflexly talking and thinking in terms of Darwin’s biocosmogonically chartered definitive version—in The Descent of Man (1871)—of the British bourgeoisie’s ruling class’s earlier reinvention of Man1’s civic humanist homo politicus as that of liberal monohumanist Man2 as homo oeconomicus, together with its now fully desupernaturalized sociogenically encoded order of consciousness. These are the very terms, therefore, in which we ourselves, in now historically postcolonial / postapartheid contexts, are. If in our case, only mimetically so! This at the same time as we are also struggling to think outside the limits of the purely biocentric order of consciousness that is genre- specific to the Western bourgeoisie’s homo oeconomicus. But it’s extremely difficult to do, right? You know why? Because Darwinism’s powerful, seductive force as a cosmogony, or origin narrative, is due to the fact that it is the first in our human history to be not only part myth but also part natural science. In fact, this mutation—the part myth / part natural science workings of Darwinism—draws attention to Darwin’s powerful neoMalthusian conceptual leap.65 A leap by means of which—over and against Cardinal Bellarmine—Darwin was to definitively replace the biblical Cre- ation account of the origin of all forms of biological life, including the major bios aspect of our being hybridly human, with a new evolutionary account. Why, then, say that this Darwinian account is only part science? Biologist Glyn Isaac, in his essay “Aspects of Human Evolution” (1983), provides the answer. Isaac makes us aware of the ecumenically human trap into which Darwin had also partly fallen: Understanding the literature on human evolution calls for the recognition of special problems that confront scientists who report on this topic. Regardless of how the scientists present them, accounts of human origins are read as replacement materials for genesis. They fulfill needs that are reflected in the fact that all societies have in their culture some form of origin beliefs, that is, some narrative or configurational notion of how the world and humanity began. Usually, these beliefs do more than cope with curiosity, they have allegorical content, and they convey values, ethics and attitudes. The Adam and Eve creation story of the Bible is simply one of a wide variety of such poetic formulations. . . . The scientific movement which culminated in Darwin’s compelling formulation of evolution as a mode of origin seemed to sweep away earlier beliefs and relegate them to the realm of myth and legend. Following on from this, it is often supposed that the myths have been replaced by something quite different, which we call “science.” However, this is only partly true; scientific theories and information about human origins have been slotted into the same old places in our minds and our cultures that used to be occupied by the myths. . . . Our new origin beliefs are in fact surrogate myths, that are themselves part science, part myths. 66 So the trap, you see, is that of the paradox that lies at the core of our metaDarwinian hybridity. For what I’m saying is that as humans, we cannot / do not preexist our cosmogonies, our representations of our origins—even though it is we ourselves who invent those cosmogonies and then retroactively project them onto a past. We invent them in formulaic storytelling terms, as “donor figures” or “entities,” who have extrahumanly (supernaturally, but now also naturally and / or bioevolutionarily, therefore secularly) mandated what the structuring societal order of our genre- specific, eusocial or cultural present would have to be.67 As the French cultural anthropologist Maurice Godelier also makes clear, with respect to the above: we, too, hitherto have also systematically kept the reality of our own agency—from our origins until today—opaque to ourselves. 68 Thus all our humanly invented chartering cosmogonies, including our contemporary macro (monohumanistic / monotheistic) cosmogonies, are law- likely configured as being extrahumanly mandated.69 All such sacred theological discourses ( Judaism, Islamism, Christianity, for example) continue to function in the already theo- cosmogonically mandated cognitively closed terms that are indispensable to the enacting of their respective behavior- inducing and behavior- regulatory fictively eusocializing imperative. This is especially apparent, too, in the secular substitute monohumanist religion of Darwin’s neo- Malthusian biocosmogony: here, in the biocosmogony of symbolic life / death—as that of selection / dysselection and eugenic / dysgenic codes—the incarnation of symbolic life, will law- likely be that of the ruling- class bourgeoisie as the naturally selected (eugenic) master of Malthusian natural scarcity. With this emerges, cumulatively, the virtuous breadwinner, together with his pre- 1960s virtuous housewife, and, corelatedly, the savvy investor, the capital accumulator, or at least the steady job holder.70 In effect, wealth, no longer in its traditional, inherited freehold landowning form, but in its now unceasingly capital- accumulating, global form, is itself the sole macro- signifier of ultimate symbolic life. Symbolic death, therefore, is that of having been naturally dysselected and mastered by Malthusian natural scarcity: as are the globally homogenized dysgenic non- breadwinning jobless poor / the pauper / homeless / the welfare queens. Poverty itself, therefore, is the “significant ill” signifier of ultimate symbolic death and, consequently, capital accumulation, and therefore symbolic life signifies and narrates a plan of salvation that will cure the dysselected significant ill! The systemic reproduction of the real- life categories of both signifiers are indispensable to the continued enactment of the ruling - class bourgeoisie’s governing code of symbolic life / death and the defining of liberal (now neoliberal) monohumanist Man2. This now purely secular coding of life / death is itself discursively—indeed rigorously—elaborated bioepistemologically, on the model of a natural organism, by the disciplines of our social sciences and humanities, together with their respective genre- specific and ethno- class truths of solidarity.71 Consequently, within the laws of hybrid auto- institution and / or pseudospeciation the (humanities and social science) disciplinary truths of solidarity enact their biocosmogonically chartered sociogenic code of symbolic life / death, also imperatively calling to be discursively elaborated in cognitively (cum psychoaffectively / aesthetically) closed terms.
Ideal theory is a form of abstraction away from the material violence of settler colonialism – their view from nowhere is not only useless but actively props up settlerism. Nichols 13 Nichols, R. (2013). Indigeneity and the Settler Contract today. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 39(2), 165–186. doi:10.1177/0191453712470359 SM Throughout the 20th century, of course, these ‘high theories’ of human development have come under considerable attack. Although anti-imperial leaders and thinkers from those subject to European colonization had always offered trenchant critiques of the European discourse of progress, and counter-narratives were always available from within European thought, it was not until the 20th century that this counter-discourse began to take hold within Europe itself in any significant way. For instance, one of the first demands of the former colonies in the United Nations was to insist on the removal of references from UN documents to members in terms of ‘civilized’ versus ‘uncivilized’. The reason they gave was that this discourse was a prevailing justification for western imperialism in both its colonial and neo-colonial forms and, by the end of the two world wars – themselves major blows to European pretensions to be the standard of civilization – thousands of people in the West were reading these criticisms and taking them more seriously. And so, combined with various other factors (including the rise of Anglo-American analytic philosophy generally), the historical-anthropology language has largely been displaced by other modes of philosophical reflection – namely, more ‘ideal’ theory. As we also all know, in the early 1970s a particular variant of this formal or ideal theory came to predominate in the western academy. The publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) revived and reactivated the intellectual tradition of social contract theory.3 Political 166 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2) Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV on March 18, 2015 philosophers after Rawls and Nozick have been generally reluctant to engage in the grand, complex historical and anthropological narratives that characterized the work of, for instance, Hegel and Marx. Instead, they argued that guiding principles for the organization of a just society (and a just relationship between societies) can be generated by abstracting away from the specific historical and cultural conditions of the present. By imagining oneself in (to use Rawls’ parlance) an ‘original position’, behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ (i.e. without knowledge of one’s race, gender, culture, social location, etc.), it is possible to determine what first principles would be generally acceptable to all (regardless of the above qualifiers). The notion of an original ‘contract’ between such individuals is thus used as a device of representation to generate a normative theory which can then be used to critically examine actually existing practices. This tradition and mode of philosophical reflection have come to replace the 19th-century historical-anthropological discourse as the prevailing manner in which philosophers and political theorists in the western academy (but especially in Anglo-American countries) analyse the possibility of a just relationship to non-western societies. The purpose of this article is to reflect not only upon the limitations, but more importantly upon the political function of this approach, particularly when it is deployed as a resource for reflection on the political struggles and normative claims of the indigenous peoples in the settler-colonial societies of the Anglo-American world (e.g. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States). In so doing, I hope to present a small slice of a much larger project comprising a genealogy of what I will refer to here asthe ‘Settler Contract’.4 In usingthe term ‘Settler Contract’ I am deliberately playing off of previous work by philosophers and political theorists who have been concerned to show the historical function and development of social contract theory in relation to specific axes of oppression and domination. Two of the most important contributions to this literature are Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract and CharlesMills’TheRacialContract.In Pateman’s 1988 work, she rereadthe canon of western social contract theory in an attempt to demonstrate that the presumptively neutral and ideal accounts of the origins of civil society as presented in the works of, for instance, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, were in fact always (implicitly or explicitly) sexual-patriarchal narratives that legitimized the subordination of women. In 1995, Charles Mills deliberately borrowed from Pateman in his project of unmasking the racial (or, more precisely, whitesupremacist) nature of the contract. There, Mills defined the ‘Racial Contract’ as ... that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements ... between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) ‘racial’ (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 ... as ‘white,’ and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as ‘nonwhite’ and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities the whites either already inhabit or establish or in transactions as aligns with these polities, and the moral and juridical rules normally regulating the behaviour of whites in their dealings with one another either do not apply at all in dealings with nonwhites or apply only in a qualified form.5 Although they have not necessarily used the specific term of art ‘Settler Contract’, for some time now various thinkers have attempted to contribute to an expansion on these Nichols 167 Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV on March 18, 2015 themes by demonstrating the ways in which social contract theory has served as a primary justificatory device for the establishment of another axis of oppression and domination: an expropriation and usurpation contract whereby the constitution of the ideal civil society is premised upon the extermination of indigenous peoples and/or the displacement of them from their lands. I will use the term ‘Settler Contract’ to refer to the strategic use of the fiction of a society as the product of a ‘contract’ between its founding members when it is employed in these historical moments to displace the question of that society’s actual formation in acts of conquest, genocide and land appropriation.6 The Settler Contract’s reactivation is used not to deny the content of specific indigenous peoples’ claims, but rather to shift the register of argumentation to a highly abstract and counter-factual level, relieving the burden of proof from colonial states. In such a case, the original contract between white colonial settlers thus ‘simultaneously presupposes, extinguishes, and replaces a state of nature. A settled colony simultaneously presupposes and extinguishes a terra nullius.’ 7 The Settler Contract then refers to the dual legitimating function of the philosophical and historical-narrative device of the ‘original contract’ as the origins of societal order: first, by presupposing no previous indigenous societies and second, by legitimizing the violence required to turn this fiction into reality. Although the Settler Contract has obvious similarities and points of overlap with the Racial Contract, and is constituted in gendered and sexualized practices, it is analysable as a distinct axis since it pertains more to issues related to land appropriation and the subordination of previously sovereign polities and societies. My specific contribution here is twofold. First, I am interested in expanding the scope of these critical genealogies to include the mode of argumentation or style of reasoning endemic to social contract theory. In order to explain what I mean by this it is helpful to look to a point of difference between Pateman and Mills. Although Charles Mills sees the actual historical instantiation of contract theory as implicated in white supremacy, he nevertheless argues that the form or model of reasoning it represents can be ‘modified and used for emancipatory purposes’.8 Mills argues that the language of an ideal contract that constitutes society ‘serves a useful heuristic purpose – it’s a way of dramatizing the original social contract idea of humans choosing the principles that would regulate a just society’.9 This is why Mills described his work as a contribution to that long struggle to ‘close the gap between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of the Racial Contract’.10 Carole Pateman, on the other hand, has argued that the theoretical device of an appeal to the ‘ideal’ contract is itself inherently problematic. This is because Pateman, unlike Mills, sees contract theory as requiring the ‘fiction’ of property in the person. This theoretical presupposition is, according to Pateman, necessarily enabling of domination and oppression. She writes: Property in the person cannot be contracted out in the absence of the owner. If the worker’s services (property) are to be ‘employed’ in the manner required by the employer, the worker has to go with them. The property is useful to the employer only if the worker acts as the employer demands and, therefore, entry into the contract means that the work becomes a subordinate. The consequence of voluntary entry into a contract is not freedom but superiority and subordination.11 168 Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(2) Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV on March 18, 2015 Although Pateman’s more radical and comprehensive critique of social contract theory is instructive here, my contribution is different still. While I agree in general with Pateman’s assessment of the inherently problematic nature of contract theory, my aim is to bring to light another facet of this, one specifically related to colonization. As I will discuss in more length below, I am concerned to show how the appeal to an ‘ideal’ original contract, even as a heuristic device for the generating of ‘first principles’, serves to displace questions of the historical instantiation of actual political societies and domains of sovereignty and, as such, has served and continues to serve the function of justifying ongoing occupation of settler societies in indigenous territory. To do this, I draw upon a Foucaultian distinction between historico-political vs philosophico-juridical discourses of sovereignty and right as a means of complementing and augmenting previous work on the Settler Contract. Furthermore, I argue that the philosophico-juridical discourse of the Settler Contract has its origins – both in historical time and as an event repeated in contemporaneous time – at the moment in which the weight of the past cannot be borne. Contract theory can therefore be studied not merely in terms of the content of its claims (i.e. true or false depictions of indigenous peoples), but in terms of its strategic function in relieving the burden of the historical inheritance of conquest. When read in light of this function, I argue, contract theory emerges as an inherently problematic framework for the adjudication of indigenous claims and, moreover, for the establishment of a non-colonial relationship between indigenous peoples and settler-colonial societies. This also means, however, that unlike Pateman and Mills, I am less interested in the specific content of, for instance, the racist and demeaning depictions of indigenous peoples as pre-political ‘savages’ in the works of contract theorists since it is my claim that even independent of any specifically negative portrayal of indigenous peoples within such work, social contract theory is still a vehicle for the displacement of such peoples, conceptually and in actual historical fact. In fact, I want to argue, it is in those places where contract theory is at its most abstract (purportedly neutral and non-evaluative) that it often functions most effectively as a strategy of settler-colonial domination. The second contribution to this discussion I would like to make is to demonstrate how this form of theory continues to function today with respect to the claims of indigenous peoples. Thus, I am also less concerned here with the historical figures of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant than Pateman or Mills, and more interested in those contemporary thinkers who explicitly work in this tradition – philosophers such as John Rawls, Robert Nozick and, the focus of this article, Jeremy Waldron. A few caveats before I proceed. First, it is not my claim that contemporary thinkers such as Rawls, Nozick, or Waldron necessarily intend to facilitate the logic of the Settler Contract (though I do not rule out this possibility either). I am not primarily interested in what specific authors intend to do with their arguments, but rather with how a specific rhetorical structure or style of argumentation shapes the discursive space such that certain outcomes appear as the logical or necessary conclusion to an argument when, in fact, the debate has been skewed in this direction by the point of departure itself. Second, I acknowledge that my selection of authors is non-comprehensive. I have chosen here to focus on Jeremy Waldron’s recent application of the social contract tradition to the claims of indigenous peoples. This is in part because (as I said at the outset) this particular article is merely one small slice of a much larger genealogy. But it is also in Nichols 169 Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIV on March 18, 2015 part because Waldron represents a kind of ‘exemplary figure’ here. One of the difficulties in examining contemporary analytic contract philosophy as it relates to indigenous claims is that, overwhelmingly, philosophers working within this tradition do not consider such questions at all. Jeremy Waldron is a major exception to this rule. Since Waldron explicitly locates his work within the tradition descending from Hobbes and Locke, through Kant to Rawls and Nozick, and because Waldron’s influential and prominent role as legal scholar enmeshes his work closely with the juridical apparatus that actually adjudicates indigenous claims in Anglo-settler societies, and finally, because Waldron (a New Zealander of European descent) takes up the question of ‘indigeneity’ so directly and seriously, it seems appropriate to take him as an exemplar of the attempt to reformulate some modified version of analytic contract theory in relation to indigenous peoples.
The alternative is refusal – a political depression that recognizes reconciliation will never be enough and creates harmful optimism to the political. Instead, embrace an affective pessimism that grounds alternative futures. The question is not whether Native people want the world, but if the world wants Native people Belcourt 2016 (Billy-ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch,Political Depression in a Time of Reconciliation, Jan 15, 2016, http://activehistory.ca/2016/01/political-depression-in-a-time-of-reconciliation/)//NotJacob//recut anop It’s tough: knowing that you might not get the world you want and the world that wants you back, that your bones might never stop feeling achy and fragile from the wear and tear of mere existence, from the hard labour of getting through the day. Ours are bodies that have been depleted by time, that have been wrenched into a world they can’t properly bend or squirm into because our flesh is paradoxically both too much and not enough for it. In the wake of both eventful and slowed kinds of premature death, what does it mean that the state wants so eagerly to move Indigenous bodies, to touch them, so to speak? Reconciliation is an affective mess: it throws together and condenses histories of trauma and their shaky bodies and feelings into a neatly bordered desire; a desire to let go, to move on, to turn to the future with open arms, as it were. Reconciliation is stubbornly ambivalent in its potentiality, an object of desire that we’re not entirely certain how to acquire or substantiate, but one that the state – reified through the bodies of politicians, Indigenous or otherwise – is telling us we need. In fact, Justice Murray Sinclair noted that the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on December 15, 2015, puts us at the “threshold of a new era in this country.”1 I am interested in how life might be lived willfully and badly in the face of governmental forms of redress when many of us are stretched thin, how reconciliation, though instantiating a noticeable shift in the national affective atmosphere,2 doesn’t actually remake the substance of the social or the political such that we’re still tethered to scenes of living that can’t sustain us. What I am trying to get at is: reconciliation works insofar as it is a way of looking forward to being in this world, at the expense of more radical projects like decolonization that want to experiment with different strategies for survival.3 This way of doing things isn’t working and, because of that, optimism is hard to come by. According to cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, political depression emerges from the realization “that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.”4 It is the pestering sense that whatever you do, it won’t be enough; that things will continue uninterrupted, teasing you because something different is all you’ve wanted from the start. To be politically depressed is to worry about the temporal reach of neoliberal projects like reconciliation, to question their orientation toward the future because the present requires all of your energy in order to feel like anything but dying. Political depression is of a piece with a dispossessory enterprise that remakes the topography of the ordinary such that the labour of maintaining one’s life becomes too hard to keep up. We have to wait for the then and there in the here and now; how do we preserve ourselves until then? As Leanne Simpson points out, reconciliation has been reparative for some survivors, encouraging them to tell their stories, to keep going, so to speak.5 But, what of the gendered and racialized technologies of violence that created our scenes of living, scenes we’ve been forced to think are of our own choosing? Optimism for the work of reconciliation disappeared in the face of multiple crises: of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, of HIV infection rates, of mass incarceration, of diabetes, of suicide. Reconciliation, at once a heuristic and a form of statecraft, fakes a political that doesn’t actually exist as such, one that not only presupposes that we – Indigenous peoples, that is – are willing to stay attached to it, but that we are already folded into it, that we’ve already consented to it. What does it mean, for example, to consent to a nation-to-nation relationship if there are no other options to choose from? Reconciliation wants so badly to be a keyword of sorts, to contain so much inside its semantic confines, to be “wide-reaching in its explanatory power.”6 I’m not surprised things have started to leak all over the place. Decolonization might need something of an affective turn: I think there are ways of being attuned to our bodies such that we can gauge if our visceral responses are trained or not, parasitic or not. In short: what do our tears signal, what do his – Justin Trudeau’s – signal? We cry because pain holds our world together. I don’t want pain to hold our world together anymore. Perhaps admitting we are politically depressed is one of the most important things we could do in this day and age. When survival becomes radical and death becomes part and parcel of the ordinary itself, political depression might be our only point of departure. But, political depression is also about dreaming up alternatives that can sustain your attachments to life. Cvetkovich reminds us that we need “other affective tools for transformation” because hope and blind allegiance have failed too many of us too often.7 I am interested in the generative work of pessimism, how being fed up propels us onward, and keeps us grounded in the now, such that we can make it to the future, even if that’s just tomorrow. As Kim TallBear put it, we’ve been living in a post-apocalyptic world (in its ecological ruins and in the face of its crisis-making politics) for quite some time,8 one that exhausts our bodies to the point of depression and death and one that slowly removes us from the non-normative or the astray.9 We are stuck in the thick of things, left clinging to an impasse without an exit strategy. We might need reconciliation today, but Indigenous peoples need a more capacious world-building project for tomorrow, one that can bear all of us and the sovereignties built into our breathing. We should not be asked: do you want the world today? Instead, we should be asking: does the world want us?
12/20/21
2 - K - Settlerism vs Model Minority
Tournament: Longhorn Classic | Round: 3 | Opponent: Coppell ER | Judge: Spencer Orlowski Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose. Model minority exclusion is predicated on settler anxiety; they only operate under solving for the external impacts of settler colonialism but ignore the root cause to all settler oppression, reintrenching the settler’s position of power Vimalassery and Day, 18 (Manu Vimalassery and Iyko Day, 4-3-2018, accessed on 7-14-2020, Muse.jhu, "Project MUSE - Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism by Iyko Day (review)", https://muse.jhu.edu/article/689184) WW JC Settler colonialism through Asian Americanist critique. Operating in a framework that crosses the Canada-US border, Alien Capital argues that Asian Americans personify abstract value in North American settler colonial capitalism and provide a racial target for the anxieties of settlers reacting to capitalist abstraction. Day’s argument hinges on the ways that settler colonial glorification of the concrete—as exemplified in whiteness and the nuclear family and revolving around settler appropriations of indigenous relations with place (in which settlers substitute themselves as native)—manifests anxieties concerning the contradictions of settler capitalism. Settlers displace these anxieties onto variously racialized aliens, violently associating Asian bodies with the domination of capitalist abstraction. Elimination and exclusion, Day convincingly argues, are interlinked modes of settler colonialism. “Asians,” she writes, “are as unnatural to the landscape as Indigenous peoples are natural. This is the double edge of settler colonialism” (112). I understand North American settler sovereignty to be a reactive set of future-oriented claims articulated and levied against indigenous relationalities, which I call counter-sovereignty. Day’s argument helps me understand that alien desires, as queer desires, potentially disrupt settler futurity, and given the fact and necessity of ongoing indigenous existence to the stability of settler colonialism, futurity is all that settlers can actually claim. Settler sovereignty is preemptive. Alien desires, then, potentially disrupt settler sovereignty, and anti-Asian racism anxiously lashes out in the present against the possible displacement of settler futures. In the first chapter, Day reads Richard Fung’s Dirty Laundry alongside Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, drawing connections between their depictions of Chinese railroad labor, time, and money. The chapter begins with an analysis of a telegram sent by William Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The telegram, Day argues, exemplifies the role of telegraphs and railroads in the “consolidation of the settler nation” through new temporalities marked by increased speed and uniformity over distances (41). On the back of the telegraph is a sketch of a Chinese worker’s facial profile, which the Canadian Pacific Railway disallowed from reproduction in the book; Day considers this censorious silence over the course of the chapter, exploring the ways in which the representation of a Chinese worker is “out of sync” with settler temporality in historical and contemporary corporate and colonial practices (42). Tensions between the signifiers of race and capital—the vertical lines of the Chinese worker’s mustache depicted on the back of the telegram mirror the lines of double-entry records detailed on the telegram’s 200 Book Reviews front—led to the association of exploited and vulnerable Chinese labor with social perversion, which Day argues fed the Chinese workers’ dehumanization as abstract labor (44). Day argues that Fung and Kingston interrupt this dehumanization by framing racialized labor through the interplay of sexuality and temporality, opening up questions about social necessity and the value of (racial) capital. Alien desires offer no future guarantee for white settler colonialism. Alien desires disrupt settler futurity, setting trajectories in motion that displace the reproduction of settler claims to define and control indigenous places. The second chapter moves from the question of time to artistic depictions of the physical landscapes affected by settler colonialism, focusing on the photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi and Jin-me Yoon. The chapter begins with an analysis of Ken Gonzalez-Day’s Erased Lynching, a manipulated photograph of a lynching in the western United States. Reading this photograph as producing visibility out of erasure, Day transitions from her analysis of the telegram in the first chapter to introduce the second chapter’s argument concerning constructions of settler colonial landscapes as concrete sites of indigenous erasure and of indigenizing purity and authenticity on the part of settlers. Day argues that Tseng’s and Yoon’s work parodizes and disrupts the setter landscape through alien racial difference. For instance, Day shows how Tseng’s photographs of his own body in front of tourist landmarks impose an “extravagant degeneration,” an alien abstraction juxtaposed against concrete manifestations of nature (82). Such displays foreground the imperial dimensions of US and Canadian landscape art, which Day claims are predicated on the genocide of indigenous peoples. As with the queerness of Chinese railroad labor, Tseng’s body in his photographs fails to project permanence or purity, undermining them instead. In the book’s third chapter, Day focuses on Japanese internment in the US and Canada. Day examines how Joy Kagawa’s Obasan and Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory exemplify shifting identifications of Japanese, Jewish, and indigenous people toward different ends. Parsing various theories, Day focuses on the economic irrationality of racism as a driving factor for Japanese internment. She connects this irrationality to the development of the model minority myth, as it resignifies Asian labor from dangerous hyper-efficiency—associated with the production of unnatural value—to commendable pliability and productivity in the form of an “ideal surplus labor force” (122). This resignification, she argues, rescripts Japanese people in Canada and the US as transient laborers (rather than as posing dangerous Book Reviews 201 competition to white labor and capital). According to Day, “settler colonial logics of elimination (from land) and exclusion (as exploited alien labor) are not mutually exclusive but dialectically connected” (141). In the fourth chapter, which analyzes Asian Americans in the neoliberal urban spaces of Vancouver and Los Angeles through Ken Lum’s multimedia art and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, Day reads Lum’s performance piece Entertainment for Surrey and the character Manzanar from Tropic of Orange as indexes of nonproductive bodies in neoliberal urban settings. Lum’s and Manzanar’s bodies, Day suggests, are examples of those bodies which remain distinct from populations that are exploited on a racial and gendered basis as surplus labor, visually interrupting capitalist circulation on the highways of Vancouver and Los Angeles. Following the neoliberal reconstitution of immigration laws in Canada and the US, the border became a site to construct neoliberal multiculturalism through a new migrant labor system, resulting in the economic bifurcation of Asian racialization. Day crucially draws out the ways that both ends of this economic bifurcation are distinctly targeted as capital in the abstract and in Asian bodies. Lum’s work, Day argues, disrupts the seemingly smooth and transparent surfaces of a multiculturalism that announces itself as antiracist and instead leaves the viewer suspended in the nonequivalence—the instabilities—between differently marked ways of being human. Day’s theorization of alien capital as embodied in Asians and other nonnative people of color provides a compelling model to draw out connections between colonialism, race, and capitalism in North America. Day offers an excellent and necessary addition to the growing academic literature at the junction between Asian American studies and settler colonial studies. How, over this long history, does ongoing indigenous presence inflect the association of Asian bodies and desires with abstract capital in colonized lands? How does this abstraction work differently when we proceed from the centrality of the slave property claim to racial capitalism, resting not on a labor theory of value but on force-claims of dominion of masters over the enslaved? In what ways does alien capital resonate or dissipate in a context of dreams of (black) freedom and indigenous resurgence?
The alternative is refusal – a political depression that recognizes reconciliation will never be enough and creates harmful optimism to the political. Instead, embrace an affective pessimism that grounds alternative futures. The question is not whether Native people want the world, but if the world wants Native people Belcourt 2016 (Billy-ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch,Political Depression in a Time of Reconciliation, Jan 15, 2016, http://activehistory.ca/2016/01/political-depression-in-a-time-of-reconciliation/)//NotJacob//recut anop It’s tough: knowing that you might not get the world you want and the world that wants you back, that your bones might never stop feeling achy and fragile from the wear and tear of mere existence, from the hard labour of getting through the day. Ours are bodies that have been depleted by time, that have been wrenched into a world they can’t properly bend or squirm into because our flesh is paradoxically both too much and not enough for it. In the wake of both eventful and slowed kinds of premature death, what does it mean that the state wants so eagerly to move Indigenous bodies, to touch them, so to speak? Reconciliation is an affective mess: it throws together and condenses histories of trauma and their shaky bodies and feelings into a neatly bordered desire; a desire to let go, to move on, to turn to the future with open arms, as it were. Reconciliation is stubbornly ambivalent in its potentiality, an object of desire that we’re not entirely certain how to acquire or substantiate, but one that the state – reified through the bodies of politicians, Indigenous or otherwise – is telling us we need. In fact, Justice Murray Sinclair noted that the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on December 15, 2015, puts us at the “threshold of a new era in this country.”1 I am interested in how life might be lived willfully and badly in the face of governmental forms of redress when many of us are stretched thin, how reconciliation, though instantiating a noticeable shift in the national affective atmosphere,2 doesn’t actually remake the substance of the social or the political such that we’re still tethered to scenes of living that can’t sustain us. What I am trying to get at is: reconciliation works insofar as it is a way of looking forward to being in this world, at the expense of more radical projects like decolonization that want to experiment with different strategies for survival.3 This way of doing things isn’t working and, because of that, optimism is hard to come by. According to cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, political depression emerges from the realization “that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.”4 It is the pestering sense that whatever you do, it won’t be enough; that things will continue uninterrupted, teasing you because something different is all you’ve wanted from the start. To be politically depressed is to worry about the temporal reach of neoliberal projects like reconciliation, to question their orientation toward the future because the present requires all of your energy in order to feel like anything but dying. Political depression is of a piece with a dispossessory enterprise that remakes the topography of the ordinary such that the labour of maintaining one’s life becomes too hard to keep up. We have to wait for the then and there in the here and now; how do we preserve ourselves until then? As Leanne Simpson points out, reconciliation has been reparative for some survivors, encouraging them to tell their stories, to keep going, so to speak.5 But, what of the gendered and racialized technologies of violence that created our scenes of living, scenes we’ve been forced to think are of our own choosing? Optimism for the work of reconciliation disappeared in the face of multiple crises: of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, of HIV infection rates, of mass incarceration, of diabetes, of suicide. Reconciliation, at once a heuristic and a form of statecraft, fakes a political that doesn’t actually exist as such, one that not only presupposes that we – Indigenous peoples, that is – are willing to stay attached to it, but that we are already folded into it, that we’ve already consented to it. What does it mean, for example, to consent to a nation-to-nation relationship if there are no other options to choose from? Reconciliation wants so badly to be a keyword of sorts, to contain so much inside its semantic confines, to be “wide-reaching in its explanatory power.”6 I’m not surprised things have started to leak all over the place. Decolonization might need something of an affective turn: I think there are ways of being attuned to our bodies such that we can gauge if our visceral responses are trained or not, parasitic or not. In short: what do our tears signal, what do his – Justin Trudeau’s – signal? We cry because pain holds our world together. I don’t want pain to hold our world together anymore. Perhaps admitting we are politically depressed is one of the most important things we could do in this day and age. When survival becomes radical and death becomes part and parcel of the ordinary itself, political depression might be our only point of departure. But, political depression is also about dreaming up alternatives that can sustain your attachments to life. Cvetkovich reminds us that we need “other affective tools for transformation” because hope and blind allegiance have failed too many of us too often.7 I am interested in the generative work of pessimism, how being fed up propels us onward, and keeps us grounded in the now, such that we can make it to the future, even if that’s just tomorrow. As Kim TallBear put it, we’ve been living in a post-apocalyptic world (in its ecological ruins and in the face of its crisis-making politics) for quite some time,8 one that exhausts our bodies to the point of depression and death and one that slowly removes us from the non-normative or the astray.9 We are stuck in the thick of things, left clinging to an impasse without an exit strategy. We might need reconciliation today, but Indigenous peoples need a more capacious world-building project for tomorrow, one that can bear all of us and the sovereignties built into our breathing. We should not be asked: do you want the world today? Instead, we should be asking: does the world want us?
12/4/21
2 - K - Settlerism vs Techno-Orientalism
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: Octas | Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: JP Stuckert, Kristiana Baez, Dillon Johnson Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose.
The alternative is to refuse the affirmative’s endorsement of settler political selfhood. This isn’t “reject the aff”—it’s a micro-political process that destabilizes the settler psyche by breaking down the coherence of settler colonialism built through repetition. Debate is an ethical affirmation of a certain ideology. Voting neg forces a confrontation of the genocidal settlement, destabilizing the settler subject—that comes prior to evaluating the settler truth claims of the aff. Henderson 15 Henderson, Phil. (2015). Imagoed communities: the psychosocial space of settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(1), 40–56. doi:10.1080/2201473x.2015.1092194 JParkrecut anop At a distance, the duplicity here is quite strange. Lines are drowned, forests are cut, nets are stolen, because settlers know reflexively that they have a right – duty even – to shape the vacant land according to their collective and individual needs. Yet, the very things which they seek to remove should prove the falsity of terra nullius, as they evidence indigenous presence. The settler subject is able to gloss the violence of his actions so easily, however, because he is ultimately the product of, and dependent upon, a series of power relations that actively disappear indigenous peoples as active sovereign bodies. Within the psychosocial order of settler sovereignty, supported by the settler imago, these acts are understood as progressive or represent an adherence to the law, and become unreadable to the settler for what they are: the latest in a series of dispossessive acts. Destabilizing a dispossessive subject Not only does the concept of the spatial imago allow us to interrogate the formation of the settler as a subject, it also provides a powerful analytical tool to explain the extreme vitriolic reactions that indigenous peoples constantly face from settlers. Many point to racism as 10 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 the source of such reactions, and this is not without cause, as settlers have long imbibed a sense of racial and cultural superiority – particularly toward indigenous peoples. Despite these prejudices, however, Wolfe notes that the ‘primary motive’ of settler colonialism’s domination ‘is not race’ but ‘access to territory’. 63 Thus, inasmuch as the settler colonial imago validates access to territory by occluding indigenous sovereignty, the ongoing presences on and claims to the land by indigenous peoples trouble the settler imago and induce panic in settler subjects. Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces, settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their daily life – in all its banality – is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’ beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown writes, in the ‘loss of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66 Threatened with this ‘loss of containment’, the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown’s thesis to the settler colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic – this rabid and insatiable anger – is always already at the core of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression ‘even after indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening’. 68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the maintenance of settler colonialism’s imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject – further development and entrenchment of the settler colonial imago – is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers are also always already in a psychically defensive position – that is, the settler’s offensive position on occupied land is sustained through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the subject’s reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this requires averting attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the hill’. 70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical outbursts’. Such is the case when settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire’s energy into an obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-disciplining colonial subject’. 73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the subject’s arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my account apart from Rifkin’s. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’ of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus, the process of subject formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of settler colonialism can be subverted – creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity to pursue what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler colonial history and culture, to decanter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the ‘repetitive practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-politics of resistance’, which historically 12 P. HENDERSON Downloaded by New York University at 15:35 26 February 2016 took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure. Today, we can draw similar inspiration from the variety of tactics used in movements like Idle No More. From flash mobs in major malls, to round dances that block city streets, and even projects to rename Toronto locations, Idle No More is engaged in a series of micro-political projects across Turtle Island.80 The micro-politics of the movement strengthen indigenous subjects and their spatialities, while leaving an indelible imprint in the settler psyche. Predictably, rage and resentment were provoked in some settlers;81 however, Idle No More also drew thousands of settler-allies into the streets and renewed conversations about the necessity of nation-to-nation relationships. With settler colonial spaces disrupted and a relationship of domination made impossible to ignore, in the tradition of centuries of indigenous resistance, Idle No More put the settler subject into serious flux once more.
10/18/21
2 - K - Techno-Orientalism
Tournament: debateLA Challenge | Round: 3 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart JL | Judge: Holden Bukowsky, Chris Castillo Their descriptions of China rising merely serve to repeat racialized tropes of yellow peril through techno-orientalism framing Asians as subhuman, whose success, location or population pose a threat to the western liberal order 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 recut aaditg *brackets in og text 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. 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.’’
1/13/22
2 - PIK - Asian Solidarity
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Little Rock Central MG | Judge: Chris Castillo, Derek Hilligoss, Brianna Aaron Text: I advocate for the aff absent being read against a fellow Asian. Causes psychological violence since you force us to negate our identity and suffering O/ws A perf-con and pre-meditated murder – you know what you were doing awas bad but did it anyways B Link turn – aff can’t solve when it recreates violence - o/w under their accessibility argument. Asian coalitions are key to their method.
Colitations good 2. Solves all their offense shakes off stereotypes or smthing 3. Only way to actualize “back up intentions with actions” and “we uplift and support each other” 4. Nuance is bad surrounding w absolutism ignores nuances between intersectionality and dif ethnicities of asians Arti Kohli and Becky Belcore, 21 Aarti Kohli, (Aarti Kohli is the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Asian Law Caucus, the organization that convenes the Asian American Leaders Table.) Becky Belcore, (Becky Belcore is executive director of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (NAKASEC), a progressive grassroots organization and a member of the Asian American Leaders Table.). "Coalitions and solidarity with others are vital to Asian American activism." Prism, 6-10-2021, Accessed 1-9-2022. https://prismreports.org/2021/06/10/coalitions-and-solidarity-with-others-are-vital-to-asian-american-activism/ duongie For many Asian Americans, it can feel as if we live surrounded by absolutism and extremes, with little room for nuance. But we often occupy “in-between” spaces and identities, and nuance is necessary in order to understand our work with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. It’s also essential when it comes to understanding ourselves as immigrants from colonized nations, and as Indigenous people, multi-racial people, undocumented people, or trans-racial adoptees. It may be uncomfortable, but we must persist in the complex work of making progress toward racial solidarity so that we can create a more just future for our communities. In the wake of increased violence targeting Asian Americans, a new network of 100+ organizations serving AAPI communities was convened. Its goal is to coalesce and leverage our power toward policy change, solidarity, and shifting the public narrative. The “Asian American Leaders Table” provides a ray of hope in the type of coalition building and mutual support that can buoy us during hard times. Our work broadens our understanding of our own communities, revealing layers that influence how we uplift and support each other, or step aside when necessary. For example, we acknowledge that Pacific Islanders were deliberately combined together with Asian Americans by government systems that have no knowledge or interest in our distinct histories and needs. We know Southeast Asians face higher risks when it comes to criminalization and deportation. We see that East Asians are more likely to be targeted for street harassment and assault due to racist COVID-19 narratives. We know that our Indian American colleagues are feeling high levels of stress with families in the homeland who are struggling with a raging pandemic. Sikh American communities were severely targeted post-9/11, and were the target of a mass shooting in Indianapolis. And our Muslim siblings need our solidarity and support amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Our coalition work doesn’t shy away from these complicated aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander identities. We cleave deeper into the histories, identities, and stories that make us different from one another, and back up our intentions with actions. Our vision is to shift the narrative around heritage and solidarity. For example, portraying Asian Americans solely as victims does a disservice to the many examples of Asian American resistance, solidarity, organizing, and community development that has benefited our society. Our campaign, “Resistance is our Heritage,” tells stories to inspire current generations of people to change their actions, to effect change within our systems, and catalyze a better future for new generations of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. In addition to stories of resistance, it’s also important to share stories of solidarity in order to counteract stereotypes that pit Asian Americans against other marginalized groups and paint Asian Americans as disengaged in politics and activism. That’s why we’ve launched a new series of videos with stories and educational guides that we hope will spark discussions around solidarity in service of transformative change, including stories like: How Indo-Caribbean populations have organized around economic justice, resulting in new budgetary earmarks for exploited workers affected by COVID-19 in the New York state budget. Efforts to build a broad multi-racial coalition to end the surveillance of Muslim, South Asian, and Arab community members by local law enforcement and federal authorities. Using the experience of Japanese American internment to end detention sites and support immigrant and refugee communities targeted by racism, state violence, injustice, and oppression in the United States. Resistance as heritage carries us through our day-to-day work as well. We owe so much to the work of Black activists and civil rights movements that influences the ethics, values, and strategies that allow us to meet the diverse needs of all communities of color, and enact necessary changes that ultimately make for a stronger U.S. This includes work like advocating for language access at the polls—not just Asian languages, but Spanish and African languages, too, so that a greater and more diverse cross-section of our citizenry can engage in free, fair, and accessible elections. We advocate for justice for those whose citizenship, legal status, and livelihood hang in the balance due to outdated immigration laws that hurt families in the U.S. and internationally. For generations, the model minority myth painted Asian Americans as a successful monolith and stymied policymakers’ understanding of the widening Asian American wealth gap—neglecting the fact that Asian Americans are the most economically unequal racial group in the U.S. Our work channels the voices of millions of Asian Americans calling for good jobs, union rights, affordable housing, strong public education, and reliable health care, not just for us but for all of the groups who depend on these rights. We remember the lessons of the 1982 garment workers’ strike in New York’s Chinatown and the impact Asian American coalition building had on workers’ rights. As COVID-19 cases drop, the number of vaccinated people grows, and we “return to normal,” workers need to be paid fair wages and get basic safety and health protections. Without those at minimum, the economic divide will only keep growing. The benefits of cross-racial solidarity work are clear. The hard part is figuring out how to do it. We are inspired by the stories of our predecessors because it’s helpful to remind ourselves that the idea of co-liberation is not a new one. The history of Asian American and Pacific Islander coalitions with other oppressed groups includes the Filipino and Mexican farmworkers who organized the Delano grape strike, the civil rights collaboration between Grace Lee Boggs and Malcom X, Japanese Americans first protesting the anti-Muslim and xenophobic violence that followed 9/11, and later the inhumane treatment of migrants and immigrants at the U.S. southern borders. Solidarity and co-liberation isn’t a rarity for Asian Americans; it’s a vital part of our activism. Systems and communication methods have changed, but the intent remains the same. We’re inspired by the energy and dedication of the groups involved with the Asian American Leaders Table, and we hope that others will join us as we forge new paths toward allyship and a co-liberated future. Their ev proves the aff is about india too AND not talking about it supercharges our offense bc they don’t subvert techno-Orientalism broadly – insert blue 1AC Roh et al 15. *David S. Roh is associate professor of English and director of the Digital Matters Lab at the University of Utah, where he specializes in digital humanities and Asian American literature. Betsy Huang is an associate professor of English and former inaugural Chief Officer of Diversity and Inclusion at Clark University. *Greta A. Niu writes about Asian stuff and tech “Techno-Orientalism,” 2015, Imagining Asia in Speculativevikas Throughout the twentieth century, variations of that premodern-hypermodern dynamic in speculative visions of Asia and Asians have been recycled numerous times. 2 Exemplars include the villainous Khan Noonien Singh in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe, the leader of a group of superhumans who attempt to take control of the Starship Enterprise; the Chinese scientist Dr. X in Neal Stephenson’s novel, The Diamond Age (1995),a counterfeiter using “a gallimaufry of contraband technology” (73) to steal Western innovations; and most recently The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 (2013), a clear revival of Dr. Fu Manchu played cleverly by Ben Kingsley in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. 3 But Western speculations of an Asianized future are not always consolidated in a singular fictional figure as in Fu Manchu, Dr. X, or The Mandarin. The yellow peril anxiety of an earlier, industrial-age era embodied by Fu Manchu found new forms across cultures and hemispheres as Asian economies become more visible competitors in the age of globalization and rapid technological innovations. One needs to witness only the speculative fictional worlds of Maureen McHugh’s novel China Mountain Zhang (1992), Joss Whedon’s television series Firefly (2002), and Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010) to trace persisting anxieties over the past three decades of a China dominated future. All of these worlds feature Western protagonists struggling to navigate a sociopolitical landscape in which China is the dominant global empire with a superior technological edge. Beyond the focus on China, paradigmatic works such as William Gibson’s Japan-based oeuvre (including Neuromancer), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix films have also burnished in the Western consciousness Asian-influenced visions of the future underpinned by a familiar yet estranged mixture of Orientalist sensibilities. These examples perfectly illustrate our definition of techno-Orientalism: the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.4 Techno-Orientalist imaginations are infused with the languages and codes of the technological and the futuristic. These developed alongside industrial advances in the West and have become part of the West’s project of securing dominance as architects of the future, a project that requires configurations of the East as the very technology with which to shape it. Techno-Orientalist speculations of an Asianized future have become ever more prevalent in the wake of neoliberal trade policies that enabled greater flow of information and capital between the East and the West. Substantial criticism of techno-Orientalism emerged in the mid-1990s when cultural theorists began to trace its manifestations and theorize its causes and implications. Kevin Morley and David Robins, Toshiya Ueno, and Kumiko Sato, principal trailblazers of the field, laid much of the valuable groundwork. Morley and Robins’s Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (Routledge, 1995), in which a definition of “techno-Orientalism” first saw print, remains the most cited in critical assessments of technological and Orientalist discourses; however, Ueno has probably written most extensively about techno-Orientalism as a discursive cultural phenomenon in the era of what he identifies as the “post-Fordist social environment of globalization” (223). “The basis of Orientalism and xenophobia is the subordination of Others through a sort of ‘mirror of cultural conceit,’” Ueno explains. “The Orient exists in so far as the West needs it, because it brings the project of the West into focus” (223). Whereas Orientalism, as a strategy of representational containment, arrests Asia in traditional, and often premodern imagery, techno-Orientalism presents a broader, dynamic, and often contradictory spectrum of images, constructed by the East and West alike, of an “Orient” undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformations. Techno-Orientalism, like Orientalism, places great emphasis on the project of modernity—cultures privilege modernity and fear losing their perceived “edge” over others. Stretching beyond Orientalism’s premise of a hegemonic West’s representational authority over the East, techno-Orientalism’s scope is much more expansive and bidirectional, its discourses mutually constituted by the flow of trade and capital across the hemispheres. As Ueno observes, techno-Orientalism is first and foremost an effect of globalism. “If the Orient was invented by the West,” he writes, “then the Techno-Orient was also invented by the world of information capitalism” (228). Technological developments, driven by the imperial aspirations and the appetites of consumerist societies on both sides of the Pacific, propel the engines of invention and production. In its wake, Western nations vying for cultural and economic dominance with Asian nations find in techno-Orientalism an expressive vehicle for their aspirations and fears. Our volume, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, documents past and current constructions of the role of Asia in a technologized future and critically examines this proliferating phenomenon. Dr. Fu Manchu illustrates just one way in which techno-Orientalist imagery pervades Western cultural productions in the early twentieth century. The principal locales of techno-Orientalist projects as they developed in the late twentieth century have primarily been Japan and China. Ueno, whose influential analyses of “Japanimation” in the mid-1990s seeded the field of techno-Orientalist studies, observes, “In Techno-Orientalism, Japan is not only located geographically, but is also projected chronologically. Jean Baudrillard once called Japan a satellite in orbit. Now Japan has been located in the future of technology” (228). Morley and Robins put a finer point on the temporal dimension of the spatial construction: “If the future is technological, and if technology has become ‘Japanised,’ then the syllogism would suggest that the future is now Japanese, too. The postmodern era will be the Pacific era. Japan is the future, and it is a future that seems to be transcending and displacing Western modernity” (168). Whereas Japan’s dubious honor as the original techno-Orient was bestowed in the eighties with the help of the cyberpunk movement, the techno-Orientalizing of China occurred roughly a decade later. 5 China was not yet a competitor in the global economy in the1980s, when the West focused its wary gaze on what it saw as an invasion of Japanese capital investments and imports into Western economies. When China was recognized as a newly industrialized country (NIC) in the 1990s and its influence in the global economy increased, it, too, became once again a target of techno-Orientalist fashioning. The discourse on China’s “rise” in the U.S. context, consistent with techno-Orientalist contradictions, has focused on constructing its people as a vast, subaltern-like labor force and as a giant consumer market whose appetite for Western cultural products, if nurtured, could secure U.S. global cultural and economic dominance. This dual image of China as both developing-world producers and first world consumers presents a representational challenge for the West: Is China a human factory? Or is it a consumerist society, like the United States, whose enormous purchasing power dictates the future of technological innovations and economies? Japan and China are thus signified differently in the techno-Orientalist vocabulary. Both are constructed as competitors and therefore threats to the U.S. economy; but while Japan competes with the United States for dominance in technological innovation, China competes with the United States in labor and production. To put it in starker terms, Japan creates technology, but China is the technology. In the eyes of the West, both are crucial engines of the future: Japan innovates and China manufactures. And as Asia, writ large, becomes a greater consumerist force than the West,6 its threat/value dualism commensurately increases. These differences in the technological signification of Japan and China manifest themselves in the fictive forecasts of the Asian-tinged future. If Japan is a screen on which the West has projected its technological fantasies, then China is a screen on which the West projects its fears of being colonized, mechanized, and instrumentalized in its own pursuit of technological dominance. India, another NIC, has also found itself under the techno-Orientalist gaze as a consequence of U.S. outsourcing practices. Asa much maligned business strategy, outsourcing has provoked extremely negative public sentiments in the United States. These opinions find expression in a particular strand of techno-Orientalist discourse that consolidates China and India as the chief threats to the U.S. service and labor sectors. These Asian nations serve as the scapegoats for corporate decisions to move service and manufacturing jobs abroad and bear the brunt of the resulting xenophobic antipathies. Chinese and Indian workers, for instance, are routinely portrayed in techno-Orientalist and technophobic vocabularies; call center employees in India adopt Western Christian names and mimic the linguistic and idiomatic style of Americans, a practice so ubiquitous as to be parodied cinematically in romantic comedies such as Outsourced (2006), conjuring images of Dickian androids (or Blade Runner’s “replicants”) who simulate human behavior and threaten the distinction between “real” and “fake” Americans. Glossy spreads of endless rows of Chinese workers in corporate factories and towns in mainstream magazines such as Time and Wired seal the visual vocabulary of Asians as the cogs of hyperproduction. In the NIC contexts, techno-Orientalist discourse constructs Asians as mere simulacra and maintains a prevailing sense of the inhumanity of Asian labor—the very antithesis of Western liberal humanism.
2/14/22
3 - NC - Util
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 5 | Opponent: Marcus JR | Judge: Grant Brown The standard is minimizing material violence. 1 Personal identity reductionism is true – if the hemispheres of my brain were transplanted into 2 different people, neither would be me. Parfit 84. Derek Parfit 1984, “Reasons and Persons”, Oxford Paperbacks It is in fact true that one hemisphere is enough. There are many people who have survived, when a stroke or injury puts out of action one of their hemispheres. With his remaining hemisphere, such a person may need to re-learn certain things, such as adult speech, or how to control both hands. But this is possible. In my example I am assuming that, as may be true of certain actual people, both of my hemispheres have the full range of abilities. I could thus survive with either hemisphere, without any need for re-learning.¶ I shall now combine these last two claims. I would survive if my brain was successfully transplanted into my twin's body. And I could survive with only half my brain, the other half having been destroyed. Given these two facts, it seems clear that I would survive if half my brain was successfully transplanted into my twin's body, and the other half was destroyed.¶ What if the other half was not destroyed? This is the case that Wiggins described: that in which a person, like an amoeba, divides.40 To simplify the case, I assume that I am one of three identical triplets. Consider¶ My Division. My body is fatally injured, as are the brains of my two brothers. My brain is divided, and each half is successfully transplanted into the body of one of my brothers. Each of the resulting people believes that he is me, seems to remember living my life, has my character, and is in every other way psychologically continuous with me. And he has a body that is very like mine.¶ This case is likely to remain impossible. Though it is claimed that, in certain people, the two hemispheres may have the same full range of abilities, this claim might be false. I am here assuming that this claim is true when applied to me. I am also assuming that it would be possible to connect a transplanted half-brain with the nerves in its new body. And I am assuming that we could divide, not just the upper hemispheres, but also the lower brain. My first two assumptions may be able to be made true if there is enough progress in neurophysiology. But it seems likely that it would never be possible to divide the lower brain, in a way that did not impair its functioning.¶ Does it matter if, for this reason, this imagined case of complete division will always remain impossible? Given the aims of my discussion, this does not matter. This impossibility is merely technical. The one feature of the case that might be held to be deeply impossible—the division of a person's consciousness into two separate streams—is the feature that has actually happened. It WOULD have been important if this had been impossible, since this might have supported some claim about what we really are. It might have supported the claim that we are indivisible Cartesian Egos. It therefore matters that the division of a person's consciousness is in fact possible. There seems to be no similar connection between a particular view about what we really are and the impossibility of dividing and successfully transplanting the two halves of the lower brain. This impossibility thus provides no ground for refusing to consider the imagined case in which we suppose that this can be done. And considering this case may help us to decide both what we believe ourselves to be, and what in fact we are. As Einstein's example showed, it can be useful to consider impossible thought-experiments.¶ It may help to state, in advance, what I believe this case to show. It provides a further argument against the view that we are separately existing entities. But the main conclusion to be hdrawn is that personal identity is not what matters.¶ It is natural to believe that our identity is what matters. Reconsider the Branch-Line Case, where I have talked to my Replica on Mars, and am about to die. Suppose we believe that I and my Replica are different people. It is then natural to assume that my prospect is almost as bad as ordinary death. In a few days, there will be no one living who will be me. It is natural to assume that this is what matters. In discussing My Division, I shall start by making this assumption.¶ In this case, each half of my brain will be successfully transplanted into the very similar body of one of my two brothers. Both of the resulting people will be fully psychologically continuous with me, as I am now. What happens to me?¶ There are only four possibilities: (1) I do not survive; (2) I survive as one of the two people; (3) I survive as the other; (4) I survive as both.¶ The objection to (1) is this. I would survive if my brain was successfully transplanted. And people have in fact survived with half their brains destroyed. Given these facts, it seems clear that I would survive if half my brain was successfully transplanted, and the other half was destroyed. So how could I fail to survive if the other half was also successfully transplanted? How could a double success be a failure?¶ Consider the next two possibilities. Perhaps one success is the maximum score. Perhaps I shall be one of the two resulting people. The objection here is that, in this case, each half of my brain is exactly similar, and so, to start with, is each resulting person. Given these facts, how can I survive as only one of the two people? What can make me one of them rather than the other?¶ These three possibilities cannot be dismissed as incoherent. We can understand them. But, while we assume that identity is what matters, (1) is not plausible. My Division would not be as bad as death. Nor are (2) and (3) plausible. There remains the fourth possibility: that I survive as both of the resulting people.¶ This possibility might be described in several ways. I might first claim: ‘What we have called “the two resulting people” are not two people. They are one person. I do survive this operation. Its effect is to give me two bodies, and a divided mind.’¶ This claim cannot be dismissed outright. As I argued, we ought to admit as possible that a person could have a divided mind. If this is possible, each half of my divided mind might control its own body. But though this description of the case cannot be rejected as inconceivable, it involves a great distortion in our concept of a person. In my imagined Physics Exam I claimed that this case involved only one person. There were two features of the case that made this plausible. The divided mind was soon reunited, and there was only one body. If a mind was permanently divided, and its halves developed in different ways, it would become less plausible to claim that the case involves only one person. (Remember the actual patient who complained that, when he embraced his wife, his left hand pushed her away.)¶ The case of complete division, where there are also two bodies, seems to be a long way over the borderline. After I have had this operation, the two ‘products’ each have all of the features of a person. They could live at opposite ends of the Earth. Suppose that they have poor memories, and that their appearance changes in different ways. After many years, they might meet again, and fail even to recognise each other. We might have to claim of such a pair, innocently playing tennis: ‘What you see out there is a single person, playing tennis with himself. In each half of his mind he mistakenly believes that he is playing tennis with someone else.’ If we are not yet Reductionists, we believe that there is one true answer to the questionwhether these two tennis-players are a single person. Given what we mean by ‘person’, the answer must be No. It cannot be true that what I believe to be a stranger, standing there behind the net, is in fact another part of myself. That justifies util. Gruzalski 86. Bart Gruzalski 86 UChicago, “Parfit's Impact on Utilitarianism”, Ethics, Vol. 96, No. 4, July 1986. Parfit concludes his discussion of distributive moral principles by claiming that, “when we cease to believe that persons are separately existing entities, the Utilitarian view becomes more plausible. Is the gain in plausibility great, or small? My argument leaves this question open” (p. 342). In contrast, I have argued that the Reductionist View strongly supports the utilitarian account of desert and distributive justice. The argument has two aspects. One is the recognition of the utilitarian emphasis on secondary rules, including principles of distributive justice and policies of desert. These rules, principles, and policies are treated within the utilitarian account as if they have self-standing, whereas in fact they are justified on the principle of utility which alone has self-standing within the utilitarian program. The other aspect of the argument involves the recognition that the utilitarian’s dual treatment of secondary principles dovetails with the dual account of the nature of persons on the Reductionist View: persons exist, yet their existence just involves bodies and interrelated mental and physical events, and a complete description of our lives need not claim that persons exist. Furthermore, a body, brain, and interrelated series of mental and physical events are more fundamental and basic than the person whose existence just consists in them, much as the citizens and the territory are more fundamental and basic than the nation whose existence just consists in them. This corresponds precisely with the utilitarian account, for utilitarianism treats persons as fundamental and separate existents, while grounding this treatment on the impersonal elements of pain, suffering, happiness, and contentment. Because util-itarianism accurately reflects in this way the true nature of persons, it is much more plausible than has been previously recognized. In addition, since many of the current competitors to utilitarianism presuppose that the person is separate from the body, brain, and interrelated mental and physical events, it follows that these views err by being too personal and are therefore implausible. It follows that when we cease to believe that persons are separately existing entities, utilitarianism becomes significantly more plausible than any of its person-centered theoretical competitors. 2 Actor Spec— States must use util. Any other standard dooms the moral theory Goodin 90. Robert Goodin 90, professor of philosophy at the Australian National University college of arts and social sciences, “The Utilitarian Response,” pgs 141-142 RS My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about public officials and their situations that make it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to choose general rules or conduct. 3 Extinction comes first under any framework. Pummer 15 Theron, Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. “Moral Agreement on Saving the World” Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. May 18, 2015 AT There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent disagreements are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now, whatever general moral view we adopt: that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent beings on this planet are eliminated by an enormous catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. How we might in fact try to reduce such existential risks is discussed elsewhere. My claim here is only that we – whether we’re consequentialists, deontologists, or virtue ethicists – should all agree that we should try to save the world. According to consequentialism, we should maximize the good, where this is taken to be the goodness, from an impartial perspective, of outcomes. Clearly one thing that makes an outcome good is that the people in it are doing well. There is little disagreement here. If the happiness or well-being of possible future people is just as important as that of people who already exist, and if they would have good lives, it is not hard to see how reducing existential risk is easily the most important thing in the whole world. This is for the familiar reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. There are so many possible future people that reducing existential risk is arguably the most important thing in the world, even if the well-being of these possible people were given only 0.001 as much weight as that of existing people. Even on a wholly person-affecting view – according to which there’s nothing (apart from effects on existing people) to be said in favor of creating happy people – the case for reducing existential risk is very strong. As noted in this seminal paper, this case is strengthened by the fact that there’s a good chance that many existing people will, with the aid of life-extension technology, live very long and very high quality lives. You might think what I have just argued applies to consequentialists only. There is a tendency to assume that, if an argument appeals to consequentialist considerations (the goodness of outcomes), it is irrelevant to non-consequentialists. But that is a huge mistake. Non-consequentialism is the view that there’s more that determines rightness than the goodness of consequences or outcomes; it is not the view that the latter don’t matter. Even John Rawls wrote, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” Minimally plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good, from an impartial point of view. They’d thus imply very strong reasons to reduce existential risk, at least when this doesn’t significantly involve doing harm to others or damaging one’s character. What’s even more surprising, perhaps, is that even if our own good (or that of those near and dear to us) has much greater weight than goodness from the impartial “point of view of the universe,” indeed even if the latter is entirely morally irrelevant, we may nonetheless have very strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Even egoism, the view that each agent should maximize her own good, might imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. It will depend, among other things, on what one’s own good consists in. If well-being consisted in pleasure only, it is somewhat harder to argue that egoism would imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk – perhaps we could argue that one would maximize her expected hedonic well-being by funding life extension technology or by having herself cryogenically frozen at the time of her bodily death as well as giving money to reduce existential risk (so that there is a world for her to live in!). I am not sure, however, how strong the reasons to do this would be. But views which imply that, if I don’t care about other people, I have no or very little reason to help them are not even minimally plausible views (in addition to hedonistic egoism, I here have in mind views that imply that one has no reason to perform an act unless one actually desires to do that act). To be minimally plausible, egoism will need to be paired with a more sophisticated account of well-being. To see this, it is enough to consider, as Plato did, the possibility of a ring of invisibility – suppose that, while wearing it, Ayn could derive some pleasure by helping the poor, but instead could derive just a bit more by severely harming them. Hedonistic egoism would absurdly imply she should do the latter. To avoid this implication, egoists would need to build something like the meaningfulness of a life into well-being, in some robust way, where this would to a significant extent be a function of other-regarding concerns (see chapter 12 of this classic intro to ethics). But once these elements are included, we can (roughly, as above) argue that this sort of egoism will imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Add to all of this Samuel Scheffler’s recent intriguing arguments (quick podcast version available here) that most of what makes our lives go well would be undermined if there were no future generations of intelligent persons. On his view, my life would contain vastly less well-being if (say) a year after my death the world came to an end. So obviously if Scheffler were right I’d have very strong reason to reduce existential risk. We should also take into account moral uncertainty. What is it reasonable for one to do, when one is uncertain not (only) about the empirical facts, but also about the moral facts? I’ve just argued that there’s agreement among minimally plausible ethical views that we have strong reason to reduce existential risk – not only consequentialists, but also deontologists, virtue ethicists, and sophisticated egoists should agree. But even those (hedonistic egoists) who disagree should have a significant level of confidence that they are mistaken, and that one of the above views is correct. Even if they were 90 sure that their view is the correct one (and 10 sure that one of these other ones is correct), they would have pretty strong reason, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, to reduce existential risk. Perhaps most disturbingly still, even if we are only 1 sure that the well-being of possible future people matters, it is at least arguable that, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, reducing existential risk is the most important thing in the world. Again, this is largely for the reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. (For more on this and other related issues, see this excellent dissertation). Of course, it is uncertain whether these untold trillions would, in general, have good lives. It’s possible they’ll be miserable. It is enough for my claim that there is moral agreement in the relevant sense if, at least given certain empirical claims about what future lives would most likely be like, all minimally plausible moral views would converge on the conclusion that we should try to save the world. While there are some non-crazy views that place significantly greater moral weight on avoiding suffering than on promoting happiness, for reasons others have offered (and for independent reasons I won’t get into here unless requested to), they nonetheless seem to be fairly implausible views. And even if things did not go well for our ancestors, I am optimistic that they will overall go fantastically well for our descendants, if we allow them to. I suspect that most of us alive today – at least those of us not suffering from extreme illness or poverty – have lives that are well worth living, and that things will continue to improve. Derek Parfit, whose work has emphasized future generations as well as agreement in ethics, described our situation clearly and accurately: “We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy…. Our descendants might, I believe, make the further future very good. But that good future may also depend in part on us. If our selfish recklessness ends human history, we would be acting very wrongly.” (From chapter 36 of On What Matters) 4 Pleasure and pain are intrinsic value and disvalue. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events, situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable 10. Pleasure is a passive reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends. However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure 14. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction, homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in their pursuit. 15. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers 16 which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons 17–19 despite the notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO Charles Darwin and other biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness; yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact, Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life 20. Only genes that lead to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate, distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral reward functions have evolved to help individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will ultimately result in evolutionary advantage 21, additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment. Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence, under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine 22. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms may play a role 23. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these systems promoting hypodopaminergia 24. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce healthy behavioral changes, including stress management 25. The work of Esch and Stefano 26 concerning the link between compassion and love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades 26–37, but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends 38. However, it is not entirely clear exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear 39. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of pleasure 40. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum (VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good” response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade” that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors 3,6,41. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to optimism as a dopaminergic response 42. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions like panic and fear, as discussed above 43. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” 3. That is, dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli 44. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards 45. Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy, disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation 46. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease 47. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions 48. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. 48 suggested based on review that whereas the gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) 49. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence for our concerns was discovered 50 In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa et al. 50 small case found various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers examined 247 specimens of neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably, abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work for things that have no apparent short-term benefit 51. In similar work, Volkow and Bale 52 proposed a model in which dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS.
9/12/21
JanFeb - CP - China EIA
Tournament: debateLA Challenge | Round: 3 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart JL | Judge: Holden Bukowsky, Chris Castillo The People’s Republic of China should submit an environmental impact assessment of the appropriation of outer space by private entities to the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs for public comment, modification, and approval. The United States federal government should implement the approved version of the submitted proposal. Normal means is NPC and LAC unilateral action in Chinese “Congress” – cx proves unilateral action w/o consultation Counterplan competes and creates the least environmentally damaging version of the aff. William R. Kramer, PhD Polisci/Futures Studies @ U of H Manoa, Currently HDR Inc. Extraterrestrial Environmental Analyst, ’14, “Extraterrestrial environmental impact assessments A foreseeable prerequisite for wise decisions regarding outer space exploration, research and development” Space Policy 30 (2014) 215-222 To be most effective, all spacefaring nations and enterprises would voluntarily participate in assessing their extraterrestrial environmental impacts prior to undertaking actions in space. A hypothetical chronology of such a process might include: (1) Impact assessments are prepared by the action proponent and submitted to an impartial international panel or board; (2) The panel determines the assessment's sufficiency; (3) The assessment is published in an electronic or other format accessible to the public followed by a comment period; (4) The action proponent addresses comments and submits responses to the panel; (5) The panel publishes its approval or concerns; (6) The action proceeds, is modified or is abandoned; and (7) should the action proceed, periodic reports of the action's progress and impacts are filed for future reference in a digital format to allow broad access. The process would support the spirit of both NEPA to “fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations” (42 USC x4331(b)(1)) and Article 4(1) of the Moon Agreement's directive that “due regard shall be paid to the interests of present and future generations.” Given the likelihood that all states would appreciate the need for maintaining extraterrestrial environments and landscapes for both future research and exploitation, pressure from peer states and space industries may be sufficient to encourage a trend of compliance. Such a review and approval system (perhaps similar to NEPA's relationship with the Council on Environmental Quality and its oversight function) could be attempted within the structure of the UN, such as within the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs. The spirit of an extraterrestrial environmental assessment program would be likely to fit within the mandate of the organization. However, amending the Outer Space Treaty or otherwise developing an administrative UN capacity to achieve the goals proposed in this paper would require a level of international commitment and cooperation that may be both lengthy and difficult to achieve. Spacefaring nations and international organizations are already invited to submit annual reports on their space activities and research to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Space, so a precedent for reporting exists. Presently, however, reports tend to document positive actions and research, not details of extraterrestrial environmental impacts. Extinction. EIA is key to preserve space resources, stop resource wars, and extra-terrestrial environmental damage. William R. Kramer, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies @ University of Hawaii, '17, In dreams begin responsibilities – environmental impact assessment and outer space development, ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICE, VOL. 19, NO. 3, 128–138 Benefits of extraterrestrial environmental impact assessment Most publications regarding outer space resources maintain that those resources are nearly limitless, and many business models for exploitation do not imagine that resources on Mars, for example, will ever be exhausted (Lewis, 1996; Zubrin, 1996; Renstrom, 2016). Ever is a long time. While the statement may be figuratively true for some mineral ores that may last through an individual company’s project timeline, it is not necessarily true for long-term planning. There will likely be competition for the rarest (most valuable) minerals. Without some form of planning and regulation, they may be extracted in an inefficient and environmentally damaging manner and be quickly depleted (as exemplified by hydraulic mining for gold on Earth, which wasted much of the resource and resulted in extensive environmental damage) (Merchant, 1998). How might resources be put to their highest and best use unless regulated? Both the Moon and Mars have water ice which will be crucial for human survival, but water also has lucrative industrial uses; it is potentially the raw material for manufacturing both rocket fuel and oxygen. Conflicts over resource allocation may be better addressed during an assessment process that seeks to balance highest and best use with discovery and first use. Who gains access to specific areas for mining becomes more problematic in that the Outer Space Treaty does not allow “ownership” of extraterrestrial territory; there is no guarantee that companies such as those listed previously will gain access to the most productive sites. The China National Space Administration is planning to place a crew on the Moon by 2024, so competition for the best sites will be intense (Kramer, 2015b; China Digital Times, 2012). Space industries generally are not considering that their proposed actions may preclude alternative uses such as scientific research and human settlement. There will be a stream of not yet imagined uses that could be adversely affected or foreclosed. Many of the same conflicts between land use and human habitation experienced on Earth may emerge on extraterrestrial sites. On the Moon, for example, there are preferable sites for collecting solar energy. These “peaks of eternal light” are areas nearly always or constantly exposed to sunlight at the poles. They are very limited in both distribution and size (Elvis, Milligan, and Krolikowski, 2016). If a mining operation were to determine such areas suitable for their operations, or if mining created a constant plume of dust that would diminish the effectiveness of solar panels, how might such a situation be resolved? Should potentially dangerous industries such as fuel manufacturing or storage be located near living areas? Would hydraulic fluid pipelines be closely monitored for leaks that may affect subsurface ice deposits mined for drinking water? How might vibrations from detonations affect unrelated structures or scientific instrumentation, such as telescopes? And how might a search for life, whether extinct or still living, be affected by human presence and our trail of bacteria and organic wastes? Humans’ biological pollution of Mars, for example, may greatly affect the results of any search for extraterrestrial life there (Kramer, 2009; McKay, 2009). Peter Doran of the Planetary Protection Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council offered, “The big issue with all missions to Mars is we don’t want to create a situation where we are impacting future life-detection science. Picture humans … walking around shedding microbes everywhere we go. Space suits as we know them do not take care of this problem (Mack, 2016).”
1/13/22
JanFeb - CP - EIA
Tournament: debateLA Challenge | Round: 1 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Alexandra Mork, Claudia Ribera Text: The appropriation of outer space by private entities via Large Satellite Constellations based in the United States is just. The appropriation of outer space by all other private entities via Large Satellite Constellations in Lower Earth Orbit is unjust. The United States federal government should submit an environmental impact assessment of the plan to the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs for public comment, modification, and approval. The United States federal government should implement the approved version of the submitted proposal. Counterplan competes and creates the least environmentally damaging version of the aff. William R. Kramer, PhD Polisci/Futures Studies @ U of H Manoa, Currently HDR Inc. Extraterrestrial Environmental Analyst, ’14, “Extraterrestrial environmental impact assessments A foreseeable prerequisite for wise decisions regarding outer space exploration, research and development” Space Policy 30 (2014) 215-222 To be most effective, all spacefaring nations and enterprises would voluntarily participate in assessing their extraterrestrial environmental impacts prior to undertaking actions in space. A hypothetical chronology of such a process might include: (1) Impact assessments are prepared by the action proponent and submitted to an impartial international panel or board; (2) The panel determines the assessment's sufficiency; (3) The assessment is published in an electronic or other format accessible to the public followed by a comment period; (4) The action proponent addresses comments and submits responses to the panel; (5) The panel publishes its approval or concerns; (6) The action proceeds, is modified or is abandoned; and (7) should the action proceed, periodic reports of the action's progress and impacts are filed for future reference in a digital format to allow broad access. The process would support the spirit of both NEPA to “fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations” (42 USC x4331(b)(1)) and Article 4(1) of the Moon Agreement's directive that “due regard shall be paid to the interests of present and future generations.” Given the likelihood that all states would appreciate the need for maintaining extraterrestrial environments and landscapes for both future research and exploitation, pressure from peer states and space industries may be sufficient to encourage a trend of compliance. Such a review and approval system (perhaps similar to NEPA's relationship with the Council on Environmental Quality and its oversight function) could be attempted within the structure of the UN, such as within the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs. The spirit of an extraterrestrial environmental assessment program would be likely to fit within the mandate of the organization. However, amending the Outer Space Treaty or otherwise developing an administrative UN capacity to achieve the goals proposed in this paper would require a level of international commitment and cooperation that may be both lengthy and difficult to achieve. Spacefaring nations and international organizations are already invited to submit annual reports on their space activities and research to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Space, so a precedent for reporting exists. Presently, however, reports tend to document positive actions and research, not details of extraterrestrial environmental impacts. Extinction. EIA is key to preserve space resources, stop resource wars, and extra-terrestrial environmental damage. William R. Kramer, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies @ University of Hawaii, '17, In dreams begin responsibilities – environmental impact assessment and outer space development, ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICE, VOL. 19, NO. 3, 128–138 Benefits of extraterrestrial environmental impact assessment Most publications regarding outer space resources maintain that those resources are nearly limitless, and many business models for exploitation do not imagine that resources on Mars, for example, will ever be exhausted (Lewis, 1996; Zubrin, 1996; Renstrom, 2016). Ever is a long time. While the statement may be figuratively true for some mineral ores that may last through an individual company’s project timeline, it is not necessarily true for long-term planning. There will likely be competition for the rarest (most valuable) minerals. Without some form of planning and regulation, they may be extracted in an inefficient and environmentally damaging manner and be quickly depleted (as exemplified by hydraulic mining for gold on Earth, which wasted much of the resource and resulted in extensive environmental damage) (Merchant, 1998). How might resources be put to their highest and best use unless regulated? Both the Moon and Mars have water ice which will be crucial for human survival, but water also has lucrative industrial uses; it is potentially the raw material for manufacturing both rocket fuel and oxygen. Conflicts over resource allocation may be better addressed during an assessment process that seeks to balance highest and best use with discovery and first use. Who gains access to specific areas for mining becomes more problematic in that the Outer Space Treaty does not allow “ownership” of extraterrestrial territory; there is no guarantee that companies such as those listed previously will gain access to the most productive sites. The China National Space Administration is planning to place a crew on the Moon by 2024, so competition for the best sites will be intense (Kramer, 2015b; China Digital Times, 2012). Space industries generally are not considering that their proposed actions may preclude alternative uses such as scientific research and human settlement. There will be a stream of not yet imagined uses that could be adversely affected or foreclosed. Many of the same conflicts between land use and human habitation experienced on Earth may emerge on extraterrestrial sites. On the Moon, for example, there are preferable sites for collecting solar energy. These “peaks of eternal light” are areas nearly always or constantly exposed to sunlight at the poles. They are very limited in both distribution and size (Elvis, Milligan, and Krolikowski, 2016). If a mining operation were to determine such areas suitable for their operations, or if mining created a constant plume of dust that would diminish the effectiveness of solar panels, how might such a situation be resolved? Should potentially dangerous industries such as fuel manufacturing or storage be located near living areas? Would hydraulic fluid pipelines be closely monitored for leaks that may affect subsurface ice deposits mined for drinking water? How might vibrations from detonations affect unrelated structures or scientific instrumentation, such as telescopes? And how might a search for life, whether extinct or still living, be affected by human presence and our trail of bacteria and organic wastes? Humans’ biological pollution of Mars, for example, may greatly affect the results of any search for extraterrestrial life there (Kramer, 2009; McKay, 2009). Peter Doran of the Planetary Protection Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council offered, “The big issue with all missions to Mars is we don’t want to create a situation where we are impacting future life-detection science. Picture humans … walking around shedding microbes everywhere we go. Space suits as we know them do not take care of this problem (Mack, 2016).”
1/13/22
JanFeb - CP - Space Colonization
Tournament: Blake | Round: 1 | Opponent: West Bend ER | Judge: Saied Beckford Text: Private entities should colonize outer space. All other forms of appropriation of outer space by private entities are unjust. Space colonization is good and possible – new developing tech and adaptation solves civil war, extinction, civilization collapse, and exploration defense doesn’t apply. Kennedy ’19 Fred, “To Colonize Space Or Not To Colonize: That Is The Question (For All Of Us)”, 12-18-2019, Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/fredkennedy/2019/12/18/to-colonize-or-not-to-colonize~-~-that-is-the-question-for-all-of-us/?sh=65a8d2702367//pranav It’s important to distinguish between colonize and explore. Exploration already enjoys broad approval here in America. In June, 77 of U.S. respondents told Gallup pollsters that NASA’s budget should either be maintained or increased – undeniable evidence of support for the American space program (as it’s currently constituted). By any measure, we’ve done an admirable job of surveying the solar system over the past 60 years – an essential first step in any comprehensive program of exploration. Unmanned probes developed and launched by the United States and the Soviet Union conducted flybys of the Moon and the terrestrial planets not long after we reached Earth orbit, and since then, we’ve flown by the outer planets. Multiple nations have placed increasingly sophisticated robotic emissaries on the surfaces of the Moon, Mars, Venus and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Most stunningly, in a tour de force of technology and Cold War chutzpah, the U.S. dispatched humans to set foot on another world, just 50 years and a few months ago. But after only six such visits, we never returned. Moon habitats in lava tubes, crops under glass domes, ice mining at the south pole? No. NASA’s Artemis program may place a man and a woman on the Moon again in 2024. But that’s hardly colonization. For perspective, let’s look closer to home. Sailors from an American vessel may have landed on Antarctica as early as 1821 – the claim is unverified – but no scientific expeditions “wintered” there for another 75 years. The first two of these, one Belgian and one British, endured extreme cold and privation – one inadvertently, the other by design. And yet, 200 years after the first explorer set foot on the continent, there are no permanent settlements (partially as a result of a political consensus reached in the late 1950s, but in no small part due to the difficulty of extracting resources such as ore or fossil fuels through kilometers of ice). Less than 5,000 international researchers and support staff comprise the “summer population” at the bottom of the world. That number dwindles to just 1,100 during the harsh Antarctic winter, requiring millions of tons of supplies and fuel to be delivered every year – none of which can be produced locally. To suggest that Antarctica is colonized would be far overstating the sustainability of human presence there. If Antarctica is hard, the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and interplanetary space will be punishingly difficult. Writing in Gizmodo this past July, George Dvorsky describes the challenges to a human colony posed by low gravity, radiation, lack of air and water, and the psychological effects of long-term confinement and isolation inside artificial structures, in space or on planetary surfaces. Add to this the economic uncertainties of such a venture – where the modern analog of a Dutch or British East India Company would face enormous skepticism from investors regarding the profitability of shipping any good or finished product between colonial ports of call – and it becomes clear why nation states and mega-corporations alike have so far resisted the temptation to set up camp beyond geosynchronous orbit. Perhaps, many argue, we should focus our limited resources on unresolved problems here at home? Yet a wave of interest in pursuing solar system colonization is building, whether its initial focus is the Moon, Mars, or O’Neill-style space habitats. Jeff Bezos has argued eloquently for moving heavy industry off the home planet, preserving Earth as a nature reserve, and building the space-based infrastructure that will lower barriers and create opportunities for vast economic and cultural growth (similar to how the Internet and a revolution in microelectronics has allowed Amazon and numerous other companies to achieve spectacular wealth). Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking both suggested the need for a “hedge” population of humans on Mars to allow human civilization to reboot itself in the event of a catastrophe on Earth – an eggs-in-several-baskets approach which actually complements the arguments made by Bezos. And while both are valid reasons for pursuing colonization, there’s a stronger, overarching rationale that clinches it. I’ll assert that a fundamental truth – repeatedly borne out by history – is that expanding, outwardly-focused civilizations are far less likely to turn on themselves, and far more likely to expend their fecundity on growing habitations, conducting important research and creating wealth for their citizens. A civilization that turns away from discovery and growth stagnates – a point made by NASA’s Chief Historian Steven Dick as well as Mars exploration advocate Robert Zubrin. As a species, we have yet to resolve problems of extreme political polarization (both internal to nation states as well as among them), inequalities in wealth distribution, deficiencies in civil liberties, environmental depredations and war. Forgoing opportunities to expand our presence into the cosmos to achieve better outcomes here at home hasn’t eliminated these scourges. What’s more, the “cabin fever” often decried by opponents of colonization (when applied to small, isolated outposts far from Earth) turns out to be a potential problem for our own planet. Without a relief valve for ideological pilgrims or staunch individualists who might just prefer to be on their own despite the inevitable hardships, we may well run the risk of exacerbating the polarization and internecine strife we strive so hard to quell. Focusing humanity’s attention and imagination on a grand project may well give us the running room we need to address these problems. But the decision cannot be made by one country, or one company, or one segment of the human population. If we do this, it will of necessity be a truly international endeavor, a cross-sector endeavor (with all commercial, civil, and defense interests engaged and cooperating). The good news: Critical technologies such as propulsion and power generation systems will improve over time. Transit durations between celestial destinations will shorten (in the same way sailing vessels gave way to steam ships and then to airliners and perhaps, one day, to point-to-point ballistic reusable rockets). Methods for obtaining critical resources on other planets will be refined and enhanced. Genetic engineering may be used to better adapt humans, their crops and other biota to life in space or on other planetary surfaces – to withstand the effects of low or micro-gravity, radiation, and the psychological effects of long-duration spaceflight.
12/18/21
JanFeb - CP - Stop the Space Race
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 4 | Opponent: Monta Vista KR | Judge: Colter Heirigs CP Text: The United States federal government should not start a space race with Russia and China. The United States federal government should end the Artemis Accords.
Solves the aff – all of their ev is predicated on a space race being started. Analytical CPs good – k2 test affs from multiple persepctives and generate CPs during prep/CX of the 1ac where there isn’t enough time to cut cards
2/13/22
JanFeb - DA - Innovation
Tournament: Blake | Round: 1 | Opponent: West Bend ER | Judge: Saied Beckford Strong commercial space catalyzes tech innovation – progress at the margins and spinoff tech change global information networks Joshua Hampson 2017, Security Studies Fellow at the Niskanen Center, 1-25-2017, “The Future of Space Commercialization”, Niskanen Center, https://republicans-science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/TheFutureofSpaceCommercializationFinal.pdf Innovation is generally hard to predict; some new technologies seem to come out of nowhere and others only take off when paired with a new application. It is difficult to predict the future, but it is reasonable to expect that a growing space economy would open opportunities for technological and organizational innovation. In terms of technology, the difficult environment of outer space helps incentivize progress along the margins. Because each object launched into orbit costs a significant amount of money—at the moment between $27,000 and $43,000 per pound, though that will likely drop in the future —each 19 reduction in payload size saves money or means more can be launched. At the same time, the ability to fit more capability into a smaller satellite opens outer space to actors that previously were priced out of the market. This is one of the reasons why small, affordable satellites are increasingly pursued by companies or organizations that cannot afford to launch larger traditional satellites. These small 20 satellites also provide non-traditional launchers, such as engineering students or prototypers, the opportunity to learn about satellite production and test new technologies before working on a full-sized satellite. That expansion of developers, experimenters, and testers cannot but help increase innovation opportunities. Technological developments from outer space have been applied to terrestrial life since the earliest days of space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) maintains a website that lists technologies that have spun off from such research projects. Lightweight 21 nanotubes, useful in protecting astronauts during space exploration, are now being tested for applications in emergency response gear and electrical insulation. The need for certainty about the resiliency of materials used in space led to the development of an analytics tool useful across a range of industries. Temper foam, the material used in memory-foam pillows, was developed for NASA for seat covers. As more companies pursue their own space goals, more innovations will likely come from the commercial sector. Outer space is not just a catalyst for technological development. Satellite constellations and their unique line-of-sight vantage point can provide new perspectives to old industries. Deploying satellites into low-Earth orbit, as Facebook wants to do, can connect large, previously-unreached swathes of 22 humanity to the Internet. Remote sensing technology could change how whole industries operate, such as crop monitoring, herd management, crisis response, and land evaluation, among others. 23 While satellites cannot provide all essential information for some of these industries, they can fill in some useful gaps and work as part of a wider system of tools. Space infrastructure, in helping to change how people connect and perceive Earth, could help spark innovations on the ground as well. These innovations, changes to global networks, and new opportunities could lead to wider economic growth. Short innovation cycles mean every contract counts John J. Klein 19, Senior Fellow and Strategist at Falcon Research Inc. and adjunct professor at the George Washington University Space Policy Institute, 1-15-2019, "Rethinking Requirements and Risk in the New Space Age," Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/rethinking-requirements-and-risk-in-the-new-space-age Unfortunately, these variances in models between the MDAP’s lengthy development cycle and the commercial space sector’s 18-month innovation cycle are a result of stark differences in thinking about requirements and risk. Requirements and risk for MDAPs commonly focus on ensuring critical mission capabilities at a given cost. In contrast, the commercial space sector tends to focus more on providing innovation quickly using economies of scale. The commercial sector understands that time dynamically shapes decisions related to requirements and risk because of the relatively short innovation cycle. In a highly competitive space sector with tight profit margins, those unable to innovate quickly will likely be out of business soon. Alternatively, space systems with mission assurance requirements – where failures are detrimental to national security and military operations – often drive DoD’s timelines. Program managers of critical national security space systems commonly require additional time to test and verify that satellites can perform missions with a very low probability of failure. Tech innovation solves every existential threat – cumulative extinction events outweigh the aff Dylan Matthews 18. Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University. 10-26-2018. "How to help people millions of years from now." Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.*
12/18/21
JanFeb - DA - Japan Prolif
Tournament: Blake | Round: 1 | Opponent: West Bend ER | Judge: Saied Beckford The plan is a space shock that causes Asian arms races Dean Cheng 9, Senior Research Fellow in the Asia Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, Former Senior Analyst at the China Studies Division of the Center for Naval Analyses, Former Senior Analyst with Science Applications International Corporation, “Reflections On Sino-US Space Cooperation”, Space and Defense, Volume 2, Number 3, Winter 2009, https://www.usafa.edu/app/uploads/Space_and_Defense_2_3.pdf Broader International Implications Beyond the bilateral difficulties of cooperating with the PRC, it is also important to consider potential ramifications of Sino-US cooperation in space on the Asian political landscape. In particular, cooperation between Washington and Beijing on space issues may well arouse concerns in Tokyo and Delhi. Both of these nations have their own space programs, and while they are arguably not engaged in a “space race” with China (or each other), they are certainly keeping a close eye on developments regarding China. Of particular importance is Japan. The United States relationship with Japan is arguably its most important in East Asia. US interest in Japan should be self evident. Japan hosts 47,000 US troops and is the linchpin for forward US presence in that hemisphere. Japan is the second largest contributor to all major international organizations that buttress US foreign policy…. Japan is the bulwark for US deterrence and engagement of China and North Korea—the reason why those countries cannot assume that the United States will eventually withdraw from the region.35 For Japan, whose “peace constitution” forbids it from using war as an instrument of state policy, the United States is an essential guarantor of its security. Any move by the US that might undermine this view raises not only the prospect of weakening US-Japanese ties, but also potentially affecting Japan’s security policies. In this regard, then, it is essential not to engage in activities that would undercut perceptions of American reliability. Such moves, it should be noted, are not limited to those in the security realm. For example, the Nixon administration undertook several initiatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s that rocked Tokyo-Washington relations, and are still remembered as the “Nixon shocks.” While some of these were in the realm of security (including Nixon’s opening to China and the promulgation of the Nixon Doctrine), the others were in the trade area. These included a ten percent surcharge on all imports entering the US and suspended the convertibility of the dollar (i.e., removed the US from the gold standard).36 Part of the “shock” was the fundamental nature of these shifts. Even more damaging, however, was the failure of the Nixon Administration to consult their Japanese counterparts, catching them wholly off-guard. It took several years for the effects of these shocks to wear off. If the United States is intent upon expanding space relations with the PRC, then it would behoove it to consult Japan, in order to minimize the prospect of a “space shock.” Failing to do so may well incur a Japanese reaction. The decision on the part of Japan to build an explicitly intelligence-focused satellite was in response to the North Korean missile test of 1999, suggesting that Tokyo is fully capable of undertaking space-oriented responses when it is concerned.37 That, in turn, would potentially arouse the ire of China. The tragic history of Sino-Japanese relations continues to cast a baleful influence upon current interactions between the two states. If there is not a “space race” currently underway between Beijing and Tokyo, it would be most unfortunate if American actions were to precipitate one.
Japan will develop offensive strike---nuclear war Kelly C. Wadsworth 19, Non-Resident Kelly Fellow at Pacific Forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, PhD Student in International Security Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, MBA and MA in International Studies (Korea Studies) at the University of Washington, Former Visiting Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, BA in International Relations and East Asia from the University of California, Davis, “Should Japan Adopt Conventional Missile Strike Capabilities?”, Asia Policy, Volume 14, Number 2, April 2019, p. 83-87 American proponents of Japan obtaining a conventional missile strike capability interviewed for this research argued that the United States could use a more capable ally in the region to address the threat posed by heightened Chinese naval activity. While that prospect might be a tempting short-term fix to offset the U.S. Department of Defense budget cuts over the last decade, the long-term interests of the United States in maintaining regional stability should also be considered. In addition to the negative reactions of Beijing and Seoul, a Japanese offensive strike capability could decrease regional confidence in the credibility of U.S. power in Asia. As noted above, some experts argue that if Japan strengthens its offensive capability, such a move might be interpreted by neighbors reliant on the U.S. nuclear umbrella as a sign that Tokyo is losing confidence in the United States’ credibility.71 This could start a chain reaction that causes more U.S. allies to hedge with China or to develop their own strike capabilities, further increasing instability in Asia. China. China would likely be the most vocal in its disapproval of a Japanese conventional missile strike capability, potentially offering not just harsh words but also harsh actions that could further decrease regional stability in an already tense security environment. China expressed dissent when Japan considered a preemptive strike option against the North Korean threat in 2006, arguing that the move was “extremely irresponsible” and would severely interfere with international diplomatic efforts, aggravating tensions in Northeast Asia.72 Over ten years later, the regional environment is even more tense as a result of North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and China’s island reclamation efforts in the East and South China Seas. Support from Washington for Tokyo’s armament would likely fuel Beijing’s narrative that an aggressive and hegemonic United States is fixated on containing China and would be used to justify China’s own increased militarization. It would likely also end any chance of dialogue between Washington and Beijing on facilitating peaceful resolutions to regional territorial disputes. Brad Roberts points out that adopting strike capability would assist Japan in cases where its interests do not align with those of the United States, as in potential gray-zone conflicts. 73 However, the ensuing heightened mistrust between the alliance partners and China may work to increase the likelihood of a gray-zone conflict—such as the 2010 collision of Japanese and Chinese boats in disputed territory—possibly escalating into war. In addition, if Japan had a conventional missile strike capability that could be used to “preempt” a perceived imminent attack from China, Beijing would in turn be more likely to consider preemption of Japanese strike abilities, causing a premature escalation of the crisis that would undoubtedly draw in the United States. South Korea. Despite significant progress on U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral security cooperation in recent years, Japan-ROK military relations remain increasingly tense, a situation that could easily spiral out of control if Japan adopted an offensive capability.74 When Japan, sparked by North Korea’s provocations in 2006, publicly debated the legality of a “preemptive strike” option, South Korean officials bluntly expressed their negative opinion of Japan’s intentions. A spokesperson for the Blue House secretariat, for example, remarked, “We have been alerted by this display of Japan’s inclination to aggression,” and that Japan was using the crisis “as an excuse to beef up their military.”75 South Koreans demonstrated a similar sentiment after Tokyo’s 2014 CSD proposal, with a 2015 poll showing that the majority of the public (56.9) perceived Japan as “militaristic,” up 3.8 percentage points from the previous year.76 If Tokyo were to push forward with the discussion of adopting a conventional missile strike capability, South Korean public opinion would likely become even more unfavorable toward Japan. At a time when enhanced trilateral cooperation is important to deter the evolving threats in the region, Japan advancing legislation to allow for conventional missile strike capabilities would likely derail those efforts, especially if labeled “preemptive.” Such a move could even push Seoul to hedge with Beijing, as the ROK is increasingly reluctant to join any initiative perceived to be aimed at containing China.77 With China as South Korea’s largest trading partner and the United States as its greatest security ally, the ROK is not eager to choose between the two sides. Southeast Asia. Countries in Southeast Asia are watching the Trump administration closely to see where Washington will draw the line on China’s military rise and growing regional assertiveness, and many are already hedging accordingly. For example, countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines are increasing their own conventional arsenal and naval capabilities as a result of Washington’s “slow erosion of credibility” in the region during the Obama administration.78 Defense of Japan 2018 seems to have confidence in the Trump administration’s commitment to maintaining a powerful presence in Asia.79 However, as discussed earlier, if Japan were to pursue an offensive defense strategy, the Southeast Asian countries could see this as a sign of Tokyo’s loss of faith in the United States’ willingness to uphold its defense commitments. China’s seizure of the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012 has already eroded these countries’ confidence in the U.S. security guarantee to some extent.80 Declining credibility and corresponding hedging—through either growing armament or alignment with China—could not only further increase tensions and heighten the risk of a gray-zone escalation but also lead to greater Chinese military assertiveness and dominance in the region. Summary Despite the seemingly unbalanced nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance, the argument for “balancing” the alliance with Japan’s development of an independent conventional missile strike capability does not take into account important repercussions that could undermine both regional stability and U.S. credibility. In addition, updated Japanese defense guidelines, such as CSD, already give Japan a “greater role” in global security. Unless future U.S. administrations drastically reduce the U.S. military presence in Asia, the benefit of a more equal alliance would not outweigh the potential costs of Japan’s adoption of a conventional missile strike capability. CONCLUSION The arguments supporting Japan’s acquisition of a conventional missile strike capability do not hold weight in the current regional, economic, and alliance environments. The development of such a capability is not a practical solution for Japan to abate the threat from the DPRK, and the move could be perceived by China and South Korea as facilitating a U.S. strategy of containment. Traditional restrictions on the Japanese defense budget would not practically allow the buildup of the military capabilities required for a conventional missile strike force, a restriction that cannot be changed without support from a military-wary public. At first glance, a “normal” Japan that is capable of contributing to U.S. deterrence efforts might seem appealing from an alliance perspective, especially after the 2010 U.S. defense budget cuts, and an increasingly threatening regional security environment. Yet, though the U.S.-Japan alliance may be unbalanced in terms of capabilities, the United States has broader interests in regional stability that will be better promoted if Japan maintains a purely defensive force. A strike-capable Japan might not only escalate an already tense regional standoff with China but also elicit a harsh response from other countries against Tokyo and Washington. It could also erode the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, potentially leading to increased militarization throughout Asia. If the environment surrounding any of these three arguments changes—for example, if the United States’ actions discredit its reliability to protect Japan under the alliance, if Japanese public support allows an increase in the JSDF’s budget, or if the United States can no longer maintain a credible military deterrence in Asia—Japan would have a strong argument to move forward with conventional missile strike capabilities. In that case, both parties should exercise prudence in their public communications of planned alliance cooperation on the matter and about how or why the alliance would choose to employ such abilities. Hawkish suggestions of the potential to increase U.S. dominance in the region should be avoided.81 China is rightfully wary of any reference to conventional prompt global strike. Such rhetoric coming from Japan or the United States combined with the decision to move forward on conventional missile strike capabilities could be considered a threatening signal by Beijing.82 Without calculated prudence in regional dialogues, even the discussion of Tokyo acquiring conventional missile strike capabilities could ultimately worsen the regional security environment rather than improve it.
12/18/21
JanFeb - K - Techno-Orientalism
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart EL | Judge: Colton Gilbert 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 recut aaditg *brackets in og text 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. The implementation of the 1AC packaged through racist representations causes material violence which outweighs. 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 recut aaditg 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. 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.’’ 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.
2/12/22
JanFeb - NC - Kant
Tournament: Harvard Westlake Debates | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harker MK | Judge: Tej Gedela The meta-ethic is practical reason— 1 Inescapability— I can question why to follow or the validity of an ethical theory, which concedes the authority of reason as if I question reason, I use reason to question. Outweighs on validity—any other truth risks falsity Reality may be fake, our experiences may be arbitrary, and experience may be descriptive not normative, but questioning the validity of reason requires reason, conceding its validity. Any other ethic begs the question of why, meaning it’s arbitrary and nonbinding 2 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 That justifies universality— If we are all reasoners, we must all be able to determine if an action is good. An action that maximizes my freedom at the cost of others then would have to be recognized as good by everyone, but that leads to a contradiction where everyone takes other’s freedoms to maximize theirs, making it impossible to reach my end Thus, the standard is respecting a system of inner and outer freedom
2 Banning private space appropriation inhibits the sale and use of spacecraft and fuel- that’s a form of restricting the free economic choices of individuals Richman 12, Sheldon. “The free market doesn’t need government regulation.” Reason, August 5, 2012. AHS RG Order grows from market forces. But where do market forces come from? They are the result of human action. Individuals select ends and act to achieve them by adopting suitable means. Since means are scarce and ends are abundant, individuals economize in order to accomplish more rather than less. And they always seek to exchange lower values for higher values (as they see them) and never the other way around. In a world of scarcity, tradeoffs are unavoidable, so one aims to trade up rather than down. (One’s trading partner does the same.) The result of this, along with other features of human action, and the world at large is what we call market forces. But really, it is just men and women acting rationally in the world.
1/16/22
JanFeb - T - Appropriation
Tournament: Blake | Round: 5 | Opponent: Scarsdale DH | Judge: Lawrence Zhao Interpretation: “Appropriation of outer space” by private entities refers to the exercise of exclusive control of space. TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW Vol. 2013 No. 4 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should be clear.214 The ITU has, quite blatantly, created something akin to “property interests in outer space.”215 It allows nations to exclude others from their orbital slots, even when the nation is not currently using that slot.216 This is directly in line with at least one definition of outer-space appropriation.217 Start Footnote 217Id. at 236 (“Appropriation of outer space, therefore, is ‘the exercise of exclusive control or exclusive use’ with a sense of permanence, which limits other nations’ access to it.”) (quoting Milton L. Smith, The Role of the ITU in the Development of Space Law, 17 ANNALS AIR and SPACE L. 157, 165 (1992)). End Footnote 217The ITU even allows nations with unused slots to devise them to other entities, creating a market for the property rights set up by this regulation.218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations of the Bogotá Declaration were trying to accomplish, albeit through different means.219
Private appropriation of extracted space resources is distinct from appropriation “of” outer space. Despite longstanding permission of appropriation of extracted resources, sovereign claims are still universally prohibited. Abigail D. Pershing, J.D. Candidate @ Yale, B.A. UChicago,’19, "Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today," Yale Journal of International Law 44, no. 1 II. THE FIRST SHIFT IN CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW’S INTERPRETATION OF THE NON-APPROPRIATION PRINCIPLE Since the drafting of the Outer Space Treaty, several States have chosen to reinterpret the non-appropriation principle as narrower in scope than its drafters originally intended. This reinterpretation has gone largely unchallenged and has in fact been widely adopted by space-faring nations. In turn, this has had the effect of changing customary international law relating to the non-appropriation principle. Shifting away from its original blanket application in 1967, States have carved out an exception to the non-appropriation principle, allowing appropriation of extracted space resources.53 This Part examines this shift in the context of the two branches of the United Nation’s customary international law standard: State practice and opinio juris. A. State Practice The earliest hint of a change in customary international law relating to the interpretation of the non-appropriation clause came in 1969, when the United States first sent astronauts to the moon. As part of his historic journey, astronaut Neil Armstrong collected moonrocks that he brought back with him to Earth and promptly handed off to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as U.S. property.54 Later, the USSR similarly claimed lunar material as government property, some of which was eventually sold to private citizens. 55 These first instances of space resource appropriation did not draw much attention, but they presented a distinct shift marking the beginning of a new period in State practice. Having previously been limited by their technological capabilities, States could now establish new practices with respect to celestial bodies. This was the beginning of a pattern of appropriation that slowly unfolded over the next few decades and has since solidified into the general and consistent State practice necessary to establish the existence of customary international law. Currently, the U.S. government owns 842 pounds of lunar material.56 There is little question that NASA and the U.S. government consider this material, as well as other space materials collected by American astronauts, to be government property.57 In fact, NASA explicitly endorses U.S. property rights over these moon rocks, stating that “lunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. government property.”5 The U.S. delegation’s reaction to the language of the 1979 Moon Agreement further cemented this interpretation that appropriation of extracted resources is a permissible exception to the non-appropriation clause of Article II. Although the United States is not a party to the Moon Agreement, it did participate in the negotiations.59 The Moon Agreement states in relevant part: Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or nongovernmental organization, national organization or nongovernmental entity or of any natural person.60 In response to this language, the U.S. delegation made a statement laying out the American view that the words “in place” imply that private property rights apply to extracted resources61—a comment that went completely unchallenged. That all States seemed to accept this point, even those bound by the Moon Agreement, is further evidence of a shift in customary international law.62 B. Opinio Juris: Domestic Legislation Domestic law, both in the United States and abroad, provides further evidence of the shift in customary international law surrounding the issue of nonappropriation as it relates to extracted space resources. Domestic U.S. space law is codified at Section 51 of the U.S. Code and has been regularly modified to expand private actors’ rights in space.63 Beginning in 1984, the Commercial Space Launch Act provided that “the United States should encourage private sector launches and associated services.”64 The goal of the 1984 Act was to support commercial space launches by private companies and individuals.65 It did not, however, specifically discuss commercial exploitation of space. The first such mention of commercial use of space appeared in 2004, with the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.66 This Act specifically aimed at regulating space tourism but did not explicitly guarantee any private rights in space.67 The most significant change in U.S. space law came with the passage of the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act in 2015. As incorporated into Section 51 of the Code, this Act provides: A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.68 Whereas the idea that private corporations might go into space may have seemed far-fetched to the drafters of the Outer Space Treaty, the SPACE Act of 2015 was the first instance of a government recognizing such a trend and officially supporting private companies’ commercial rights to space resources under law. With the new 2015 amendment to Section 51 in place, U.S. companies can now rest assured that any profits they reap from space mining are firmly legal—at least within U.S. jurisdictions. Although the United States was the first country to officially reinterpret the non-appropriation principle, other countries are following suit. On July 20, 2017, Luxembourg passed a law entitled On the Exploration and Utilization of Space Resources with a vote of fifty-five to two.69 The law took effect on August 1, 2017.70 Article 1 of the new law states simply that “space resources can be appropriated,” and Article 3 expressly grants private companies permission to explore and use space resources for commercial purposes.71 Official commentary on the law establishes that its goal is to provide companies with legal certainty regarding ownership over space materials—a goal that the commentators regard as legal under the Outer Space Treaty despite the non-appropriation principle.72 The next country to enact similar legislation may be the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the UAE Space Agency director general, Mohammed Al Ahbabi, the UAE is currently in the process of drafting a space law covering both human space exploration and commercial activities such as mining.73 To further this goal, in 2017 the UAE set up the Space Agency Working Group on Space Policy and Law to specify the procedures, mechanisms, and other standards of the space sector, including an appropriate legal framework.74 C. Opinio Juris: Legal Scholarship Other major space powers are also considering similar laws in the future, including Japan, China, and Australia. 75 Senior officials within China’s space program have explicitly stated that the country’s goal is to explore outer space and to take advantage of outer space resources.76 The general international trend clearly points in this direction in anticipation of a potential “space gold rush.” 7 Mirroring the shift in State practice and domestic laws, the legal community has also changed its approach to the interpretation of the nonappropriation principle. Whereas at the time of the ratification of the Outer Space Treaty the majority of legal scholars tended to apply the non-appropriation principle broadly, most legal scholars now view appropriation of extracted materials as permissible.78 Brandon Gruner underscores that this new view is historically distinct from prior legal interpretation, noting that modern interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation principle differ from those of the Treaty’s authors.79 In contrast to earlier legal theory that denied the possibility of appropriation of any space resources, scholars now widely accept that extracting space resources from celestial bodies is a “use” permitted by the Outer Space Treaty and that extracted materials become the property of the entity that performed the extraction.80 Stressing the fact that the Treaty does not explicitly prohibit appropriating resources from outer space, other authors conclude that the use of extracted space resources is permitted, meaning that the new SPACE Act is a plausible interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty.81 However, scholars have been careful to cabin the extent to which they accept the legality of appropriation. For instance, although Thomas Gangale and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley acknowledge the legality of private appropriation of extracted space resources, they nonetheless emphasize that “ownership of and the right to use extraterrestrial resources is distinct from ownership of real property” and that any such claim to real property is illegal.82 Lawrence Cooper is also careful to point out this distinction: “the Outer Space Treaties recognize sovereignty over property placed into space, property produced in space, and resources removed from their place in space, but ban sovereignty claims by states; international law extends this ban to individuals.”83 Although there remain some scholars who still insist on the illegality of the 2015 U.S. law and State appropriation of space resources generally,84 their dominance has waned since the 1960s. These scholars are now a minority in the face of general acceptance among the legal community that minerals and other space resources, once extracted, may be legally claimed as property. 85 Taken together, the elements described above—statements made in the international arena, de facto appropriation of space resources in the form of moon rocks, the adoption of new national policies permitting appropriation of extracted space resources, and the weight of the international legal community’s opinion— indicate a fundamental shift in customary international law. The Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation clause has been redefined via customary international law norms from its broad application to now include a carve-out allowing appropriation of space resources once such resources have been extracted.
Violation: Starlink is a series of satellites – that doesn’t appropriate anything and is distinct from broadly banning sovereignty of outer space per 1ac Estes. Independently, aff is about exploration which isn’t appropriation.
Standards: 1) Limits – their interpretation means that affs about any outer space activity would be topical: mining, photography, sending rovers, collecting ice cores, launching satellites, deflecting debris, can’t sell rocks on EBAY, etc. This explodes neg prep burdens since outer space activity is so vague – no generics exist to answer both the photography and the rovers aff, so affs would just win with a tiny impact every round. At worst, they’re extra-T which proves all of our offense OR they don’t solve. 2) Ground – allowing debates about extracting any space resource denies the neg links to core generics like space democracy bad, space colonization good, the moon pic, the property rights NC, etc. – that kills clash by forcing negatives to the fringes of argumentation that disagree with everything and kills fairness by giving the aff a major prep advantage since they only need to frontline the few negative arguments that link to their aff.
Fairness and education are voters – debate’s a game, and fairness is necessary to determine the winner of the game, and education is the reason why schools fund debate. Drop the debater – dropping the argument doesn’t rectify abuse since winning T proves why we don’t have the burden of rejoinder against their aff. Use competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since there’s no consensus as to what’s reasonable. No RVIs – fairness and education are logical litmus tests and they incentivize baiting theory and prepping it out which turns substance crowdout
12/19/21
JanFeb - T - Extra
Tournament: Blake | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Neenah IH | Judge: Christopher Vincent, Elijah Smith, Saied Beckford Interpretation: The affirmative must only deem the appropriation of outer space by private entities unjust.
Violation: they defend a broad rejection of the structures that support settler colonialism - cx
Vote Neg - : A Jurisdiction -- the aff is extra T since it doesn’t affirm the resolution. At worst they lose on substance since they don’t win the debate, if you are not debating the rez, you are not following the pre-set resolution burden meaning the judge cannot vote aff since there was literally not an aff. B Limits -- There are infinite planks you can add to your advocacy text and infinite permutations of them which explodes the topic – I have to prep against infinite affs individually which massively skews engagement as you have infinite prep time to frontline your one aff whereas I won’t be prepared for yours. Limits key to fairness and education by ensuring a manageable prep burden to engage the aff. C Ground -- Solvency deficit is core neg ground, your interp allows you to just steal solvency out of thin air – functionally utopian fiat. For example, if I want to say that aff can’t solve since complete elimination isn’t realistic you just fiat that away instead of debating me, controls the internal link to clash. D TVA – defend space appropriation being unjust because it’s a form of settler desire to conquer other lands. E Competing Interps: 1 T is a binary – you’re either topical or ur not 2 collapses – debate ab a specified briteline
12/19/21
JanFeb - T - Extra
Tournament: Harvard Westlake Debates | Round: 5 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS | Judge: Nick Fleming Interpretation: “private entities” excludes governments UpCounsel n.d. (UpCounsel, interactive online service that makes it faster and easier for businesses to find and hire legal help solely based on their preferences) “Private Entity: Everything You Need to Know” JL A private entity can be a partnership, corporation, individual, nonprofit organization, company, or any other organized group that is not government-affiliated. Indian tribes and foreign public entities are not considered private entities. Violations:
The aff requires bans governments from alienating resources for non-publicly justified purposes – 1AC Babcock 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 2. The 1AC defends “sustainable space activities” broadly – that includes activities towards space like rocket launches which aren’t appropriation – Westwod inserts yellow 1AC Aganaba-Jeanty 16 (, T., 2016. Space Sustainability and the Freedom of Outer Space. online Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14777622.2016.1148463 Accessed 15 December 2021 Timiebi is an assistant professor of Space and Society, in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, an affiliate faculty with the Interplanetary Initiative, a senior global futures scientist with the Global Futures Lab, and holds a courtesy appointment at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, all at Arizona State University. Timiebi was a post-doctoral fellow and is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) based in Waterloo, Ontario Canada where she focused on environmental and space governance. Timiebi was Executive Director of the World Space Week Association coordinating the global response to the UN 1999 declaration that World Space Week should be celebrated Oct 4-10 annually. She is currently on the Advisory Board for the Space Generation Advisory Council supporting the UN Programme on Space Applications. She is also on the Science Advisory Board of World View Enterprises and the SETI Institute. - pp. 10-13.)-rahulpenu recut pranav -~--Critique of status quo polices for space sustainability -~--New regimes key -~--Sustainability needs to be in law -~--Perm VS Global South Ks 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
Vote negative for limits – their interpretation justifies affs banning any government from appropriating space – that skirts the core topic controversy of what private entities specifically should do and kills uniqueness because national appropriation is already prohibited – unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on – limits are key to reciprocal prep burden – extra T creates a slippery slope that incentivizes Frankenstein affs with infinite additional planks to circumvent neg links
1/17/22
JanFeb - T - Extra
Tournament: California Invitational Berkeley Debate | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake ADi | Judge: Aditya Madaraju Interpretation: the affirmative must only defend that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Violation: they also defend a tax on billionaires - cx
Vote neg : limits – they explode limits to include any action not related to the topic which allows the mto spike out of disad links – that kills neg ground and makes effective contestation impossible – that’s an internall ink to fairness which is a voter bc it’s the only thing the ballot can resolve
Dtd – sets a precedent that debaters won’t be abusive
Ci on T – you’re either topical or not
2/19/22
JanFeb - T - Extra vs PTD v2
Tournament: Harvard Westlake Debates | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Ayala AM | Judge: Danielle Dosch, Tej Gedela, Vishan Chaudhary Interpretation: “private entities” excludes governments UpCounsel n.d. (UpCounsel, interactive online service that makes it faster and easier for businesses to find and hire legal help solely based on their preferences) “Private Entity: Everything You Need to Know” JL A private entity can be a partnership, corporation, individual, nonprofit organization, company, or any other organized group that is not government-affiliated. Indian tribes and foreign public entities are not considered private entities. Violations:
The aff requires bans governments from alienating resources for non-publicly justified purposes – 1AC Babcock 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
Vote negative for limits – their interpretation justifies affs banning any government from appropriating space – that skirts the core topic controversy of what private entities specifically should do and kills uniqueness because national appropriation is already prohibited – unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on – limits are key to reciprocal prep burden
– extra T creates a slippery slope that incentivizes Frankenstein affs with infinite additional planks to circumvent neg links
1/17/22
JanFeb - T - Framework
Tournament: Blake | Round: Finals | Opponent: Byram Hills AK | Judge: Jonathan Hsu, Jack McKyton, Kate Totz Our interpretation is that the negative shouldn’t have the burden of rejoinder against affirmatives that don’t defend that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Appropriation of outer space” by private entities refers to the exercise of exclusive control of space. TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW Vol. 2013 No. 4 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should be clear.214 The ITU has, quite blatantly, created something akin to “property interests in outer space.”215 It allows nations to exclude others from their orbital slots, even when the nation is not currently using that slot.216 This is directly in line with at least one definition of outer-space appropriation.217 Start Footnote 217Id. at 236 (“Appropriation of outer space, therefore, is ‘the exercise of exclusive control or exclusive use’ with a sense of permanence, which limits other nations’ access to it.”) (quoting Milton L. Smith, The Role of the ITU in the Development of Space Law, 17 ANNALS AIR and SPACE L. 157, 165 (1992)). End Footnote 217The ITU even allows nations with unused slots to devise them to other entities, creating a market for the property rights set up by this regulation.218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations of the Bogotá Declaration were trying to accomplish, albeit through different means.219 Violation: They defend dysfluency – cx. Standards: 1 Procedural fairness – their interp explodes limits and allows affs to monopolize the moral high ground. The lack of a stable mechanism lets them radically re-contextualize their aff and erase neg ground via perms. Fairness is good and prior – debate’s a game that requires effective competition and negation, which makes their offense inevitable. Cutting negs to every possible aff wrecks small schools, which has a disparate impact on under-resourced and minority debaters. They don’t get to weigh the aff – it’s just as likely that they’re winning it because we weren’t able to effectively prepare to defeat it. 2 Switch Side Debate – read your stuff on the neg which non-uniques your offense and is net better since a Kritik on the neg has to be tailored to the aff– otherwise your discussion starts and ends at the 1AC. 3 TVA – read the aff on lex vm wiki – the cybernetics aff that uses disabled folk to turn capitalism against itself and is a form of affective pessimism against able-body desires to expand into space. Paradigm Issues: Use competing interps – topicality is question of models of debate which they should have to proactively justify and we’ll win reasonability links to our offense. Drop the debater because dropping the arg is severance which moots 7 minutes of 1nc offense No rvis—it’s your burden to be fair and T—same reason you don’t win for answering inherency or putting defense on a disad. They can’t weigh the case—lack of preround prep means their truth claims are untested which you should presume false—they’re also only winning case because we couldn’t engage with it No impact turns—exclusions are inevitable because we only have 45 minutes so it’s best to draw those exclusions along reciprocal lines to ensure a role for the negative
12/20/21
JanFeb - T - Outer Space
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 6 | Opponent: Ayala AM | Judge: Nick Fleming Interpretation: outer space consists of regions outside the atmospheres of celestial bodies Tanabe 19 (Rosie, updater and writer at NWE) “Outer space,” New World Encyclopedia, 1/8/2019 JL Outer space (often called space) consists of the relatively empty regions of the universe outside the atmospheres of celestial bodies. Outer space is used to distinguish it from airspace and terrestrial locations. There is no clear boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space, as the density of the atmosphere gradually decreases as the altitude increases.
The moon has an atmosphere— Siegal 21(Ethan, a Ph.D. astrophysicist and author of "Starts with a Bang!" He is a science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. He has won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for his blog, including the award for best science blog by the Institute of Physics.) “The “airless” Moon really does have an atmosphere, after all,” Big Think, November 17, 2021. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/airless-moon-atmosphere/ RR And yet, the Moon actually does have an atmosphere: one that’s measurable and detectable. In addition, it has something even better than an atmosphere: an atmospheric “tail” made of sodium atoms. Here’s the fascinating science behind our lunar companion’s tenuous, but nonnegligible, atmosphere, which we mustn’t ignore any longer.
Violation: Lunar Heritage Sites are located on the moon, not in outer space. Nasa 13 (Nasa, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is America’s civil space program and the global leader in space exploration. The agency has a diverse workforce of just under 18,000 civil servants, and works with many more U.S. contractors, academia, and international and commercial partners to explore, discover, and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity. With an annual budget of $23.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2021, which is less than 0.5 of the overall U.S. federal budget, NASA supports more than 312,000 jobs across the United States, generating more than $64.3 billion in total economic output (Fiscal Year 2019).) “Lunar Heritage Sites,” NASA, 12/13/13. https://moon.nasa.gov/resources/53/lunar-heritage-sites/ RR
This graphic highlights locations on the moon NASA considers "lunar heritage sites" and the path NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory spacecraft will take on their final flight.
Navigators on the GRAIL team have designed an end of mission plan that rules out the extremely remote possibility of either of the two GRAIL spacecraft impacting near any of these historic locations. The Apollo 11, 12, 14, 16 and 17 landing sites are indicated with green circles. The Surveyor sites are indicated with yellow squares. The Soviet Union's Luna and Lunakhod landing sites are indicated with red diamonds and red triangles, respectively.
The ground tracks for the Ebb and Flow spacecraft during their final half-orbits are shown in blue and red.
Standards: 1) Limits – their interpretation means that they allow for the elimination of private appropriation on earth, asteroids, galaxies, comets, mars etc. This explodes neg prep burdens since outer space activity is so vague – no generics exist to answer both the earth and the moon aff, so affs would just win with a tiny impact every round 2) Ground – allowing debates about celestial bodies denies the neg links to core generics like space democracy bad, space colonization good, the moon pic, the property rights NC, etc. – that kills clash by forcing negatives to the fringes of argumentation that disagree with everything and kills fairness by giving the aff a major prep advantage since they only need to frontline the few negative arguments that link to their aff.
Drop the debater – dropping the argument doesn’t rectify abuse since winning T proves why we don’t have the burden of rejoinder against their aff. Use competing interps – reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since there’s no consensus as to what’s reasonable.
2/13/22
JanFeb - T - Private Entities
Tournament: debateLA Challenge | Round: 3 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart JL | Judge: Holden Bukowsky, Chris Castillo Interpretation: “Private entities” is a generic bare plural. The aff may not defend that a subset of nations ban the appropriation of outer space. Nebel 19. Jake Nebel is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and executive director of Victory Briefs. He writes a lot of this stuff lol – duh. “Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution.” Vbriefly. August 12, 2019. https://www.vbriefly.com/2019/08/12/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution/?fbclid=IwAR0hUkKdDzHWrNeqEVI7m59pwsnmqLl490n4uRLQTe7bWmWDO_avWCNzi14 TG Both distinctions are important. Generic resolutions can’t be affirmed by specifying particular instances. But, since generics tolerate exceptions, plan-inclusive counterplans (PICs) do not negate generic resolutions. Bare plurals are typically used to express generic generalizations. But there are two important things to keep in mind. First, generic generalizations are also often expressed via other means (e.g., definite singulars, indefinite singulars, and bare singulars). Second, and more importantly for present purposes, bare plurals can also be used to express existential generalizations. For example, “Birds are singing outside my window” is true just in case there are some birds singing outside my window; it doesn’t require birds in general to be singing outside my window. So, what about “colleges and universities,” “standardized tests,” and “undergraduate admissions decisions”? Are they generic or existential bare plurals? On other topics I have taken great pains to point out that their bare plurals are generic—because, well, they are. On this topic, though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced. Let’s see why. “Colleges and universities” is a generic bare plural. I don’t think this claim should require any argument, when you think about it, but here are a few reasons. First, ask yourself, honestly, whether the following speech sounds good to you: “Eight colleges and universities—namely, those in the Ivy League—ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions. Maybe other colleges and universities ought to consider them, but not the Ivies. Therefore, in the United States, colleges and universities ought not consider standardized tests in undergraduate admissions decisions.” That is obviously not a valid argument: the conclusion does not follow. Anyone who sincerely believes that it is valid argument is, to be charitable, deeply confused. But the inference above would be good if “colleges and universities” in the resolution were existential. By way of contrast: “Eight birds are singing outside my window. Maybe lots of birds aren’t singing outside my window, but eight birds are. Therefore, birds are singing outside my window.” Since the bare plural “birds” in the conclusion gets an existential reading, the conclusion follows from the premise that eight birds are singing outside my window: “eight” entails “some.” If the resolution were existential with respect to “colleges and universities,” then the Ivy League argument above would be a valid inference. Since it’s not a valid inference, “colleges and universities” must be a generic bare plural. Second, “colleges and universities” fails the upward-entailment test for existential uses of bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Lima beans are on my plate.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some lima beans on my plate. One test of this is that it entails the more general sentence, “Beans are on my plate.” Now consider the sentence, “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” (To isolate “colleges and universities,” I’ve eliminated the other bare plurals in the resolution; it cannot plausibly be generic in the isolated case but existential in the resolution.) This sentence does not entail the more general statement that educational institutions ought not consider the SAT. This shows that “colleges and universities” is generic, because it fails the upward-entailment test for existential bare plurals. Third, “colleges and universities” fails the adverb of quantification test for existential bare plurals. Consider the sentence, “Dogs are barking outside my window.” This sentence expresses an existential statement that is true just in case there are some dogs barking outside my window. One test of this appeals to the drastic change of meaning caused by inserting any adverb of quantification (e.g., always, sometimes, generally, often, seldom, never, ever). You cannot add any such adverb into the sentence without drastically changing its meaning. To apply this test to the resolution, let’s again isolate the bare plural subject: “Colleges and universities ought not consider the SAT.” Adding generally (“Colleges and universitiesz generally ought not consider the SAT”) or ever (“Colleges and universities ought not ever consider the SAT”) result in comparatively minor changes of meaning. (Note that this test doesn’t require there to be no change of meaning and doesn’t have to work for every adverb of quantification.) This strongly suggests what we already know: that “colleges and universities” is generic rather than existential in the resolution. It applies to “private entities” – 1 upward entailment test – “appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust” doesn’t entail that all entities ought to ban private entities because public entities don’t, 2 adverb test – adding “generally” to the res doesn’t substantially change its meaning because a ban is universal. Precision o/w – anything else justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. Violation – They specified China Standards: 1 Limits and ground – their model allows affs to defend any combination of private entities in any countries which explodes negative burden and causes random affs every tournament 2 TVA solves: Read the plan as an advantage under a whole rez – PICs don’t solve because potential neg abuse doesn’t justify aff abuse Fairness is a voter – debate’s a game that needs rules to evaluate it and answers to it rely on the judge evaluating the argument fairly No RVIs: a. Chills theory – If people know they might lose for reading theory, it will disincentivize them. b. You don’t get to win by being fair. Use competing interpretations: a. Reasonability causes a race to the bottom with testing the limit of it b. collapses – de ate abspecified briteline Drop the debater: for being abusive – we can’t restart the round from the 1AC and I’m skewed for the rest of the debate.
1/13/22
JanFeb - T - Tropicality
Tournament: debateLA Challenge | Round: 1 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Alexandra Mork, Claudia Ribera Interpretation: the affirmative must use a lens of tropicality. It’s a prerequisite to ethical space policy discussion. Violation: Vote neg - They don’t forefront a critical geography framing—that reproduces destructive colonial violence against the equatorial margins. Dunnett, 19—Department of Geography, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast (Oliver, “Imperialism, Technology and Tropicality in Arthur C. Clarke’s Geopolitics of Outer Space,” Geopolitics, January 31, 2019, dml) Approaching concepts of outer space, geopolitics and science through Arthur C. Clarke first requires a broader discussion of relevant debates in postcolonial studies, science and technology studies, and historical geography. Synthesising some of these themes, the anthropologist Peter Redfield’s study of the European space programme aimed to ‘recombine elements of imaginative discourse with technical practise, tracing the trajectory of adventure as it leaves the planet, and highlighting the historical geography of power that runs through the Final Frontier’ (Redfield 2002, 792). This empirically rich work provides a sound theoretical basis for exploring the cultural and political roots of spaceflight in the late modern era, while taking seriously imaginative representations of outer space. Existing studies of outer space in this period have mostly examined, by contrast, the social and cultural ‘impacts’ of the better-known American and Soviet/Russian space programmes, in the geopolitical context of the Cold War (Dick and Launius 2007; Parker and Bell 2009). Redfield connects outer space and empire in two ways: Firstly, through analysing the imaginative geographies of exploration, conquest and adventure that have long characterised spaceflight narratives, and second, in examining the colonial status of the European Space Agency launch site in French Guiana in South America, home of the Ariane satellite launcher rocket since 1979. Other researchers have considered rocket sites in colonial locations such as Hammaguir in Algeria, launch site of the French satellite Astérix in 1965, and Woomera in South Australia, where the British Blue Streak rocket was tested in the 1960s (Gorman 2009; Instone 2010). The development of these sites as centres of imperial techno-science notably came at a time when European empires were disintegrating in spaces across the world, and thereby make effective case studies for examining late-modern connections to the empire of outer space. An integral argument in critical studies of spaceflight is that space exploration represents a modernist dream that acts as a continuation of empire, implicating discourses of technology-as-progress. In this respect, historian Michael Adas has explained how, in the industrial era, science and technology were seen as ‘measures of human worth’, justifying European colonialism while also acting as the means through which imperial power was exercised (Adas 1989, 3). This pattern has been noted in accounts of technological determinism that frequently characterise narratives of space exploration. For example, the American space programme of the 1960s, specifically Project Apollo, is said to have exemplified and helped proliferate ‘technocratic’ modes of governance in the United States, typified by ‘a utopian attitude towards technology’ as a solution to all the world’s problems (Sage 2014, 57). More recently, ‘NewSpace’ magnates such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have enrolled the language of utopian technological futurism to promote ambitious space ventures such as the colonisation of Mars (SpaceX 2018). Such framings have been described as ‘depressingly ubiquitous’ in portrayals of so-called ‘frontier technologies’, adding to debates on the extent to which technology can be seen as culturally and politically produced, rather than naturalised as a harbinger of progress and modernity (Bingham 2005, 202; Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Critics have typically rejected technological determinism as an effective explanation of societal development, drawing on postmodernist accounts that define a role for the social construction of science and technology (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Indeed, researchers have demonstrated how spaceflight technology did not emerge naturally at any given place or time, with political and cultural factors influencing substantial geographical and historical disparities in its development (Winter 1983). Further studies have effectively outlined how various popular cultures, including science fiction novels, astronomical art and the public spectacle of rocketry, worked as integral parts of the wider discourse of twentieth-century outer space technology (MacDonald 2008; Redfield 2002; Sage 2008). Adding further nuance to debates on the relationship between technology and culture, Redfield explains how a combination of political, cultural and geophysical factors led to the selection of French Guiana as the home of the European Space Agency’s rocket launch facility in the early 1970s (Redfield 2000). Notwithstanding its history as part of the French imperial sphere of influence, French Guiana’s significance for European spaceflight operations lies with its geographical location near to the equator, and its eastward-facing coastline. This is because, firstly, equatorial sites benefit from the maximum ‘latitudinal boost’ resulting from the centrifugal forces of the earth’s rotation, and, second, the Atlantic Ocean is made available as a vast testing range, where spent rockets can safely crash back down into the open seas. Furthermore, the equatorial region becomes prized in the geography of spaceport site selection because of its alignment with the prime ‘real estate’ of the geosynchronous orbit, located along a band in space 36,000 km above the earth’s equator (Collis 2009). As Clarke illustrated in 1945, satellites placed in this orbit attain specific value as they remain fixed above any given point on the earth’s equatorial belt, and can thereby be used for reliable global communications services (Clarke 1945). This new perspective was officially recognised in the 1976 Bogotá Declaration, which stated that ‘t he geostationary orbit is a scarce natural resource’, over which equatorial states should have national sovereignty (Bogotá Declaration 1976). While signed by a consortium of equatorial states, the declaration remains unratified by the United Nations, highlighting the unequal power geometries involved in outer space geopolitics. Such concerns demonstrate how the study of space launch sites, both actual and anticipated, presents opportunities for researchers interested in the intersections between science and technology studies, critical geopolitics and cultural-historical geographies of the tropical region. Indeed, while equatorial sites have their own unique advantages for the space industry, postcolonial scholars have demonstrated how tropical spaces have been assigned particular characteristics, drawing on a wider body of work that has addressed the complicity of western culture in discourses of empire (Pratt 1992; Said 1993). Such characteristics relate to opportunities for adventure, the presence of bountiful natural resources, and the danger and excitement of exotic allure. For Richard Phillips, ‘European empires and European masculinities were imagined in geographies of adventure’ in children’s novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), famously set on a fictitious tropical island (Phillips 1997). Twentieth century imaginative spaces of adventure have also been interpreted in relation to geographies of empire, whether in relation to historical figures like T E Lawrence, or fictional archetypes such as James Bond or Tintin (Dawson 1994; Dodds 2003; Dunnett 2009). According to Graham Dawson, ‘the modern adventure tale is imbued with the imaginative resonance of colonial power relations underpinned by science and technology’, while at the same time, adventure becomes ‘balanced with anxiety and desire’ in the colonial context (Dawson 1994, 59, 53). The adventure genre and its associated tropes remain closely connected to narratives of space exploration, as seen in examples such as the 1964 feature film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, or Andy Weir’s 2014 novel The Martian and subsequent film release, whose extra-terrestrial spaces are represented through a combination of masculine endeavour and exotic encounter (Crossley 2010). Beyond generic conceptions of adventure, research in cultural and historical geography has drawn on the concept of ‘tropicality’ as a way of understanding certain representations and experiences of tropical spaces, that also relate to wider cosmographic frameworks (Arnold 2000). As Denis Cosgrove reminds us, ‘the originating tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are celestial rather than terrestrial markers within a geocentric cosmos’ (Cosgrove 2005, 199). They comprise two great circles that delineate the equatorial band of the earth where the sun passes through the zenith directly above at least once a year, as defined by the earth’s axial tilt. It is the interplay between this cosmographic definition of the tropics, and ethnographic and biological understandings of the tropics, which has defined notions of tropicality in the western world. Such framings can be traced to medieval notions of an equatorial ‘torrid zone’ as part of a Ptolemaic theory of world climatic regions (Cormack 1994). While being considered a barrier to human (European) civilization, the equatorial zone has also been seen as a realm where ‘the superabundance of nature was believed to overwhelm human endeavour’ (Leys Stepan 2001, 18). Yet as voyages of discovery opened up previously unencountered spaces to European experience and representation, imaginative geographies of the tropics persisted. Some, for example, have associated ‘paradisal geographies’ with ‘New World islands … as the location of peoples as yet unfallen and as sites of natural richness’ (Withers 1999, 84). Others have recognised the ways in which ‘tropicality has frequently served as a foil to temperate nature’, or as a ‘site for European fantasies of self-realisation’ (Driver and Martins 2005, 3, 4). Tropical spaces have also been associated with forms of modernity, whether in relation to early modern voyages of discovery, or in ‘modernist abstractions of nature’ in twentieth century landscape designs (Leys Stepan 2001, 210). This paper adapts cultural and cosmographical readings of tropicality in the context of late-imperial techno-science to consider a concept of ‘cosmological tropicality’, a sense in which tropical spaces are more intimately aligned with the heavenly movements of the cosmos, and therefore could hold the key to the future of space exploration. Geographers Felix Driver and Luciana Martins have argued that understandings of tropicality have been largely framed through ‘projections’ of imagined geographies, and that researchers should attempt to understand such representations as they have been produced, negotiated or contested (Driver and Martins 2005, 5). Touching on similar themes, Gerry Kearns’ research on the late-nineteenth-century travels of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder in colonial Africa has investigated the ways in which personal encounters and travel experiences helped shape the identities of British imperial subjects, informing their broader geopolitical outlooks (Kearns 1997). As such, while Clarke’s projections of Ceylon/Sri Lanka are inherently representational, they also relate closely to the tangible, experienced geographies of his life in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and present the unusual perspective of a western individual who lived on this island for most of his adult life. In approaching Clarke by thinking through his experiences as well as the representational texts he produced, it becomes possible to engage ‘socio-technical’ understandings of the nuanced relationships between technology, society, representation, discourse and experience. Here, drawing from Bruno Latour’s conception of technology as a social and material construction, Nick Bingham has called for a renewed understanding of socio-technical assemblages ‘between diverse people, non-humans and places’ (Bingham 2005, 201). As such, this paper attempts to understand the extent to which Clarke’s projections of outer space technology were shaped by negotiation with, and experience of, the specific geographies of twentieth century Ceylon/Sri Lanka. In his aforementioned essay on tropicality, Cosgrove warns that, ‘in rehearsing – even with critical intent – the ways in which Europeans so closely and outrageously have bound tropical ethnography into a mutually deterministic embrace with the physical environments of the tropics, we risk perpetuating the silencing of voices speaking from within tropical space’ (Cosgrove 2005, 198). The same could be said of any account that purports to interpret the visions of one Englishman’s fantasy of space exploration in a tropical ‘paradise’. Yet there remains value in ascertaining the ways in which outer space has been connected to earthly imaginative geographies, and how experiences of particular places have informed geopolitical cultures of outer space. While acknowledging the limitations of such an approach, this paper seeks to investigate the extent to which Clarke’s socio-technical constructions of Ceylon/Sri Lanka were formulated with respect to local culture and politics. Tariq Jazeel has, for example, contested the notion of ‘Sri Lankan island-ness’, explaining how the perceived unity of the Sri Lankan state today can be traced to British imperial rule from 1815 to 1948, before which the island had been made up of a number of separate kingdoms since the fifteenth century (Duncan 1990; Jazeel 2009). The replacement of this multi-cultural space with a unitary British imperial island colony was, according to one researcher, reflected in a sense of modernity in the everyday material cultures of local people, while the damaging legacy of the unification can be clearly seen in the destructive civil war that plagued the country from 1983 to 2009 (Wickramasinghe 2009). Such issues are pertinent to understanding the complex interactions that Clarke had with the places and landscapes of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, particularly the understandings of modernity and progress that were central to Clarke’s world-view. Discourses of space exploration have, in the ways outlined here, been connected to a variety of familiar geographical imaginations concerning empire, adventure and the anticipation of a technologically-driven future. Yet studying Arthur C. Clarke adds the further perspective of experiencing and representing tropical spaces as part of a critical geopolitics of outer space, an exercise that has only received partial critical attention through Redfield’s work on French Guiana. By turning to three phases in Clarke’s life and works we can see how cultures of empire, technological determinism and ‘cosmological tropicality’ are played out in the immediate context of late-twentiethcentury Ceylon/Sri Lanka. That ethical frame outweighs. Klinger, 19—Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University (Julie Michelle, “Environmental Geopolitics and Outer Space,” Geopolitics, March 20, 2019, dml) On Earth, the environmental geopolitics of outer space are inseparable from questions of environmental justice. Environmental (in)justice unfolds across multiple scales through concrete processes: localized and stratospheric emissions from space launches (Carlsen, Kenesova, and Batyrbekova 2007; Jones, Bekki, and Pyle 1995), the placement of outer space related infrastructure in national and global peripheries (Gorman 2007; Mitchell 2017; Redfield 2001), and the use of such infrastructure to advance or thwart environmental destruction (Da Costa 2001; Guzmán 2013; Parks 2012). Human engagement with outer space enlists industrial economies, global networks of infrastructure and expertise, and the generation and control of information. All of these activities take place in specific sites and are subject to ongoing transformations in territorial governance practices. By locating infrastructures that are securitized, dangerous, and environmentally toxic in remote areas, the state or empire accomplishes two things. It consolidates power in far-flung territories while mitigating against liabilities and security threats that might arise from placing launch infrastructures closer to the metropole. In order to reduce environmental impacts, adequate resources, personnel, and expertise need to be assigned to the task of monitoring and mitigating the regional fallout of rocket launches (Hall et al. 2014). This may not be the case if the site in question has been deemed sacrificable by those with territorial control. Launches and Their Infrastructures Reaching outer space requires Earthly infrastructure, which means that space launches have concrete footprints that change according to developments in launch technologies. The placement of outer space related infrastructure on Earth is a question of environmental (in)justice. Which sites are chosen, who is expropriated, and which environments are impacted is subject to strategic geopolitical calculations, which, more often than not, employ classical geopolitical reasoning (Hickman and Dolman 2002; Ingold 2006; Meira Filho, Guimarães Fortes, and Barcelos 2014; NDRI 2006). Launch sites are tightly controlled to reduce the risk of interference or failure, therefore situating launch sites in remote areas is often explained in terms of safety and security (Zapata and Murray 2008). No doubt this is important: rockets are composed of many tonnes of material and combustive fuel, so they must be launched in places where damage from routine as well as potentially catastrophic explosions can be contained. For humans to reach “the final frontier,” they must first find a frontier space on Earth that can be made into an empty space in which controlled explosions can be routine. Frontiers are seldom as empty as those aiming to conquer them would claim. Where they are not populated by people, they are filled with other sorts of meanings and life forms (Klinger 2017; Tsing 2005). Potential launch sites and testing ranges deemed by government authorities to be simultaneously remote, safe, and suitable to contain the risks of rocket launch must first be made empty of people, with prior land use regimes or territorial claims pushed beyond designated buffer zones (Gorman 2007; Mitchell 2017). Hence the placement of space infrastructure follows colonial geographies of extraction, sacrifice, and risk (Mitchell 2017; Redfield 2001). As Gorman (2007) put it: “because of their distance from the metropole, these places lend themselves to hosting prisons, detention camps, military installations, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste. All of these establishments, including rocket ranges, have inspired reactions of protest.” These so-called ‘peripheral’ spaces are nevertheless central to their inhabitants and their neighbors, who question the logic of extraglobal conquest in the face of unresolved Earthly injustices. Consider, for example, the case of the launch site in Alcântara, Brazil, which has been well documented by Araújo and Filho (2006) and Mitchell (2017). Through a close examination of local, national, and international politics, these authors document how the government’s racialized approach to the subsistence communities displaced by space infrastructure deepened structural inequalities. Grassroots opposition to the launch site grew not out of an a priori ideological opposition of poor people to national progress in outer space, as some officials alleged, but rather resulted from the failure to account for the food insecurity generated by state resettlement projects. The resettlement schemes were themselves misinformed by impoverished notions of local livelihoods. Local claims against the deprivations caused by statesponsored space practices have deepened schisms between the military and civilian space programs at the federal government level. Through the lens of classical geopolitics, these structural inequalities scarcely register, with the result that the ‘crawling’ progress of Brazil’s space program is pathologized as poor management practices symptomatic of an inadequately implemented national development vision (Amaral 2010). Critical geopolitics helps deconstruct the nationalist performativity of such endeavors by considering the political and economic value placed on the spectacle of spaceflight (Boczkowska 2017; Macdonald 2008, 2010; Sage 2016). Feminist geopolitics draws our attention to the racialized and gendered dispossession advanced by the state, through the construction of space infrastructure and exercised through access to land. The fact that environmental and public health impacts were only considered by the authorities after years of mobilization by Black social movements, religious communities, and scholars highlights the ways in which inattention to the local in the pursuit of space power perpetuates environmental injustice, which in turn interrupts national plans for space progress. Rocket launches affect local and global environments through the construction of infrastructure, the exposure of local environments to toxic residues, and the dispersal of pollutants in land, air, and sea. Rockets are the only source of direct anthropogenic emissions sources in the stratosphere. Ozone-depleting substances (ODS) such as nitrous oxide, hydrogen chlorine, and aluminum oxide are emitted by rockets, and can destroy 105 ozone molecules before degrading (Voigt et al. 2013). The ozone layer prevents cancer and cataract-causing ultraviolet-b waves from reaching the Earth. As of 2013, rocket launches accounted for less than 1 of ODS emissions. As other ODS are phased out under the Montreal Protocol and the frequency of lower cost space launches increases, the proportion and quantity is likely to increase (Durrieu and Nelson 2013; Ross et al. 2009). Although affluent economies in the northern hemisphere are responsible for most ODS emissions (Polvani 2011; Rousseaux et al. 1999), the geography of exposure disproportionately affects an overall higher population in remote regions and in the southern hemisphere (Norval et al. 2011; Robinson and Erickson 2015; Thompson et al. 2011) because ozone depletion is most serious in regions where high altitude stratospheric clouds are most likely to form: above the polar regions and major mountain ranges (Carslaw et al. 1998; Perlwitz et al. 2008). This is an example of environmental injustice on a global scale, where the global south bears the environmental burden of actions predominately taken in the global north, rocket launches included. In the process, global power relations are reinscribed through the uneven distribution of harm to peripheral and southern bodies, mediated in this case through the redistribution of gases in the stratosphere that increase exposure to solar radiation. Coming closer to Earth, environmental geopolitics of outer space are manifest in the dispersal of particulate matter into ecosystems surrounding active launch sites. This is more than a strictly local environmental concern, because which spaces are subject to the hazards of launch sites involves careful calculations weighing financial cost, state power, and multifarious territorial interests. With each launch, surrounding areas are showered with toxins, heavy metals, and acids over a distance that varies widely with wind, weather, and precipitation patterns at the moment of lift-off.3 The most researched of these pollutants are hydrogen chloride, aluminum oxide, and various aerosolized heavy metals. Release of these pollutants from rocket launches results in localized regional acid rain (Madsen 1981), plant death, fish kills, and failed seed germination of native plants in launch sites (Marion, Black, and Zedler 1989; Schmalzer et al. 1992). These effects, and research on them, are mostly concentrated within one kilometer of the launch site. But they have been recorded several kilometers away under certain weather conditions (Schmalzer et al. 1998). Recent studies on the concentration of trace elements in wildlife in areas near NASA launch activities in Florida, USA, found that more than half of the adults and juvenile alligators had “greater than toxic levels” of trace elements in their liver (Horai et al. 2014). Both the subject, and the vague statement of findings, highlights the lack of research into the impacts on downstream human and non-human communities. In contrast to the precautions taken to protect workers in buildings adjacent to facilities where these technologies are developed (Bolch et al. 1990; Chrostowski, Gan, and Campbell 2010), much less consideration is given to communities within the dynamic pollutant shadow of rocket launches. In Kazakhstan, Russia, and China, researchers have begun examining the effects of the highly toxic liquid propellant, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH), which has been in use since the dawn of the space age. It has noted carcinogenic, mutagenic, convulsant, teratogenic, and embryotoxic effects (Carlsen, Kenesova, and Batyrbekova 2007), and it has been found to cause DNA damage and chromosomal aberrations in rodents living near the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (Kolumbayeva et al. 2014). Despite these known hazards, methods to detect UDMH at the trace concentrations at which toxic effects begin to manifest in humans do not yet exist (Kenessov, Bakaikina, and Ormanbekovna 2015), meaning that there is no knowledge of how this circulates in the environment, bioaccumulates up the food chain, or could potentially be sequestered through soil or plant filtration. The lack of technology or methodology to adequately track the dispersal of hazardous pollutants that have been used for decades in the surrounding environment illustrates another aspect of environmental injustice: the preference on the part of political and economic elites to create spaces of waste rather than allocate adequate resources to maintain safe and non-toxic environments.4
Not specifying an agent is a voting issue – wrecks counterplan competition, disad links and skews neg fairness by letting the 1ar shift in the future.
New affs are a voting issue for predictability and clash – they get infinite prep time to frontline an aff which makes negating impossible bc they’re always ahead which kills any educational benefit to the aff.
1/13/22
NovDec - CP - Advantage vs Terror
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 5 | Opponent: Eagan AE | Judge: Indu Pandey The United States federal government should substantially improve training programs for allied militaries and partner sub-state groups with extreme vetting and have the president of the United States issue a public statement encouraging state and local officials to expand work with Muslim communities.
Improved training programs assist foreign countries in combatting global terrorism and Biden’s statement would decrease radicalism – assumes Trump policies Byman 2-16. Daniel Byman is a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, where his research focuses on counterterrorism and Middle East security “What Trump should do about terrorism (but probably won’t),” 2-16-2017, Brookings Institute, URL: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/what-trump-should-do-about-terrorism-but-probably-wont//vikas Since the start of his presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump has repeatedly warned about “a major threat from radical Islamic terrorism,” and he has tweeted (and Twitter is the forum used for all serious discussions of policy) as follows: And while foreign policy in general got little attention in his “America First” inaugural speech, Trump did single out counterterrorism, promising to “unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.” Since taking power, Trump has justified an exclusionary executive order on visas and refugees (not, he claims, a Muslim ban) in the name of fighting terrorism, and on his watch, the military conducted a raid in Yemen that led to the death of one U.S. Navy SEAL and more than 20 civilians, including children. So it is safe to say that under Trump, terrorism will remain at the top of the U.S. national security agenda. Assessing the danger of terrorism is difficult, because so much varies by region. At home, only 94 Americans have died from jihadist attacks since 9/11—far fewer than experts (including myself) anticipated in the scary weeks after 9/11. Indeed, although it often goes unmentioned, but before Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, right-wing terrorists had killed more Americans in the post-9/11 era than had violent Islamist radicals. The public’s perception of the danger of terrorism is far worse than the reality. Even after fifteen years of a relentless global counterterrorism campaign, 40 percent of Americans believe the ability of terrorists to launch a major attack on the United States is greater than it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and another 31 percent believe it is simply the same. There is no evidence for either of these propositions. Some of this misperception stems from the post-9/11 media environment. After the towers fell, reporting of terrorist plots, let alone actual attacks, has skyrocketed, particularly if the perpetrators have even weak connections to jihadist groups like al Qaeda or its even more evil spinoff, the Islamic State. The globalization of media meant that Islamic State attacks in Dhaka or al Qaeda attacks in Bali receive considerable press coverage, to say nothing of the attacks in even more relatable and accessible locales in Europe. All of this makes Trump’s claim that the media have neglected terrorism seem bizarre to terrorism experts, where the normal complaint is that the media do the terrorists’ job for them by giving them so much free publicity. Indeed, although the terrorism problem in Europe is more severe than that facing the United States, it too has not surged dramatically compared to past decades. The 1970s and 1980s saw many attacks. Recent years have seen bloody and horrific attacks, like the 2015 shootings and bombings in Paris that killed 130 people—but 1988 saw 440 people die, most of whom perished when Libyan agents bombed Pan Am 103. The political impact in Europe and the United States is far greater than the danger to citizens’ lives. Trump scored many points playing up the threat of Muslim immigrants and Syrian refugees, with the terrorism danger (despite being low to nil statistically) looming in the background. In Europe the politics are even nastier, and in a span of a few short years xenophobic movements have gained extraordinary popularity and influence almost everywhere. Across the continent and often regardless of domestic economic stability or even ethnic diversity, European nations have experienced a surge of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, nationalism. While the American public has an exaggerated sense of the terrorism threat, there has been a real surge in violence outside the West. Terrorism has exploded throughout much of South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Terrorist groups have eagerly exploited and exacerbated the security vacuum created by the civil wars that have killed more than one hundred thousand in Afghanistan, tens of thousands in Pakistan, tens of thousands in Nigeria, thousands in Yemen, thousands in Libya, and hundreds of thousands in Syria. Countries like Turkey, Mali, Lebanon, and others near these hotbeds have also suffered from spillover violence. Far more than domestic attacks, the real danger to U.S. interests is in Muslim parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Stability and governance in many countries have collapsed and they are under strain in others. This wave of instability and the terrorist violence it spawns have an impact beyond the immediate human cost. They have geopolitical implications as threatened states fearfully react, with countries like Saudi Arabia intervening in the quagmire of Yemen’s civil war and as regional tension with Iran more generally escalate. The threat of terrorism also enables repressive U.S. partners to resist pressure for political reform—an example here being Egypt’s claim that all forms of religious opposition are linked to terrorism. The U.S. response focuses on part of these dangers, but only in part. The post-9/11 efforts developed by the Bush administration and continued under the Obama administration have resulted in an effective combination of global intelligence gathering, security service disruption, and targeted strikes (particularly by drones) that has taken a real toll on terrorist groups, especially al Qaeda. For partner countries with stable governments, the United States partners with local security services to monitor, detain, arrest, and jail suspected terrorists. In less stable places like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, targeted killing of terrorist leaders eliminates critical bomb-makers and logisticians, while those that survive are forced into hiding. Indeed, the success of these counterterrorism efforts has contributed to the recent push by al Qaeda and now the Islamic State to encourage lone wolves. This approach, however, is less effective when jihadists control territory, and here is where the Obama administration often came up short. In areas where civil wars rage, the United States will have to step up and improve training programs for allied militaries and partner sub-state groups. We need more competent good guys—or at least more competent less-bad guys—to push back the Islamic State and other groups on the ground and ideally hold the territory against any renewed attacks or guerrilla operations. It is easy to recommend this policy; the difficulty inevitably lies in its execution. Military training programs in Syria and Iraq have often failed disastrously. In both countries, despite months or even years of training, U.S.-trained forces repeatedly fled before the enemy (or, in Syria, sometimes even before). When the Islamic State took Mosul in June 2014, it only took perhaps 1,000 fighters to force 30,000 well-armed Iraqi forces to abandon the city, leaving behind massive stockpiles of sophisticated equipment, small arms, and ammunition for their jihadist foes. Starting small is vital. From small unit leaders through to senior officers, the United States will need to carefully vet—here’s a place where “extreme vetting” may be a good idea—the personnel in its training programs. The second critical factor is improving governance. Instead of funding large financial aid packages or pushing expansive democratization programs, the U.S. should first focus on minimizing corruption and assisting in basic service provision. At the same time as the Trump administration should try to rectify past failures, it must also be willing to exploit the Obama administration’s quite real successes. The United States must also be prepared for the full collapse of the so-called caliphate, which has steadily lost ground and seen its recruitment of foreign fighters and funding dry up. Assuming it continues to lose territory, many of its local fighters will go underground or return home. For the thousands of foreigners returning home or moving somewhere else, at least some among them will decide to continue the fight at home or wherever the opportunity arises. As it suffers further losses, the Islamic State itself will encourage more lone wolves to maintain its image and remain relevant to both its supporters and enemies. The fall of Raqqa, albeit an important accomplishment, will not mark final victory. The United States, however, cannot and should not be everywhere. It will be crucial that the new president delineates between areas of strong interest and interests that are peripheral. Some areas are often better left to allies (and yes, allies are important): France, for example, can continue to take the lead in much of North and West Africa. In an ironic twist, it could prove more challenging for the new president to navigate domestic waters than the shoals of the Middle East, and here I worry that the new president will make things worse. The first problem is institutionalization. Under both Bush and Obama, new and controversial counterterrorism instruments—targeted killings, increased domestic surveillance, aggressive FBI sting operations, detention without trial, and so on—are at the heart of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. In addition, the United States is bombing the Islamic State in Iraq and definitely in Syria with only less than clear legal justification. Since 9/11, counterterrorism policy has been largely the province of the executive branch, with some modification by the courts and some by Congress. Despite its interventions in the interrogation and detention debates, Congress, perhaps the most important branch in the long-term, has been conspicuously absent under both parties’ leadership. The dearth of public debate and legislation, regardless of your opinion about the policies in question, has created the current environment where either government lawyers can be forced into legalistic gymnastics trying to justify programs or operations become unnecessarily restricted for lack of clear authority. The proper participation of Congress in the policy process will put the executive branch and the courts on a sounder footing and ensure longer-term planning necessary for programs develops properly. Trump, however, so far seems skeptical on divided government and the separation of powers. The unrealistic domestic assessment of the terrorism threat reflects another serious counterterrorism failure: resilience. President Obama had tried repeatedly to talk down the threat, starting with a landmark speech in 2013 in which he described al Qaeda as on “the path to defeat” and noting that another 9/11 is unlikely. He was right. But the rise of the Islamic State and its high-profile atrocities have fostered the perception that the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland has skyrocketed. Public polling and the election rhetoric seem to demonstrate definitively that Obama’s efforts to build resilience failed. It remains easy for a terrorist group, or even some lucky amateurs, to sow fear and disrupt the nation with even minor attacks—the Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three people, resulted in the shutdown of an entire metropolitan area and impacted the whole country. Another unfortunate consequence of this election is the real risk to one of America’s greatest counterterrorism successes: integration of immigrant communities. In contrast to Europe, the American Muslim community is remarkably well integrated and regularly cooperates with law enforcement. Ideally, the new president would press state and local officials to continue and expand their work with Muslim communities, not just to stop radicalism in their ranks but also to protect them from right-wing extremists. Besides being the right thing to do, good law enforcement relations with Muslim Americans, especially in an atmosphere in which many face daily security threats, will help ensure that radicalization remains low and that if and when it occurs, the community is comfortable with and motivated to cooperate with law enforcement. We all know this is unlikely, and in fact Trump is likely to further alienate this community. Nor will the damage go away once Trump leaves office. Regrettably, the demonization of the American Muslim community Trump has unleashed—and which is so unlike the behavior of President Bush—will endure with potentially serious counterterrorism (and more broadly social and moral) implications. Now that this door is open (or maybe off its hinges) it seems likely other politicians will be tempted to walk through.
11/21/21
NovDec - CP - Ban LAW Deployment
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary CP Text: States should ban the deployment of Lethal Autonomous Weapons. HRW ’20 Human Rights Watch, “Stopping Killer Robots”, 08-10-2020, https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/08/10/stopping-killer-robots/country-positions-banning-fully-autonomous-weapons-and//pranav Weapons systems that select and engage targets without meaningful human control are unacceptable and need to be prevented. All countries have a duty to protect humanity from this dangerous development by banning fully autonomous weapons. Retaining meaningful human control over the use of force is an ethical imperative, a legal necessity, and a moral obligation.
11/21/21
NovDec - CP - Police
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 7 | Opponent: Greenhill KD | Judge: Jacob Nails CP Text: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of all workers except police to strike. The inclusion of the police into the right to strike erases difference – the essence of a cop is to practice brutality and crackdowns strikes Marcy ’15 Sam, “The year of the pig: Should workers support police strikes?”, 01-08-2015, https://www.workers.org/2015/01/17782///pranav Are strikes by the police to be regarded approximately the same way as strikes by ordinary workers? A reading of the treatment accorded to the New York police strike by the Daily World (the paper of the Communist Party which professes to be Marxist-Leninist) clearly conveys this impression. A column by George Morris, the Daily World’s labor analyst, waxes eloquent about the cops’ strike and says “it is in the spirit of rebellion we see everywhere today as in unions against the long entrenched bureaucracy.” He further says that the cops are “beginning to see themselves as in much the same position as other city employees and workers.” Finally, he admonishes his readers that “fire should not be blunderbussed against all on the police force.” You see, the way to look at it is that there are good cops and bad cops, just like there are good capitalists and bad ones. We must assume then, that there are good storm troopers and bad ones if we use the logic of George Morris. In this way, Morris substitutes bourgeois morality for Marxist analysis of class antagonisms and contradictions between class groupings. The cops’ strike is not an isolated phenomenon. There is one in progress right now in Milwaukee. Earlier there were strikes or stoppages in Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio. Strike preparations are underway in perhaps a dozen other cities throughout the country. It is therefore necessary and in the vital interests of the working class to restate the fundamental position of revolutionary Marxism on this crucial question. Should strikes of cops be treated on an equal level with workers’ strikes? Emphatically, no! A striking worker and a striking police officer may on the surface appear to have the same immediate aims — to get higher pay and better conditions for themselves. But this is to take an extremely narrow and superficial view of their apparently similar situations. The truth, however, is that there is objectively speaking not a shred of class identity between workers and the police. The fundamental interests of the workers are diametrically opposed to those of the police and are absolutely irreconcilable with them. Producers or parasites? A worker is, above all, a producer. The police officer is a parasite who lives off what the worker produces. No truer words could be said! All the material wealth which is now in the possession of the capitalist class was produced by the workers. When a worker goes out on strike she or he is merely trying to retrieve a portion of the wealth which her or his labor power produced. The worker gets back in the form of wages only a portion of what he or she produces. The rest is what the capitalist class retains in the form of profit (really the unpaid labor of the workers). The gross national income of the U.S. last year reached the astronomical sum of one trillion dollars. It was all produced by workers: Black, Brown, white, men and women and even children. The struggles of all the workers, insofar as their immediate demands are concerned, are merely to retrieve a larger portion of this wealth which they produced for the bosses and which the bosses keep for themselves. Contribute nothing to social wealth What have the cops contributed to the production of this unprecedented amount of wealth? Nothing at all. In fact, their principal function is to guard the wealth for the capitalists, protect their monopolist profits from the demands of the workers. Even as the New York cops were out on strike, their emergency crews were busily clubbing the heads of striking telephone workers. That’s the very essence of a cop: to crack the heads of strikers and practice the most inhuman brutality against the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano/a communities. A cop is a mercenary hired by the capitalist class through their agent (the city government) to keep the mass of the workers and the oppressed in complete subjection. They utilize all the forces and violence at their disposal whenever the masses rise up in rebellion against the unendurable conditions imposed by the master class. The police are the most parasitic social grouping in society. When they work — if that’s what it can possibly be called — their labor is directed against the workers and oppressed. Graft, corruption, intimate collaboration with all sorts of underworld figures and enterprises such as gambling, narcotics and a thousand other shady businesses — that’s what cops are really engaged in. They are utterly inseparable from crime and corruption itself. One could not exist without the other. Both are nourished and supported by the nature of the capitalist system itself. To put the police on a par with the workers is to erase the difference between the persecutors and their victims. Leyton doesn’t say anything that takes out the pic – it j warrants why opting-out is bad, but not RTS not applying to a specific industry.
11/21/21
NovDec - CP - UBI
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Eden Prairie DT | Judge: Breigh Plat CP: The United States Congress should repeal welfare and transfer programs, including but not limited to Social Security and Medicare and repeal base-narrowing features of the individual income tax system. The United States Department of Health and Human Services should provide a basic-income guarantee of $13,788 to individuals age 18 or older in the United States and provide a basic-income guarantee of $6,894 to individuals under the age of 18 in the United States.
Replacing welfare and tax breaks with a basic income solves inequality and is completely revenue-neutral Jensen et al 17 (Matthew, William Ensor, Anderson Frailey, Amy Xu, founding director of the Open Source Policy Center (OSPC) at AEI, which makes critical policy simulation models AND research associates at American Enterprise Institute, May, “A Budget-Neutral Universal Basic Income”, https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/UBI-Jensen-et-al-working-paper.pdf, Aly M) Reform We model a policy reform that repeals most welfare and transfer programs (benefit programs) and basenarrowing features of the individual income tax system in favor of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). The UBI is calibrated to neutralize the budgetary effect of the reform including taxes collected on UBI income, which would be taxable. Individuals under 18 receive a UBI that is one-half of that received by individuals 18 and over. This reform repeals 20 benefits programs, which are listed in Appendix A. A selection of major benefits programs—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Veterans Benefits (VB), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)—are modeled using Transfer Augmentation Model (C-TAM), and the benefits totals are assigned to individuals in the Current Population Survey (CPS). Benefit payments for these programs total $2.17 trillion in 2014. We also repeal many smaller programs using total outlays reported by the Office of Management and Budget. Payments for these programs total just over $366 billion. In the distributional analysis later in this paper, we assume the distribution of the nonmodeled programs matches that of a subset of the modeled benefits: Medicaid, VB, SNAP, and SSI. Combined, the repeal of these programs frees up $2.54 trillion for a UBI in 2014. The reform also repeals 23 provisions in the federal individual income tax code, listed in Table 1, which we model with Tax Calculator and Tax Data. In total, the base-broadening tax reform increases tax liabilities by $649 billion in 2014. We do not repeal several provisions because of lack of data, including the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance. Results Together, repealing the benefit programs and tax reform frees up $3.21 trillion for a UBI. After accounting for the additional revenue gained by making the UBI taxable, this is sufficient to finance a UBI of $13,788 for individuals 18 or older and $6,894 for individuals under 18.
Basic income removes inequality as an economic possibility Santens 1/15 (Scott, founding member of the Economic Security Project, an adviser to the Universal Income Project, a founding committee member of Basic Income Action, committee member of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, 2017, “Why we should all have a basic income”, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income/, Aly M) Humans need security to thrive, and basic income is a secure economic base – the new foundation on which to transform the precarious present, and build a more solid future. That’s not to say it’s a silver bullet. It’s that our problems are not impossible to solve. Poverty is not a supernatural foe, nor is extreme inequality or the threat of mass income loss due to automation. They are all just choices. And at any point, we can choose to make new ones. Based on the evidence we already have and will likely continue to build, I firmly believe one of those choices should be unconditional basic income as a new equal starting point for all.
11/6/21
NovDec - DA - Econ
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 7 | Opponent: Greenhill KD | Judge: Jacob Nails German econ is bogged down by supply chain issues, but growth in 2022 likely Eddy 21 , Melissa Eddy is a correspondent based in Berlin who covers German politics, social issues and culture for The New York Times. Her most recent work has delved into the challenges of integrating 1 million refugees, the spate of Islamist terror attacks and the legacy of a trove of Nazi-looted art. She has covered Germany’s green energy transformation and Chancellor Angela Merkel since she entered office in 2005. A Minnesota native fluent in German and French, she came to Germany as a Fulbright scholar in 1996. Before joining The International Herald Tribune, now the international edition of The New York Times, in 2015, she was a correspondent for The Associated Press in Frankfurt, Vienna and the Balkans. 11-5-2021, "Persistent shortages are stunting German economic growth.," No Publication, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/world/europe/shortages-german-economic-growth.html, Accessed 11/20/21 Persistent shortages are dragging down the German economy, Europe’s largest, as companies struggle to fill orders because the necessary parts or raw materials are not arriving from abroad. Surveys and data released this week indicate that the ongoing crunch in the supply chain is the main factor slowing Germany’s manufacturing powerhouse, causing the government to scale back its forecast for economic growth for 2021. Many economists are now predicting that the situation won’t improve until well into 2022. Industrial production shrank by 1.1 percent in September compared with the previous month, according to data released on Friday by the Federal Statistics Office. The drop was led by a fall in the production of mechanical, electrical and data processing equipment. More than 90 percent of all manufacturers in the automobile and electrical equipment industries said that their production had been hampered by a lack of supplies, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Ifo Institute. Some economists are predicting the shortages could result in a “bottleneck recession.” And last month the German government cut its projection for economic growth for the year to 2.6 percent, down from a 3.5 percent estimate in April, citing supply chain issues and rising energy prices. “There will not be the final spurt we had hoped for,” said Peter Altmaier, the minister of economy in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s caretaker government. But the government predicted the economy would gain momentum in 2022, and lifted its estimate for next year’s growth to 4.1 percent from 3.6 percent, reflecting more shipments of microchips and raw materials. That projection reflects the expectation that a backlog of orders will be able to be filled in the coming months. Data released on Thursday showed industrial orders rebounding less than expected at an increase of 1.1 percent in September, after an unexpectedly large drop in August. Given the demand, some economists believe that with an increase in shipping predicted for the first part of next year, the German economy is positioned to improve, although it will not be immediate. “There is a potential for an upside,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economic analyst with ING Bank. “Only a small improvement in industrial production is required to see positive growth.” One of the biggest threats, however, remains the coronavirus pandemic. Germany finds itself facing a fourth wave of infections, with a record number of new infections, 33,949, recorded in a 24-hour period on Thursday. That could prevent people from going out shopping or dining, endangering a projected increase in private consumption that has proved one of the bright spots in the German economy, and hitting the country just as the holiday period arrives, a high point for consumer spending.
Strikes hurt critical core industries that is necessary for economic growth McElroy 19 John McElroy 10-25-2019 "Strikes Hurt Everybody" https://www.wardsauto.com/ideaxchange/strikes-hurt-everybody (MPA at McCombs school of Business) This creates a poisonous relationship between the company and its workforce. Many GM hourly workers don’t identify as GM employees. They identify as UAW members. And they see the union as the source of their jobs, not the company. It’s an unhealthy dynamic that puts GM at a disadvantage to non-union automakers in the U.S. like Honda and Toyota, where workers take pride in the company they work for and the products they make. Attacking the company in the media also drives away customers. Who wants to buy a shiny new car from a company that’s accused of underpaying its workers and treating them unfairly? Data from the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, MI, show that GM loses market share during strikes and never gets it back. GM lost two percentage points during the 1998 strike, which in today’s market would represent a loss of 340,000 sales. Because GM reports sales on a quarterly basis we’ll only find out at the end of December if it lost market share from this strike. UAW members say one of their greatest concerns is job security. But causing a company to lose market share is a sure-fire path to more plant closings and layoffs. Even so, unions are incredibly important for boosting wages and benefits for working-class people. GM’s UAW-represented workers earn considerably more than their non-union counterparts, about $26,000 more per worker, per year, in total compensation. Without a union they never would have achieved that. Strikes are a powerful weapon for unions. They usually are the only way they can get management to accede to their demands. If not for the power of collective bargaining and the threat of a strike, management would largely ignore union demands. If you took away that threat, management would pay its workers peanuts. Just ask the Mexican line workers who are paid $1.50 an hour to make $50,000 BMWs. But strikes don’t just hurt the people walking the picket lines or the company they’re striking against. They hurt suppliers, car dealers and the communities located near the plants. The Anderson Economic Group estimates that 75,000 workers at supplier companies were temporarily laid off because of the GM strike. Unlike UAW picketers, those supplier workers won’t get any strike pay or an $11,000 contract signing bonus. No, most of them lost close to a month’s worth of wages, which must be financially devastating for them. GM’s suppliers also lost a lot of money. So now they’re cutting budgets and delaying capital investments to make up for the lost revenue, which is a further drag on the economy. According to CAR, the communities and states where GM’s plants are located collectively lost a couple of hundred million dollars in payroll and tax revenue. Some economists warn that if the strike were prolonged it could knock the state of Michigan – home to GM and the UAW – into a recession. That prompted the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, to call GM CEO Mary Barra and UAW leaders and urge them to settle as fast as possible. So, while the UAW managed to get a nice raise for its members, the strike left a path of destruction in its wake. That’s not fair to the innocent bystanders who will never regain what they lost. John McElroyI’m not sure how this will ever be resolved. I understand the need for collective bargaining and the threat of a strike. But there’s got to be a better way to get workers a raise without torching the countryside. Err Negative – over-estimate the effect on Strikes on the economy since traditional economic measures underestimate the damage. Babb No Date Katrina Babb "Chapter 11: The Economic Impact of Unions" http://isu.indstate.edu/conant/ecn351/ch11/chapter11.htm (Professor of Economic at Indiana State) Strikes Simple statistics on strike activity suggest that strikes are relatively rare and the associated aggregate economic losses are relatively minimal. Table 11-3 provides data on major work stoppages, defined as those involving 1000 or more workers and lasting at least one full day or one work shift. But these data can be misleading as a measure of the costliness of a strike. On the one hand, employers in the struck industry may have anticipated the strike and worked their labor force overtime to accumulate inventories to supply customers during the strike period, so that the work lost data overstates the actual loss. On the other hand, the amount lost can be understated by the data if production in associated industries ( those that buy inputs from the struck industry or sell products to it) is disrupted. As a broad generalization, the adverse effects of a strike on nonstriking firms and customers are likely to be greater when services are involved and less when products are involved. Remember, that strikes are the result of the failure of both parties to the negotiation, so it is inaccurate to attribute all of the costs associated with a strike to labor alone. Global war Liu 18 (Qian Liu- Managing Director, Greater China, The Economist Group. Young Global Leader. 11/13/18 “The next economic crisis could cause a global conflict. Here's why” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/the-next-economic-crisis-could-cause-a-global-conflict-heres-why JO) The response to the 2008 economic crisis has relied far too much on monetary stimulus, in the form of quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates, and included far too little structural reform. This means that the next crisis could come soon – and pave the way for a large-scale military conflict. The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict. The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates. Image: UN But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything from financial and labor markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies. Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more time than actual governing. And Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment. The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. In the United States, housing prices are now 8 higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929. As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilize and stimulate the economy. If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy. According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been characterized also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries – attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war. For example, during the Great Depression, US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun. To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking conflict. According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high levels. Have you read? How to prevent World War 3 How countries have recovered from the financial crisis and other top economic stories of the week Four things not to do in an economic crisis This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and diplomatic tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis, anxiety over globalization, political polarization, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis. Voters have good reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are increasingly giving their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For example, despite the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being eschewed, as countries – most notably, Donald Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies. Meanwhile, proxy wars are raging in Syria and Yemen. Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility that the next economic crisis could lead to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logic of the political scientist Samuel Huntington , considering such a scenario could help us avoid it, because it would force us to take action. In this case, the key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they have long promised, while replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful global dialogue. The alternative may well be global conflagration.
11/21/21
NovDec - DA - Inflation
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 4 | Opponent: Eden Prairie DT | Judge: Breigh Plat Best studies conclude inflation is expected to level out and is transitory – err neg other predictions are based off intuitions and have bad track records. Mark Hulbert 10/26 , Why These Economists Aren't Worried About Inflation. Barrons (10-26-2021) https://www.barrons.com/articles/inflation-economists-51635264860?tesla=y//anop The consumer price index is likely to rise next year by about 3—and perhaps even less. If so, of course, inflation in 2022 could be much less the 5.4 rate at which the CPI has risen over the past 12 months. This rosy projection comes from the inflation models that have the best historical track records, according to a new study. Focusing on the models with the best track records would seem to be an obvious approach to the debate over whether inflation’s recent spike is transitory. But surprisingly few commentators have done so. Many appear to have instead based their projections on little more than intuitions and hunches, picking and choosing among the myriad pieces of available economic data and anecdotal evidence to find what supports their prior beliefs. Their approach, in effect, is: “Here’s the conclusion on which I will base my facts.” The new study that instead focuses on historical track records is written by two economists at the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, Randal Verbrugge and Saeed Zaman. Their study is entitled “Whose Inflation Expectations Best Predict Inflation”? (Note that the conclusions of their study are theirs, they write, “and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.”) After studying a number of competing models, the economists found that the models based on the forecasts of “professional economists and businesses have tended to provide more accurate predictions of future inflation than the models based on expectations of households and of financial market participants.” That’s good news because households are among those who currently believe that inflation’s recent spike will be more than transitory. Consider the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, which finds that consumers on average expect the CPI to rise 4.7 over the coming year. That’s only slightly below the 5.4 rate at which the CPI has risen over the trailing year. In contrast, consider the much lower projections of three models that are based on the forecasts of professional economists and businesses: The quarterly survey of 36 professional economic forecasters conducted by the Philadelphia Fed. Their latest median forecast for the CPI’s increase in 2022 is 2.4—barely half that of consumers’ expectations. Wolters Kluwer Blue Chip. The median of their 2022 CPI forecasts is for an increase of 3.3. That’s higher than in the Philadelphia Fed’s survey, but still a lot lower than the CPI’s trailing 12-month increase. The Atlanta Fed each month surveys approximately 300 businesses in the Southeast U.S., asking for their inflation expectations for the subsequent year. The consensus expectation in the latest such survey is an increase of 3.1. The average of these three projections is below 3. In an email, Dr. Zaman mentioned another inflation model whose record in their study was almost as good. This additional model, which was devised a number of years ago by the Cleveland Fed, has a number of inputs, including Treasury yields, surveys of professional forecasters, and inflation swaps (derivatives in which one party to the transaction agrees to swap fixed payments in return for payments tied to the inflation rate). This model is currently forecasting that the CPI over the next 12 months will rise 1.8. There’s no guarantee that any of these models’ projections will be accurate, needless to say. But if you believe that inflation will be much higher, the burden of proof is on you to both codify the model on which your belief is based and document that it has a superior historical record. It’s not good enough simply to refer to potentially inflationary factors like supply-chain bottlenecks , higher energy prices, increased government borrowing, or the (hopefully) imminent end of pandemic-induced dampers on economic activity. Those factors are also being taken into account by the professional economists, forecasters, and businesses whose median projections came out ahead in this new study’s performance ranking. And yet they, on balance, are still in the “inflation is transitory” camp. What about the “break-even inflation rate“—the inflation model that is referred to most often in the financial press? It measures the difference between the yields on nominal Treasuries and those of Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS, of similar maturities. It’s referred to as the break-even rate because it is the future inflation rate that would mean the total return from investing in TIPS today would be identical to that from buying nominal Treasuries. But, as Dr. Verbrugge said in an email, “Breakevens are notoriously poor predictors of inflation, compared to these other measures” that their study found to have decent track records. The plan spurs persistent inflation – unions realize they are disenfranchised but have a unique opportunity to rebuild into disruptive strikes. Liz Peek 21 Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company, Biden's Big Labor policies will create next round of inflation. The Hill. (10-22-2021) https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/577933-bidens-big-labor-policies-will-create-next-round-of-inflation//anop Americans blame President Biden for rising inflation; it could get worse. The administration’s big-spending policies and inability to cure our supply chain woes have driven prices higher. In addition, Biden’s generous handouts and vaccine mandates have pushed workers to the sidelines, making it difficult to fill jobs and raising costs even further. But it is Biden’s enthusiasm for Big Labor that is going to make matters worse. We are now entering a new phase of inflation pressures. A rising cost of living is pushing workers to demand higher wages, which in turn prompts companies to raise prices even more, igniting an unholy cycle that penalizes everyone. ADVERTISEMENT Unions, cheered on by Biden’s White House, have decided to take advantage of this moment. Labor strikes are on the increase, which will lead to higher wages, take workers offline and make it even harder to get goods to customers. Those bare shelves popping up around the country may just be a teaser for what comes next. A wage-price spiral is the phenomenon that causes inflation to become “persistent” and not “transitory.” This is what Democrats will bring to the 2022 midterm elections. A recent Morning Consult/Politico poll found that 62 percent of registered voters, including 61 percent of independents and even 41 percent of Democrats, blame Biden’s policies for soaring inflation. With prices rising at the fastest rate in 13 years, less than half of those surveyed attribute the increase to Americans returning to pre-pandemic behavior. Though the policies that contributed to price hikes on everything from rents to gasoline to chicken were not specified in this poll, other surveys have found voters pinning rising inflation on Democrats’ big spending programs, such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. That is one reason (along with a healthy survival instinct) that moderate Democrats are now slow-walking Biden’s $3.5 trillion “social infrastructure” bill. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the connection the other day, when he shirked responsibility for port delays and trucker shortages by arguing that we don’t have just a supply problem but also a demand problem. Buttigieg is correct. With Congress authorizing an unprecedented $5 trillion in “relief” spending over the past two years and with the Federal Reserve pumping trillions into the money supply, the country is awash with money. Put most simply, there is too much money chasing too few goods. As a consequence, prices in September rose 5.4 percent from the year before, faster that the growth in wages, which increased 4.6 percent. Over the past year, real average hourly wages are down almost one percent. Workers are falling behind, and they know it. Unions have taken notice and decided that this is the time to begin rebuilding their ranks among private companies. Only 6.3 percent of private-sector workers today belong to unions, a massive drop from 12 percent in 1990. Clearly, labor leaders would like to reverse that trend. With the nation short of workers, this may be the perfect time to do so. Just recently, 10,000 United Auto Workers at tractor manufacturer John Deere went out on strike for the first time in three decades, while 31,000 employees at Kaiser Permanente are also staging a walkout. Some 1,400 workers at cereal-maker Kellogg are striking. All in, there have been 12 strikes of 1,000 workers or more so far this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a total of 178 work stoppages. Those figures are way above 2020 totals, but about the same as in 2018 and 2019. My guess: We’re in the early innings. Workers are aware that they have leverage, and union leaders know there is a pro-Big Labor president in the White House. Early in his tenure, Biden posted a message about workers’ right to organize and the virtues of collective bargaining on Twitter that many saw as encouraging employees at an Amazon facility in Alabama to vote in favor of forming a union. It was an unprecedented intrusion by a president into such contests. As it happened, Biden’s push failed when workers overwhelmingly defeated the organizing effort. President Biden has gone further, inserting into his stimulus bills pro-union items like making union dues deductible and requiring that federal funds flow predominantly to union shops. As important, he has packed the National Labor Relations Board with former union lawyers committed to advancing the cause. Politico reports that the agency’s expected rulings could “serve as a backdoor for enacting provisions … that would vastly expand workers’ ability to join unions in potentially the most important overhaul of U.S. labor law since the 1940s.” Organizing gig workers is one of the new board's top ambitions. The Los Angeles Times affirms: “Biden has put unions at the center of policy — viewing them as vehicles not only to rebuild middle-class jobs but also to address climate change and racial and gender inequity.” The John Deere workers rejected a contract that would have awarded raises of 5 percent to 6 percent and offered another 3 percent wage hike in 2023 and 2025. Deere’s employees are emboldened by the company’s current profitability and the struggle to hire new employees. Most likely, workers elsewhere will follow suit. We have not seen a wave of disruptive labor strikes for many years. For the past two decades globalization put a lid on the demands of workers who were wary of shipping jobs overseas, and the Great Recession crimped corporate profits. ADVERTISEMENT White House 'confident' Manchin will back reconciliation framework Only 35 percent say US economy doing well: poll Biden’s pro-union efforts could win back some of those blue-collar workers who defected to Donald Trump in 2016, but the president’s encouragement of Big Labor will surely lead to higher wages. Those pay hikes will spur even higher inflation; it will be hard to stop the merry-go-round. It will also be hard for Biden and his fellow Democrats to escape responsibility for what many voters consider the country’s number one problem: inflation. Excess inflation causes collapse – destroys savings of millions of households. Jo Harper 21 Jo Harper is a freelance British journalist based in Warsaw, writing for the BBC, Politico, Deutsche Welle and others. How big a threat is inflation? – DW – 07/30/2021. dw (7-30-2021) https://beta.dw.com/en/how-big-a-threat-is-inflation/a-58653487//anop Many economists advocate a middle-ground of low to moderate inflation of around 2 per year. When inflation breaches that figure some benefit and others lose out. Inflation is usually considered a problem when it goes above 5, Brigitte Granville, a professor of economics at Queen Mary University, London, told DW. If inflation causes a currency to decline, then it can benefit exporters by making their goods more affordable when priced in other currencies. People with assets that are priced in a particular currency, like property or commodities, may like to see some inflation as that raises the price of their assets. Inflation can also increase profit margins and reduce debt in real terms. It can benefit borrowers because the inflation-adjusted value of their outstanding debts shrinks. However, higher inflation tends to harm savers as it erodes the purchasing power of the money they have saved. People holding assets denominated in currency, such as cash or bonds, may also not like inflation, as it erodes the real value of their holdings. Moreover, if central banks felt obliged to tighten monetary policy to check rising prices, it could cause a sharp correction in financial markets, which have been pumped up by a decade of QE-style liquidity injections. "Millions of middle-class households which have been placing increasing proportions of their savings in mutual funds invested in equities would suffer," Granville says. However, inflation of 3 or 4 could be positive for many economies at the moment. There are economists who argue strongly that it would reduce the debt overhang in real terms, for example. Recuperating growth is key to international cooperation to solve multiple existential threats Haass 17 Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department (2001-2003), and was President George W. Bush's special envoy to Northern Ireland and Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. “A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order” published January 10, 2017 A large portion of the burden of creating and maintaining order at the regional or global level will fall on the United States. This is inevitable for several reasons, only one of which is that the United States is and will likely remain the most powerful country in the world for decades to come. The corollary to this point is that no other country or group of countries has either the capacity or the mind-set to build a global order. Nor can order ever be expected to emerge automatically; there is no invisible hand in the geopolitical marketplace. Again, a large part of the burden (or, more positively, opportunity) falls on the principal power of the day. There is more than a little self-interest at stake. The United States cannot remain aloof, much less unaffected by a world in disarray. Globalization is more reality than choice. At the regional level, the United States actually faces the opposite problem, namely, that certain actors do have the mind-set and means to shape an order. The problem is that their views of order are in part or in whole incompatible with U.S. interests. Examples would include Iran and ISIS in the Middle East, China in Asia, and Russia in Europe. It will not be an easy time for the United States. The sheer number and range of challenges is daunting. There are a large number of actors and forces to contend with. Alliances, normally created in opposition to some country or countries, may not be as useful a vehicle in a world in which not all foes are always foes and not all friends are always friendly. Diplomacy will count for a great deal; there will be a premium on dexterity. Consultations that aim to affect the actions of other governments and their leaders are likely to matter more than negotiations that aim to solve problems. Another reality is that the United States for all its power cannot impose order. Partially this reflects what might be called structural realities, namely, that no country can contend with global challenges on its own given the very nature of these challenges. The United States could reduce its carbon footprint dramatically, but the effect on global climate would be modest if India and China failed to follow suit. Similarly, on its own the United States cannot maintain a world trading system or successfully combat terrorism or disease. Adding to these realities are resource limits. The United States cannot provide all the troops or dollars to maintain order in the Middle East and Europe and Asia and South Asia. There is simply too much capability in too many hands. Unilateralism is rarely a serious foreign policy option. Partners are essential. That is one of the reasons why sovereign obligation is a desirable compass for U.S. foreign policy. Earlier I made the case that it represents realism for an era of globalization. It also is a natural successor to containment, the doctrine that guided the United States for the four decades of the Cold War. There are basic differences, however. Containment was about holding back more than bringing in and was designed for an era when rivals were almost always adversaries and in which the challenges were mostly related to classical geopolitical competition.1 Sovereign obligation, by contrast, is designed for a world in which sometime rivals are sometime partners and in which collective efforts are required to meet common challenges. Up to this point, we have focused on what the United States needs to do in the world to promote order. That is what one would expect from a book about international relations and American foreign policy. But a focus on foreign policy is not enough. National security is a coin with two sides, and what the United States does at home, what is normally thought of as belonging to the domestic realm, is every bit as much a part of national security as foreign policy. It is best to understand the issue as guns and butter rather than guns versus butter. When it comes to the domestic side, the argument is straightforward. In order to lead and compete and act effectively in the world, the United States needs to put its house in order. I have written on what this entails in a book titled Foreign Policy Begins at Home.2 This was sometimes interpreted as suggesting a turn away from foreign policy. It was nothing of the sort. Foreign policy begins at home, but it ends there only at the country’s peril.3 Earlier I mentioned that the United States has few unilateral options, that there are few if any things it can do better alone than with others. The counterpart to this claim is that the world cannot come up with the elements of a working order absent the United States. The United States is not sufficient, but it is necessary. It is also true that the United States cannot lead or act effectively in the world if it does not have a strong domestic foundation. National security inevitably requires significant amounts of human, physical, and financial resources to draw on. The better the United States is doing economically, the more it will have available in the way of resources to devote to what it wants and needs to do abroad without igniting a divisive and distracting domestic debate as to priorities. An additional benefit is that respect for the United States and for the American political, social, and economic model (along with a desire to emulate it) will increase only if it is seen as successful. The most basic test of the success of the model will be economic growth. U.S. growth levels may appear all right when compared with what a good many other countries are experiencing, but they are below what is needed and fall short of what is possible. There is no reason why the United States is not growing in the range of 3 percent or even higher other than what it is doing and, more important, not doing.4
11/6/21
NovDec - DA - Infrastructure
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Cooper City NR | Judge: Lala Diallo Reconciliation passes now - 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 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.
11/6/21
NovDec - DA - Infrastructure V2
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary 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. Labor reform saps PC – empirically prove with Obama, corporate opposition, and Democratic resistance Leon 21 Luis Feliz Leon, 01-06-2021, “"If we want it, we’re going to have to fight like hell for it" - Labor faces an uphill battle to pass the PRO Act,” Strike Wave, https://www.thestrikewave.com/original-content/labor-faces-uphill-battle-to-pass-pro-act/SJKS The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which died in the Senate during President Barack Obama’s first term, had similar potential to increase union membership, as it would have enabled workers to get union representation if a majority signed union cards (“card check”) rather than through an election. It died because Obama was unwilling to put political capital behind it to overcome opposition from Republicans and center-right Democrats. “EFCA was very close to becoming law. At the end of the day, in my view, the Obama administration did not put the necessary political capital into securing its passage,” said EPI's McNicholas. “The Obama administration decided to focus on ‘bipartisan’ and ‘reach across the aisle’ type solutions to the 2008 financial crisis, and thus didn't care about EFCA in the face of the anti-EFCA mobilization by strong ‘antis’ like the Chamber of Commerce,” says Susan Kang, a professor of political science at John Jay College who studies political economy, labor, and human rights. “Basically, labor was swept aside by the Obama administration … at the exact moment when he had the strongest mandate and political capital.” Another issue, said Patrick Burke, an organizer with United Auto Workers Local 2322 in Massachusetts, was that EFCA's card-check provisions, when framed as a replacement for elections, “became very easy to demonize and difficult to explain to people not already familiar with labor law.” “The short story is that the EFCA was doomed from a few moderate Dems not being willing to go through with card check once actually in power to enact it. The long story is that the labor movement's disappearance from the ‘adult table’ of Democratic politics has cyclical downward effects. They're less able to convince Dems to go out on the limb for them and to prioritize their legislative requests,” said Brandon Magner, a labor lawyer in Indiana. Despite a history of betrayal and rejection, labor and immigrant rights organizations, coalesced around Biden, a self-professed “union guy,” after the primaries and helped deliver him to the White House in the hope that doing so would lead to executive action on immigration and labor law reform. “We call on Congress to pass and Biden to sign the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act early in 2021 to make sure every worker who wants to form or join a union is able to do so freely and fairly,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement after the election. But union organizers, researchers, and labor lawyers see dim prospects for winning significant labor reform during the Biden administration. “The PRO Act is obviously dead in the Senate unless Mitch McConnell gets knocked into the minority, but I don't see it being passed without full-throated support for gutting the filibuster from Biden, Harris, Schumer, Durbin, and more,” said Magner, the labor lawyer, adding that “the history of failed labor law reform efforts indicates you need 60 votes to pass anything.” That is particularly true of Democrats in “right-to-work” states like South Carolina where U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham was a reliable opponent in the House. But the greatest liability might be Biden himself. “The few times that Biden met McConnell at the negotiating table during the Obama years, McConnell left with Biden’s wallet,” dryly observed The Intercept’s Ryan Grim. “Even if the Democrats capture the Georgia Senate seats, their margin will be too small to overcome a Republican filibuster or, if they change the rules, more than one Democrat will break ranks, and no Republicans will support the act,” said Friedman. Even if Biden were to somehow outmaneuver McConnell’s chicanery, there would be fierce opposition to contend with on the corporate side from the likes of Americans for Tax Reform, which has used Georgia runoff elections as an opportunity to fearmonger on the PRO Act, and, when backed against the wall, Biden may revert to his timeworn moderate instincts and not go to bat for labor reform unless forced to. “Prospects for major labor law reform under the Biden administration are directly tied to unions’ and union federations’ willingness to hold the administration’s feet to the fire. They are not going to do it on their own – if we want it, we’re going to have to fight like hell for it,” said Pitkin, the former UNITE HERE organizer. “The biggest question is whether there is enough street heat and organizing to prioritize legislation like this," said Burke, the UAW organizer. “Workers in motion spur labor-law reforms, not the other way around.” They lash out against Reconciliation – it 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
NovDec - T - A
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 7 | Opponent: Greenhill KD | Judge: Jacob Nails Interpretation – The affirmative must defend all governments. “A” is an indefinite article that modifies “government” in the res – this means that you have to prove the resolution true in a VACUUM, not in a particular instance CCC (“Articles, Determiners, and Quantifiers”, http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/determiners/determiners.htm#articles, Capital Community College Foundation, a nonprofit 501 c-3 organization that supports scholarships, faculty development, and curriculum innovation) LHSLA JC/SJ The three articles — a, an, the — are a kind of adjective. The is called the definite article because it usually precedes a specific or previously mentioned noun; a and an are called indefinite articles because they are used to refer to something in a less specific manner (an unspecified count noun). These words are also listed among the noun markers or determiners because they are almost invariably followed by a noun (or something else acting as a noun). caution CAUTION! Even after you learn all the principles behind the use of these articles, you will find an abundance of situations where choosing the correct article or choosing whether to use one or not will prove chancy. Icy highways are dangerous. The icy highways are dangerous. And both are correct. The is used with specific nouns. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something that is one of a kind: The moon circles the earth. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something in the abstract: The United States has encouraged the use of the private automobile as opposed to the use of public transit. The is required when the noun it refers to represents something named earlier in the text. (See below..) If you would like help with the distinction between count and non-count nouns, please refer to Count and Non-Count Nouns. We use a before singular count-nouns that begin with consonants (a cow, a barn, a sheep); we use an before singular count-nouns that begin with vowels or vowel-like sounds (an apple, an urban blight, an open door). Words that begin with an h sound often require an a (as in a horse, a history book, a hotel), but if an h-word begins with an actual vowel sound, use an an (as in an hour, an honor). We would say a useful device and a union matter because the u of those words actually sounds like yoo (as opposed, say, to the u of an ugly incident). The same is true of a European and a Euro (because of that consonantal "Yoo" sound). We would say a once-in-a-lifetime experience or a one-time hero because the words once and one begin with a w sound (as if they were spelled wuntz and won). Merriam-Webster's Dictionary says that we can use an before an h- word that begins with an unstressed syllable. Thus, we might say an hisTORical moment, but we would say a HIStory book. Many writers would call that an affectation and prefer that we say a historical, but apparently, this choice is a matter of personal taste. For help on using articles with abbreviations and acronyms (a or an FBI agent?), see the section on Abbreviations. First and subsequent reference: When we first refer to something in written text, we often use an indefinite article to modify it. A newspaper has an obligation to seek out and tell the truth. In a subsequent reference to this newspaper, however, we will use the definite article: There are situations, however, when the newspaper must determine whether the public's safety is jeopardized by knowing the truth. Another example: "I'd like a glass of orange juice, please," John said. "I put the glass of juice on the counter already," Sheila replied. Exception: When a modifier appears between the article and the noun, the subsequent article will continue to be indefinite: "I'd like a big glass of orange juice, please," John said. "I put a big glass of juice on the counter already," Sheila replied. Generic reference: We can refer to something in a generic way by using any of the three articles. We can do the same thing by omitting the article altogether. A beagle makes a great hunting dog and family companion. An airedale is sometimes a rather skittish animal. The golden retriever is a marvelous pet for children. Irish setters are not the highly intelligent animals they used to be. The difference between the generic indefinite pronoun and the normal indefinite pronoun is that the latter refers to any of that class ("I want to buy a beagle, and any old beagle will do.") whereas the former (see beagle sentence) refers to all members of that class. “Governments” is a generic indefinite singular. Leslie 12 Leslie, Sarah-Jane. “Generics.” In Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Language, edited by Gillian Russell and Delia Fara, 355–366. Routledge, 2012. https://www.princeton.edu/~sjleslie/RoutledgeHandbookEntryGenerics.pdf SM GENERICS VS. EXISTENTIALS The interpretation of sentences containing bare plurals, indefinite singulars, or definite singulars can be either generic as in (1) respectively or existential/specific as in (2): (1) Tigers are striped A tiger is striped The tiger is striped. (2) Tigers are on the front lawn A tiger is on the front lawn The tiger is on the front lawn. The subjects in (1) are prima facie the same as in (2), yet their interpretations in (1) are intuitively quite different from those in (2). In (2) we are talking about some particular tigers, while in (1) we are saying something about tigers in general. There are some tests that are helpful in distinguishing these two readings. For example, the existential interpretation is upward entailing, meaning that the statement will always remain true if we replace the subject term with a more inclusive term. For example, if it is true that tigers are on the lawn, then it will also be true that animals are on the lawn. This is not so if the sentence is interpreted generically. For example, it is true that tigers are striped, but it does not follow that animals are striped (Lawler 1973 Laca 1990; Krifka et al 1995). Another test concerns whether we can insert an adverb of quantification (in the sense of Lewis 1975) with minimal change of meaning (Krifka et al 1995). For example, inserting “usually” in the sentences in (1) (e.g. “tigers are usually striped”) produces only a small change in meaning, while inserting “usually” in (2) dramatically alters the meaning of the sentence (e.g. “tigers are usually on the front lawn). (For generics such as “mosquitoes carry malaria”, the adverb “sometimes” is perhaps better used than “usually”.) Upward entailment – saying all leaderships should have unconditional right to strike is different from all governments
Violation- you specify Germany. Standards– Limits: specifying a democracy offers huge explosion in the topic since they get permutations of 76 governments, like US, Hong Kong, or Mauritius. That outweighs: A. Iterative content mastery: debaters learn best from successive strategic iterations, so engaging in debates about the same core issues challenges students to innovate and adapt their arguments based on feedback from opponents and judges. B. Prep: nuanced research requires a stasis point. A large caselist results in shallow debates 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. TVA: affirm the entire resolution and have the _ as an advantage – solves
11/21/21
NovDec - T - Just
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington AG | Judge: Julian Kuffour Interpretation: the affirmative must defend that only just governments ought to recognize the right to strike Just governments respect liberties Dorn 12 James A. Dorn, Cato Journal, "The Scope of Government in a Free Society", Fall 2012, https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/2012/12/v32n3-10.pdf If laws are just, liberty and property are secure. The most certain test of justice is negative—that is, justice occurs when injustice (the violation of natural rights to life, liberty, and property) is prevented. The emphasis here is on what Hayek (1967) called “just rules of conduct,” not on the fairness of outcomes. No one has stated the negative concept of justice better than the 19th century French classical liberal Frederic Bastiat (1850 1964: 65): When law and force confine a man within the bounds of justice, they do not impose anything on him but a mere negation. They impose on him only the obligation to refrain from injuring others. They do not infringe on his personality, or his liberty or his property. They merely safeguard the personality, the liberty, and the property of others. They stand on the defensive; they defend the equal rights of all. They fulfill a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is uncontested. In short, the purpose of a just government is not to do good with other people’s money, but to prevent injustice by protecting property and securing liberty.
Violation—the US is not just - their court system is racist. Nellis, Ph.D., 18, Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/, Sentencing Project, The United States criminal justice system is the largest in the world. At yearend 2015, over 6.7 million individuals1) were under some form of correctional control in the United States, including 2.2 million incarcerated in federal, state, or local prisons and jails.2) The U.S. is a world leader in its rate of incarceration, dwarfing the rate of nearly every other nation.3) Such broad statistics mask the racial disparity that pervades the U.S. criminal justice system, and for African Americans in particular. African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, and they are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. African-American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than whites and Hispanics are 3.1 times as likely.4) As of 2001, one of every three black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as could one of every six Latinos—compared to one of every seventeen white boys.5) Racial and ethnic disparities among women are less substantial than among men but remain prevalent.6) The source of such disparities is deeper and more systemic than explicit racial discrimination. The United States in effect operates two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color. The wealthy can access a vigorous adversary system replete with constitutional protections for defendants. Yet the experiences of poor and minority defendants within the criminal justice system often differ substantially from that model due to a number of factors, each of which contributes to the overrepresentation of such individuals in the system. As former Georgetown Law Professor David Cole states in his book No Equal Justice,
Vote Neg – 1 Precision — anything else justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. 2 Limits – there are 200 governments in the world – letting them pick an unjust one which explodes limits via infinite permutations of governments. Kills neg ground bc we have to prep every government including local and unrecognized governments, but they can cherry pick unjust governments which kills clash. That’s an internall ink to fairness and education – they’re voters per the 1ac. 3 CI – T is a binaristic question – ur either topical or ur not. 4 No rvis – it’s illogical – you shouldn’t win for proving ur topical
11/20/21
NovDec - T - Unconditional
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 4 | Opponent: Dwight-Englewood EK | Judge: Vishan Chaudhary Interpretation: The affirmative must defend an unconditional right to strike. This means that the Affirmative must defend that anyone regardless of job or occupation has a fundamental right to strike. Merriam Webster ND, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unconditionalsid not conditional or limited : ABSOLUTE, UNQUALIFIED “Unconditional” necessitates the absence of narrowing restrictions. US Legal ‘ND (US Legal; dictionary of legal terms of art; US Legal; “Unconditional Law and Legal Definition”; https://definitions.uslegal.com/u/unconditional/; Accessed: 10-30-2021; AU) Unconditional means without conditions; without restrictions; or absolute. For instance, unconditional promise is a promise that is unqualified in nature. A party who makes an unconditional promise must perform that promise even though the other party has not performed according to the bargain. Violation – They only grant the Right to Strike to agricultural workers. That by definition is a condition since they condition the right to strike on a particular occupation. Jensen ’18 (Eric; co-director of the Stanford Rule of Law Program, in collaboration with USAID, The Asia Foundation, and Stanford Law School; April 2018; “Introduction to the Laws of Timor-Leste”; Stanford Law School; https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Timor-Leste-Constitutional-Rights.pdf; Accessed: 10-30-2021; AU) If individuals want to defend their rights at work, the Constitution gives them the right form trade unions and to strike. Individuals are free to join and participate in professional associations that are peaceful. This includes trade unions. Individuals in trade unions have a right to organize their unions independent of the government or their employers. Trade unions should be free and independent, and individuals have the right to set the unions’ internal structure freely. Independent trade unions are important to allow individuals to organize with other workers to collectively defend their interests and their rights. It is important that they are independent so that they reflect the individuals’ interests and not the employer’s or the government’s interests. Individuals have the right to strike. If they feel that their employer is not respecting their rights or interests, employees can refuse to work in protest. The Constitution creates a duty that during a strike, the employer still has to maintain equipment and provide for safety. Individuals’ right to strike is limited by the law. The Constitution states that the right to strike is conditional on the strike being compliant with legal regulations that the government creates. This means that the government can pass laws that limit when and how individuals can exercise their right to strike. The right to strike is important to give individuals the power to defend their labor rights. Vote Neg – 1 Limits – there are endless conditions the aff can place on the right to strike – i.e based on occupation, national holidays, location of strike, etc. That makes the topic untenable since the Aff can just infinitely specify any condition or permutation of conditions which makes predictable preparation and in-depth clash impossible. 2 Neg Ground – specifying scenarios lets affs spike out of core, reduction-based disads like Bizcon and Small Businesses. Links are already non-existent on this topic – letting affs impose restrictions on RTS makes it even narrower. 3 TVA – Defend an unconditional RTS in the US.
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 - T is a binaristic question, you’re either topical or ur not No RVI – yiou shouldn’t win for being topical
11/21/21
NovDec - Theory - Must Spec Right to Strike
Tournament: Longhorn Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: San Mateo ZS | Judge: Breigh Plat Interpretation: The affirmative must specify what kinds of strikes they defend an unconditional right for. Vote Neg: Topic lit proves its key -– 4 different major categories all with very different implications. SHRM The Society for Human Resource Management is a professional human resources membership association headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. SHRM promotes the role of HR as a profession and provides education, certification, and networking to its members, while lobbying Congress on issues pertinent to labor management, “Are all types of strikes protected under the National Labor Relations Act?”, https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/cms_021003.aspx//pranav An employee's right to strike is a critical component of the right to organize but is not without limitations. Certain strikes qualify as protected activity under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), but not all strikes are protected. The main types of strikes covered by the NLRA are: Unfair labor practice strikes, which protest employers' illegal activities. Economic strikes, which may occur when there are disputes over wages or benefits. Recognition strikes, which are intended to force employers to recognize unions. Jurisdictional strikes, which are concerted refusals to work to affirm members' right to particular job assignments and to protest the assignment of work to another union or to unorganized employees. A unionized employee's right to reinstatement after a strike ends varies based on the type of strike and the underlying reason for the strike. Employers are allowed to hire replacement workers during unfair labor practice strikes and economic strikes. O/W on topic ed – we only get two months to debate about the topic. Education’s a voter and comes first - 1 only terminal impact in debate 2 fairness isn’t a voter a doesn’t exist – different starting points and biases all prove unfairness is inevitable b doesn’t control the internal link – we can still learn things even if debate is unfair CI – 1 rtt – best possible norm 2 collapses No RVIs 1 baiting – better theory debater will 2 chilling effect – chills debaters from checking abuse
12/4/21
SeptOct - CP - Advantage vs Butler
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 5 | Opponent: Marcus JR | Judge: Grant Brown CP Text: The member nations of the World Trade organization should give everyone adequate health care. Solves the first contention – ww is blue 1AC Forman 07 Trade Rules, Intellectual Property, and the Right to Health From: Ethics and International Affairs By: Lisa Forman Fall 2007 Given the adverse health impacts of the intellectual property protections contained in these free-trade agreements, why do countries consent to entering them at all? On the one hand, it is not surprising that governments may favor economic growth over critical health investments, especially considering how routinely health systems are underfinanced and how access to health care for marginalized and poor populations is so often neglected in both rich and poor countries.30 Governments may also assume that the aggregate economic benefits of these trade agreements outweigh and indeed justify any restrictions in access to medicines that they may cause. At the same time, trade negotiators may simply lack knowledge of the health implications of higher levels of intellectual property protection. There is, however, a degree of coercion that may accompany the finalization of these agreements. Peter Drahos suggests that developing countries have little room to refuse bilateral agreements, as trade negotiations take place alongside actual or threatened unilateral trade sanctions.32 Debates about the economic benefits of trade aside, from a human rights perspective sacrificing access to essential medicines for the poorest (those who most assuredly will be affected) in the service of broader economic growth is not an acceptable trade-off. Nor should it be a necessary trade-off. In Peru recently, largely due to the advocacy of Paul Hunt, the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, the government conducted an assessment of the potential impact of a free-trade agreement being negotiated with the United States. The assessment indicated that the agreement would limit access to medicines for approximately 700,000 people, and the government accordingly recommended implementing a fund from industries that would profit from the agreement to supplement this shortfall.33 While the Peruvian experience suggests that governments can mitigate the restrictive impact of trade rules on medicines access at the domestic level, impact assessments cannot directly challenge the injustices inherent in the current trade regime on medicines. Free-trade agreements and corporate and governmental challenges effectively turn TRIPS rights into powerful corporate entitlements that can be only rarely limited. This not only perpetuates the inaccessibility of present medicines but excludes poor people from accessing new therapeutic advances. INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS ON HEALTH Since the global imposition and enforcement of stringent patent rights play a direct role in the high loss of life due to inaccessible medicines, such a system should be justifiable not simply from the perspective of intellectual property rights but from the perspective of human rights law. Access to essential medicines is a fundamental human rights claim under the rights to health and life.34 In accordance with international human rights law, it should therefore be seen as a core human rights entitlement to receive minimally adequate health care. Under these rights, governments have a range of duties with regard to medicines, which include, inter alia, ensuring the affordability of essential medicines and preventing restrictions on access. In this light, government use of TRIPS flexibilities to provide access to lifesaving medicines should be seen as necessary to fulfill their duties under rights to health and life. In cases where the adoption of patent provisions in TRIPS-plus free-trade agreements will result in the loss of life due to limited access to lifesaving drugs, this action should be seen as a violation of these duties. Support for the idea that the enforcement of trade-related intellectual property rights may violate human rights is found in the work of Thomas Pogge. Pogge argues that those who uphold social rules, such as trade and economic policies, can violate human rights when these rules 'Joreseeably and avoidably deprive human beings of secure access to the objects of their human rights."35 Pogge argues that the present international patent system fulfils these conditions. Solves 2nd contention – ww is blue 1AC Baker 13 AFRICAN HUMAN RIGHTS LAW JOURNAL * BA (UDW), BProc (UNISA), LLM (UDW), LLD (UKZN); vawday@ukzn.ac.za BA (Harvard), JD (Northeastern); b.baker@neu.edu (2013) 13 AHRLJ 55-81 Achieving social justice in the human rights/intellectual property debate: Realising the goal of access to medicines Yousuf A Vawda* Associate Professor of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Brook K Baker Professor of Law, Northeastern University, Boston MA, USA; Honorary Research Fellow, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa The increasing privatisation of knowledge and the products of knowledge have been a significant feature of the capitalist system from its earliest phases. It was typified by the ‘enclosure movement’,106 the design to fence off public spaces and bring them under private ownership and control. This culminated in according proprietary status to the products of the intellect – the recognition of intellectual property rights. In more recent times, the harmonisation and integration of intellectual property rights, through institutions such as the WIPO and WTO, signify a new wave of the enclosure movement, with intellectual property right protection now having a global reach. Protagonists of this approach have argued that the new property regime has given rise to ‘unparalleled expansion of productive possibilities’.107 But for whose benefit? Life-saving medicines and medical devices, critical to the health and well-being of individuals and societies alike, have not escaped appropriation as private assets. Medicines are thus often viewed as private commodities because of various factors, including, amongst others: • Reigning bioethical models with their focus on patient autonomy have emphasised individual aspects of health care, reinforced by the fact that medicines are privately consumed.108 • The market pre-selects consumers of highly-priced medicines, by excluding those individuals who cannot afford them. But medicines are – at least partially – public goods in the sense that they have significant implications for public health, are also global in their development and impact, and are prone to regulation in their development, manufacture, allocation and use.109 The public dimensions of medicines are well known, directly from their role in public health vaccination measures, as well as in the treatment of epidemic and endemic diseases. The public dimension also entails the public consequences emanating from choices made in research and development of new medicines, and the profiteering surrounding lifestyle drugs which draws resources away from research into socalled ‘neglected’ diseases. In contrast to private goods, ‘public goods’ are goods that are essentially social in character, even though (like medicines) they may be intended for private consumption.110 Public goods also often have positive externalities, meaning that their broad accessibility and use benefit the public at large, not just those who use them. This public benefit is most obvious in the instance of vaccination, where herd immunity develops because of wide diffusion. However, the same dynamic can be seen with respect to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. Indeed, because healthier populations have increased capacity in the economic, cultural, political and self actualising sphere, there are positive externalities for treating chronic and even temporary disease conditions. Medicines, therefore, cannot merely be regarded as private goods. Drug development itself has assumed a global character. It may be true that most innovation in this area emanates from laboratories in developed countries. However, developing countries make a significant contribution to the development of medicines in several ways, including sharing knowledge of indigenous plants and their properties, and controversially, being involved as research participants in clinical trials for medicines, from which they sometimes may not themselves benefit.111 A major change in the recent discourse on global health concerns the ‘framing, norms, and policy approaches to addressing the problem of globally inequitable access to drugs, diagnostics, vaccines and other health technologies’.112 This development is due, in no small part, to the global political and social mobilisation on the issue of access to affordable anti-retrovirals, which has fomented a re-think of the traditional approaches to understanding medicines as private goods, has focused attention on the global demand for access to health technologies for all (as opposed to merely ‘neglected’ diseases), and has highlighted the need for new, more inclusive governance mechanisms to manage pharmaceutical and related innovation.113
9/12/21
SeptOct - CP - Advantage vs Cannabis
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Austin Broussard, Gerard Grigsby CP Text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization should legalize cannabis.
9/17/21
SeptOct - CP - Advantage vs Vaccines
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Samantha Mclaughlin The United States should: - substantially increase production and global distribution of the COVID-19 Vaccine - cooperate with allies to achieve increased production and global distribution of the COVID-19 Vaccine. Solves heg – us intervenes in vaccine diplomacy better than the aff bc it looks like follow on w the other wto countries Solves developing econs – gives them vaccines Solves credibility – resolves covid which the wto is struggling with That solves better – IP rights don’t hinder vaccine cooperation, but manufacturing capacity is the current constraint. Hans Sauer 6-17 (Deputy General Counsel, Biotechnology Industry Organization.) “Web event — Confronting Joe Biden’s proposed TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments” https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/210617-Confronting-Joe-Bidens-proposed-TRIPS-waiver.pdf?x91208andx91208 TDI But contrary to what Lori said, there are genuine real problems in the supply chain that are not caused by patents, that are simply caused by the unavailability and the constraints on existing capacity. There is in this world such a thing as maxed-out capacity that just can’t be increased on a dime. It’s not all due to intellectual property. This is true for existing vaccines as well as for vaccine raw materials. There are trade barriers. There are export restrictions that we should all be aware of and that we need to work on. And there are very real political, I think, interests in finding an explanation for how we got to this place that absolve governments around the world from their own policy decisions that they made in the past. In the United States, again, it was the declared policy of the previous administration, as well as this one, that we would vaccinate healthy college kids and go all down the line and offer a vaccine to everybody who wants it before we start sharing any with grandmothers in Burkina Faso. That was the policy. You can agree with it or disagree with it, but that was policy. We had export restrictions in place before a lot of other countries did. And that, too, contributed to unequal access of vaccines around the world. Another thing that was predictable was that politicians and governments around the world who want to be seen as proactive, on the ball, in control, for a long time were actually very indecisive, very unsure about how to address the COVID problem, which has so many dimensions. Vaccines are only one of those. But with respect to vaccines, not many governments took decisive action, put money on the table, put bets on multiple horses, before we knew whether these vaccines would work, would be approved. And it was governments in middle-income countries who now, I think, justifiably are concerned that they’re not getting fast enough access, who didn’t have the means and who didn’t have the decision-making structure to place the same bets on multiple horses, if you will, that were placed in the relatively more wealthy, global North and global West. But there is, I think, a really good and, with hindsight, predictable explanation of how we got to this place, and I think it teaches us something about how to fix the problem going forward. So why will the waiver not work? Well, first of all, with complex technology like vaccines, Lori touched on it, reverse engineering, like you would for a small molecule drug, is much more difficult if not impossible. But it depends very much more than small molecule drugs on cooperation, on voluntary transfer of technology, and on mutual assistance. We have seen as part of the pandemic response an unprecedented level of collaborations and cooperation and no indication that IP has stood in the way of the pandemic response. The waiver proponents have found zero credible examples of where IP has actually been an obstacle, where somebody has tried to block somebody else from developing a COVID vaccine or other COVID countermeasure, right? It’s not there. Second, the myth of this vast global capacity to manufacture COVID vaccines that somehow exists out there is unsubstantiated and frankly, in my opinion, untrue. But there is no such thing as vast untapped, idle capacity that could be turned around on a dime to start making COVID vaccines within weeks or even months. This capacity needs to be built; it needs to be established. And at a time when time is of the essence to beat this pandemic, starting capacity-building discussions is helpful, but it won’t be the answer to beat this pandemic. It will be the answer if we do everything right to beating the next pandemic. And if we learn any lesson of this, and then I will stop, is that the COVID waiver as well as the situation in which we find ourselves — if anything, it’s a reminder that we definitely have to take global capacity-building more seriously than we did in the past. That is true for the global North, as well as for middle-income countries — all of whom have to dedicate themselves much more determinedly to pandemic preparedness. And there’s a need to invest both in preparedness and in public health systems that hasn’t happened in the wake of past pandemic threats. This is what we will need to do. We will need to reduce export restrictions, and we will need to rededicate ourselves to preparing for the next pandemic. As far as this pandemic goes, there are 11 vaccines around the world that are already being shot into arms, only four of which come from the global North. How many more vaccines do we want? I don’t know, maybe 11 is enough if we start making more of them. But there are manufacturers around the world who know how to do this — including in China, including in India, and including in Russia. All developed their homegrown vaccines, apparently without interference by IP rights, right? So let’s make more of those. I think that’s going to be the more practical and realistic answer to solving the problem. And we need to lean on governments to stop export controls and to dedicate themselves to more global equity. Unilateral US action is necessary to combat Chinese and Russian vaccine diplomacy – they’re establishing spheres of influence because of few vaccines in developing countries – collapses the LIO. Carman and Carl 21. (Ezequiel Carman is an Argentine lawyer and global health and trade policy consultant. Previously, he served as a legal advisor to the Ministry of Justice of Buenos Aires, an assistant professor of international public law at the Universidad Católica Argentina, and a research assistant at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Joseph Carl is a graduate of Liberty University, where he studied international relations and strategic international studies. He has worked for the U.S. Department of State and the Heritage Foundation) “A U.S. vaccine diplomacy strategy for Latin America and the Caribbean,” The Global Americans, June 15, 2021. https://theglobalamericans.org/2021/06/a-u-s-vaccine-diplomacy-strategy-for-latin-america-and-the-caribbean/ TDI Once again, history seems to be repeating itself. The United States, along with the world’s other rich and mostly Western countries, continue to be accused of hoarding medical supplies, having purchased one billion surplus vaccine doses (more than is required to vaccinate their citizens). In their absence, China—and, to a lesser extent, Russia—have rushed to take advantage of the vaccine gap in the Global South, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. A lack of leadership from Washington in sharing vaccines and their intellectual property (IP) earlier in the pandemic has allowed its geopolitical competitors to take advantage of Latin America’s desperate need to acquire scarce vaccines. Although the region represents only eight percent of the global population, it has experienced nearly one-third of all COVID-19 deaths. Historical precedent demonstrates this is not the first time that Washington’s international moral standing has been damaged during a global health crisis, due to the lack of political will to share lifesaving drugs and other vital resources. However, this time around, unlike in such past episodes, there will be concrete geopolitical consequences to Washington’s inaction. In recent years, the U.S. has lost significant political and economic influence among its southern neighbors; without swift remedial action, its geopolitical rivals may cement such losses through their campaigns of vaccine diplomacy. To rebuild its influence in the region, Washington will need to muster the political will to increase Latin America and the Caribbean’s access to vaccines and develop a sound strategy for its own vaccine diplomacy. Already, some countries in the region have been sufficiently strong-armed by other global powers, the implications of which could be damaging for U.S. interests. As the world transitions into the next stage of the pandemic, those nations that continue to be most ravaged by COVID-19 will likely continue to remember which countries provided them with aid and succor in their time of need. History repeats itself In 1981, the first cases of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) were reported; the following decade was defined by a devastating global AIDS epidemic (which would eventually be recognized as a pandemic). Analogous to how Latin America and the Caribbean have borne disproportionately the burden of COVID-19, Africa was hit hardest by the AIDS epidemic. Many parallels can be drawn between the international handlings of both the COVID-19 and AIDS pandemics. By the late 1980s, once antiretroviral therapies (ARV) were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), AIDS deaths in the U.S. began to decline immediately. Nevertheless, high levels of AIDS-related deaths in Africa continued for another decade. Africa’s enduring fight against AIDS was largely due to the cost of ARVs, which, at the time, were priced at USD $10,000 per person annually—completely out of reach for most developing countries. Pharmaceutical companies argued that the drug’s high selling price was necessary to procure a return on its investment in the research and development (RandD) of the ARV, and that pricing the drugs at a marginal cost would maximize consumer surplus while also halting future development in the industry. When pricing a drug, a pharmaceutical company needs to factor-in several costs: 1) the cost of RandD for drugs that never enter the market; 2) clinical trials necessary to comply with regulatory requirements; 3) and the marketing cost of promoting the new drug. While the original price of the patented ARV was USD $10,000 per patient per year, the price of the generic version, manufactured by the Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla, was only USD $1.00 per day. During the AIDS pandemic, since many developing countries were members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), they were forbidden from importing generic pharmaceutical products because in order to maintain compliance with regulations imposed by the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement. Western pharmaceutical companies—the owners of the IP rights for the medications—blocked access to generic ARV drugs out of fear that the importation of these generic alternatives would ultimately threaten their net profitization. Despite the protests of the pharmaceutical industry, India and South Africa continued to compete with and defy the U.S. and the WTO (a body in which powerful industrialized economies—those of the U.S., Europe, and Japan—wield disproportionate influence). Drug companies eventually sued to keep lifesaving therapies out of the hands of dying AIDS-sufferers in Africa, a state of affairs that engendered a forceful reaction from international activists. After years of political pressure, Washington was forced to yield, eventually pushing for the relaxation of stringent IP protections for ARVs, making generic versions of the drugs more accessible and affordable. Despite its eventual concession, the perception that the U.S. had fought bitterly to prioritize pharmaceutical company profits over human lives in the Global South only helped bolster negative narratives surrounding the Western superpower. However, unlike the unipolarity that characterized the 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. is no longer the only global superpower, and the humanitarian decisions it makes now—during a new global health crisis—have the potential to be hugely consequential for the country’s influence and image. Similar to its trajectory at the height of the AIDS crisis, Washington only recently voiced its desire to back the WTO patent waiver proposal, having come under tremendous international pressure. Granted, the U.S. backed a patent waiver for COVID-19 vaccines much faster than it did for ARVs in the 1980s. However, having been presented with a rare opportunity to make amends for past moral missteps—by eliminating vaccine IP protections to ensure that affordable, generic versions of COVID-19 vaccines could be manufactured en masse around the world—the U.S. once again hesitated, limiting opportunities for developing nations to recover from the pandemic and again amplifying criticisms of the United States. Backed by over 100 developing countries, India and South Africa are once again leading the current fight to eliminate IP protections. India and South Africa filed a waiver with the WTO requesting a temporary suspension of patent obligations under TRIPS (Sections 1, 4, 5, and 7 of Part II) so that developing countries can access vaccines in a timely manner. The intent of this effort is to boost domestic manufacturing capacity by facilitating the widespread production of generic versions of COVID-19 vaccines, evening the odds with respect to global vaccine procurement and accessibility. The waiver would also allow developing countries to procure vaccines more expeditiously, either by producing them themselves or by streamlining the cumbersome institutional and legal requirements of importing pharmaceutical products from other countries that possess the necessary manufacturing capacity. After months of pushback from activists and political leaders, the U.S. finally expressed its support for patent waivers, with several key Western powers (notably France and the European Union (EU)) following suit. However, Germany—a major political player in the patent waiver debate due to its powerful pharmaceutical sector—continues to oppose the move. Other European countries remain similarly split on the patent waiver proposal, reflecting the fact that any patent waiver proposal will still requires extensive negotiation (in order for it to be accepted, there must be unanimous consent among WTO members). Political leaders and activists continue to call on the West to support the waiving of IP protections, noting that current projections anticipate that wealthy countries will be able to immunize their entire populations by the end of 2021, while developing countries will only see the same results in the next three to four years. Unlike the AIDS pandemic, COVID-19 has generated not only massive medical concerns, but also a global economic crisis: vaccination campaigns in richer countries have already allowed them to begin to rebuild their economies, while mass unemployment and lockdowns continue to strangle the economies of many developing nations. Increasing the supply and accessibility of vaccines in the developing world will undoubtedly facilitate a faster, and more equal, economic recovery. Continuing to allow the virus to spread unencumbered throughout the Global South, however, will only increase the likelihood of further viral mutations, possibly jeopardizing the efficacy of existing vaccines and further perpetuating already grave economic and medical concerns. Washington’s initial unwillingness to cross the pharmaceutical industry has undeniably damaged the moral standing of the United States. Moreover, this decision also created a humanitarian void eagerly filled by Beijing and Moscow, as they actively seek to position themselves as the benefactors of the most COVID-19-stricken region of the world: Latin America and the Caribbean. To date, Russian and Chinese vaccine diplomacy have already led to economic, diplomatic, and political losses being felt by Washington; this trend, if allowed to continue, will only further limit U.S. regional influence with its neighbors to the south. A lack of strategy and political will In the absence of an effective vaccine diplomacy strategy from Washington, and with the perpetuation of its current nationalistic vaccine policy, some of the pharmaceutical companies that the U.S. so readily protects have pushed countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean into the waiting arms of Beijing and Moscow. While some Latin American countries have received a few vaccines from Western companies, most nations in the region continue to struggle to obtain doses. Pfizer, a U.S. pharmaceutical company, was accused of bullying Latin American countries during vaccine procurement negotiations, using its own leverage to attempt to force desperate nations to offer sovereign assets—such as their embassies—as collateral. Pfizer’s efforts resulted in a lost deal with Argentina, which has continued to grow increasingly closer to China. While the U.S. possesses a surplus of COVID-19 vaccines, it has failed to develop an effective, far-reaching donation strategy. Only recently did the Biden administration announce its plans to ship 80 million vaccines—a small portion of its surplus supply—abroad. Of the initial 25 million doses destined to be distributed internationally, 19 million will be donated to the largely mismanaged UN-backed COVAX program, with only six million of these COVAX doses designated for Latin America and the Caribbean. In comparison, China alone has donated or sold over 165 million vaccines to Latin America, with countries like Chile and Uruguay having vaccinated 80 and 63 percent of their populations, respectively, with Chinese vaccines. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden previously donated a total of 4.2 million AstraZeneca vaccines to Canada and Mexico, the first vaccines that the U.S. had sent abroad. Still, this relatively modest donation was preceded by repeated calls from prominent Latin American leaders for President Biden to donate vaccines to U.S. allies in Latin America. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was notably rebuffed in his request for shipments of U.S. vaccines, being told by the Biden administration that it was prioritizing the vaccination of the American public (despite the fact that Washington had already bought enough vaccines to inoculate the entire U.S. population several times over). Colombia President Iván Duque of Colombia, a country that is a key regional ally, has also called for the Biden administration to aid countries in the Western Hemisphere that are struggling to procure vaccines. By contrast, some Latin American officials have described easier negotiations, cheaper prices, and overall better terms in their successful agreements with Russia and China. Last year, for example, Beijing offered a USD $1 billion loan to Latin American nations to help finance their purchasing of Chinese-made vaccines—an offer that was well-received by recipient countries. Due to a lack of vaccine support and assurance from Washington, countries are growing closer to Beijing and Moscow, succumbing to rival geopolitical powers that do not align with the diplomatic and economic interests of the United States.
9/13/21
SeptOct - CP - Orphan Drugs
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Peninsula RM | Judge: Adam Torson Counterplan Text - The member nations of the World Trade Organization should - eliminate intellectual property protections for medicines except for orphan drugs. - prioritize distribution of orphan drugs to the Global South. Orphan drug legislation is specifically key to stimulate research into rare diseases Horgan et. al 20 D, Moss B, Boccia S, Genuardi M, Gajewski M, Capurso G, Fenaux P, Gulbis B, Pellegrini M, Mañú Pereira M, M, Gutiérrez Valle V, Gutiérrez Ibarluzea I, Kent A, Cattaneo I, Jagielska B, Belina I, Tumiene B, Ward A, Papaluca M: Time for Change? The Why, What and How of Promoting Innovation to Tackle Rare Diseases – Is It Time to Update the EU’s Orphan Regulation? And if so, What Should be Changed? Biomed Hub 2020;5:1-11. doi: 10.1159/000509272 https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/509272#sid The European Union’s (EU) Regulation (EC) No. 141/2000 on orphan medicinal products (OMPs) (referred to as “the regulation” in this paper) states that “patients suffering from rare conditions should be entitled to the same quality of treatment as other patients,” and concludes that “it is therefore necessary to stimulate the research, development and bringing to the market of appropriate medications by the pharmaceutical industry” 1. Rare diseases had already been identified as a priority area for Community action within the framework for action in the field of public health 2, and the regulation’s stated aim is – “to provide incentives for the research, development and placing on the market of designated orphan medicinal products.” It set up a mechanism to ensure that “orphan medicinal products eligible for incentives should be easily and unequivocally identified,” with the condition that “objective criteria for designation should be established” 3. The core incentive of the regulation is the granting of 10 years (+2 years for paediatric orphan medicines) of marketing exclusivity and a range of financial and scientific provisions granted via the European Medicines Agency to support product development and application for Marketing Authorisation. Nearly two decades later, the success of the measure has been demonstrated. Investment both from public research funders and from companies of all sizes in rare disease research has resulted in the approval of more than 150 orphan drugs – compared with just eight therapies for rare diseases available before the adoption of the regulation. That translates into a lot of patient benefit. With clinical research stimulated by the legislation, the EU sees some 2,000 clinical trials providing still more innovation or hope for treatments in the current RandD pipeline 4. But over the intervening years, the limitations in the functioning of the legislation have become apparent too, and these merit attention if the beneficial effects for patients and caregivers are to be maximised 5. This paper explores the successes and limitation of both the regulation and its implementation mechanisms in the current regulatory context, and suggests some improvements that could maximise its benefits and boost rare disease research even further. The discussion needs to be precise if it is to be effective. Review of the functioning of the regulation may coincide with a period of more intense scrutiny and concerns over containing the rise of expenditure to ensure sustainability of healthcare systems, with a particular focus on expensive innovation which are often developed within the orphan conditions. While there is undoubted importance in the wider but distinct debate over healthcare costs, it does not bear directly on reviewing the orphan medicines regulation 6. At the same time, economic questions do, however, have relevance to the debate on orphans, since patients’ access to the medicines that become available is conditioned by the national arrangements for reimbursement or listing of products: there is an increasing tension between the potential access to agents that can modify or even cure rare diseases, and the models for reimbursement available to European payers. Part of this hesitancy can be ascribed to the novelty of the challenges presented by many innovative treatments, which by their nature present unknowns to payers. Clearly, there is also a need to deal with uncertainty with regard to value demonstration, especially when value or values are perceived not to be sufficiently demonstrated. The risk is that such powerful economic reservations can have a cumulative negative impact on the motivation for pursuing research into rare disease treatments – thus running counter to the guiding principle of the legislation itself 7. Current value assessment rules across Europe for orphan drugs remain largely inadequate and can become a real fourth hurdle to effective patient access to those treatments 8. The regulation’s stimulation of new product development has also helped promote the development of EU biotech companies. The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of more than 150 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) focusing on rare diseases. No wonder that one of the prominent Members of the European Parliament over this period, Francoise Grossetête, emphasised the importance of the regulation in addressing “real medical needs” and generating “therapeutic breakthroughs” 9. The underlying strength of the concept of providing incentives for RandD in areas of unmet need is confirmed by the fact that Germany and other Member States are now exploring whether OMP-type incentives could contribute to solving the major risks of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), through promoting development of new anti-bacterials even where simple market economics do not provide sufficient motivation for investment 10. Thanks to increased investments and the associated efforts thus made possible, some rare diseases now benefit from effective treatments. There are leading examples in the area of haemophilia, paroxysmal nocturnal haemoglobinuria (PNH), and some lysosomal storage diseases such as Gaucher. The full list of conditions for which “orphans medicines” have been launched in Europe is too extensive to reproduce here, but by way of illustration it ranges from rare cancers to rare variants of common diseases (pulmonary hypertension, neonatal diabetes) and to rare congenital, mostly childhood-onset disorders (Gaucher, cystinosis, inherited hyperammonaemias) 11. However, these tales of success should not lead to any delusions that the process has been – or is becoming – easy. Successes in developing innovative treatments are hard-won. Without consistent and determined effort, innovation does not happen – and innovation in rare diseases is all the more challenging. The key elements of the innovation process are well documented, but the nature of the challenges is perhaps not always fully appreciated by those outside the healthcare sector, being seen as costs and not as investments. Rare diseases are categorized as “orphan diseases” because their occurrence in a small number of patients means that, despite apparent high unmet medical need, there is limited scientific understanding, making it difficult to justify the development risk and investment to develop new treatments. The OMP regulation was developed explicitly to support efforts in this field of innovation 12. Rare diseases disproportionately affect people of color RDDC, No Date (RDDC, No Date, accessed on 9-6-2021, Rare Disease Diversity Coalition, "Charting thePath Forwardfor Equity inRare Diseases", https://3hqwxl1mqiah5r73r2q7zll1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/RDDC_Path_Forward_Final.pdf)//sid While the rare disease community continues to face hurdles generally, people of color face additional hurdles in their quest for care . Barriers to diagnosis and treatment for people of color often have deadly consequences . Flaws across the entire system have a compounding effect on the care that Black, Native American, Hispanic, Asian, and Pacific Islander Americans with rare diseases receive . Americans of color continue to be underrepresented in genome-wide association studies and clinical research trials, leading to a lack of understanding about effective treatments, particularly in diverse populations . Despite making up more than 38 percent of the U .S . population, people of color comprise only 16 percent of research study participants .20 On the patient side, people of color are less likely to have affordable access to health care and rare disease experts .21 To make matters worse, some rare diseases disproportionately impact people of color . For instance, sarcoidosis, sickle cell anemia, thalassemia, and some forms of lupus are known to affect minority populations at higher rates than the general population .22 And implicit bias particularly harms people of color with rare diseases .23
9/18/21
SeptOct - CP - Patent Pools
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 5 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart AW | Judge: Jeannine Lopez CP Text: Member nations of the World Trade Organization should create patent pool licensing platforms for genomic medicines.
Solves the first advantage Their author Stramiello 18 (Michael, PhD, an intellectual property litigation associate in Washington, DC. His practice focuses on the life sciences industry) “CRISPR: The New Frontier of Biotechnology Innovation” American Bar Association, Jan/Feb 2018. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/intellectual_property_law/publications/landslide/2017-18/january-february/crispr-new-frontier-biotechnology-innovation-digital-feature///pranav As CRISPR marches on, there may be an elegant solution for making it widely available without government intervention in licensing: patent pools. These joint licensing platforms enable owners to combine their IP rights into bundles that are made accessible, nonexclusively, to a broad range of users via a single transaction with predictable terms. As a result, licensors and licensees can concentrate on innovation and commercial development, respectively, while minimizing transaction costs and litigation risk.32 This model was popularized in the 1990s, when the consumer electronics industry adopted it to facilitate deployment of the MPEG-2 digital video standard, which has yielded about $5 trillion in worldwide product sales since 1997.33 A key coordinator of that effort, MPEG LA LLC, now invites CRISPR/Cas9 patent holders to participate in their own pool. MPEG LA has been gauging interest from CRISPR rights holders since at least April 2017.34 Broad and Rockefeller University announced that they had submitted nearly two dozen “key CRISPR-Cas9 patents,”35 from 10 families, “for evaluation of eligibility to participate in discussions facilitated by MPEG LA regarding creation of a CRISPR Joint Licensing Platform.”36 UC reportedly has no plans to follow suit, citing potential conflicts with its existing licenses.37 The effect that pooling would have on such arrangements may remain unclear until contributors finalize pool terms, which could take years. Early efforts might focus on pooling foundational patents, and there has also been speculation about specialized pools geared toward particular CRISPR applications (e.g., agriculture and industrial biotechnology).38 Pooling may prove to be more of a challenge with respect to human therapeutics, a field where rights holders typically expect exclusivity as a reward for their enormous investment in rigorous clinical trials.
10/17/21
SeptOct - CP - UHC
Tournament: Meadows | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Millard North NL | Judge: Claudia Ribear, Kabir Dubey, Heaven Montague The United States should implement a universal healthcare system including free insulin. Implementing a UHC system gets insulin to the uninsured Goozner PhD 20 Merril Goozner (PhD and literally wrote the book on overpriced drugs, called “The 800$ pill), Winter 2020, "Insulin Should Be Free. Yes, Free.," Democracy Journal, https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/55/insulin-should-be-free-yes-free/ AW Later in the year, on the eve of the second Democratic Party debate, Senator Bernie Sanders, who has made Medicare-for-All his signature policy proposal, took a busload of diabetics to Canada to purchase insulin that is one-tenth the United States price. Sanders’s single-payer system would go beyond negotiating lower prices as is done in Canada and other industrialized nations. It would completely eliminate the copays and deductibles that stand in the way of many patients—including some who are well-insured—getting the medications they need. That our health-care system fails to provide essential medicines to people who face immediate death or injury without them is morally outrageous. The pricing and access policies of profit-seeking drug companies also make that failure quite literally a human rights violation. Those companies—and the government that fails to control them—are flagrantly ignoring the World Health Organization’s constitution, which calls “the highest attainable standard of health a fundamental right of every human being.” The document, which the United States signed in 1946, also says that “understanding health as a human right creates a legal obligation on states to ensure access to timely, acceptable, and affordable health care of appropriate quality.”
10/31/21
SeptOct - CP - US
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Peninsula RM | Judge: Adam Torson CP Text: The United States should increase intellectual patent protections for medicines. The member nations of the World Trade Organization except for the United States ought to eliminate patent protections for medicines. The United States should: - substantially increase production and global distribution of the COVID-19 Vaccine - cooperate with allies to achieve increased production and global distribution of the COVID-19 Vaccine.
That solves better – IP rights don’t hinder vaccine cooperation, but manufacturing capacity is the current constraint. Hans Sauer 6-17 (Deputy General Counsel, Biotechnology Industry Organization.) “Web event — Confronting Joe Biden’s proposed TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments” https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/210617-Confronting-Joe-Bidens-proposed-TRIPS-waiver.pdf?x91208andx91208 TDI But contrary to what Lori said, there are genuine real problems in the supply chain that are not caused by patents, that are simply caused by the unavailability and the constraints on existing capacity. There is in this world such a thing as maxed-out capacity that just can’t be increased on a dime. It’s not all due to intellectual property. This is true for existing vaccines as well as for vaccine raw materials. There are trade barriers. There are export restrictions that we should all be aware of and that we need to work on. And there are very real political, I think, interests in finding an explanation for how we got to this place that absolve governments around the world from their own policy decisions that they made in the past. In the United States, again, it was the declared policy of the previous administration, as well as this one, that we would vaccinate healthy college kids and go all down the line and offer a vaccine to everybody who wants it before we start sharing any with grandmothers in Burkina Faso. That was the policy. You can agree with it or disagree with it, but that was policy. We had export restrictions in place before a lot of other countries did. And that, too, contributed to unequal access of vaccines around the world. Another thing that was predictable was that politicians and governments around the world who want to be seen as proactive, on the ball, in control, for a long time were actually very indecisive, very unsure about how to address the COVID problem, which has so many dimensions. Vaccines are only one of those. But with respect to vaccines, not many governments took decisive action, put money on the table, put bets on multiple horses, before we knew whether these vaccines would work, would be approved. And it was governments in middle-income countries who now, I think, justifiably are concerned that they’re not getting fast enough access, who didn’t have the means and who didn’t have the decision-making structure to place the same bets on multiple horses, if you will, that were placed in the relatively more wealthy, global North and global West. But there is, I think, a really good and, with hindsight, predictable explanation of how we got to this place, and I think it teaches us something about how to fix the problem going forward. So why will the waiver not work? Well, first of all, with complex technology like vaccines, Lori touched on it, reverse engineering, like you would for a small molecule drug, is much more difficult if not impossible. But it depends very much more than small molecule drugs on cooperation, on voluntary transfer of technology, and on mutual assistance. We have seen as part of the pandemic response an unprecedented level of collaborations and cooperation and no indication that IP has stood in the way of the pandemic response. The waiver proponents have found zero credible examples of where IP has actually been an obstacle, where somebody has tried to block somebody else from developing a COVID vaccine or other COVID countermeasure, right? It’s not there. Second, the myth of this vast global capacity to manufacture COVID vaccines that somehow exists out there is unsubstantiated and frankly, in my opinion, untrue. But there is no such thing as vast untapped, idle capacity that could be turned around on a dime to start making COVID vaccines within weeks or even months. This capacity needs to be built; it needs to be established. And at a time when time is of the essence to beat this pandemic, starting capacity-building discussions is helpful, but it won’t be the answer to beat this pandemic. It will be the answer if we do everything right to beating the next pandemic. And if we learn any lesson of this, and then I will stop, is that the COVID waiver as well as the situation in which we find ourselves — if anything, it’s a reminder that we definitely have to take global capacity-building more seriously than we did in the past. That is true for the global North, as well as for middle-income countries — all of whom have to dedicate themselves much more determinedly to pandemic preparedness. And there’s a need to invest both in preparedness and in public health systems that hasn’t happened in the wake of past pandemic threats. This is what we will need to do. We will need to reduce export restrictions, and we will need to rededicate ourselves to preparing for the next pandemic. As far as this pandemic goes, there are 11 vaccines around the world that are already being shot into arms, only four of which come from the global North. How many more vaccines do we want? I don’t know, maybe 11 is enough if we start making more of them. But there are manufacturers around the world who know how to do this — including in China, including in India, and including in Russia. All developed their homegrown vaccines, apparently without interference by IP rights, right? So let’s make more of those. I think that’s going to be the more practical and realistic answer to solving the problem. And we need to lean on governments to stop export controls and to dedicate themselves to more global equity.
9/18/21
SeptOct - DA - Infrastructure
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Samantha Mclaughlin Infrastructure passes now with limited corporation support, but increased big Pharma backlash causes it to fail Waldman 8/31 Paul, opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. Before joining The Post, he worked at an advocacy group, edited an online magazine, taught at university and worked on political campaigns. He has authored or co-authored four books on media and politics, and his work has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines. He is also a senior writer at the American Prospect, “Opinion: Democrats, don’t knuckle under to corporations on the reconciliation bill”, 08-31-2021, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/31/democrats-dont-knuckle-under-corporations-reconciliation-bill///pranav The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate and awaits action in the House was in some ways a model of bipartisanship, supported by some Republicans as well as all the chamber’s Democrats, and given a boost from traditionally Republican business groups. That wasn’t a surprise; big corporations need infrastructure to do business. If the government pays for better roads, a more resilient electrical grid and wider availability of broadband, it’ll probably help the bottom line. But what happens when the government suggests addressing Americans’ needs and asks those corporations to help pay for it? This is what happens: A torrent of political groups representing some of the country’s most influential corporations — including ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and the Walt Disney Company — is laying the groundwork for a massive lobbying blitz to stop Congress from enacting significant swaths of President Biden’s $3.5 trillion economic agenda. The emerging opposition appears to be vast, spanning drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers and oil-and-gas giants. In recent weeks, top Washington organizations representing these and other industries have started strategizing behind the scenes, seeking to battle back key elements in Democrats proposed overhaul to federal health care, education and safety net programs. This campaign will have lots of behind-the-scenes pressure: Together, these companies employ a group of lobbyists that are approximately equal in number to China’s People’s Liberation Army — as well as online and TV ads coming to a screen near you. So Democrats should now ask themselves: What are we doing here? As in, why did we decide to run for Congress? Because there are some moments that test your resolve, in which you have to ask what the purpose of public service is, and whether it’s more than just staying in your job for as long as possible. There are disagreements among Democrats about what should be in the final bill, and it’s almost certain that these corporations will have some success in stripping away some provisions they find threatening. There’s an increase in the corporate tax rate (though under every proposal, it would still be less than before the 2017 Republican tax cut). There’s money to boost Internal Revenue Service enforcement of existing tax laws, which the people who run corporations don’t like; an overstretched, overworked IRS that can’t manage to audit the super-rich is just how CEOs like things. Perhaps most threatening is the proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs, as they are currently barred by law from doing. Democrats insist that change would pay for much of the trillions of dollars in new and beefed-up social programs this bill creates. Big Pharma hates the plan – empirics – err neg our ev literally cites their press releases PhRMA ’21 The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading innovative biopharmaceutical research companies, which are devoted to discovering and developing medicines that enable patients to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Since 2000, PhRMA member companies have invested nearly $1 trillion in the search for new treatments and cures, including an estimated $83 billion in 2019 alone, “PhRMA Statement on WTO TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver”, 05-05-2021, https://www.phrma.org/coronavirus/phrma-statement-on-wto-trips-intellectual-property-waiver//pranav WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 5, 2021) – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) president and CEO Stephen J. Ubl made the following statement after the United States Trade Representative expressed support for a proposal to waive patent protections for COVID-19 medicines: “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. “This change in longstanding American policy will not save lives. It also flies in the face of President Biden’s stated policy of building up American infrastructure and creating jobs by handing over American innovations to countries looking to undermine our leadership in biomedical discovery. This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials. These are the real challenges we face that this empty promise ignores. “In the past few days alone, we’ve seen more American vaccine exports, increased production targets from manufacturers, new commitments to COVAX and unprecedented aid for India during its devastating COVID-19 surge. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are fully committed to providing global access to COVID-19 vaccines, and they are collaborating at a scale that was previously unimaginable, including more than 200 manufacturing and other partnerships to date. The biopharmaceutical industry shares the goal to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, and we hope we can all re-focus on that shared objective.” They lash out against infra and use COVID clout to kill it – they have public support, and a win now postpones reform indefinitely which turns case Fuchs et al. 09/02 Hailey Fuchs attended Yale University and was an inaugural Bradlee Fellow for The Washington Post, where she reported on national politics, Alice Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering the Capitol Hill beat. Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered federal policy and politics for Talking Points Memo, Megan Wilson is a health care and influence reporter at POLITICO, “Drug industry banks on its Covid clout to halt Dems’ push on prices”, 09-02-2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/02/drug-prices-democrats-lobbying-508127//pranav As Democrats prepare a massive overhaul of prescription drug policy, major pharmaceutical companies are mounting a lobbying campaign against it, arguing that the effort could undermine a Covid fight likely to last far longer than originally expected. In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have issued warnings about the reconciliation package now moving through both chambers of Congress that is set to include language allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs, which could generate billions of dollars in savings. In those conversations, K Street insiders say, lobbyists have explicitly mentioned that the fight against the coronavirus will almost certainly extend beyond the current surge of the Delta variant. And they’re arguing that now isn’t the time to hit the industry with new regulations or taxes, particularly in light of its successful efforts to swiftly develop vaccines for the virus. “For years, politicians have been saying that the federal government can interfere in the price of medicines and patients won’t suffer any harm,” said Brian Newell, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, in a statement. “But in countries where this already happens, people experience fewer choices and less access to prescription medicines. Patients know if something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.” The escalating warnings from the pharmaceutical industry are part of what is expected to be one of the more dramatic and expensive lobbying fights in recent memory, and a heightened repeat of the industry’s pushback to actions by former President Donald Trump to target drug prices. The proposal now under consideration in Democrats’ reconciliation package could save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars by leveraging its ability to purchase prescription drugs, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Without those funds, Democrats won’t be able to pay for the rest of the health care agenda they’ve promised to voters, including expansions of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. But the plan has political power as more than a revenue raiser. Party leaders — from President Joe Biden to Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — are touting it as one of the most important components of the $3.5 trillion package, with the potential to lower out-of-pocket health spending for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Outside advocates have also zeroed in on it as the most consequential policy fight on the horizon. “This is the best chance that we have seen in a couple of decades to enact meaningful reforms to drug pricing policy in the United States that will lower the prices of prescription drugs, and it’s very clear that the drug companies are going all out to stop it,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “This is Armageddon for pharma.” Progressive Democrats and their outside allies believe they’re closer than they’ve been in decades to imposing some price controls, and worry that failure to do so this year will delay progress indefinitely given the possibility of the party losing one or more chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms. In April, the House passed a fairly aggressive version — H.R. 3 (117) — though a handful of moderate Democrats friendly to the industry have threatened to block it when it comes back to the floor for a vote later this fall. Leadership has largely shrugged off this threat, banking on the fact that the most vulnerable frontline Democrats are vocally in favor of the policy, while most of the dissenters sit in safe blue districts. The Senate is designing its own version, outlined by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in June, as a middle ground between HR3 and the more narrow, bipartisan bill he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put forward last Congress. A senior Senate Democratic aide confirmed to POLITICO that the bill is nearly complete and that they’re in the process of shopping it around to undecided senators to make sure it has enough support to move forward in the 50-50 upper chamber. “It makes sense to get buy-in before releasing it rather than releasing it with fingers crossed and then tweaking it once members complain,” the aide said. But the reform push is coming at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is working hand-in-hand with government officials to combat the pandemic and enjoying a boost in public opinion as a result, even as drug costs continue to rise. The companies claim that fundamental changes to their bottom line — in addition to the Medicare provision, the reconciliation bill will likely raise corporate tax rate significantly, as high as 28 percent (a jump of 7 percentage points) — will threaten its current investments in research and development at a historically critical juncture. With the final draft of the bill expected in the coming weeks, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, is taking its case public. The group has recently spent at least seven figures on ads pressuring Congress not to change Medicare drug policy. Big pharma always wins – independently kills aff solvency bc it causes the plan to be watered down so much that de facto monopolies can survive Florko and Facher ‘19 Nicholas Florko is a Stat News Washington correspondent and Lev Facher is Stat News health and life sciences writer, “How pharma, under attack from all sides, keeps winning in Washington”, 07-16-2019, Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/16/pharma-still-winning///pranav It does not seem to matter how angrily President Trump tweets, how pointedly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lobs a critique, or how shrewdly health secretary Alex Azar drafts a regulatory change. The pharmaceutical industry is still winning in Washington. In the past month alone, drug makers and the army of lobbyists they employ pressured a Republican senator not to push forward a bill that would have limited some of their intellectual property rights, according to lobbyists and industry representatives. They managed to water down another before it was added to a legislative package aimed at lowering health care costs. Lobbyists also convinced yet another GOP lawmaker — once bombastically opposed to the industry’s patent tactics — to publicly commit to softening his own legislation on the topic, as STAT reported last month. Even off Capitol Hill, they found a way to block perhaps the Trump administration’s most substantial anti-industry accomplishment in the past two years: a rule that would have required drug companies to list their prices in television ads. To pick their way through the policy minefield, drug makers have successfully deployed dozens of lobbyists and devoted record-breaking sums to their federal advocacy efforts. But there is also a seemingly new strategy in play: industry CEOs have targeted their campaign donations this year on a pair of vulnerable Republican lawmakers — and then called on them not to upend the industry’s business model. In more than a dozen interviews by STAT with an array of industry employees, Capitol Hill staff, lobbyists, policy analysts, and advocates for lower drug prices, however, an unmistakable disconnect emerges. Even though Washington has stepped up its rhetorical attacks on the industry, and focused its policymaking efforts on reining in high drug prices, the pharmaceutical industry’s time-honored lobbying and advocacy strategies have kept both lawmakers and the Trump administration from landing any of their prescription-drug punches. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement to STAT. Durbin, who recently saw the industry successfully oppose his proposal to curtail some of the industry’s patent maneuvering, added that, “Pharma’s billions allow them to continue to rip off American families and taxpayers.” The industry doesn’t get all the credit; it has also benefited from a fractured Congress and discord between President Trump’s most senior health care advisers. PhRMA, the drug industry’s largest lobbying group here, declined to comment for this article. But industry leaders have broadly argued against efforts to rein in the industry’s practices in terms of price hikes and patents, making the case that that could irreparably stifle medical innovation. The battle is far from over, and industry representatives and lobbyists are quick to hypothesize that the worst, for them, is yet to come. They point to several ongoing legislative initiatives, including in the Senate Finance Committee, that could take more concerted direct aim at their pricing strategies in Medicare. They’re waiting, too, to see if House Democrats can cut a drug pricing deal with the White House to empower Medicare to negotiate at least some drug prices. Another pending regulation, loathed by drug makers, might tie their pricing decisions in Medicare to an index of international prices. They’ve also bemoaned the Trump administration’s decision last week to abandon a policy change that would have ended drug rebates — which, the pharmaceutical industry has said, could have given drug makers more space to lower their prices voluntarily. “We’re getting killed!” one pharma lobbyist told STAT. Of course, the Trump administration’s supposedly devastating decision to abandon that proposal simply maintains the status quo. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers.” n Valentine’s Day, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) enjoyed a showering of love that is familiar in Washington: a flood of campaign contributions, many at the federal limit of $2,800 for a candidate or $5,000 for an affiliated political committee. One donation came from Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, who donated $5,000 to Tillis and another $10,000 to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and associated campaign committees. Another came from Kenneth Frazier, the top executive at Merck. The Tillis campaign committee eventually cashed checks from CEOs and other high-ranking executives at those companies as well as Amgen, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Bristol Myers-Squibb, plus two high-ranking officials at the advocacy group PhRMA. Six lobbyists at one firm that works with PhRMA, BGR, also combined to contribute $100,000 to a bevy of Republican lawmakers and the party’s campaign arms. Tillis raised an additional $64,500 from drug industry political action committees in the past quarter, according to disclosures released on Monday. A Pfizer spokeswoman declined to comment about Bourla’s contributions, and representatives for the other companies did not respond to STAT’s request for comment. Tills was one of few individual lawmakers — in many cases, the only one — to whom the executives had written personal checks during the current election cycle. While drug industry CEOs frequently contribute to political committees for congressional leadership, the breadth of executives who donated Tillis specifically is notable, particularly considering his outspoken role on pharmaceutical industry issues. While lobbyists pushed back on the notion that campaign contributions directly influence votes, the donations targeted so specifically to a particular candidate could be seen as a prime example of Washington’s system for rewarding loyalty and how industries protect their interests. The same PhRMA PAC that donated to Tillis has given generously in recent years: nearly $200,000 in the 2018 campaign cycle, roughly 58 of which was targeted toward Republicans. Drug industry PACs donated $10.3 million in total in that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The figure two years before was even higher: a total of $12.2 million from industry-aligned PACs alone. It is no accident that the pharmaceutical industry has maintained its reputation among the nation’s most powerful lobbies, said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks political influence. “Their access and influence goes beyond this Congress or even the administration,” Krumholz said in an interview, adding that she “was struggling to think of evidence” it had waned. Pharma has a reputation here for winning on policy — often thanks to the lawmakers who are among the biggest recipients of the millions that drug corporations, employees, and the industry political arms donate each year. Even as the rhetoric has escalated, the industry has quietly worked to insulate itself from any major legislative changes. Take, for example, a recent about-face from Cornyn, the Texas Republican who took in some campaign cash alongside Tillis. As recently as February, Cornyn seemed to be positioning himself as a rare Republican figurehead for anti-pharma congressional wrath. At a widely publicized hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he went head-to-head with AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez, pressing him to explain why the company had filed more than 100 patents on its blockbuster arthritis drug Humira. Cornyn introduced legislation soon after the skirmish to crack down on patent “thicketing,” a term for a drug company tactic to accumulate tens, if not hundreds, of patents to shield a drug from potential generic competition. Pharma sprung into action. They recruited congressional allies, including Tillis, to pressure Cornyn to significantly rework the bill, and they succeeded. The version of the bill that eventually cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee was stripped of language that would have empowered the Federal Trade Commission to go after patent thicketing. Instead, the bill limited how many patents a drug maker could assert in a patent lawsuit. The new version of the bill lost “a lot of teeth” and “solves a narrower problem in a narrow way,” advocates told STAT when the change was first introduced. It is far from the only example of the industry’s aggressive interventions to water down legislation. “In lots of ways they’re like the National Rifle Association, because they have an incredible power to squash out any negative opinion, nor to feel any of the ill effects of those things,” said Pallavi Damani Kumar, an American University crisis communications professor who once worked in media relations for drug manufacturers. “It just speaks to how incredibly savvy they are.” Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists also successfully fought to keep another anti-drug industry patent proposal from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) out of a bipartisan drug pricing package moving through the Senate HELP Committee. The legislation would have allowed the FDA to approve cheaper versions of drugs, even when the more expensive product was protected by certain patents. Cassidy’s proposal never even made it into the HELP package. As the lobbyist who bemoaned the withdrawal of the rebate rule put it, Cassidy “simmered down” in the face of industry pressure. In recent weeks, the industry had targeted Cassidy in particular, in recent weeks, for fear he would break with many of his GOP colleagues to support a cap on some price hikes for drugs purchased under Medicare, a proposal so far pushed only by Democrats. “Sen. Cassidy doesn’t care what lobbyists think — he is going to do what’s best for patients,” said Ty Bofferding, a Cassidy spokesman. “Sen. Cassidy fought for the committee to include the REMEDY Act in the package, despite strong opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.” The committee eventually included half the bill’s provisions, he added, as well as four other pieces of legislation meant to prevent the industry from taking advantage of the patent system. The drug industry also notched a win by watering down another proposal in that package from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would have blocked drug makers from suing over patents they didn’t disclose to the FDA. The version of the bill that actually made it into the package doesn’t block drug makers from suing, but instead directs the FDA to create a public list of companies that fail to disclose their patents. “This change is a big win for drug makers,” Michael Carrier, a Rutgers University professor and expert on patent gaming, told STAT. “Shaming is something drug makers don’t seem worried about.” Matthew Lane, the executive director of the Coalition Against Patent Abuse, likewise added that the altered bill “doesn’t seem to be doing much anymore.” Not all of the pharma-endorsed changes, however, are self-serving. Patent experts and federal regulators too had raised concerns with some of the bill being proposed. Cornyn’s patent bill was particularly controversial. “These provisions encourage ‘fishing expeditions’ by zealous bureaucrats, politically motivated by the popularity of efforts to reduce drug prices and garner the political benefits of being seen to be pursuing these ends,” Kevin Noonan, a patent lawyer at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert and Berghoff wrote in a recent blog post, referring to the original Cornyn bill. Drug-pricing advocates said lobbyists have even managed to convince lawmakers to introduce some legislation they say has explicitly favored the drug industry, including intellectual property-focused legislation that would allow drug makers to patent human genes. That particular bill would “undo the bipartisan effort underway to fix pharma’s exploitation of the patent system,” said the Coalition Against Patent Abuse. And they were far from the only group raising concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 150 other groups wrote to lawmakers last month opposing the bill. Pharma’s list of policy victories goes on: Drug companies and allied patient groups forced the Trump administration to back off a proposal to make relatively minor changes to Medicare’s so-called protected classes policy. Currently, Medicare is required to cover all drugs for certain conditions, including depression and HIV. The Trump administration proposed in November that private Medicare plans should be able to remove certain drugs in those classes from their formularies, if the drugs were just new formulations of a cheaper, older version of the same drug, or when a drug spiked in price. But drug industry opposition helped convince the administration to spike that effort. A week ago, the industry struck its biggest blow yet. Three of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies —Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck — prevailed in a lawsuit to strike down a Trump administration requirement that they disclose list prices in television advertisements. The lack of congressional action — despite the Democratic enthusiasm and bipartisan appetite — is still further evidence of industry’s ability to stave off defeat. As the dozens of Democrats running for president ramp up their anti-pharma rhetoric, both Trump and progressives have begun to fret that Washington’s efforts have proven to be all bark and no bite. With two weeks remaining before the August recess and an escalating 2020 campaign, some advocates fear that the window for bold action is closing quickly. “It’s appalling that we are six months into this Congress and we haven’t seen meaningful legislation passed on American’s number one issue for this congress,” said Peter Maybarduk, who leads drug-pricing initiatives for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “Congress needs to get its act together.” Infra’s 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.
9/13/21
SeptOct - DA - Infrastructure v2
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 6 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit DL | Judge: Chris Theis Reconciliation passes now with limited corporation support, but increased big Pharma backlash causes it to fail Waldman 8/31 Paul, opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. Before joining The Post, he worked at an advocacy group, edited an online magazine, taught at university and worked on political campaigns. He has authored or co-authored four books on media and politics, and his work has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines. He is also a senior writer at the American Prospect, “Opinion: Democrats, don’t knuckle under to corporations on the reconciliation bill”, 08-31-2021, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/31/democrats-dont-knuckle-under-corporations-reconciliation-bill///pranav The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate and awaits action in the House was in some ways a model of bipartisanship, supported by some Republicans as well as all the chamber’s Democrats, and given a boost from traditionally Republican business groups. That wasn’t a surprise; big corporations need infrastructure to do business. If the government pays for better roads, a more resilient electrical grid and wider availability of broadband, it’ll probably help the bottom line. But what happens when the government suggests addressing Americans’ needs and asks those corporations to help pay for it? This is what happens: A torrent of political groups representing some of the country’s most influential corporations — including ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and the Walt Disney Company — is laying the groundwork for a massive lobbying blitz to stop Congress from enacting significant swaths of President Biden’s $3.5 trillion economic agenda. The emerging opposition appears to be vast, spanning drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers and oil-and-gas giants. In recent weeks, top Washington organizations representing these and other industries have started strategizing behind the scenes, seeking to battle back key elements in Democrats proposed overhaul to federal health care, education and safety net programs. This campaign will have lots of behind-the-scenes pressure: Together, these companies employ a group of lobbyists that are approximately equal in number to China’s People’s Liberation Army — as well as online and TV ads coming to a screen near you. So Democrats should now ask themselves: What are we doing here? As in, why did we decide to run for Congress? Because there are some moments that test your resolve, in which you have to ask what the purpose of public service is, and whether it’s more than just staying in your job for as long as possible. There are disagreements among Democrats about what should be in the final bill, and it’s almost certain that these corporations will have some success in stripping away some provisions they find threatening. There’s an increase in the corporate tax rate (though under every proposal, it would still be less than before the 2017 Republican tax cut). There’s money to boost Internal Revenue Service enforcement of existing tax laws, which the people who run corporations don’t like; an overstretched, overworked IRS that can’t manage to audit the super-rich is just how CEOs like things. Perhaps most threatening is the proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs, as they are currently barred by law from doing. Democrats insist that change would pay for much of the trillions of dollars in new and beefed-up social programs this bill creates. Big Pharma hates the plan – empirics – err neg our ev literally cites their press releases PhRMA ’21 The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading innovative biopharmaceutical research companies, which are devoted to discovering and developing medicines that enable patients to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Since 2000, PhRMA member companies have invested nearly $1 trillion in the search for new treatments and cures, including an estimated $83 billion in 2019 alone, “PhRMA Statement on WTO TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver”, 05-05-2021, https://www.phrma.org/coronavirus/phrma-statement-on-wto-trips-intellectual-property-waiver//pranav WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 5, 2021) – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) president and CEO Stephen J. Ubl made the following statement after the United States Trade Representative expressed support for a proposal to waive patent protections for COVID-19 medicines: “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. “This change in longstanding American policy will not save lives. It also flies in the face of President Biden’s stated policy of building up American infrastructure and creating jobs by handing over American innovations to countries looking to undermine our leadership in biomedical discovery. This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials. These are the real challenges we face that this empty promise ignores. “In the past few days alone, we’ve seen more American vaccine exports, increased production targets from manufacturers, new commitments to COVAX and unprecedented aid for India during its devastating COVID-19 surge. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are fully committed to providing global access to COVID-19 vaccines, and they are collaborating at a scale that was previously unimaginable, including more than 200 manufacturing and other partnerships to date. The biopharmaceutical industry shares the goal to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, and we hope we can all re-focus on that shared objective.” Plan requires significant PC which Biden can’t afford to spend– Pharma, GOP, allies, and long negotiations. Bhadrakumar ’21 M.K., Retired Ambassador; Columnist for Hindu and Deccan Herald Indian newspapers, Rediff.com, Asia Times and Strategic Culture Foundation, Moscow Previous positions: career diplomat for 30 years in the Indian Foreign Service: served in the Indian Embassy in Moscow (1975-1977; 1987-1998); Under Secretary (1977-1979), Joint Secretary (1992-1995), Director (1989-1991), Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan Division and Kashmir Unit, Foreign Ministry; held posts in the Indian Missions in Bonn, Colombo, Seoul; Charge d’Affaires, Indian embassies in Kuwait and Kabul; Acting/Deputy High Commissioner in Islamabad; Ambassador to Turkey and Uzbekistan., “Biden’s Decision on TRIPS Waiver is Political Theatre”, 05-08-2021, https://www.newsclick.in/biden-decision-TRIPS-waiver-political-theatre//pranav The US pharmaceutical industry and congressional Republicans have already gone on the offensive blasting Biden’s announcement saying it undermines incentives for American innovation. Besides, the argument goes, even with the patent waiver, vaccine manufacturing is a complex process and is not like simply flipping a switch. Sen. Richard Burr, the top Republican on the US Senate Health Committee, has denounced Biden’s decision: “Intellectual property protections are part of the reason we have these life-saving products; stripping these protections only ensures we won’t have the vaccines or treatments we need when the next pandemic occurs.” The Republican senators backed by Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks propose to introduce legislation to block the move. Clearly, Biden would rather spend his political capital on getting the necessary legislation through the Congress to advance his domestic reform agenda rather than spend time and energy to take on the pharmaceutical industry to burnish his image as a good Samaritan on the world stage. Conceivably, Biden could be counting on the “text-based negotiations” at the WTO dragging on for months, if not years, without reaching anywhere. The US support for the waiver could even be a tactic to convince pharmaceutical firms to back less drastic steps, like sharing technology and expanding joint ventures, to quickly boost global production. So far, COVID-19 vaccines have been distributed primarily to the wealthy countries that developed them, while the pandemic sweeps through poorer ones, such as India, and the real goal is, after all, expanded vaccine distribution. Biden is well aware that there will be huge opposition to the TRIPS waiver from the US’ European allies as well. The British press has reported that the UK has been in closed-door talks at the WTO in recent months along with the likes of Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, Singapore, the European Union and the US, who all opposed the idea. They lash out against infra and use COVID clout to kill it – they have public support, and a win now postpones reform indefinitely which turns case Fuchs et al. 09/02 Hailey Fuchs attended Yale University and was an inaugural Bradlee Fellow for The Washington Post, where she reported on national politics, Alice Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering the Capitol Hill beat. Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered federal policy and politics for Talking Points Memo, Megan Wilson is a health care and influence reporter at POLITICO, “Drug industry banks on its Covid clout to halt Dems’ push on prices”, 09-02-2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/02/drug-prices-democrats-lobbying-508127//pranav As Democrats prepare a massive overhaul of prescription drug policy, major pharmaceutical companies are mounting a lobbying campaign against it, arguing that the effort could undermine a Covid fight likely to last far longer than originally expected. In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have issued warnings about the reconciliation package now moving through both chambers of Congress that is set to include language allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs, which could generate billions of dollars in savings. In those conversations, K Street insiders say, lobbyists have explicitly mentioned that the fight against the coronavirus will almost certainly extend beyond the current surge of the Delta variant. And they’re arguing that now isn’t the time to hit the industry with new regulations or taxes, particularly in light of its successful efforts to swiftly develop vaccines for the virus. “For years, politicians have been saying that the federal government can interfere in the price of medicines and patients won’t suffer any harm,” said Brian Newell, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, in a statement. “But in countries where this already happens, people experience fewer choices and less access to prescription medicines. Patients know if something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.” The escalating warnings from the pharmaceutical industry are part of what is expected to be one of the more dramatic and expensive lobbying fights in recent memory, and a heightened repeat of the industry’s pushback to actions by former President Donald Trump to target drug prices. The proposal now under consideration in Democrats’ reconciliation package could save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars by leveraging its ability to purchase prescription drugs, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Without those funds, Democrats won’t be able to pay for the rest of the health care agenda they’ve promised to voters, including expansions of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. But the plan has political power as more than a revenue raiser. Party leaders — from President Joe Biden to Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — are touting it as one of the most important components of the $3.5 trillion package, with the potential to lower out-of-pocket health spending for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Outside advocates have also zeroed in on it as the most consequential policy fight on the horizon. “This is the best chance that we have seen in a couple of decades to enact meaningful reforms to drug pricing policy in the United States that will lower the prices of prescription drugs, and it’s very clear that the drug companies are going all out to stop it,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “This is Armageddon for pharma.” Progressive Democrats and their outside allies believe they’re closer than they’ve been in decades to imposing some price controls, and worry that failure to do so this year will delay progress indefinitely given the possibility of the party losing one or more chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms. In April, the House passed a fairly aggressive version — H.R. 3 (117) — though a handful of moderate Democrats friendly to the industry have threatened to block it when it comes back to the floor for a vote later this fall. Leadership has largely shrugged off this threat, banking on the fact that the most vulnerable frontline Democrats are vocally in favor of the policy, while most of the dissenters sit in safe blue districts. The Senate is designing its own version, outlined by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in June, as a middle ground between HR3 and the more narrow, bipartisan bill he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put forward last Congress. A senior Senate Democratic aide confirmed to POLITICO that the bill is nearly complete and that they’re in the process of shopping it around to undecided senators to make sure it has enough support to move forward in the 50-50 upper chamber. “It makes sense to get buy-in before releasing it rather than releasing it with fingers crossed and then tweaking it once members complain,” the aide said. But the reform push is coming at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is working hand-in-hand with government officials to combat the pandemic and enjoying a boost in public opinion as a result, even as drug costs continue to rise. The companies claim that fundamental changes to their bottom line — in addition to the Medicare provision, the reconciliation bill will likely raise corporate tax rate significantly, as high as 28 percent (a jump of 7 percentage points) — will threaten its current investments in research and development at a historically critical juncture. With the final draft of the bill expected in the coming weeks, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, is taking its case public. The group has recently spent at least seven figures on ads pressuring Congress not to change Medicare drug policy. Big pharma always wins – independently kills aff solvency bc it causes the plan to be watered down so much that de facto monopolies can survive Florko and Facher ‘19 Nicholas Florko is a Stat News Washington correspondent and Lev Facher is Stat News health and life sciences writer, “How pharma, under attack from all sides, keeps winning in Washington”, 07-16-2019, Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/16/pharma-still-winning///pranav It does not seem to matter how angrily President Trump tweets, how pointedly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lobs a critique, or how shrewdly health secretary Alex Azar drafts a regulatory change. The pharmaceutical industry is still winning in Washington. In the past month alone, drug makers and the army of lobbyists they employ pressured a Republican senator not to push forward a bill that would have limited some of their intellectual property rights, according to lobbyists and industry representatives. They managed to water down another before it was added to a legislative package aimed at lowering health care costs. Lobbyists also convinced yet another GOP lawmaker — once bombastically opposed to the industry’s patent tactics — to publicly commit to softening his own legislation on the topic, as STAT reported last month. Even off Capitol Hill, they found a way to block perhaps the Trump administration’s most substantial anti-industry accomplishment in the past two years: a rule that would have required drug companies to list their prices in television ads. To pick their way through the policy minefield, drug makers have successfully deployed dozens of lobbyists and devoted record-breaking sums to their federal advocacy efforts. But there is also a seemingly new strategy in play: industry CEOs have targeted their campaign donations this year on a pair of vulnerable Republican lawmakers — and then called on them not to upend the industry’s business model. In more than a dozen interviews by STAT with an array of industry employees, Capitol Hill staff, lobbyists, policy analysts, and advocates for lower drug prices, however, an unmistakable disconnect emerges. Even though Washington has stepped up its rhetorical attacks on the industry, and focused its policymaking efforts on reining in high drug prices, the pharmaceutical industry’s time-honored lobbying and advocacy strategies have kept both lawmakers and the Trump administration from landing any of their prescription-drug punches. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement to STAT. Durbin, who recently saw the industry successfully oppose his proposal to curtail some of the industry’s patent maneuvering, added that, “Pharma’s billions allow them to continue to rip off American families and taxpayers.” The industry doesn’t get all the credit; it has also benefited from a fractured Congress and discord between President Trump’s most senior health care advisers. PhRMA, the drug industry’s largest lobbying group here, declined to comment for this article. But industry leaders have broadly argued against efforts to rein in the industry’s practices in terms of price hikes and patents, making the case that that could irreparably stifle medical innovation. The battle is far from over, and industry representatives and lobbyists are quick to hypothesize that the worst, for them, is yet to come. They point to several ongoing legislative initiatives, including in the Senate Finance Committee, that could take more concerted direct aim at their pricing strategies in Medicare. They’re waiting, too, to see if House Democrats can cut a drug pricing deal with the White House to empower Medicare to negotiate at least some drug prices. Another pending regulation, loathed by drug makers, might tie their pricing decisions in Medicare to an index of international prices. They’ve also bemoaned the Trump administration’s decision last week to abandon a policy change that would have ended drug rebates — which, the pharmaceutical industry has said, could have given drug makers more space to lower their prices voluntarily. “We’re getting killed!” one pharma lobbyist told STAT. Of course, the Trump administration’s supposedly devastating decision to abandon that proposal simply maintains the status quo. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers.” n Valentine’s Day, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) enjoyed a showering of love that is familiar in Washington: a flood of campaign contributions, many at the federal limit of $2,800 for a candidate or $5,000 for an affiliated political committee. One donation came from Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, who donated $5,000 to Tillis and another $10,000 to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and associated campaign committees. Another came from Kenneth Frazier, the top executive at Merck. The Tillis campaign committee eventually cashed checks from CEOs and other high-ranking executives at those companies as well as Amgen, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Bristol Myers-Squibb, plus two high-ranking officials at the advocacy group PhRMA. Six lobbyists at one firm that works with PhRMA, BGR, also combined to contribute $100,000 to a bevy of Republican lawmakers and the party’s campaign arms. Tillis raised an additional $64,500 from drug industry political action committees in the past quarter, according to disclosures released on Monday. A Pfizer spokeswoman declined to comment about Bourla’s contributions, and representatives for the other companies did not respond to STAT’s request for comment. Tills was one of few individual lawmakers — in many cases, the only one — to whom the executives had written personal checks during the current election cycle. While drug industry CEOs frequently contribute to political committees for congressional leadership, the breadth of executives who donated Tillis specifically is notable, particularly considering his outspoken role on pharmaceutical industry issues. While lobbyists pushed back on the notion that campaign contributions directly influence votes, the donations targeted so specifically to a particular candidate could be seen as a prime example of Washington’s system for rewarding loyalty and how industries protect their interests. The same PhRMA PAC that donated to Tillis has given generously in recent years: nearly $200,000 in the 2018 campaign cycle, roughly 58 of which was targeted toward Republicans. Drug industry PACs donated $10.3 million in total in that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The figure two years before was even higher: a total of $12.2 million from industry-aligned PACs alone. It is no accident that the pharmaceutical industry has maintained its reputation among the nation’s most powerful lobbies, said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks political influence. “Their access and influence goes beyond this Congress or even the administration,” Krumholz said in an interview, adding that she “was struggling to think of evidence” it had waned. Pharma has a reputation here for winning on policy — often thanks to the lawmakers who are among the biggest recipients of the millions that drug corporations, employees, and the industry political arms donate each year. Even as the rhetoric has escalated, the industry has quietly worked to insulate itself from any major legislative changes. Take, for example, a recent about-face from Cornyn, the Texas Republican who took in some campaign cash alongside Tillis. As recently as February, Cornyn seemed to be positioning himself as a rare Republican figurehead for anti-pharma congressional wrath. At a widely publicized hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he went head-to-head with AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez, pressing him to explain why the company had filed more than 100 patents on its blockbuster arthritis drug Humira. Cornyn introduced legislation soon after the skirmish to crack down on patent “thicketing,” a term for a drug company tactic to accumulate tens, if not hundreds, of patents to shield a drug from potential generic competition. Pharma sprung into action. They recruited congressional allies, including Tillis, to pressure Cornyn to significantly rework the bill, and they succeeded. The version of the bill that eventually cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee was stripped of language that would have empowered the Federal Trade Commission to go after patent thicketing. Instead, the bill limited how many patents a drug maker could assert in a patent lawsuit. The new version of the bill lost “a lot of teeth” and “solves a narrower problem in a narrow way,” advocates told STAT when the change was first introduced. It is far from the only example of the industry’s aggressive interventions to water down legislation. “In lots of ways they’re like the National Rifle Association, because they have an incredible power to squash out any negative opinion, nor to feel any of the ill effects of those things,” said Pallavi Damani Kumar, an American University crisis communications professor who once worked in media relations for drug manufacturers. “It just speaks to how incredibly savvy they are.” Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists also successfully fought to keep another anti-drug industry patent proposal from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) out of a bipartisan drug pricing package moving through the Senate HELP Committee. The legislation would have allowed the FDA to approve cheaper versions of drugs, even when the more expensive product was protected by certain patents. Cassidy’s proposal never even made it into the HELP package. As the lobbyist who bemoaned the withdrawal of the rebate rule put it, Cassidy “simmered down” in the face of industry pressure. In recent weeks, the industry had targeted Cassidy in particular, in recent weeks, for fear he would break with many of his GOP colleagues to support a cap on some price hikes for drugs purchased under Medicare, a proposal so far pushed only by Democrats. “Sen. Cassidy doesn’t care what lobbyists think — he is going to do what’s best for patients,” said Ty Bofferding, a Cassidy spokesman. “Sen. Cassidy fought for the committee to include the REMEDY Act in the package, despite strong opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.” The committee eventually included half the bill’s provisions, he added, as well as four other pieces of legislation meant to prevent the industry from taking advantage of the patent system. The drug industry also notched a win by watering down another proposal in that package from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would have blocked drug makers from suing over patents they didn’t disclose to the FDA. The version of the bill that actually made it into the package doesn’t block drug makers from suing, but instead directs the FDA to create a public list of companies that fail to disclose their patents. “This change is a big win for drug makers,” Michael Carrier, a Rutgers University professor and expert on patent gaming, told STAT. “Shaming is something drug makers don’t seem worried about.” Matthew Lane, the executive director of the Coalition Against Patent Abuse, likewise added that the altered bill “doesn’t seem to be doing much anymore.” Not all of the pharma-endorsed changes, however, are self-serving. Patent experts and federal regulators too had raised concerns with some of the bill being proposed. Cornyn’s patent bill was particularly controversial. “These provisions encourage ‘fishing expeditions’ by zealous bureaucrats, politically motivated by the popularity of efforts to reduce drug prices and garner the political benefits of being seen to be pursuing these ends,” Kevin Noonan, a patent lawyer at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert and Berghoff wrote in a recent blog post, referring to the original Cornyn bill. Drug-pricing advocates said lobbyists have even managed to convince lawmakers to introduce some legislation they say has explicitly favored the drug industry, including intellectual property-focused legislation that would allow drug makers to patent human genes. That particular bill would “undo the bipartisan effort underway to fix pharma’s exploitation of the patent system,” said the Coalition Against Patent Abuse. And they were far from the only group raising concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 150 other groups wrote to lawmakers last month opposing the bill. Pharma’s list of policy victories goes on: Drug companies and allied patient groups forced the Trump administration to back off a proposal to make relatively minor changes to Medicare’s so-called protected classes policy. Currently, Medicare is required to cover all drugs for certain conditions, including depression and HIV. The Trump administration proposed in November that private Medicare plans should be able to remove certain drugs in those classes from their formularies, if the drugs were just new formulations of a cheaper, older version of the same drug, or when a drug spiked in price. But drug industry opposition helped convince the administration to spike that effort. A week ago, the industry struck its biggest blow yet. Three of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies —Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck — prevailed in a lawsuit to strike down a Trump administration requirement that they disclose list prices in television advertisements. The lack of congressional action — despite the Democratic enthusiasm and bipartisan appetite — is still further evidence of industry’s ability to stave off defeat. As the dozens of Democrats running for president ramp up their anti-pharma rhetoric, both Trump and progressives have begun to fret that Washington’s efforts have proven to be all bark and no bite. With two weeks remaining before the August recess and an escalating 2020 campaign, some advocates fear that the window for bold action is closing quickly. “It’s appalling that we are six months into this Congress and we haven’t seen meaningful legislation passed on American’s number one issue for this congress,” said Peter Maybarduk, who leads drug-pricing initiatives for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “Congress needs to get its act together.” Infra’s 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.
9/19/21
SeptOct - DA - Infrastructure v3
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 5 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart AW | Judge: Jeannine Lopez Soviet Union. 4 Biden PC is key to getting Manchin and Sinema on board and he won’t give up – it’s try or die and the margin of error is literally 0. Strauss 10/13 Daniel, Staff Writer @ The New Republic, “Has the Time Come for Biden to Knock Some Heads on Capitol Hill?”, 10-13-2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/163982/biden-reconciliation-cost-democrats//pranav At the same time, though, the White House has moved to a different phase of negotiations. Susan Rice, the director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, has become more visible in negotiations on the Hill, oftentimes spotted going in and out of meetings with White House National Economic Council director Brian Deese. Rice, according to multiple administration officials, has been involved in the reconciliation package talks for months, and lawmakers have looked to her as one of the point people within the administration on topics that fall under the DPC’s purview: Health care, childcare, housing. Deese and Rice have been “tag teaming” those meetings, one administration official said. “It’s just that as the negotiations have come to a head, she’s become a little more visible,” the official added. But veterans of past major Democratic policy battles warn about the limits of a White House that throws up its hands and says enough is enough. The White House has already gone out to the states, looking to rally support among the broader public by having Biden himself stump in key congressional districts. He has also used the power of the Oval Office to try to win over lawmakers like Sinema and Manchin. “Having dealt with situations like this, there is a point where the administration really doesn’t have a lot of leverage,” said former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. “They can use the media. They can use the president’s Oval Office presence to bring people down and persuade as much as they can, but ultimately there isn’t a lot of leverage, and when you’re at 50–50 and almost 50–50 in the House, every person is in a position to veto a particular proposal.” But Daschle said, so far, the White House has played its hand well in the negotiations. “I think the administration has played it about right. They’ve got to give the leaders enough flexibility,” Daschle said. Phil Schiliro, who served as the White House director of legislative affairs during Barack Obama’s presidency, stressed that right now the White House is in the common-ground phase of negotiating with lawmakers. “It really is about trying to find the opportunities to reach common ground, and that’s just a process,” Schiliro said. Still, increasingly, Democrats are having to face picking one of two choices: spending less or including fewer programs in a domestic policy package they hoped just about every Democrat running in 2022 could run on. “Here, I don’t know that there’s any magic to any number, as much as there’s getting the policies right,” Schiliro said. Publicly, the White House is trying to exude calm. Its latest deadline for moving a package forward is still a few weeks away. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday that Biden’s role, right now, as he remains very involved in negotiations, is “to find common ground so that we can move forward with an agenda that the American people demand we pass.” Privately, though, the White House and Washington Democrats in general know they’re fast approaching a different deadline—the moment when someone is going to have to come out and say whether to shrink the overall spending and duration of the package or include fewer programs. That is the only way for Democrats to win over the members they need to pass anything at all. The only Democrat with the necessary stature and the ear of the people who matter most to make that call is the president. Biden was the one who promised to unite as much of Congress as possible behind as large a domestic policy agenda as anyone in Washington had ever seen. Now he has to cut it. Big Pharma hates the plan – empirics – err neg our ev literally cites their press releases PhRMA ’21 The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading innovative biopharmaceutical research companies, which are devoted to discovering and developing medicines that enable patients to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Since 2000, PhRMA member companies have invested nearly $1 trillion in the search for new treatments and cures, including an estimated $83 billion in 2019 alone, “PhRMA Statement on WTO TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver”, 05-05-2021, https://www.phrma.org/coronavirus/phrma-statement-on-wto-trips-intellectual-property-waiver//pranav WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 5, 2021) – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) president and CEO Stephen J. Ubl made the following statement after the United States Trade Representative expressed support for a proposal to waive patent protections for COVID-19 medicines: “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. “This change in longstanding American policy will not save lives. It also flies in the face of President Biden’s stated policy of building up American infrastructure and creating jobs by handing over American innovations to countries looking to undermine our leadership in biomedical discovery. This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials. These are the real challenges we face that this empty promise ignores. “In the past few days alone, we’ve seen more American vaccine exports, increased production targets from manufacturers, new commitments to COVAX and unprecedented aid for India during its devastating COVID-19 surge. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are fully committed to providing global access to COVID-19 vaccines, and they are collaborating at a scale that was previously unimaginable, including more than 200 manufacturing and other partnerships to date. The biopharmaceutical industry shares the goal to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, and we hope we can all re-focus on that shared objective.” They lash out against infra and use COVID clout to kill it – they have public support, and a win now postpones reform indefinitely which turns case Fuchs et al. 09/02 Hailey Fuchs attended Yale University and was an inaugural Bradlee Fellow for The Washington Post, where she reported on national politics, Alice Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering the Capitol Hill beat. Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered federal policy and politics for Talking Points Memo, Megan Wilson is a health care and influence reporter at POLITICO, “Drug industry banks on its Covid clout to halt Dems’ push on prices”, 09-02-2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/02/drug-prices-democrats-lobbying-508127//pranav As Democrats prepare a massive overhaul of prescription drug policy, major pharmaceutical companies are mounting a lobbying campaign against it, arguing that the effort could undermine a Covid fight likely to last far longer than originally expected. In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have issued warnings about the reconciliation package now moving through both chambers of Congress that is set to include language allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs, which could generate billions of dollars in savings. In those conversations, K Street insiders say, lobbyists have explicitly mentioned that the fight against the coronavirus will almost certainly extend beyond the current surge of the Delta variant. And they’re arguing that now isn’t the time to hit the industry with new regulations or taxes, particularly in light of its successful efforts to swiftly develop vaccines for the virus. “For years, politicians have been saying that the federal government can interfere in the price of medicines and patients won’t suffer any harm,” said Brian Newell, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, in a statement. “But in countries where this already happens, people experience fewer choices and less access to prescription medicines. Patients know if something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.” The escalating warnings from the pharmaceutical industry are part of what is expected to be one of the more dramatic and expensive lobbying fights in recent memory, and a heightened repeat of the industry’s pushback to actions by former President Donald Trump to target drug prices. The proposal now under consideration in Democrats’ reconciliation package could save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars by leveraging its ability to purchase prescription drugs, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Without those funds, Democrats won’t be able to pay for the rest of the health care agenda they’ve promised to voters, including expansions of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. But the plan has political power as more than a revenue raiser. Party leaders — from President Joe Biden to Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — are touting it as one of the most important components of the $3.5 trillion package, with the potential to lower out-of-pocket health spending for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Outside advocates have also zeroed in on it as the most consequential policy fight on the horizon. “This is the best chance that we have seen in a couple of decades to enact meaningful reforms to drug pricing policy in the United States that will lower the prices of prescription drugs, and it’s very clear that the drug companies are going all out to stop it,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “This is Armageddon for pharma.” Progressive Democrats and their outside allies believe they’re closer than they’ve been in decades to imposing some price controls, and worry that failure to do so this year will delay progress indefinitely given the possibility of the party losing one or more chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms. In April, the House passed a fairly aggressive version — H.R. 3 (117) — though a handful of moderate Democrats friendly to the industry have threatened to block it when it comes back to the floor for a vote later this fall. Leadership has largely shrugged off this threat, banking on the fact that the most vulnerable frontline Democrats are vocally in favor of the policy, while most of the dissenters sit in safe blue districts. The Senate is designing its own version, outlined by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in June, as a middle ground between HR3 and the more narrow, bipartisan bill he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put forward last Congress. A senior Senate Democratic aide confirmed to POLITICO that the bill is nearly complete and that they’re in the process of shopping it around to undecided senators to make sure it has enough support to move forward in the 50-50 upper chamber. “It makes sense to get buy-in before releasing it rather than releasing it with fingers crossed and then tweaking it once members complain,” the aide said. But the reform push is coming at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is working hand-in-hand with government officials to combat the pandemic and enjoying a boost in public opinion as a result, even as drug costs continue to rise. The companies claim that fundamental changes to their bottom line — in addition to the Medicare provision, the reconciliation bill will likely raise corporate tax rate significantly, as high as 28 percent (a jump of 7 percentage points) — will threaten its current investments in research and development at a historically critical juncture. With the final draft of the bill expected in the coming weeks, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, is taking its case public. The group has recently spent at least seven figures on ads pressuring Congress not to change Medicare drug policy. Big pharma always wins – independently kills aff solvency bc it causes the plan to be watered down so much that de facto monopolies can survive Florko and Facher ‘19 Nicholas Florko is a Stat News Washington correspondent and Lev Facher is Stat News health and life sciences writer, “How pharma, under attack from all sides, keeps winning in Washington”, 07-16-2019, Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/16/pharma-still-winning///pranav It does not seem to matter how angrily President Trump tweets, how pointedly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lobs a critique, or how shrewdly health secretary Alex Azar drafts a regulatory change. The pharmaceutical industry is still winning in Washington. In the past month alone, drug makers and the army of lobbyists they employ pressured a Republican senator not to push forward a bill that would have limited some of their intellectual property rights, according to lobbyists and industry representatives. They managed to water down another before it was added to a legislative package aimed at lowering health care costs. Lobbyists also convinced yet another GOP lawmaker — once bombastically opposed to the industry’s patent tactics — to publicly commit to softening his own legislation on the topic, as STAT reported last month. Even off Capitol Hill, they found a way to block perhaps the Trump administration’s most substantial anti-industry accomplishment in the past two years: a rule that would have required drug companies to list their prices in television ads. To pick their way through the policy minefield, drug makers have successfully deployed dozens of lobbyists and devoted record-breaking sums to their federal advocacy efforts. But there is also a seemingly new strategy in play: industry CEOs have targeted their campaign donations this year on a pair of vulnerable Republican lawmakers — and then called on them not to upend the industry’s business model. In more than a dozen interviews by STAT with an array of industry employees, Capitol Hill staff, lobbyists, policy analysts, and advocates for lower drug prices, however, an unmistakable disconnect emerges. Even though Washington has stepped up its rhetorical attacks on the industry, and focused its policymaking efforts on reining in high drug prices, the pharmaceutical industry’s time-honored lobbying and advocacy strategies have kept both lawmakers and the Trump administration from landing any of their prescription-drug punches. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement to STAT. Durbin, who recently saw the industry successfully oppose his proposal to curtail some of the industry’s patent maneuvering, added that, “Pharma’s billions allow them to continue to rip off American families and taxpayers.” The industry doesn’t get all the credit; it has also benefited from a fractured Congress and discord between President Trump’s most senior health care advisers. PhRMA, the drug industry’s largest lobbying group here, declined to comment for this article. But industry leaders have broadly argued against efforts to rein in the industry’s practices in terms of price hikes and patents, making the case that that could irreparably stifle medical innovation. The battle is far from over, and industry representatives and lobbyists are quick to hypothesize that the worst, for them, is yet to come. They point to several ongoing legislative initiatives, including in the Senate Finance Committee, that could take more concerted direct aim at their pricing strategies in Medicare. They’re waiting, too, to see if House Democrats can cut a drug pricing deal with the White House to empower Medicare to negotiate at least some drug prices. Another pending regulation, loathed by drug makers, might tie their pricing decisions in Medicare to an index of international prices. They’ve also bemoaned the Trump administration’s decision last week to abandon a policy change that would have ended drug rebates — which, the pharmaceutical industry has said, could have given drug makers more space to lower their prices voluntarily. “We’re getting killed!” one pharma lobbyist told STAT. Of course, the Trump administration’s supposedly devastating decision to abandon that proposal simply maintains the status quo. “Big Pharma has replaced Big Tobacco as the most powerful brute in the ranks of Washington power brokers.” n Valentine’s Day, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) enjoyed a showering of love that is familiar in Washington: a flood of campaign contributions, many at the federal limit of $2,800 for a candidate or $5,000 for an affiliated political committee. One donation came from Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, who donated $5,000 to Tillis and another $10,000 to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and associated campaign committees. Another came from Kenneth Frazier, the top executive at Merck. The Tillis campaign committee eventually cashed checks from CEOs and other high-ranking executives at those companies as well as Amgen, Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Bristol Myers-Squibb, plus two high-ranking officials at the advocacy group PhRMA. Six lobbyists at one firm that works with PhRMA, BGR, also combined to contribute $100,000 to a bevy of Republican lawmakers and the party’s campaign arms. Tillis raised an additional $64,500 from drug industry political action committees in the past quarter, according to disclosures released on Monday. A Pfizer spokeswoman declined to comment about Bourla’s contributions, and representatives for the other companies did not respond to STAT’s request for comment. Tills was one of few individual lawmakers — in many cases, the only one — to whom the executives had written personal checks during the current election cycle. While drug industry CEOs frequently contribute to political committees for congressional leadership, the breadth of executives who donated Tillis specifically is notable, particularly considering his outspoken role on pharmaceutical industry issues. While lobbyists pushed back on the notion that campaign contributions directly influence votes, the donations targeted so specifically to a particular candidate could be seen as a prime example of Washington’s system for rewarding loyalty and how industries protect their interests. The same PhRMA PAC that donated to Tillis has given generously in recent years: nearly $200,000 in the 2018 campaign cycle, roughly 58 of which was targeted toward Republicans. Drug industry PACs donated $10.3 million in total in that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The figure two years before was even higher: a total of $12.2 million from industry-aligned PACs alone. It is no accident that the pharmaceutical industry has maintained its reputation among the nation’s most powerful lobbies, said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks political influence. “Their access and influence goes beyond this Congress or even the administration,” Krumholz said in an interview, adding that she “was struggling to think of evidence” it had waned. Pharma has a reputation here for winning on policy — often thanks to the lawmakers who are among the biggest recipients of the millions that drug corporations, employees, and the industry political arms donate each year. Even as the rhetoric has escalated, the industry has quietly worked to insulate itself from any major legislative changes. Take, for example, a recent about-face from Cornyn, the Texas Republican who took in some campaign cash alongside Tillis. As recently as February, Cornyn seemed to be positioning himself as a rare Republican figurehead for anti-pharma congressional wrath. At a widely publicized hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he went head-to-head with AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez, pressing him to explain why the company had filed more than 100 patents on its blockbuster arthritis drug Humira. Cornyn introduced legislation soon after the skirmish to crack down on patent “thicketing,” a term for a drug company tactic to accumulate tens, if not hundreds, of patents to shield a drug from potential generic competition. Pharma sprung into action. They recruited congressional allies, including Tillis, to pressure Cornyn to significantly rework the bill, and they succeeded. The version of the bill that eventually cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee was stripped of language that would have empowered the Federal Trade Commission to go after patent thicketing. Instead, the bill limited how many patents a drug maker could assert in a patent lawsuit. The new version of the bill lost “a lot of teeth” and “solves a narrower problem in a narrow way,” advocates told STAT when the change was first introduced. It is far from the only example of the industry’s aggressive interventions to water down legislation. “In lots of ways they’re like the National Rifle Association, because they have an incredible power to squash out any negative opinion, nor to feel any of the ill effects of those things,” said Pallavi Damani Kumar, an American University crisis communications professor who once worked in media relations for drug manufacturers. “It just speaks to how incredibly savvy they are.” Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists also successfully fought to keep another anti-drug industry patent proposal from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) out of a bipartisan drug pricing package moving through the Senate HELP Committee. The legislation would have allowed the FDA to approve cheaper versions of drugs, even when the more expensive product was protected by certain patents. Cassidy’s proposal never even made it into the HELP package. As the lobbyist who bemoaned the withdrawal of the rebate rule put it, Cassidy “simmered down” in the face of industry pressure. In recent weeks, the industry had targeted Cassidy in particular, in recent weeks, for fear he would break with many of his GOP colleagues to support a cap on some price hikes for drugs purchased under Medicare, a proposal so far pushed only by Democrats. “Sen. Cassidy doesn’t care what lobbyists think — he is going to do what’s best for patients,” said Ty Bofferding, a Cassidy spokesman. “Sen. Cassidy fought for the committee to include the REMEDY Act in the package, despite strong opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.” The committee eventually included half the bill’s provisions, he added, as well as four other pieces of legislation meant to prevent the industry from taking advantage of the patent system. The drug industry also notched a win by watering down another proposal in that package from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that would have blocked drug makers from suing over patents they didn’t disclose to the FDA. The version of the bill that actually made it into the package doesn’t block drug makers from suing, but instead directs the FDA to create a public list of companies that fail to disclose their patents. “This change is a big win for drug makers,” Michael Carrier, a Rutgers University professor and expert on patent gaming, told STAT. “Shaming is something drug makers don’t seem worried about.” Matthew Lane, the executive director of the Coalition Against Patent Abuse, likewise added that the altered bill “doesn’t seem to be doing much anymore.” Not all of the pharma-endorsed changes, however, are self-serving. Patent experts and federal regulators too had raised concerns with some of the bill being proposed. Cornyn’s patent bill was particularly controversial. “These provisions encourage ‘fishing expeditions’ by zealous bureaucrats, politically motivated by the popularity of efforts to reduce drug prices and garner the political benefits of being seen to be pursuing these ends,” Kevin Noonan, a patent lawyer at McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert and Berghoff wrote in a recent blog post, referring to the original Cornyn bill. Drug-pricing advocates said lobbyists have even managed to convince lawmakers to introduce some legislation they say has explicitly favored the drug industry, including intellectual property-focused legislation that would allow drug makers to patent human genes. That particular bill would “undo the bipartisan effort underway to fix pharma’s exploitation of the patent system,” said the Coalition Against Patent Abuse. And they were far from the only group raising concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 150 other groups wrote to lawmakers last month opposing the bill. Pharma’s list of policy victories goes on: Drug companies and allied patient groups forced the Trump administration to back off a proposal to make relatively minor changes to Medicare’s so-called protected classes policy. Currently, Medicare is required to cover all drugs for certain conditions, including depression and HIV. The Trump administration proposed in November that private Medicare plans should be able to remove certain drugs in those classes from their formularies, if the drugs were just new formulations of a cheaper, older version of the same drug, or when a drug spiked in price. But drug industry opposition helped convince the administration to spike that effort. A week ago, the industry struck its biggest blow yet. Three of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies —Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck — prevailed in a lawsuit to strike down a Trump administration requirement that they disclose list prices in television advertisements. The lack of congressional action — despite the Democratic enthusiasm and bipartisan appetite — is still further evidence of industry’s ability to stave off defeat. As the dozens of Democrats running for president ramp up their anti-pharma rhetoric, both Trump and progressives have begun to fret that Washington’s efforts have proven to be all bark and no bite. With two weeks remaining before the August recess and an escalating 2020 campaign, some advocates fear that the window for bold action is closing quickly. “It’s appalling that we are six months into this Congress and we haven’t seen meaningful legislation passed on American’s number one issue for this congress,” said Peter Maybarduk, who leads drug-pricing initiatives for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “Congress needs to get its act together.” Infra’s 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.
10/17/21
SeptOct - DA - Infrastructure v4
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lexington CH | Judge: Jada Stinnett Biden PC is key to getting Manchin and Sinema on board – continued negotiations tentatively get their votes – it’s try or die for Tuesday’s vote Edmondson and Cochrane 10/24 Catie Edmondson is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, covering Congress, Emily Cochrane is a 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, “Biden Meets With Manchin and Schumer as Democrats Race to Finish Social Policy Bill”, 10-24-2021, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/us/politics/biden-manchin-schumer-spending-bill.html//pranav WASHINGTON — President Biden huddled with key Democrats on Sunday to iron out crucial spending and tax provisions as they raced to wrap up their expansive social safety net legislation before his appearance at a U.N. climate summit next week. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said Democrats were close to completing the bill, displaying confidence that the negotiations over issues like paid leave, tax increases and Medicare benefits that have bedeviled the party for months would soon end. “We have 90 percent of the bill agreed to and written. We just have some of the last decisions to be made,” Ms. Pelosi said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that she hoped to pass an infrastructure bill that had already cleared the Senate and have a deal in hand on the social policy bill by the end of the week. “We’re pretty much there now.” Her comments came as Mr. Biden met with Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, one of the critical centrist holdouts on the budget bill. The White House called the breakfast at Mr. Biden’s Wilmington home a “productive discussion.” For weeks, intraparty divisions over the scope and size of their marquee domestic policy plan have delayed an agreement on how to trim the initial $3.5 trillion blueprint Democrats passed this year. In order to bypass united Republican opposition and pass the final bill, Democrats are using an arcane budget process known as reconciliation, which shields fiscal legislation from a filibuster but would require every Senate Democrat to unite behind the plan in the evenly divided chamber. The party’s margins in the House are not much more forgiving. Facing opposition over the $3.5 trillion price tag, White House and party leaders are coalescing around a cost of up to $2 trillion over 10 years. They have spent days negotiating primarily with Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona and another centrist holdout. House Democratic leaders hope to advance both a compromise reconciliation package and the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package. Liberals have so far balked at voting on the bipartisan deal until the more expansive domestic policy package — which is expected to address climate change, public education and health care — is agreed upon. But Democrats are facing a new sense of urgency to finish the legislation before Mr. Biden’s trip to a major United Nations climate change conference, where he hopes to point to the bill as proof that the United States is serious about leading the effort to fight global warming. “The president looked us in the eye, and he said: ‘I need this before I go and represent the United States in Glasgow. American prestige is on the line,’” Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who met with Mr. Biden last week at the White House, said on “Fox News Sunday.” Democrats are also increasingly eager to deliver the bipartisan legislation to Mr. Biden’s desk before elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey on Nov. 2, to show voters the party is making good on its promise to deliver sweeping social change. And a number of transportation programs will lapse at the end of the month without congressional action on either a stopgap extension or passage of the infrastructure bill, leading to possible furloughs. Big Pharma hates the plan – empirics – err neg our ev literally cites their press releases PhRMA ’21 The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) represents the country’s leading innovative biopharmaceutical research companies, which are devoted to discovering and developing medicines that enable patients to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. Since 2000, PhRMA member companies have invested nearly $1 trillion in the search for new treatments and cures, including an estimated $83 billion in 2019 alone, “PhRMA Statement on WTO TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver”, 05-05-2021, https://www.phrma.org/coronavirus/phrma-statement-on-wto-trips-intellectual-property-waiver//pranav WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 5, 2021) – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) president and CEO Stephen J. Ubl made the following statement after the United States Trade Representative expressed support for a proposal to waive patent protections for COVID-19 medicines: “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration has taken an unprecedented step that will undermine our global response to the pandemic and compromise safety. This decision will sow confusion between public and private partners, further weaken already strained supply chains and foster the proliferation of counterfeit vaccines. “This change in longstanding American policy will not save lives. It also flies in the face of President Biden’s stated policy of building up American infrastructure and creating jobs by handing over American innovations to countries looking to undermine our leadership in biomedical discovery. This decision does nothing to address the real challenges to getting more shots in arms, including last-mile distribution and limited availability of raw materials. These are the real challenges we face that this empty promise ignores. “In the past few days alone, we’ve seen more American vaccine exports, increased production targets from manufacturers, new commitments to COVAX and unprecedented aid for India during its devastating COVID-19 surge. Biopharmaceutical manufacturers are fully committed to providing global access to COVID-19 vaccines, and they are collaborating at a scale that was previously unimaginable, including more than 200 manufacturing and other partnerships to date. The biopharmaceutical industry shares the goal to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, and we hope we can all re-focus on that shared objective.” They lash out against infra and use COVID clout to kill it – they have public support, and a win now postpones reform indefinitely which turns case Fuchs et al. 09/02 Hailey Fuchs attended Yale University and was an inaugural Bradlee Fellow for The Washington Post, where she reported on national politics, Alice Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering the Capitol Hill beat. Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered federal policy and politics for Talking Points Memo, Megan Wilson is a health care and influence reporter at POLITICO, “Drug industry banks on its Covid clout to halt Dems’ push on prices”, 09-02-2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/02/drug-prices-democrats-lobbying-508127//pranav As Democrats prepare a massive overhaul of prescription drug policy, major pharmaceutical companies are mounting a lobbying campaign against it, arguing that the effort could undermine a Covid fight likely to last far longer than originally expected. In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have issued warnings about the reconciliation package now moving through both chambers of Congress that is set to include language allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs, which could generate billions of dollars in savings. In those conversations, K Street insiders say, lobbyists have explicitly mentioned that the fight against the coronavirus will almost certainly extend beyond the current surge of the Delta variant. And they’re arguing that now isn’t the time to hit the industry with new regulations or taxes, particularly in light of its successful efforts to swiftly develop vaccines for the virus. “For years, politicians have been saying that the federal government can interfere in the price of medicines and patients won’t suffer any harm,” said Brian Newell, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, in a statement. “But in countries where this already happens, people experience fewer choices and less access to prescription medicines. Patients know if something sounds too good to be true, then it usually is.” The escalating warnings from the pharmaceutical industry are part of what is expected to be one of the more dramatic and expensive lobbying fights in recent memory, and a heightened repeat of the industry’s pushback to actions by former President Donald Trump to target drug prices. The proposal now under consideration in Democrats’ reconciliation package could save the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars by leveraging its ability to purchase prescription drugs, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Without those funds, Democrats won’t be able to pay for the rest of the health care agenda they’ve promised to voters, including expansions of Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. But the plan has political power as more than a revenue raiser. Party leaders — from President Joe Biden to Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — are touting it as one of the most important components of the $3.5 trillion package, with the potential to lower out-of-pocket health spending for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Outside advocates have also zeroed in on it as the most consequential policy fight on the horizon. “This is the best chance that we have seen in a couple of decades to enact meaningful reforms to drug pricing policy in the United States that will lower the prices of prescription drugs, and it’s very clear that the drug companies are going all out to stop it,” said David Mitchell, founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “This is Armageddon for pharma.” Progressive Democrats and their outside allies believe they’re closer than they’ve been in decades to imposing some price controls, and worry that failure to do so this year will delay progress indefinitely given the possibility of the party losing one or more chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms. In April, the House passed a fairly aggressive version — H.R. 3 (117) — though a handful of moderate Democrats friendly to the industry have threatened to block it when it comes back to the floor for a vote later this fall. Leadership has largely shrugged off this threat, banking on the fact that the most vulnerable frontline Democrats are vocally in favor of the policy, while most of the dissenters sit in safe blue districts. The Senate is designing its own version, outlined by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in June, as a middle ground between HR3 and the more narrow, bipartisan bill he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put forward last Congress. A senior Senate Democratic aide confirmed to POLITICO that the bill is nearly complete and that they’re in the process of shopping it around to undecided senators to make sure it has enough support to move forward in the 50-50 upper chamber. “It makes sense to get buy-in before releasing it rather than releasing it with fingers crossed and then tweaking it once members complain,” the aide said. But the reform push is coming at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is working hand-in-hand with government officials to combat the pandemic and enjoying a boost in public opinion as a result, even as drug costs continue to rise. The companies claim that fundamental changes to their bottom line — in addition to the Medicare provision, the reconciliation bill will likely raise corporate tax rate significantly, as high as 28 percent (a jump of 7 percentage points) — will threaten its current investments in research and development at a historically critical juncture. With the final draft of the bill expected in the coming weeks, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, is taking its case public. The group has recently spent at least seven figures on ads pressuring Congress not to change Medicare drug policy. Specifically, they flip Sinema – she’s in their pocket Perez and Sirota 10/08 Andrew Perez - Senior editor and reporter at The Daily Poster covering money and influence, David Sirota - Journalist. Denverite. Founder of The Daily Poster. Editor at Large of Jacobin. Columnist at The Guardian, ““They Pick The One””, https://www.dailyposter.com/they-pick-the-one///pranav “The pharmaceutical lobby is very savvy,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said earlier this week during a Daily Poster live chat. “They pick the one or two people they need to block things, on the relevant committees or at the relevant time." “It may differ from congress to congress,” explained Khanna, who is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We try to get 90-95 percent of the caucus. They are focused not on 90 percent, but the blockers.” In the current Congress, Big Pharma appears to have zeroed in on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., as one of their lead obstructionists to help kill or gut Democrats’ drug pricing plan. In the 2020 election cycle, pharmaceutical political action committees suddenly funneled more money to her than they did the whole six years she served in the U.S. House. Pharmaceutical companies can charge up to four times as much in the United States for name-brand pharmaceuticals than in other countries, in part because Congress barred Medicare from using its bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. President Joe Biden and most Democrats support lifting that prohibition in their reconciliation legislation, a move that would save hundreds of billions of dollars — but Sinema has emerged as the party’s most prominent opponent to the plan. Her heel turn on drug pricing is a dramatic shift. A one-time progressive activist, Sinema campaigned on lowering drug prices in her 2018 Senate race, and she was still calling on Congress to address rising drug costs as recently as last year, boasting on her Senate website that she was fighting to “ensure life-saving drugs” would be more affordable. But it’s clear now the pharmaceutical industry has been courting Sinema for some time. Indeed, in March 2021, as pharmaceutical PAC money was flooding into her campaign coffers, drug lobbyists were already bragging to Beltway reporters that they may have found their lead blocker in Sinema. Infra’s 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. Have a high threshold for climate skep—their ev is silly propaganda Santos and Feygina 17 Jessica M. Santos SCHOOL OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 and CLIMATE CENTRAL, PRINCETON, NJ. Irina Feygina CLIMATE CENTRAL, PRINCETON, NJ. “Responding to Climate Change Skepticism and the Ideological Divide.” Michigan Journal of Sustainability 5, no. 1 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mjs.12333712.0005.102.~Anop How can we make sense of skepticism in response to an urgent threat that may destroy civilization as we know it? Central to understanding climate skepticism is the psychological process of motivated reasoning—the unconscious process of making conclusions, developing preferences, or making decisions in ways that are influenced by, and often aim to align with, an individual’s needs, goals, beliefs, and desires (Kunda 1990). Motivated reasoning affects information processing and can result in ignoring, discounting, misunderstanding, or biasing information that conflicts with existing beliefs and attitudes, or to strengthening these despite the inconsistent nature of the information (Redlawsk 2002). Motivated reasoning serves to protect and maintain an individual’s beliefs, attitudes, worldviews, and perception of self (i.e. Dunning 1999; Lewandowsky and Oberauer 2016; Taber and Lodge 2006). In the domain of political decision-making, motivated reasoning is at play when voters support a policy if it is endorsed by their political party (Peterson et al. 2013), even if they would otherwise oppose it (Bolsen, Druckman, and Cook 2014). Similarly, presenting voters with negative information about their preferred candidate gives rise to stronger, rather than weaker, support (Redlawsk 2002). Individuals of both political parties are affected by motivated reasoning (e.g. Kahan 2013; Leeper and Slothuus 2014; Taber and Lodge 2006). Motivated reasoning is also at play in how people process and respond to scientific information about climate change. Conservative individuals who follow science news are less likely than their liberal counterparts to support climate change mitigation policy (Hart, Nisbet, and Myers 2015), while individuals who are motivated to reject scientific results due to partisanship are more likely to do so if they are educated and scientifically literate (Lewandowsky and Oberauer 2016). These findings suggest that presenting people with information about climate change are by no means sufficient to convince them of its reality, and that these effects are not ameliorated, but rather exacerbated, by education. Motivated reasoning underlies many mechanisms that contribute to climate change skepticism, discussed next.
10/31/21
SeptOct - DA - Innovation Hegemony
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard-Westlake OF | Judge: Mauchline, Rachel 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 COVID 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.
9/18/21
SeptOct - DA - Modi Adventurism
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Samantha Mclaughlin India’s COVID crisis has killed Modi’s appetite for international adventurism, but increasing vaccine production reverses the trend. Singh ’21 (Sushant; senior fellow with the Centre for Policy Research in India; 5-3-2021; “The End of Modi’s Global Dreams”; Foreign Policy; https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/03/india-vishwaguru-modi-second-wave-soft-power-self-sufficiency/; Accessed: 8-27-2021) India’s prime minister advanced a muscular foreign policy, but his mishandling of the pandemic is an embarrassing step back. In December 2004, when an earthquake and tsunami struck Asia, then-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided it was high time for India to stop accepting aid from other countries to deal with disasters and rely on itself instead. “We feel that we can cope with the situation on our own,” he said, “and we will take their help if needed.” It was a pointed political statement about India’s growing economic heft, and it wasn’t the last. Singh’s government offered aid to the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and to China after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Seen as a matter of national pride, an indicator of self-sufficiency, and a snub to nosy aid givers, the practice continued under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi despite pressure to change course during floods in the southern state of Kerala in 2018. Modi, who has consistently campaigned on virulent nationalism captured by the slogan “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (or self-reliant India), has been forced to abruptly change policy. Last week, with images of people dying on roads without oxygen and crematoriums for pet dogs being used for humans’ last rites as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed the country, his government accepted offers of help from nearly 40 other nations. Its diplomats have lobbied with foreign governments for oxygen plants and tankers, the arrival of medicines, and other supplies hailed on social media. “We have given assistance; we are getting assistance,” said Harsh Vardhan Shringla, the country’s top diplomat, to justify the embarrassing U-turn. “It shows an interdependent world. It shows a world that is working with each other.” The world may be working with each other, but it is not working for Modi in the realm of foreign policy. Rather, this is a moment of reckoning, triggered by the rampaging coronavirus. After seven years as prime minister, Modi’s hyper-nationalistic domestic agenda—including his ambition of making the country a “Vishwaguru” (or master to the world)—now lies in tatters. India, which has been envisaged since former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration became the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue’s lynchpin and focused other efforts in the Indo-Pacific strategy to counter China, will have to work harder to justify that role. Meanwhile, China has redoubled its efforts in India’s neighborhood since the second wave began, strengthening its existing ties with South Asian countries and contrasting its strength and reliability with India’s limitations. No doubt, New Delhi will be able to regain a certain sense of normalcy in a few months, but the mishandling of the pandemic has dealt it a weaker hand in ongoing backchannel talks with Islamabad and border negotiations with Beijing. But even longer-lasting damage has been done to India’s soft power, which was already dented under Modi’s authoritarian regime. This is a big problem for the government as it was soft power that allowed New Delhi to assert itself for a seat at the global high table to begin with. Front page images and video clips of constantly burning pyres and dying patients may recede from the foreground with time, but rebuilding India’s diplomatic heft and geopolitical prominence will need more than the passage of months and years. It will take a concerted effort, and S. Jaishankar, Modi’s chosen man to be India’s foreign minister, has so far appeared unequal to the task. In March, when the second wave of the pandemic started unfolding in India, Jaishankar’s ministry was busy issuing official statements and organizing social media storms against popstar Rihanna and climate change activist Greta Thunberg. On Thursday, at the peak of the health crisis, Jaishankar’s focus in a meeting with all the Indian ambassadors to various global capitals was on countering the so-called “one-sided” narrative in international media, which said Modi’s government had failed the country by its “incompetent” handling of the second pandemic wave. Until recently, Jaishankar was also the most enthusiastic promoter of the government’s Vaccine Maitri (or “Vaccine Friendship”) program, under which New Delhi supplied around 66.4 million doses of the India-made AstraZeneca vaccine to 95 countries in packing boxes marked prominently with large pictures of Modi. These vaccines were either commercially contracted, given as bilateral grants, or transferred under the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) scheme for poorer countries. Meanwhile, India’s own vaccination rollout has been dismal. Around 2 percent of Indians have been fully vaccinated, despite the country being the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer—a misstep that has emerged as one of the key culprits for India’s uncontrolled second wave. Having exported doses in a quest for personal glory, Modi is now awaiting 20 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines from the United States after abruptly reversing 16 years of policy, as indicated in its disaster management documents, against accepting bilateral aid. It is bad enough that India is getting help from traditional partners like the United States and Russia, but it is also accepting supplies coming from China, with which India’s relationship has been increasingly strained under Modi. And it must have been particularly galling to the prime minister that even Pakistan made an offer to help with medical supplies and equipment. So woeful is India’s situation that it has started importing 88,000 pounds of medical oxygen daily from the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Most Indians acknowledge their country was in an economic recession last year, and accepting bilateral aid is more of a compulsion than a choice. But how will they reconcile that with the fact that work on a $2 billion project to reconstruct a government office complex in the national capital, including building a new residence for Modi, continues unabated as an “essential service” during the pandemic? Modi boasted of having made India a Vishwaguru and personally enhancing national prestige through his numerous global trips. His ultranationalist supporters had started assuming India was already a global power in the same league as the United States and China. This feeling tied in with his domestic political positioning. Hindutva, or homogenized Hindu nationalism, was offered as the ideology that had made this supremacy possible. But now Modi’s supporters find their dreams of a global power shattered. They must instead confront the harsh reality of being citizens of a so-called “third world country,” which is dependent once again on the largesse of others. As the Indian economy continues to be hammered by the pandemic, there is little Modi can offer economically to his base. The edifice of nationalist pride, prestige, and global respect built by Modi on his so-called foreign-policy prowess has been demolished by the pandemic. The pandemic has hurt India in other ways too. Australia, a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad), has imposed a ban on its citizens from returning home, threatening five-year prison sentences, if they have spent time in India. In its first leaders’ summit in March, the grouping decided to provide a billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to the Indo-Pacific region by 2022. The vaccines were to be produced in India, funded by the United States and Japan, and distributed by Australia, in what was seen as the showpiece initiative to move the Quad away from its security-centric approach and soften its reputation as an anti-China grouping. With India struggling to produce vaccines for its own citizens hit by the pandemic, it is unlikely the Quad will be able to keep its scheme on schedule. In the bargain, New Delhi’s position as the lynchpin of the Quad stands considerably diminished. If India stumbles, the American dream of the Quad can never become a reality. Beijing has already moved in to take advantage of India’s misfortune to strengthen its ties with other South Asian countries. Last Tuesday, the Chinese foreign minister held a meeting with his counterparts from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka for cooperation against COVID-19. India was absent from the meeting. And although Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka have received some vaccine supplies from India and expect more, these countries are now looking toward Beijing for doses after New Delhi failed to keep up its commercial and COVAX commitments. In the race between the two Asian giants to be an attractive and reliable partner in South Asia, India seems to have finished behind China. China has also pressed its advantage along its restive border with India. After an initial disengagement in Ladakh, India, China refused to pull back any further from other Indian-held territories it had moved into last summer. It stonewalled Indian attempts to discuss these areas in the last round of talks between the two sides, and it has constructed permanent military infrastructure and deployed troops close to the disputed border. If there were ever a time for India to demonstrate its strength, it would be now. But the second wave of COVID-19 has forced the opposite. A similar impact will be felt during New Delhi’s ongoing backchannel talks with Islamabad, where Pakistan will likely try to take full advantage of any chinks in India’s armor. India cannot afford to walk away from those talks as it has already been forced to engage with Islamabad due to its own inability to handle a two-front threat from China and Pakistan. An economy and a country ravaged by the pandemic makes the dual threat an even more challenging proposition for India—and hands Pakistan an unexpected advantage in the talks.
Modi’s domestic support sets the course for his international policies – trust in his administration directly translates into Indian adventurism. Mishra et al. ’16 (Atul; contributor to the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre; January 2016; “The evolving domestic drivers of Indian foregin policy”; Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre; https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/195766/f9f6e4b3e8a2c703364e7fb102dbf413.pdf; Accessed: 8-28-2021) To inform answers to these questions, five broad categories of domestic influence that currently influence evolving Indian foreign policy decision-making processes are explored below: simple majority politics, the symbolism of Indian aspirations, the factor of Modi’s personality, regional states’ influence and business interests. Firstly and most simplistically, the BJP’s simple majority means a government that in theory is less constrained by regional political forces or alliance partners that can bring coalition politics to a grinding halt. Policy is then by definition allowed to be more rational and predictable in both the domestic and international environments. A related factor is that few in the BJP are seen to be able to challenge either Modi or BJP president Amit Shah. Like a other party in India, the BJP has disgruntled elements, but they are unlikely to cause serious foreign policy disruptions in the short term.8 As a result, the party’s projection of corporate unity and its marginalising of rebellious leaders can be expected to continue, especially given India’s need for sustained economic growth and social development. This basic current political reality has set the stage for confronting the issues that the Modi government was elected to deal with. Secondly, the symbolism of aspiration has acquired great substance through Modi. There has been a long-standing practice of paying occasional lip service to traditional Indian principles of foreign policy such as non-alignment, morality and human rights. But under Modi the hesitancy about India projecting itself as an aspirational and even aggressive international power is disappearing. For example, the BJP has sought to replace the five traditional international principles of panchsheel (a term associated with Buddhism) with the five new pillars of panchamrit or “five nectars” (a term unambiguously associated with Hinduism). These are: dignity, dialogue, security, shared prosperity and culture.9 While panchsheel sought to combine and balance the values of India and those of the West, panchamrit calls to mind the emphasis on non-West- ern, “Asian values” that do not necessarily fit well with the values of open, searching and public criticism, social equality, and radical dissent in politics. Further, Modi promises that India will now be guided by the “Three Cs” in its international relations: culture, commerce and connec- tivity (Economic Times, 2014). This is typified by the govern- ment’s unapologetic use of its religious and cultural resources – primarily Hinduism – as elements of soft power on the international stage.10 The declaration that June 21st would be International Yoga Day and Modi’s numerous religious/cultural gestures during his overseas visits support this perspective. Thirdly, the personality factor has returned to the centre of Indian diplomacy. Modi has recast Indian foreign policy in a vigorous and purposive – and above all personal – light. His image is that of a simple and hardworking man who is clearheaded, decisive, and incorruptible. Like neoliberal leaders of China (primarily the late Deng Xiaoping) and Singapore (the late Lee Kuan Yew), he has been described as a pragmatist. Although the term is ephemeral and something of a misfit (principally because Modi is economi- cally and politically ideological), it has been used to positively describe his business-like attitude to foreign affairs. He lends a personal touch to relations with powers greater than India, as was evident in the way India hosted U.S. president Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping,11 giving the impression that all the parties involved are at the same level and thus hiding power disparities. Modi breaks protocol, becomes informal when the occasion demands, and ably sells India as an investment and cultural destination. Although previous Indian leaders have historically promoted business with “strong” leaders whose democratic credentials are suspected by the international community, Modi has prioritised economic interests rather than democratic ideals and is at ease with such leaders. Finally, unlike other Indian leaders who conducted themselves in deference to established Indian traditions on international conduct built over decades, Modi comes across as unburdened by this legacy. He is neither understated nor regards himself as the leader of a post- colonial country who is conscious of his country’s lack of international clout. He has positioned himself as the leader of a young, aspiring country that has much to offer in terms of culture and human potential.
9/13/21
SeptOct - K - Settlerism vs Insulin
Tournament: Meadows | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Millard North NL | Judge: Claudia Ribear, Kabir Dubey, Heaven Montague Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose. The aff’s analysis of health overlooks structures of white supremacy and settler colonialism dictating healtb conditions for indigenous people which turns the case. Kashyap 20 Monika Batra Kashyap is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law, Ronald A. Peterson Law Clinic. J.D., University of California Berkeley School of Law. November 2020 California Law Review “U.S. Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and the Racially Disparate Impacts of COVID-19” https://www.californialawreview.org/settler-colonialism-white-supremacy-covid-19/aaditg A settler colonialism framework recognizes that the United States is a present-day settler colonial society whose laws, institutions, and systems of governance continue to enact an ongoing “structure of invasion” that persists to this day.55 ... Scholars across multiple disciplines have turned towards using a settler colonialism framework in their analyses to broaden understandings of how systems of subordination are structured in the United States.66 ... A framework of settler colonialism understands that the three foundational processes upon which the United States was built—Indigenous elimination, anti-Black racism, and immigrant exploitation—are ongoing processes that continue to shape present-day systemic inequities.77 In other words, a settler colonialism framework acknowledges the endurance of three ongoing “strategies of colonization” that continue to maintain settler colonialism’s structure of invasion: 1) strategies of elimination targeting Indigenous peoples; 2) strategies of subjugation targeting Black people (anti-Black racism); and 3) strategies of exploitation and exclusion targeting immigrants of color.88 ... Moreover, a settler colonialism framework acknowledges that the ongoing strategies of colonization continue to be fueled, enabled and bolstered by an elaborate set of racial logics that Andrea Smith describes as the “logics of White supremacy.”99 ... Smith argues that White supremacy in the U.S. context is enacted through three primary interrelated logics: 1) the view of Indigenous people as necessarily disappearing;1010 ... 2) the view of Black people as enslavable;1111 ... and 3) the view of immigrants of color as inferior and permanent “threats to the empire” who must either be exploited or excluded.1212 ... While the manifestations of these White supremacist logics may change over time, “they remain as persistently present today as they were five hundred years ago.”1313 This Essay will connect the persistent strategies, logics, and identities created by settler colonialism to the disparate health impacts of COVID-19 in Indigenous, Black, and immigrant of color communities in the United States. By offering a framework that uncovers the root causes of ongoing patterns of systemic oppression, this Essay hopes to inspire reform efforts that seek to alter such patterns by advancing reform efforts that are grounded in truth, justice, and reconciliation. I. Strategies of Indigenous Elimination: The Impacts of COVID-19 on Indigenous Communities Settler colonialism has eliminated Indigenous peoples in the United States through a host of strategies meant to obtain and maintain territorial control of the settler state.1414 As historian Patrick Wolfe explains, settler colonialism “requires the elimination of the owners of that territory, but not in any particular way.”1515 Elimination strategies employed by settler colonialism include genocidal violence, biological warfare through the introduction of infectious diseases, forced removal and relocation, confinement to reservations, child abduction, religious conversion, forced resocialization in residential boarding schools, and intricate biological and cultural assimilation programs that strip Indigenous people of their culture and replace it with settler culture.1616 White supremacist logics support the idea that Indigenous people are “nonhuman wild savages unsuited for civilization” who must therefore be eliminated, rendered expendable, or made invisible in order to justify dispossessing them of their lands.1717 ... These logics continue to underpin the removal of Indigenous people from settler spaces in both literal and conceptual ways.1818 ... For example, despite the fact that Indigenous peoples are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, these deaths rarely gain the national spotlight, and are instead rendered invisible.1919 ... Moreover, contemporary popular narratives that designate European settlers as the “founding fathers” and refer to the United States as a “nation of immigrants” erase the existence of Indigenous peoples and render them invisible.2020 ... Another significant way in which settler colonialism’s ongoing strategy of Indigenous elimination manifests today is through devastating health disparities in Indigenous communities, which result in higher death rates for Indigenous peoples.2121 ... Important medical research implicates settler colonialism in contributing to poor health outcomes and high mortality rates in Indigenous communities in the United States.2222 ... This research highlights the devastating health impacts resulting from the brutal dispossession of traditional lands, the forced relocation to unproductive and polluted lands contaminated by heavy metals and industrial waste, the introduction of infectious settler diseases, and the introduction of harmful substances such as tobacco and alcohol.2323 ... This research also affirms a report previously published by the World Health Organization finding that Indigenous health is significantly affected by factors related to loss of language and connection to the land, environmental deprivation, and spiritual, emotional, and mental disconnectedness resulting from the loss of Indigenous traditions, culture, and identity.2424 ... The research concludes that these “oppressive factors” caused by colonialism perpetuate “severe inequalities in Indigenous health status, unsatisfactory disease and vital statistics, impaired emotional and social wellbeing, and poor prospects for future generations.”2525 Indigenous Health Part 1, supra note 22, at 66. The devastating health impacts resulting from settler colonialism’s strategy of Indigenous elimination have led to disproportionately high rates of pre-existing health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease2626 ... that put Indigenous peoples at a higher risk of death by COVID-19.2727 ... And historical and structural inequities in federal funding—such as lack of support for municipal plumbing systems—have further exacerbated the health disparities that put Indigenous peoples at higher-risk in the COVID-19 crisis.2828 ... For example, 40 percent of Navajo households do not have access to running water, making it difficult to comply with handwashing recommendations.2929 ... As a result, Indigenous communities who were previously decimated by the imposition of settler diseases such as measles, whooping cough, small-pox, influenza, and tuberculosis continue to be eliminated by health disparities that make them disproportionately vulnerable to a new disease: COVID-19.3030 ... Today, Indigenous peoples in the United States are dying 3.2 times the rate of White people as a result of COVID-19.3131 The alternative is refusal – a political depression that recognizes reconciliation will never be enough and creates harmful optimism to the political. Instead, embrace an affective pessimism that grounds alternative futures. The question is not whether Native people want the world, but if the world wants Native people Belcourt 2016 (Billy-ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch,Political Depression in a Time of Reconciliation, Jan 15, 2016, http://activehistory.ca/2016/01/political-depression-in-a-time-of-reconciliation/)//NotJacob//recut anop It’s tough: knowing that you might not get the world you want and the world that wants you back, that your bones might never stop feeling achy and fragile from the wear and tear of mere existence, from the hard labour of getting through the day. Ours are bodies that have been depleted by time, that have been wrenched into a world they can’t properly bend or squirm into because our flesh is paradoxically both too much and not enough for it. In the wake of both eventful and slowed kinds of premature death, what does it mean that the state wants so eagerly to move Indigenous bodies, to touch them, so to speak? Reconciliation is an affective mess: it throws together and condenses histories of trauma and their shaky bodies and feelings into a neatly bordered desire; a desire to let go, to move on, to turn to the future with open arms, as it were. Reconciliation is stubbornly ambivalent in its potentiality, an object of desire that we’re not entirely certain how to acquire or substantiate, but one that the state – reified through the bodies of politicians, Indigenous or otherwise – is telling us we need. In fact, Justice Murray Sinclair noted that the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on December 15, 2015, puts us at the “threshold of a new era in this country.”1 I am interested in how life might be lived willfully and badly in the face of governmental forms of redress when many of us are stretched thin, how reconciliation, though instantiating a noticeable shift in the national affective atmosphere,2 doesn’t actually remake the substance of the social or the political such that we’re still tethered to scenes of living that can’t sustain us. What I am trying to get at is: reconciliation works insofar as it is a way of looking forward to being in this world, at the expense of more radical projects like decolonization that want to experiment with different strategies for survival.3 This way of doing things isn’t working and, because of that, optimism is hard to come by. According to cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, political depression emerges from the realization “that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.”4 It is the pestering sense that whatever you do, it won’t be enough; that things will continue uninterrupted, teasing you because something different is all you’ve wanted from the start. To be politically depressed is to worry about the temporal reach of neoliberal projects like reconciliation, to question their orientation toward the future because the present requires all of your energy in order to feel like anything but dying. Political depression is of a piece with a dispossessory enterprise that remakes the topography of the ordinary such that the labour of maintaining one’s life becomes too hard to keep up. We have to wait for the then and there in the here and now; how do we preserve ourselves until then? As Leanne Simpson points out, reconciliation has been reparative for some survivors, encouraging them to tell their stories, to keep going, so to speak.5 But, what of the gendered and racialized technologies of violence that created our scenes of living, scenes we’ve been forced to think are of our own choosing? Optimism for the work of reconciliation disappeared in the face of multiple crises: of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, of HIV infection rates, of mass incarceration, of diabetes, of suicide. Reconciliation, at once a heuristic and a form of statecraft, fakes a political that doesn’t actually exist as such, one that not only presupposes that we – Indigenous peoples, that is – are willing to stay attached to it, but that we are already folded into it, that we’ve already consented to it. What does it mean, for example, to consent to a nation-to-nation relationship if there are no other options to choose from? Reconciliation wants so badly to be a keyword of sorts, to contain so much inside its semantic confines, to be “wide-reaching in its explanatory power.”6 I’m not surprised things have started to leak all over the place. Decolonization might need something of an affective turn: I think there are ways of being attuned to our bodies such that we can gauge if our visceral responses are trained or not, parasitic or not. In short: what do our tears signal, what do his – Justin Trudeau’s – signal? We cry because pain holds our world together. I don’t want pain to hold our world together anymore. Perhaps admitting we are politically depressed is one of the most important things we could do in this day and age. When survival becomes radical and death becomes part and parcel of the ordinary itself, political depression might be our only point of departure. But, political depression is also about dreaming up alternatives that can sustain your attachments to life. Cvetkovich reminds us that we need “other affective tools for transformation” because hope and blind allegiance have failed too many of us too often.7 I am interested in the generative work of pessimism, how being fed up propels us onward, and keeps us grounded in the now, such that we can make it to the future, even if that’s just tomorrow. As Kim TallBear put it, we’ve been living in a post-apocalyptic world (in its ecological ruins and in the face of its crisis-making politics) for quite some time,8 one that exhausts our bodies to the point of depression and death and one that slowly removes us from the non-normative or the astray.9 We are stuck in the thick of things, left clinging to an impasse without an exit strategy. We might need reconciliation today, but Indigenous peoples need a more capacious world-building project for tomorrow, one that can bear all of us and the sovereignties built into our breathing. We should not be asked: do you want the world today? Instead, we should be asking: does the world want us?
10/31/21
SeptOct - K - Settlerism vs Jordan
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 4 | Opponent: Southlake Carroll PK | Judge: Annabelle Long Indigeneity connotates a state of non-ontology allowing for the construction of the human that legitimizes its self into a history of elimination, jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body to cohere settler temporality Belcourt 16. Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch, and his poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Red Rising Magazine, SAD Mag, mâmawi-âcimowak, PRISM International, and The Malahat Review. ("A POLTERGEIST MANIFESTO," 2016, Feral Feminism) vikas recut aaditg Admittedly, the feral is a precarious space from which to theorize, sullied with an injurability bound up in the work of liberal humanism as such, an enterprise that weaponizes a set of moral barometers to distribute ferality unevenly to differently citizened and raced bodies—ones that are too close for comfort and must be pushed outside arm’s reach. Perhaps ferality traverses a semantic line of flight commensurate¬ with that of savagery, barbarism, and lawlessness, concreting into one history of elimination: that is, a history of eliminating recalcitrant indigeneities incompatible within a supposedly hygienic social. The word savage comes from the Latin salvaticus, an alteration of silvaticus, meaning “wild,” literally “of the woods.” Of persons, it means “reckless, ungovernable” (“Savage”). In the space-time of settler states, savagery temporarily stands in for those subjectivities tethered to a supposedly waning form of indigeneity, one that came from the woods and, because of this, had to be jettisoned from or assimilated into the national body. Here is Audra Simpson on the history of Indian “lawlessness”: Its genealogy extends back to the earliest moments of recorded encounter, when Indians appeared to have no law, to be without order, and thus, to be in the colonizer’s most generous articulation of differentiation, in need of the trappings of civilization. “Law” may be one instrument of civilization, as a regulating technique of power that develops through the work upon a political body and a territory. (2014, 144) According to Simpson, the recognition of Indigenous peoples as lawless rendered them governable, motivating the settler state (here, Canada) to curate and thus contain atrophied indigeneities—and, consequently, their sovereignties, lands, and politics—within the borders of federal law (2014, 144-45). Similarly, in The Transit of Empire Jodi Byrd traces the epistemological gimmicks through which the concept of “Indianness” came to align with “the savage other” (2011, 27). For her, this alignment provided the “rationale for imperial domination” and continues to stalk philosophy’s patterns of thinking (ibid.). Simpson, writing about the Mohawks of Kahnawake, argues that “a fear of lawlessness” continues to haunt the colonial imaginary, thereby diminishing “Indigenous rights to trade and to act as sovereigns in their own territories” (2014, 145). We might take the following lyrics from the popular Disney film Pocahontas as an example of the ways indigeneity circulates as a feral signifier in colonial economies of meaning-making: Ratcliffe What can you expect From filthy little heathens? Their whole disgusting race is like a curse Their skin’s a hellish red They’re only good when dead They’re vermin, as I said And worse English settlers They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human. (Gabriel and Goldberg 1995) Savagery connotes a state of non-ontology: Indigenous peoples are forced to cling to a barely extant humanity and coterminously collapse into a putatively wretched form of animality. Savagery is lethal, and its Indian becomes the prehistoric alibi through which the human is constituted as such. Indigenous peoples have therefore labored to explain away this savagery, reifying whitened rubrics for proper citizenship and crafting a genre of life tangible within the scenes of living through that are constitutive of settler colonialism as such. These scenes, however, are dead set on destroying the remnants of that savagery, converting their casualties into morally compatible subjects deserving of rights and life in a multicultural state that stokes the liberal fantasy of life after racial trauma at the expense of decolonial flourishing itself. This paper is therefore interested in the subjectivities and forms of sociality that savagery destroys when applied from without, and the political work of appropriating that savagery in the name of decolonization. Ours is a form of indigeneity that hints at a fundamental pollutability that both confirms and threatens forms of ontology tethered to a taxonomized humanity built in that foundational episode of subjection of which Simpson speaks. I am suggesting that savagery always-already references an otherworld of sorts: there are forms of life abandoned outside modernity’s episteme whose expressivities surge with affects anomalous within the topography of settler colonialism. This paper is not a historicist or nostalgic attachment to a pre-savage indigeneity resurrected from a past somehow unscathed by the violence that left us in the thick of things in the first place. Instead, I emphasize the potentiality of ferality as a politics in a world bent on our destruction—a world that eliminates indigeneities too radical to collapse into a collective sensorium, training us to a live in an ordinary that the settler state needs to persist as such, one that only some will survive. This world incentivizes our collusion with a multicultural state instantiated through a myth of belonging that actively disavows difference in the name of that very difference. We are repeatedly hurried into a kind of waning sociality, the content and form of which appear both too familiar and not familiar enough. In short, we are habitually left scavenging for ways to go on without knowing what it is we want. Let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s thoughts on “the wild”: It is a tricky word to use but it is a concept that we cannot live without if we are to combat the conventional modes of rule that have synced social norms to economic practices and have created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet, where every ripple is quickly smoothed over, where every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo. (2013, 126) Where Halberstam finds disturbance, I find indigeneity-cum-disturbance par excellence. Halberstam’s “wild” evokes a potentiality laboured in the here and now and “an alternative to how we want to think about being” in and outside an authoritarian state (2013, 126-27). Perhaps the wild risks the decolonial, a geography of life-building that dreams up tomorrows whose referents are the fractured indigeneities struggling to survive a historical present built on our suffering. Ferality is a stepping stone to a future grounded in Indigenous peoples’ legal and political orders. This paper does not traffic in teleologies of the anarchic or lawless as they emerge in Western thought; instead, it refuses settler sovereignty and calls for forms of collective Indigenous life that are attuned to queerness’s wretched histories and future-making potentialities. Indigeneity is an ante-ontology of sorts: it is prior to and therefore disruptive of ontology. Indigeneity makes manifest residues or pockets of times, worlds, and subjectivities that warp both common sense and philosophy into falsities that fall short of completely explaining what is going on. Indigenous life is truncated in the biopolitical category of Savage in order to make our attachments to ourselves assimilable inside settler colonialism’s national sensorium. Settler colonialism purges excessive forms of indigeneity that trouble its rubrics for sensing out the human and the nonhuman. In other words, settler colonialism works up modes of being-in-the-world that narrate themselves as the only options we have. What would it mean, then, to persist in the space of savagery, exhausting the present and holding out for futures that are not obsessed with the proper boundary between human and nonhuman life? This paper now turns to the present, asking: what happens when indigeneity collides with queerness inside the reserve, and how might a feral theory make sense of that collision? Deadly Presents “I went through a really hard time… I was beaten; more than once. I was choked” (Klassen 2014). These were the words of Tyler-Alan Jacobs, a two-spirit man from the Squamish Nation, capturing at once the terror of queer life on the reserve and the hardening of time into a thing that slows down bodies and pushes them outside its securitized geographies. Jacobs had grown up with his attackers, attackers who were energized by the pronouncement of queerness—how it insisted on being noticed, how it insisted on being. When the dust settled, “his right eye had dislodged and the side of his faced had caved in” (ibid.). Settler colonialism is fundamentally affective: it takes hold of the body, makes it perspire, and wears it out. It converts flesh into pliable automations and people into grim reapers who must choose which lives are worth keeping in the world. It can turn a person into a murderer in a matter of seconds; it is an epistemic rupturing of our attachments to life, to each other, and to ourselves. It is as if settler colonialism were simultaneously a rescue and military operation, a holy war of sorts tasked with exorcising the spectre of queer indigeneity and its putative infectivity. I rehearse this case because it allows me to risk qualifying the reserve as a geography saturated with heteronormativity’s socialities. This is a strategic interdiction that destroys supposedly degenerative queer affect worlds, untangling some bodies and not others from the future. I don’t have the statistics to substantiate these claims, but there is an archive of heartbreak and loss that is easy to come by if you ask the right people. Indeed, what would such statistics tell us that we don’t already know? What would the biopolitical work of data collection do to a knowledge-making project that thinks outside the big worlds of Statistics and Demography and, instead, inside the smaller, more precarious worlds created in the wake of gossip? I worry about ethnographic projects that seek to account for things and theory in the material in order to map the coordinates of an aberration to anchor it and its voyeurs in the theatres of the academy. The desire to attach to a body is too easily energized by a biological reading of gender that repudiates the very subjects it seeks so desperately to know and to study. What about the body? I have been asked this question, again and again. A feral theory is something of a call to arms: abolish this sort of ethnography and turn to those emergent methodologies that might better make sense of the affects and life-forms that are just now coming into focus and have been destroyed or made invisible in the name of research itself. Queer indigeneity, to borrow Fred Moten’s description of blackness, might “come most clearly into relief, by way of its negation” (2014). Perhaps decolonization needs to be a sort of séance: an attempt to communicate with the dead, a collective rising-up from the reserve’s necropolis, a feral becoming-undead. Boyd and Thrush’s Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence thinks indigeneity and its shaky histories vis-à-vis the language of haunting, where haunting is an endurant facet of “the experience of colonialism” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2012, 303). But, for me, ghostliness is differentially distributed: some more than others will be wrenched into the domain of the dead and forced to will their own ontologies into the now. Perhaps the universalist notion that haunting is a metonym for indigeneity repudiates the very life-forms that it claims to include: those who are differently queered and gendered, and, because of this, haunt waywardly and in ways that cannot be easily predicted (Ahmed 2015). This paper thus takes an imaginative turn and proceeds with something of an incantation to summon the figure of the queer Indigenous poltergeist—the feral monster in the horror story of decolonization. Queer Indigenous poltergeists do not linger inaudibly in the background; we are beside ourselves with anger, we make loud noises and throw objects around because we are demanding retribution for homicide, unloved love, and cold shoulders. We do not reconcile; we escape the reserve, pillage and mangle the settler-colonial episteme. Our arrival is both uneventful and apocalyptic, a point of departure and an entry point for an ontology that corresponds with a future that has yet to come. Sometimes all we have is the promise of the future. For the queer Indigenous poltergeist, resurrection is its own form of decolonial love. The poltergeist is an ontological anomaly: a fusion of human, object, and ghost, a “creature of social reality” and a “creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991, 149). From the German poltern meaning “to make noise, to rattle” and Geist or “ghost,” it literally means “noisy ghost,” speaking into existence an anti-subjectivity that emerges in the aftermath of death or murder (“Poltergeist”). It is the subject of Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells a story of “a haunting based on revenge” (Tuck and Ree 2013, 652). The film’s haunting is a wronging premised on an initial wrong: the eponymous poltergeist materializes when a mansion is constructed on a cemetery—a disturbing of spirits, if you will. José Esteban Muñoz argues that “The double ontology of ghosts and ghostliness, the manner in which ghosts exist inside and out and traverse categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for… queer criticism” (2009, 46). In this paper, the poltergeist names the form which indigeneity takes when it brings queer matter into its folds. In other words, this essay evokes haunting as a metaphor to hint at the ways in which queerness was murderously absorbed into the past and prematurely expected to stay there as an effect of colonialism’s drive to eliminate all traces of sexualities and genders that wandered astray. The poltergeist conceptualizes the work of queer indigeneity in the present insofar as it does not presuppose the mysterious intentions of the ghost—an otherworldly force that is bad, good, and undetectable all at once. Instead, the poltergeist is melancholic in its grief, but also pissed off. It refuses to remain in the spiritual, a space cheapened in relation to the staunch materiality of the real, and one that, though housing our conditions of possibility, cannot contain all of us. We protest forms of cruel nostalgia that tether ghosts to a discarded past within which queer Indigenous life once flourished because we know that we will never get it back and that most of us likely never experienced it in the first place. We long for that kind of love, but we know it is hard to come by. I turn to the poltergeist because I don’t have anywhere else to go. Help me, I could say. But I won’t. Queer indigeneity, then, is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive but, to use Judith Butler’s language, interminably spectral (2006, 33). We are ghosts that haunt the reserve in the event of resurrection. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, a reserve is a “tract of land, the legal title to which is held by the Crown, set apart for the use and benefit of an Indian band” (“Terminology”). The “reserve system” is part of the dispossessory ethos through which the settler state reifies land as the sign of sovereignty itself, and thus effects the political death of indigeneity, decomposing it into nothingness, into contaminated dirt. Reserves are the products of imaginations gone wild; they are ruins that bear “the physical imprint of the supernatural” on arid land, on decaying trailers arranged like weathered tombstones (Tuck and Ree 2013, 653). They are borderlands that connote simultaneous possession and dispossession: they represent the collision between settler sovereignty (insofar as the Crown holds the legal title to the land) and indigeneity (pointing to a genre of life that is distinctly Indigenous). Reserves were—some might say they still are—zones of death that regulated and regulate the movements of Indigenous bodies, quarantining their putatively contaminated flesh outside modern life in order to preserve settler-colonial futurities. It is as if the reserve were a site of complete atrophy, where indigeneity is supposed to waste away or degenerate, where queerness has already bled out. Look at the blood on your hands! The queer Indigenous poltergeist, however, foregrounds what I call a “reserve consciousness” —an awareness of the deathliness of the reserve. A reserve consciousness might be a kind of critical phenomenology that, to use Lisa Guenther’s description of this sort of insurgent knowledge project, pulls up “traces of what is not quite or no longer there—that which has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” (2015): here, the so-called on-reserve Indian. It might be about becoming a frictive surface; by rubbing up against things and resisting motion between objects, we might become unstuck. Queer Indigenous poltergeists are what Sara Ahmed calls “blockage points”: where communication stops because we cannot get through (2011, 68). That is, queer indigeneity connotes an ethical impasse, a dead end that presents us with two options: exorcism or resurrection. If settler colonialism is topological, if it persists despite elastic deformations such as stretching and twisting, wear and tear, we might have to make friction to survive. I turn to the reserve because it is a geography of affect, one in which the heaviness of atmospheres crushes some bodies to death and in which some must bear the weight of settler colonialism more than others. The violence done to us has wrenched us outside the physical world and into the supernatural. Some of us are spirits—open wounds that refuse to heal because our blood might be the one thing that cannot be stolen. Does resistance always feel like resistance, or does it sometimes feel like bleeding out (Berlant 2011)? Feral Socialities I must leave the beaten path and go where we are not. Queerness, according to Muñoz, is not yet here; it is an ideality that “we may never touch,” that propels us onward (2009, 1). Likewise, Halberstam suggests that the presentness of queerness signals a kind of emerging ontology. He argues that failure “is something that queers do and have always done exceptionally well in contrast to the grim scenarios of success” that structure “a heteronormative, capitalist society” (2011, 2-3). For Muñoz, queer failure is about “doing something that is missing in straight time’s always already flawed temporal mapping practice” (2009, 174). We know, however, that this isn’t the entire story. Whereas Muñoz’s queer past morphs into the here and now of homonormativity’s carceral tempos, indigeneity’s queernesses are saturated with the trauma of colonialism’s becoming-structure. Queer death doubles as the settler state’s condition of possibility. Pre-contact queer indigeneities had been absorbed into colonialism’s death grip; however, this making-dead was also a making-undead in the enduring of ghosts (Derrida 1994, 310). If haunting, according to Tuck and Ree, “lies precisely in its refusal to stop,” then the queer Indigenous poltergeist fails to have died by way of time travel (2013, 642). Queer indigeneity might be a kind of “feral sociality”: we are in a wild state after escaping colonial captivity and domestication. When the state evicts you, you might have to become feral to endure. To be feral is to linger in the back alleys of the settler state. It is a refusal of settler statecraft, a strategic failing to approximate the metrics of colonial citizenship, a giving up on the ethical future that reconciliation supposedly promises. As an aside, I suspect that the settler state’s reconciliatory ethos is always-already a domesticating project: it contains Indigenous suffering within the spectacularized theatre of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, building a post-Residential School temporality in which Indigenous peoples have been repaired through monetary reparations and storytelling. In the melodrama of reconciliation, the settler state wins its centuries-long war against Indian lawlessness by healing Indigenous peoples of the trauma that blocked them from becoming properly emotive citizens. Queer indigeneity, however, escapes discursive and affective concealment and therefore the category of the human itself, disturbing the binary clash between the living and nonliving by way of its un-humanity, a kind of “dead living” whereby flesh is animated through death. Perhaps we must become feral to imagine other space-times, to imagine other kinds of queerness. If settler colonialism incentivizes our collusion with the humanist enterprise of multiculturalism (and it does), what would it mean to refuse humanity and actualize other subject formations? In other words, how do the un-living live? Here, I want to propose the concept of “Indian time” to theorize the temporality and liminality of queer indigeneity as it festers in the slippage between near-death and the refusal to die. Indian time colloquially describes the regularity with which Indigenous peoples arrive late or are behind schedule. I appropriate this idiom to argue that the presentness of queer indigeneity is prefigured by an escape from and bringing forward of the past as well as a taking residence in the future. To be queer and Indigenous might mean to live outside time, to fall out of that form of affective life. Indian time thus nullifies the normative temporality of settler colonialism in which death is the telos of the human and being-in-death is an ontological fallacy. It connotes the conversion of queer indigeneity into non-living matter, into ephemera lurking in the shadows of the present, waiting, watching, and conspiring. Where Jasbir Puar argues that all things under the rubric of queer are always-already calculated into the state’s biopolitical mathematic, queer indigeneity cannot be held captive because it cannot be seen—we are still emerging in the social while simultaneously altering its substance (2012). If decolonization is, according to Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s reading of Frantz Fanon, an “unclean break from a colonial condition,” perhaps the queer Indigenous poltergeist is feral enough to will a decolonial world into a future that hails rather than expels its ghosts (2012, 20). The queer Indigenous poltergeist might have nothing else to lose.
Systems of knowledge serve to institute and replicate settler colonialism — the human is a storytelling species and knowledge systems are always already being chartered through the replication of sociogenic codes Wynter and McKittrick 15. Sylvia Wynter is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University. Katherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen's University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in black creative texts. (Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, Duke University Press, 2015) vikas To resolve the aporia of this cognitive dilemma, I turn again to Césaire’s proposed new and hybrid bios / mythoi science of the Word. Here because, as he proposed, and as earlier cited, the study of the Word / the mythoi will now determine the study of the bios / of the brain, and this will thereby enable us to gain an external (demonic ground) perspective on the always already storytellingly chartered / encoded discursive formations / aesthetic fields, as well as of, co- relatedly, our systems of knowledge. And, with this gain insight into how these systems of knowledge, each together with its genre- specific “truth of solidarity,” all institute and stably replicate our genres of being hybridly human with the also communitarian viability of each respective societal order. Yet with all of the above—including, in macro terms, the instituting of our contemporary secular and “single model” liberal (now neoliberal) monohumanist Western / Westernized transnational world system—what again must be emphasized is that the respective “truths” of their knowledge systems are always already prespecified by our storytellingly chartered sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life / death, its Word and / or Bateson- type “descriptive statement” as rigorously discursively elaborated by its “status quo system of learning” and its overall epistemological order. This order circularly ensures that each such genre- specific regime / program of truth, will law- likely function to semantically- neurochemically induce the performative enactment of our ensemble of always already role- allocated individual and collective behaviors within the reflexly and subjectively experienced terms of a cognitively closed, thereby genre- specific and fictively eusocializing, autonomously functioning, higher- level living autopoietic system. Cosmogonies of Our Planetary Life and Our Chartered Codes of Symbolic Life and Symbolic Death: Fictively Induced Modes of Inter- Altruistic Kin Recognition and Auto- Instituted Pseudospeciated Mode of Kind KM: Here Wynter elaborates on storytelling beginnings and cosmogonies. She returns to her extension of Frantz Fanon’s conception of our being hybridly human, both bios and mythoi, in order to address the unsolved phenomenon of human consciousness. She explores how our chartering / encoding genre- specific cosmogonies provide the narrative source of our fictively eusocializing subjectivities, thus enabling us to be reborn- through- initiation as always already sociogenically encoded inter- altruistically kin- recognizing members of each referent- we. At the same time, however, the law- like reification of each fictively induced and subjectively experienced order of consciousness of each referent- we is, itself, absolutized by what Wynter identifies as the law of cognitive closure. SW: Fanon put forward the idea of our skin / masks, thereby of the hybridity of our being human, in 1952. Crick and Watson cracked the genetic code in 1953. Now, I argue that Fanon’s masks enact a “second set of instructions”: that of the sociogenic code of symbolic life / death. Further, within the overall enactment of each such “second set of instructions,” the ism of gender is itself—while only one member class—a founding member class. Gender is a founding member because in order to auto- institute ourselves as subjects of a genre- specific referent- we, we must, first, co- relatedly and performatively enact each such code’s “second set of instructions” at the familial level, in terms of our gender roles. We know of this brilliant concept of the performative enactment of gender from Judith Butler.60 I am suggesting that the enactments of such gender roles are always a function of the enacting of a specific genre of being hybridly human. Butler’s illuminating redefinition of gender as a praxis rather than a noun, therefore, set off bells ringing everywhere! Why not, then, the performative enactment of all our roles, of all our role allocations as, in our contemporary Western / Westernized case, in terms of, inter alia, gender, race, class / underclass, and, across them all, sexual orientation? All as praxes, therefore, rather than nouns. So here you have the idea that with being human everything is praxis. For we are not purely biological beings! As far as the eusocial insects like bees are concerned, their roles are genetically preprescribed for them. Ours are not, even though the biocentric meritocratic iq bourgeois ideologues, such as the authors of The Bell Curve, try to tell us that they / we are.61 So the question is: What are the mechanisms, what are the technologies, what are the strategies by which we prescribe our own roles? What is common to all are cosmogonies and origin narratives. The representations of origin, which we ourselves invent, are then retroactively projected onto an imagined past. Why so? Because each such projection is the shared storytelling origin out of which we are initiatedly reborn. In this case we are no longer, as individual biological subjects, primarily born of the womb; rather, we are both initiated and reborn as fictively instituted inter- altruistic kinrecognizing members of each such symbolically re- encoded genre- specific referent- we. This is to say we are all initiatedly reborn—renatus in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Christian term—to subjectively experience ourselves as subjects of the same encoded symbolic life kind. Why this imperative? Because for all genre- specific subjects who are reborn from the same eusocializing origin myth and / or cosmogony, their genetically encoded individual biological life and its attendant imperative of naked self- preservation must at the same time be, via initiation, aversively experienced as symbolic death. 62 This is the concomitant condition of inducing in all subjects the mimetic desire for the group- collective symbolic life of its genre- specific referent- we, its fictive mode of pseudospeciated kind. The centrality of the ritually initiated and enacted storytelling codes, and thus their positive / negative, symbolic life / death semantically- neurochemically activated “second set of instructions,” emerges here: these codes are specific to each kind. The positive verbal meanings attributed to their respective modes of kind are alchemically transformed into living flesh, as its members all reflexly subjectively experience themselves, in the mimetically desirable, because opiate-rewarded, placebo terms of that mode of symbolic life prescribed by the storytelling code. This at the same time as they subjectively experience their former “born of the womb” purely biological life as mimetically aversive, because they are doing so in now opiate- reward- blocked symbolic death, nocebo terms.63 For the preservation of which of these lives, then, do you think wars are fought? In the wake of the answer to the above, we see our chartering cosmogonies as being isomorphic with what we now define as our “cultures”— in both cases we are talking about our hybrid sociogenic codes and their “second set of instructions.” These are codes that are even able to override where necessary—this with respect to our auto- instituted, non– genetically restricted fictive modes of eusociality—the first set of instructions of our own dna (unlike as is the case with all other primates). The logical corollary is this: our modes of auto- institution, together with their initiatory rituals of rebirth—as iconized by the ritual of Christian baptism—are indispensable to the enacting of the human as the only living species on Earth who is the denizen of its third and hybrid bios / mythoi level of existence! Our mode of hybrid living being alone—this together with our also hitherto always genre- specific bios / mythoi enacted orders of supraindividual consciousness—is thereby to arrive on the scene all at once! With the Big Bang of the biomutational Third Event! So you see now why we still can’t solve the problem of consciousness? In spite of the most dedicated efforts of natural scientists, brain scientists, and philosophers? For what becomes clear here is that our human orders of consciousness / modes of mind cannot exist outside the terms of a specific cosmogony. Therefore, human orders of consciousness / modes of mind cannot preexist the terms of the always already mythically chartered, genre- specific code of symbolic life / death, its “second set of instructions” and thus its governing sociogenic principle— or, as Keith Ward puts it, its nonphysical principle of causality.64 To give an example: here we are, we are talking and thinking. We are, in fact, reflexly talking and thinking in terms of Darwin’s biocosmogonically chartered definitive version—in The Descent of Man (1871)—of the British bourgeoisie’s ruling class’s earlier reinvention of Man1’s civic humanist homo politicus as that of liberal monohumanist Man2 as homo oeconomicus, together with its now fully desupernaturalized sociogenically encoded order of consciousness. These are the very terms, therefore, in which we ourselves, in now historically postcolonial / postapartheid contexts, are. If in our case, only mimetically so! This at the same time as we are also struggling to think outside the limits of the purely biocentric order of consciousness that is genre- specific to the Western bourgeoisie’s homo oeconomicus. But it’s extremely difficult to do, right? You know why? Because Darwinism’s powerful, seductive force as a cosmogony, or origin narrative, is due to the fact that it is the first in our human history to be not only part myth but also part natural science. In fact, this mutation—the part myth / part natural science workings of Darwinism—draws attention to Darwin’s powerful neoMalthusian conceptual leap.65 A leap by means of which—over and against Cardinal Bellarmine—Darwin was to definitively replace the biblical Cre- ation account of the origin of all forms of biological life, including the major bios aspect of our being hybridly human, with a new evolutionary account. Why, then, say that this Darwinian account is only part science? Biologist Glyn Isaac, in his essay “Aspects of Human Evolution” (1983), provides the answer. Isaac makes us aware of the ecumenically human trap into which Darwin had also partly fallen: Understanding the literature on human evolution calls for the recognition of special problems that confront scientists who report on this topic. Regardless of how the scientists present them, accounts of human origins are read as replacement materials for genesis. They fulfill needs that are reflected in the fact that all societies have in their culture some form of origin beliefs, that is, some narrative or configurational notion of how the world and humanity began. Usually, these beliefs do more than cope with curiosity, they have allegorical content, and they convey values, ethics and attitudes. The Adam and Eve creation story of the Bible is simply one of a wide variety of such poetic formulations. . . . The scientific movement which culminated in Darwin’s compelling formulation of evolution as a mode of origin seemed to sweep away earlier beliefs and relegate them to the realm of myth and legend. Following on from this, it is often supposed that the myths have been replaced by something quite different, which we call “science.” However, this is only partly true; scientific theories and information about human origins have been slotted into the same old places in our minds and our cultures that used to be occupied by the myths. . . . Our new origin beliefs are in fact surrogate myths, that are themselves part science, part myths. 66 So the trap, you see, is that of the paradox that lies at the core of our metaDarwinian hybridity. For what I’m saying is that as humans, we cannot / do not preexist our cosmogonies, our representations of our origins—even though it is we ourselves who invent those cosmogonies and then retroactively project them onto a past. We invent them in formulaic storytelling terms, as “donor figures” or “entities,” who have extrahumanly (supernaturally, but now also naturally and / or bioevolutionarily, therefore secularly) mandated what the structuring societal order of our genre- specific, eusocial or cultural present would have to be.67 As the French cultural anthropologist Maurice Godelier also makes clear, with respect to the above: we, too, hitherto have also systematically kept the reality of our own agency—from our origins until today—opaque to ourselves. 68 Thus all our humanly invented chartering cosmogonies, including our contemporary macro (monohumanistic / monotheistic) cosmogonies, are law- likely configured as being extrahumanly mandated.69 All such sacred theological discourses ( Judaism, Islamism, Christianity, for example) continue to function in the already theo- cosmogonically mandated cognitively closed terms that are indispensable to the enacting of their respective behavior- inducing and behavior- regulatory fictively eusocializing imperative. This is especially apparent, too, in the secular substitute monohumanist religion of Darwin’s neo- Malthusian biocosmogony: here, in the biocosmogony of symbolic life / death—as that of selection / dysselection and eugenic / dysgenic codes—the incarnation of symbolic life, will law- likely be that of the ruling- class bourgeoisie as the naturally selected (eugenic) master of Malthusian natural scarcity. With this emerges, cumulatively, the virtuous breadwinner, together with his pre- 1960s virtuous housewife, and, corelatedly, the savvy investor, the capital accumulator, or at least the steady job holder.70 In effect, wealth, no longer in its traditional, inherited freehold landowning form, but in its now unceasingly capital- accumulating, global form, is itself the sole macro- signifier of ultimate symbolic life. Symbolic death, therefore, is that of having been naturally dysselected and mastered by Malthusian natural scarcity: as are the globally homogenized dysgenic non- breadwinning jobless poor / the pauper / homeless / the welfare queens. Poverty itself, therefore, is the “significant ill” signifier of ultimate symbolic death and, consequently, capital accumulation, and therefore symbolic life signifies and narrates a plan of salvation that will cure the dysselected significant ill! The systemic reproduction of the real- life categories of both signifiers are indispensable to the continued enactment of the ruling - class bourgeoisie’s governing code of symbolic life / death and the defining of liberal (now neoliberal) monohumanist Man2. This now purely secular coding of life / death is itself discursively—indeed rigorously—elaborated bioepistemologically, on the model of a natural organism, by the disciplines of our social sciences and humanities, together with their respective genre- specific and ethno- class truths of solidarity.71 Consequently, within the laws of hybrid auto- institution and / or pseudospeciation the (humanities and social science) disciplinary truths of solidarity enact their biocosmogonically chartered sociogenic code of symbolic life / death, also imperatively calling to be discursively elaborated in cognitively (cum psychoaffectively / aesthetically) closed terms. The 1AC’s appeal to innovation and western imperial science under the justification of inequality is grounded in the “jungle” functioning through a logic of biocolonialism Barker 19 Clare Barker is a an Associate Professor in English Literature (Medical Humanities) Their Areas of expertise : postcolonial literature; indigenous literature; disability studies; medical humanities. “Biocolonial Fictions: Medical Ethics and New Extinction Discourse in Contemporary Biopiracy Narratives”https:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7116577/pdf/EMS109293.pdf aaditg The age of big pharma, population genetics, and global health initiatives that transcend national borders has ushered in new forms of extractivism that consist of mining the bodies of Indigenous people, their medicinal plants, and their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for their pharmacological potential. These new forms of scientific endeavour echo and reconfigure the colonialist appropriations of the past. As scholar and activist, Vandana Shiva, writes, ‘the colonies have now been extended to the interior spaces, the “genetic codes” of life-forms from microbes and plants to animals, including humans’.1 Shiva terms the expropriation of Indigenous biological resources ‘biopiracy’, while other activists and critics apply the broader term ‘biocolonialism’ to the range of practices that extend colonialist logic to the acquisition of human and plant organic materials, genetic ‘data’, and medicinal knowledge. This term in particular highlights the marked continuities between European colonialist practices of land and resource appropriation and the research practices within what Laurelyn Whitt calls the ‘new imperial science’, which, ‘marked by the confluence of science with capitalism’ and acting ‘in the service of western pharmaceutical … industries’ (among others), ‘enables the appropriation of indigenous knowledge and resources at a prodigious and escalating rate’.2 The logic of biocolonial extractivism operates through a reorientation of the temporal formations of settler colonialism, which equate settler practices with development and consign Indigenous peoples to the past. The land dispossessions of the colonial era were facilitated by powerful narratives of inevitable Indigenous extinction: ‘vanishing Indians’, Maori and Aboriginal ‘dying races’. As critics have shown, contemporary biocolonialist initiatives operate on similar assumptions, under which indigenous biospecimens must be preserved and biological data acquired before they vanish forever. Joanna Radin demonstrates that, since the mid-twentieth century, the ability to freeze and store blood and other organic samples has ‘emerged as a potentially powerful strategy for preserving fragments of a world that appeared to be increasingly in flux’. It enables ‘biological material to be studied in the present and especially in the future’, when (whether due to genetic admixture, European diseases, or environmental damage produced by the industrialized global North) ‘the individuals from whom it had been extracted were expected to have disappeared or changed beyond recognition’.3 In this article, I explore the intertwined relationship between medical research ethics and the logic and ideology of biocolonialism as it is represented in two contemporary American novels, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder (2011) and Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013). These novels depict ‘medical adventurers’4 undertaking biocolonialist excursions into the remote jungles of, respectively, the Amazon and the Pacific, and are centrally concerned with the methods and infrastructure of biomedical and pharmaceutical research. In both cases, the fictional scientists’ ethically problematic research practices implicate them in what Pauline Wakeford calls ‘two entangled narratives of death and disappearance: the grand récits of wildlife extinction and the vanishing Indian’.5 I focus in particular on how these texts, by presenting us with fictional bioethical quandaries related to human longevity and reproduction, engage with the new formulations of extinction discourse produced by the life sciences. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that colonial ‘extinction discourse was performative in the sense that it acted on the world as well as described it’.6 State of Wonder and The People in the Trees both imagine biological discoveries with the potential to extend human lifecycles, but these research endeavours are steeped in extinctionist ideology and themselves set in motion the decimation of previously thriving Indigenous communities. Aspirational narratives of ‘eternal life’ (in Yanagihara) and ‘world health’ (in Patchett) are underpinned by the knowledge that these communities, reframed as research subjects, are likely to vanish in the wake of what Warwick Anderson calls ‘scientific colonialism’, along with their unique ecosystems.7 The different narrative temporalities of these texts – Patchett’s anticipating a significant breakthrough in global health, Yanagihara’s narrated retrospectively from a position of irreversible loss – produce divergent valuations of human and nonhuman lives and different perspectives on the ethics of biopiracy, as I shall discuss. But in reading them together, I demonstrate how fictional engagements with biocolonial science illuminate the continuities between colonial-era extractivism and contemporary research practices. In their temporal reorientations and their ability to imagine actual and potential acts of extinction, these texts resituate extinction discourse squarely within the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century bioscientific experimentation. State of Wonder follows Marina Singh, a pharmacologist for a multinational pharmaceutical corporation, Vogel, on her expedition into the Amazon to investigate the death in the field of her colleague, Anders Eckman, and to assess the progress of a senior scientist, Annick Swenson, who is developing a fertility drug for Vogel while living with a remote tribe, the Lakashi. Swenson has discovered that the Lakashi women’s practice of chewing bark from a particular local tree (the Martin tree) not only alters their reproductive chemistry, allowing them to conceive and give birth into their seventies and eighties, but also inoculates them against malaria. Alongside their work on the fertility drug, Swenson and her team are surreptitiously developing a malaria vaccine at Vogel’s expense, which will have little appeal logic tied up with numerous contemporary research initiatives, particularly the Human Genome Diversity Project. See, for example, to company shareholders even though it ‘will have enormous benefits to world health’, since ‘the people who need a malarial vaccine will never have the means to pay for it’.8 As the narrative unfolds, the protection of the Lakashi, their lifeways, and their environment is pitted against this urgent global health imperative to save the lives of the ‘eight hundred thousand children’ who, as Swenson tells Marina, ‘die every year of malaria’ in the so-called ‘Third World’.9 The People in the Trees is framed as the memoirs of Norton Perina, a ‘renowned immunologist’ who, as a young doctor in 1950, joins an anthropological expedition to U’ivu, a fictional Micronesian state.10 Along with his anthropologist colleagues, he ‘discovers’ a ‘lost tribe’ living on the island of Ivu’ivu whose ritual ingestion of a sacred turtle endemic to the island, the opa’ivu’eke, causes extended longevity, with some tribe members apparently living for several hundred years. Perina’s research on this phenomenon earns him a Nobel Prize for Medicine, but also kickstarts a rapid process of biocolonial incursion on this island that has ‘never before been colonized’, beginning with pharmaceutical companies, seeking to develop ‘age-retarding drugs, … anti-aging skin creams, and elixirs to restore male potency’, ‘swarming throughout Ivu’ivu on the hunt for the opa’ivu’eke’.11 It results in the extinction of the turtle, the razing of the island, and the decimation of the Ivu’ivuan community through an accelerated experience of the impacts of colonization, including forced displacement, alcoholism, and disease. Both texts emphasize the overdetermination of their respective jungle environments by longstanding colonialist tropes of exotic difference that are inflected by bioscientific discourse. The Pacific island, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey has demonstrated, has long been figured as a remote, ‘hermetically sealed laboratory’, ‘deemed ahistorical and isolated’ from modernity and therefore ideal for experimentation in anthropology, ecology, and nuclear science.12 The Amazon, meanwhile, is imagined as what Veronica Davidov terms a ‘pharmacopia’ that holds within its rich ecosystems ‘fantastic cures for illnesses that defy the capacities of the Western pharmaceutical industry’, or, as Dr Swenson puts it in State of Wonder, ‘some sort of magical medicine chest’.13 Under the globalized conditions of the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries, the jungle spaces outside the West are vulnerable to exploitation due to their construction as ‘global commons’ or ‘global resource frontiers’ available to be harvested for their medical riches.14 As Swenson asserts in an unapologetic utilization of extractivist rhetoric: ‘there is much to be taken from the jungle’.15 Through their focus on the activities of life scientists in the interconnected fields of big pharma and global health, both novels appear to offer a critique of the impacts of biocolonialism on Indigenous people and the ecosystems in which they exist. But, as I will show, Perina’s retrospective narration in The People in the Trees brings into critical focus the extinctionist logic of biocolonial science, while State of Wonder’s anticipatory positioning is ultimately bound up with the future-oriented rhetoric used to justify much exploitative and damaging scientific research. The alternative is refusal – a political depression that recognizes reconciliation will never be enough and creates harmful optimism to the political. Instead, embrace an affective pessimism that grounds alternative futures. The question is not whether Native people want the world, but if the world wants Native people Belcourt 2016 (Billy-ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and is reading for an M.St. in Women's Studies at the University of Oxford. He was named by CBC Books as one of six Indigenous writers to watch,Political Depression in a Time of Reconciliation, Jan 15, 2016, http://activehistory.ca/2016/01/political-depression-in-a-time-of-reconciliation/)//NotJacob//recut anop It’s tough: knowing that you might not get the world you want and the world that wants you back, that your bones might never stop feeling achy and fragile from the wear and tear of mere existence, from the hard labour of getting through the day. Ours are bodies that have been depleted by time, that have been wrenched into a world they can’t properly bend or squirm into because our flesh is paradoxically both too much and not enough for it. In the wake of both eventful and slowed kinds of premature death, what does it mean that the state wants so eagerly to move Indigenous bodies, to touch them, so to speak? Reconciliation is an affective mess: it throws together and condenses histories of trauma and their shaky bodies and feelings into a neatly bordered desire; a desire to let go, to move on, to turn to the future with open arms, as it were. Reconciliation is stubbornly ambivalent in its potentiality, an object of desire that we’re not entirely certain how to acquire or substantiate, but one that the state – reified through the bodies of politicians, Indigenous or otherwise – is telling us we need. In fact, Justice Murray Sinclair noted that the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on December 15, 2015, puts us at the “threshold of a new era in this country.”1 I am interested in how life might be lived willfully and badly in the face of governmental forms of redress when many of us are stretched thin, how reconciliation, though instantiating a noticeable shift in the national affective atmosphere,2 doesn’t actually remake the substance of the social or the political such that we’re still tethered to scenes of living that can’t sustain us. What I am trying to get at is: reconciliation works insofar as it is a way of looking forward to being in this world, at the expense of more radical projects like decolonization that want to experiment with different strategies for survival.3 This way of doing things isn’t working and, because of that, optimism is hard to come by. According to cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, political depression emerges from the realization “that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.”4 It is the pestering sense that whatever you do, it won’t be enough; that things will continue uninterrupted, teasing you because something different is all you’ve wanted from the start. To be politically depressed is to worry about the temporal reach of neoliberal projects like reconciliation, to question their orientation toward the future because the present requires all of your energy in order to feel like anything but dying. Political depression is of a piece with a dispossessory enterprise that remakes the topography of the ordinary such that the labour of maintaining one’s life becomes too hard to keep up. We have to wait for the then and there in the here and now; how do we preserve ourselves until then? As Leanne Simpson points out, reconciliation has been reparative for some survivors, encouraging them to tell their stories, to keep going, so to speak.5 But, what of the gendered and racialized technologies of violence that created our scenes of living, scenes we’ve been forced to think are of our own choosing? Optimism for the work of reconciliation disappeared in the face of multiple crises: of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, of HIV infection rates, of mass incarceration, of diabetes, of suicide. Reconciliation, at once a heuristic and a form of statecraft, fakes a political that doesn’t actually exist as such, one that not only presupposes that we – Indigenous peoples, that is – are willing to stay attached to it, but that we are already folded into it, that we’ve already consented to it. What does it mean, for example, to consent to a nation-to-nation relationship if there are no other options to choose from? Reconciliation wants so badly to be a keyword of sorts, to contain so much inside its semantic confines, to be “wide-reaching in its explanatory power.”6 I’m not surprised things have started to leak all over the place. Decolonization might need something of an affective turn: I think there are ways of being attuned to our bodies such that we can gauge if our visceral responses are trained or not, parasitic or not. In short: what do our tears signal, what do his – Justin Trudeau’s – signal? We cry because pain holds our world together. I don’t want pain to hold our world together anymore. Perhaps admitting we are politically depressed is one of the most important things we could do in this day and age. When survival becomes radical and death becomes part and parcel of the ordinary itself, political depression might be our only point of departure. But, political depression is also about dreaming up alternatives that can sustain your attachments to life. Cvetkovich reminds us that we need “other affective tools for transformation” because hope and blind allegiance have failed too many of us too often.7 I am interested in the generative work of pessimism, how being fed up propels us onward, and keeps us grounded in the now, such that we can make it to the future, even if that’s just tomorrow. As Kim TallBear put it, we’ve been living in a post-apocalyptic world (in its ecological ruins and in the face of its crisis-making politics) for quite some time,8 one that exhausts our bodies to the point of depression and death and one that slowly removes us from the non-normative or the astray.9 We are stuck in the thick of things, left clinging to an impasse without an exit strategy. We might need reconciliation today, but Indigenous peoples need a more capacious world-building project for tomorrow, one that can bear all of us and the sovereignties built into our breathing. We should not be asked: do you want the world today? Instead, we should be asking: does the world want us?
10/17/21
SeptOct - NC - Kant
Tournament: Meadows | Round: 4 | Opponent: Marlborough WR | Judge: Lena Mizrahi The meta-ethic is practical reason— 1 Inescapability— I can question why to follow or the validity of an ethical theory, which concedes the authority of reason as if I question reason, I use reason to question. Outweighs on validity—any other truth risks falsity Reality may be fake, our experiences may be arbitrary, and experience may be descriptive not normative, but questioning the validity of reason requires reason, conceding its validity. Any other ethic begs the question of why, meaning it’s arbitrary and nonbinding 2 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 That justifies universality— If we are all reasoners, we must all be able to determine if an action is good. An action that maximizes my freedom at the cost of others then would have to be recognized as good by everyone, but that leads to a contradiction where everyone takes other’s freedoms to maximize theirs, making it impossible to reach my end Thus, the standard is respecting a system of inner and outer freedom
Now Negate: Reducing IP law uses people as a means to an end violating their freedom. Kornyo, 14 (Emmanuel Kornyo, 9-11-2014, accessed on 8-14-2021, Journals.library.columbia, "Patent Protection and the Global Access to Essential Pharmaceuticals during Patent Infringements under TRIPS| Voices in Bioethics", https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/bioethics/article/view/6467)WWPP When I think of a categorical imperative I know at once what it contains. For, since the imperative contains, beyond the law, only the necessity that the maxim be in conformity with this law, while the law contains no condition to which it would be limited, nothing is left with which the maxim of action is to conform but the universality of a law as such ... There is, therefore, only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accordance with thatmaxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.xiv In addition, the principle of deontology imposes an obligation on all people to never use another human being as a means to attain an end. In other words, the end does not justify the means. Hence, in dire humanitarian crises such as the HIV case, by breaking the patent, the government of these countries “used” the intellectual property of these patents to attain their own local or national needs. One cannot use the larger interest of the population to the exclusion of the investors or patent holders who have rights as well.xv
No kant affirms args – functionall a 1ar add on which makes negating impossible – forces 2nr to split and spend time answering a NEW advantage – also incentivizes affs to kick case and just read new offense. Independently all of their kant affirms args will j be based on conseqeunces which isn’t kant offense. No new 1ar framework – they didn’t read one in the 1ac, they don’t get one in the 1ar – incentivizes affs to read new 1ar frameworks that exclude all neg offense which makes it impossible to negate.
11/3/21
SeptOct - T - For Medicine vs Data Exclusivity
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 4 | Opponent: Southlake Carroll PK | Judge: Annabelle Long Interpretation: Intellectual property for medicine only refers to patents. Oxfam Oxfam is a British founded confederation of 20 independent charitable organizations focusing on the alleviation of global poverty, founded in 1942 and led by Oxfam International. It is a major nonprofit group with an extensive collection of operations, “Intellectual property and access to medicine”, No Date, https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-well-being/intellectual-property-and-access-to-medicine///pranav - Independently – becomes an alt cause to plan solvency Intellectual property (IP) has different forms; in the case of access to medicines, we are talking about patents. Patents are a public policy instrument aimed at stimulating innovation. By providing a monopoly through a patent—which gives inventors an economic advantage—governments seek to provide an incentive for RandD. At the same time, the public benefits from technological advancement. Violation: Data exclusivity is IP on data from clinical trials, not on the medicine itself and is distinct from patent protection. 1AC Thrasher ’21 Rachel, received a JD and a master’s degree in international relations, both from Boston University. She works on policy issues related to trade and investment agreements, trade law and development, economic relations between developing countries, and multilateral environmental agreements. She is the co-editor, alongside former Pardee Center Director Adil Najam, of a Pardee-sponsored book titled The Future of South-South Economic Relations. She teaches a course on trade and development at the Pardee School of Global Studies and continues to research areas of trade and investment agreements and their impact on development policy as part of the Global Economic Governance Initiative at Boston University, “Chart of the Week: How Data Exclusivity Laws Impact Drug Prices”, 05-21-2021, https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2021/05/25/chart-of-the-week-how-data-exclusivity-laws-impact-drug-prices///pranav Data exclusivity is a form of intellectual property protection that applies specifically to data from pharmaceutical clinical trials. While innovator firms run their own clinical trials to gain marketing approval, generic manufacturers typically rely on the innovator’s clinical trials for the same approval. Data exclusivity rules keep generic firms from relying on that data for 5 to 12 years, depending on the specific law. Data exclusivity operates independently of patent protection and can block generic manufacturers from gaining marketing approval even if the patent has expired or the original pharmaceutical product does not qualify for patent protection. Vote neg for limits – their interp explodes the topic to intellectual property protections on things other than medicine – that includes food, music, clinical trials, and more, all with distinct scenarios and no unified neg ground which makes pre-round prep impossible, killing clash. That controls the internal link to education – only terminal impact in debate and fairness – only thing under the judge’s jurisdiction. CI: 1 rtb – debaters keep being marginally abusive 2 collapses – debate ab specified briteline
No rvis – silly and illogical – shouldn’t iwn for proving ur topical
10/17/21
SeptOct - T - Medicine vs CRISPR
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 5 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart AW | Judge: Jeannine Lopez Interpretation: Medicine is a substance used for diagnosis, treatment, mitigation, or prevention of medical condition Hettiarachchi and Wijesinge 21, Charith, and Sanath WijesingheCharith Amidha Hettiarachchi* Visiting Scholar, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Heath, University of Technology Sydney, Australia and Post-Doctoral Scholar, Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka. PhD Researcher, Faculty of Law, school of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia and Lecturer in Law, Department of Legal Studies, The Open University of Sri Lanka. “Food-Medicine Interface and Its Application in International Level, Comparative Jurisdictions and Sri Lankan Legal Context.” World Nutrition 12 (March 31, 2021): 103–11. https://doi.org/10.26596/wn.2021121103-111.//anop The definition of medicine stipulated in Therapeutic Goods Act of 1989 of New South Wales, Australia (Federal Register of Legislation, 2020) and the Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1940 of India and the Medicines Act of 1968 of United Kingdom (Legislation.Gov.UK, 2020) provides a similar meaning to that of the definition embodied in National Medicines Regulatory Authority Act of 2015 of Sri Lanka, irrespective of the different terminology used in those legislations. According to the National Medicines Regulatory Authority Act of 2015 of Sri Lanka, medicine includes ‘any substance or mixture of substances manufactured, sold, offered for sale or represented for use in the diagnosis, treatment, mitigation or prevention of disease, abnormal physical states or the symptoms thereof in man or animal; and restoring, correcting or modifying functions of organs in man or animal; a medicine or combination of medicine ready for use and placed on the market under a special name or in a characteristic form, both patent and non-proprietary preparations; a product made out of medicinal herbal extract; nutraceutical with therapeutic claims; and vaccines and sera, but does not include an Ayurvedic medicine or Homoeopathic medicine’ (Government Publication Bureau, 2015). Therefore, medicine is simply identified as a substance that used for diagnosis, treatment, mitigation or prevention of a medical condition. The Sri Lankan definition of medicine excludes Ayurveda medicines from its scope. Hence, Ayurveda medicines do not come under the purview of National Medicines Regulatory Authority Act of 2015 and but fall in the scope of Ayurveda Act of 1961. Prefer: Real world education: our definition is used by five different countries in WTO – more internationally recognized – outweighs because WHO is an international organization. Violation: crispr isn’t a “substance”, it’s a technique which is distinct. Khatri ’19 Minesh, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and is board certified in nephology and internal medicine. He received his medical degree from Duke University, completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Washington, and completed a nephrology fellowship at Columbia University.Khatri is an author of numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals and a member of leading medical societies in internal medicine and nephrology. Aside from taking care of patients, Khatri is also actively involved in medical education, “What Is CRISPR?”, 10-14-2019, https://www.webmd.com/cancer/guide/crispr-facts-overview//pranav CRISPR isn’t a drug. It’s a technique. The goal is to cut out and fix glitches in your genes that threaten your health. Although it’s not the first gene-editing method scientists have tried, it’s the simplest, fastest, and most accurate. And that makes it a game-changer. CRISPR is short for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat.” It’s a bit of DNA that scientists first noticed in the immune system of bacteria. That inspired the gene-editing technique that everyone now calls CRISPR. Those bacteria use CRISPR like a “Most Wanted” list. When a virus attacks, the bacteria memorize the virus’s DNA and file its profile in their CRISPR. If that same virus attacks again later on, the bacteria pull up its file in CRISPR and copy it. That copy acts like an assassin: It hunts down the virus and cuts its DNA to destroy it. Sfera is about a drug CRISPR CREATED which is distinct from CRISPR being a drug itself. Standards: 1 limits – their model explodes the topic into the fringes of what can promote health, such as medical tech, toiletries, and food. 2 impacts: a engagement – explodes affs which creates unfair prep burdens where neg doesn’t have predictable ground to all affs – results in neg reading generics which always lets aff win and kills well-researched clash. Clash o/w – it’s the only thing unique to debate. Ground outweighs on sequencing– pre-round prep controls the i/l to in round abuse
b topic lit – they shift to discussions outside of public health. Kills quality of clash because it’s not the core of the topic lit and current events. Outweighs – even if they can increase clash, there’s no application of it
10/17/21
SeptOct - T - Medicine vs Cannabis
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Austin Broussard, Gerard Grigsby Interp – “medicines” prevent, diagnose, or treat harms MRS 20 (MAINE REVENUE SERVICE SALES, FUEL and SPECIAL TAX DIVISION) “A REFERENCE GUIDE TO THE SALES AND USE TAX LAW” https://www.maine.gov/revenue/sites/maine.gov.revenue/files/inline-files/Reference20Guide202020.pdf December 2020 SS Medicines means antibiotics, analgesics, antipyretics, stimulants, sedatives, antitoxins, anesthetics, antipruritics, hormones, antihistamines, certain “dermal fillers” (such as BoTox®), injectable contrast agents, vitamins, oxygen, vaccines and other substances that are used in the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of disease or injury and that either (1) require a prescription in order to be purchased or administered to the retail consumer or patient; or (2) are sold in packaging.
Violation – Interpretation: Medicine is a drug used in prevention Lexico ND (Lexico dictionary) https://www.lexico.com/definition/medicine BC The science or practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease (in technical use often taken to exclude surgery) ‘he made distinguished contributions to pathology and medicine’ A drug or other preparation for the treatment or prevention of disease. ‘give her some medicine’ To be a medicine a substance must meet FDA standards FDA no date https://www.fda.gov/industry/regulated-products/human-drugs What is a drug? The FDA defines a drug, in part, as “intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease” and “articles (other than food) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals.” Refer to section 201(g) of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDandC Act). The definition also includes components of drugs, such as active pharmaceutical ingredients. If you are unsure if your product is a drug or a cosmetic, visit the Is It a Cosmetic, a Drug, or Both? (Or Is It Soap?) page for more information. What drug requirements are verified at the time of importation? Imported drugs must meet FDA’s standards for quality, safety and effectiveness. FDA will verify compliance with the following requirements as applicable: Registration Listing Drug application Drug labeling Drug current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs) Cannabis isn’t a medicine – they are conflating having medicinal properties with medicines CDC ND (Center for the Disease Control and Prevention) “Is marijuana medicine?” https://www.cdc.gov/marijuana/faqs/is-marijuana-medicine.html BC Is marijuana medicine? The marijuana plant has chemicals that may help symptoms for some health problems. More and more states are making it legal to use the plant as medicine for certain conditions. But there isn’t enough research to show that the whole plant works to treat or cure these conditions. Also, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)External has not recognized or approved the marijuana plant as medicine. Because marijuana is often smoked, it can damage your lungs and cardiovascular system (e.g., heart and blood vessels). These and other damaging effects on the brain and body could make marijuana more harmful than helpful as a medicine. Another problem with marijuana as a medicine is that the ingredients aren’t exactly the same from plant to plant. There’s no way to know what kind and how much of a chemical you’re getting. Cannabis isn’t a medicine – Madras 16 (Bertha, Madras is a professor of psychobiology in the Department of Psychiatry and the chair of the Division of Neurochemistry at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University; she served as associate director for public education in the division on Addictions at Harvard Medical School.) “Opinion: 5 reasons marijuana is not medicine” The Washington Post, 4/29/2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/04/29/5-reasons-marijuana-is-not-medicine/ BC Yet unlike drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, “dispensary marijuana” has no quality control, no standardized composition or dosage for specific medical conditions. It has no prescribing information or no high-quality studies of effectiveness or long-term safety. While the FDA is not averse to approving cannabinoids as medicines and has approved two cannabinoid medications, the decision to keep marijuana in Schedule I was reaffirmed in a 2015 federal court ruling. That ruling was correct. To reside in Schedules II-V and be approved for diagnosing, mitigating, treating or curing a specific medical condition, a substance or botanical must proceed through a rigorous FDA scientific process proving safety and efficacy. Not one form of “dispensary marijuana” with a wide range of THC levels — butane hash oil, smokables, vapors, edibles, liquids — has gone through this rigorous process for a single medical condition (let alone 20 to 40 conditions). To approve a medicine, the FDA requires five criteria to be fulfilled:
The drug’s chemistry must be known and reproducible. Evidence of a standardized product, consistency, ultra-high purity, fixed dose and a measured shelf life are required by the FDA. The chemistry of “dispensary marijuana” is not standardized. Smoked, vaporized or ingested marijuana may deliver inconsistent amounts of active chemicals. Levels of the main psychoactive constituent, THC, can vary from 1 to 80 percent. Cannabidiol (known as CBD) produces effects opposite to THC, yet THC-to-CBD ratios are unregulated. 2. There must be adequate safety studies. “Dispensary marijuana” cannot be studied or used safely under medical supervision if the substance is not standardized. And while clinical research on long-term side effects has not been reported, drawing from recreational users we know that marijuana impairs or degrades brain function, and intoxicating levels interfere with learning, memory, cognition and driving. Long-term use is associated with addiction to marijuana or other drugs, loss of motivation, reduced IQ, psychosis, anxiety, excessive vomiting, sleep problems and reduced lifespan. Without a standardized product and long-term studies, the safety of indefinite use of marijuana remains unknown. 3. There must be adequate and well-controlled studies proving efficacy. Twelve meta-analyses of clinical trials scrutinizing smoked marijuana and cannabinoids conclude that there is no or insufficient evidence for the use of smoked marijuana for specific medical conditions. There are no studies of raw marijuana that include high-quality, unbiased, blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled or long-duration trials. 4. The drug must be accepted by well-qualified experts. Medical associations generally call for more cannabinoid research but do not endorse smoked marijuana as a medicine. The American Medical Association: "Cannabis is a dangerous drug and as such is a public health concern"; the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry: "Medicalization" of smoked marijuana has distorted the perception of the known risks and purposed benefits of this drug;" the American Psychiatric Association: "No current scientific evidence that marijuana is in any way beneficial for treatment of any psychiatric disorder ‚Ķ the approval process should go through the FDA." 5. Scientific evidence must be widely available. The evidence for approval of medical conditions in state ballot and legislative initiatives did not conform to rigorous, objective clinical trials nor was it widely available for scrutiny. Negate – 1 Limits – their model explodes it to medical devices, home remedies, anything that remotely treats and more – only our definition creates a reasonable caselist for medicines while they make prep impossible and wreck engagement 2 Precision – MRS is a legal definition of medicines from codified law and has intent to define which proves we’re right and consistent with topic lit
9/17/21
SeptOct - T - Reduce
Tournament: Greenhill RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Sequoia AS | Judge: Austin Broussard, Gerard Grigsby Interp – reductions are permanent Reynolds 59. Judge (In the Matter of Doris A. Montesani, Petitioner, v. Arthur Levitt, as Comptroller of the State of New York, et al., Respondents NO NUMBER IN ORIGINAL Supreme Court of New York, Appellate Division, Third Department 9 A.D.2d 51; 189 N.Y.S.2d 695; 1959 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 7391 August 13, 1959) Section 83's counterpart with regard to nondisability pensioners, section 84, prescribes a reduction only if the pensioner should again take a public job. The disability pensioner is penalized if he takes any type of employment. The reason for the difference, of course, is that in one case the only reason pension benefits are available is because the pensioner is considered incapable of gainful employment, while in the other he has fully completed his "tour" and is considered as having earned his reward with almost no strings attached. It would be manifestly unfair to the ordinary retiree to accord the disability retiree the benefits of the System to which they both belong when the latter is otherwise capable of earning a living and had not fulfilled his service obligation. If it were to be held that withholdings under section 83 were payable whenever the pensioner died or stopped his other employment the whole purpose of the provision would be defeated, i.e., the System might just as well have continued payments during the other employment since it must later pay it anyway. The section says "reduced", does not say that monthly payments shall be temporarily suspended; it says that the pension itself shall be reduced. The plain dictionary meaning of the word is to diminish, lower or degrade. The word "reduce" seems adequately to indicate permanency. Aside from the practical aspect indicating permanency other indicia point to the same conclusion. From 1924 (L. 1924, ch. 619) to 1947 (L. 1947, ch. 841) a provision appeared in the Civil Service Law which read substantially as follows: "If the pension of a beneficiary is reduced for any reason, the amount of such reduction shall be transferred from the pension reserve fund to the pension accumulation fund during that period that such reduction is in effect." (See L. 1924, ch. 619, § 2 Civil Service Law, § 58, subd. 4; L. 1947, ch. 841 Civil Service Law, § 66, subd. e.) This provision reappears in the 1955 Retirement and Social Security Law as subdivision f of section 24. This provision is useful for interpretative purposes. Since it prescribes that moneys not paid because of reduction should be transferred back to the accumulation fund the conclusion is inescapable that such reductions were meant to be permanent. If temporary suspensions were intended this bookkeeping device would result in a false picture of the funds, i.e., the reserve fund would be depleted when it would contain adequate funds to meet eventual payments 57*57 to present pensioners. Likewise, the accumulation fund would be improperly inflated with respect to the present pensioners. Section 64 of the Retirement and Social Security Law (§ 85 under the 1947 act) provides that any disability pension must be reduced by the amount payable pursuant to the Workmen's Compensation Law if applicable. In Matter of Dalton v. City of Yonkers (262 App. Div. 321, 323 1941) this court interpreted "reduce" to mean "offset" in holding that under then section 67 (relating to Workmen's Compensation benefits as do its successors sections 85 and 64), pensions were to be offset by compensation benefits. This is merely another indication that "reduce" means a diminishing of the pension pursuant to a given formula rather than a mere recoverable, temporary suspension during the time other benefits or salaries are being received by the pensioner. (Also, cf., Retirement and Social Security Law, § 101 § 84 under the 1947 act.)
Violation –
Negate – 1 Limits and topic lit – their model allows adding on infinite random suspensions to IP protections, anything from conditioning IP protections on human rights to monopolistic tendencies – the core of the debate is reducing IP protections, not temporarily suspending them 2 Precision—they justify the aff arbitrarily doing away with words in the resolution – nothing stops them defending telemedicine or big pharma bad next
Voters: Fairness and education are voters – debate’s a game that needs rules to evaluate it and education gives us portable skills for life like research and thinking. Precision o/w – anything else justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words in the resolution at their whim which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. Drop the debater – a) they have a 7-6 rebuttal advantage and the 2ar to make args I can’t respond to, b) it deters future abuse and sets a positive norm. Use competing interps – a) reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since we don’t know your bs meter, b) collapses to competing interps – we justify 2 brightlines under an offense defense paradigm just like 2 interps. No RVIs – a) illogical – you shouldn’t win for being fair – it’s a litmus test for engaging in substance,
b) norming – I can’t concede the counterinterp if I realize I’m wrong which forces me to argue for bad norms, c) baiting – incentivizes good debaters to be abusive, bait theory, then collapse to the 1AR RVI, d) topic ed – prevents 1AR blipstorm scripts and allows us to get back to substance after resolving theory
9/17/21
SeptOct - T - Vaccines
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Samantha Mclaughlin Interp – “medicines” treat or cure, whereas vaccines prevent – o/w on specificity since it’s about the COVID vaccine Vecchio 7/22 (Christopher Vecchio, CFA, Senior Strategist 7-22-2021, “Delta Variant Concerns Won't Cripple Markets, US Economy“, DailyFX, accessed: 8-9-2021, https://www.dailyfx.com/forex/video/daily_news_report/2021/07/22/market-minutes-delta-variant-concerns-wont-cripple-markets-us-economy.html) ajs Let’s stick to the facts. The COVID-19 vaccines are not medicines, which by definition “treat or cure diseases.” Vaccines “help prevent diseases,” an important distinction. Why does this matter? Because data coming out of some of the world’s developed economies with high adult vaccination rates suggest that the vaccines are working as intended: tail-risks have been reduced, with hospitalizations and deaths falling relative to the recent spike in infections (which have been occurring primarily among the unvaccinated at this point). Put another way, vaccines are like a Kevlar vest for the immune system; while they don’t make you bulletproof, they dramatically increase the odds of surviving an adverse event.s Violation – their advantage area is about vaccines which means either a. they solve nothing and vote neg on presumption because vaccines aren’t “COVID-19 medicines” or b. they violate
Negate – 1 Limits – expanding the topic to preventative treatment or medical interventions allows anything from surgery to medical devices to education strategies or mosquito repellent to prevent malaria. Destroys core generics like innovation which are exclusive to disease curing – core of the topic is about proprietary information.
Voters: Drop the debater – they have a 7-6 rebuttal advantage and the 2ar to make args I can’t respond to, Use competing interps reasonability invites arbitrary judge intervention since we don’t know your bs meter, No RVIs –illogical – you shouldn’t win for being fair – it’s a litmus test for engaging in substance, Evaluate T before 1AR theory – norms – we only have a couple months to set T norms but can set 1AR theory norms anytime,
9/13/21
SeptOct - Theory - Cant specify medicines
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington BF | Judge: Samantha Mclaughlin Interpretation: The aff may not defend WTO member nations reducing intellectual property protections for a subset of medicines.
Violation – they only defend COVID-19 medicines
Vote neg: 1 Limits – you can pick anything from COVID vaccines to marijuana to random biotech to insulin treatments and there’s no universal disad since each one has a different function and implication for health, tech, and relations – explodes neg prep and leads to random medicine of the week affs which makes cutting stable neg links impossible. PICs don’t solve – it’s absurd to say neg potential abuse justifies the aff being flat out not T, which leads to a race towards abuse. Limits key to reciprocal engagement since they create a caselist for neg prep. 2 TVA – read the aff as an advantage to a whole rez aff.
9/13/21
SeptOct - Theory - Nearly All
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Wenatchee JK | Judge: Chris Castillo, Derek Hilligoss, Annabelle Long Interp: if the affirmative specifies “nearly all medicines”, they must clarify what “nearly all” means in the 1AC Violation: They didn’t.
Vote neg for pre-round prep: makes it impossible to construct an effective 1nc pre-round bc I don’t know what medicines the aff actually defends, so I can’t cut new disad links – CX is too late bc the majority of prep time is pre-round + it’s not enough time to cut new links and redo the 1nc – voter for fairness and education. Frame through competing interps: 1 reasonability causes a race to the bottom where debaters keep being marginally abusive 2 collapses bc we debate ab a specified briteline 3 controls the internal link to substance ed – only through enacting effective norms can we have good substance debates
10/18/21
T - Private Entities
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart EL | Judge: Colton Gilbert Interpretation: the affirmative must only defend that the appropriation of space by private entities is unjust. China's "private" sector companies aren't private Olson 20 Stephen Olson, research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation. "Are Private Chinese Companies Really Private?" The Diplomat, 9-30-2020, accessed 1-14-2022, https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/are-private-chinese-companies-really-private/ HWIC China has often been criticized for a lack of transparency, especially with regard to its economic and trade policies. While in many cases these criticisms are valid, it belies the fact that in other instances, China is remarkably open and transparent about its intentions and ambitions. Such is the case with China’s “Opinion on Strengthening the United Front Work of the Private Economy in the New Era,” recently released by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (and further elaborated on by President Xi Jinping himself). This document tells us in no uncertain terms that Chinese private companies will be increasingly called upon to conduct their operations in tight coordination with governmental policy objectives and ideologies. The rest of the world should take note. A Different Vision of “Private” Business The 5,000 word “opinion” aims to ratchet-up the role and influence of the CCP within the private sector in order “to better focus the wisdom and strength of the private businesspeople on the goal and mission to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” The objective is to establish a “united front” between business and government and facilitate the “enhancement of the party’s leadership over the private economy.” According to the plan, “private economic figures are to be more closely united around the party,” thereby achieving “a high degree of consistency with the Party Central Committee on political stand, political direction, political principles, and political roads.” All of this stands in stark contrast to long-accepted concepts of how private companies function in a free market. The overriding purpose of business, according to these traditional precepts, is to earn profits through the provision of value-added products and services, in response to marketplace signals and under the constraint of basic economic realities. Government ideology plays no role in that equation. But China has a very different vision. Government officials and government ideologies are directly infused into business operations. Private sector employees are “educated” on government policies and ideologies, with the expectation that this “enlightenment” will help inform their business decisions. This government-business symbiosis is further cemented by the provision of massive government subsidies (estimated to be about 3 percent of China’s GDP) to Chinese companies. OST proves it becomes national appropriation Smith ’79 Delbert D., Legal Advisor for the Space Science and Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin, “Space Stations International Law and Policy”, October 30, 1979, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Space_Stations_International_Law_And_Pol/4U2fDwAAQBAJ?hl=enandgbpv=0andkptab=overview//pranav Three potential limitations on these conclusions should be noted. First, the interpretation set forth above would not permit commercial or international organizations from claiming exclusive rights to a particular area of outer space in the absence of actual use. Thus, if such an organization had maintained a space station in a specific orbital slot for a substantial period of time and the station-keeping system subsequently failed, the organization would not be entitled to prevent any other entity from occupying that slot pending the orbiting to a replacement station by the original occupant. Second, if an entity were established that, although commercial in form, was essentially under the control of the government of the country in which it was organized, permanent use would constitute national, as distinguished from nonnational, appropriation. This is especially true in light of the Article VI provision that makes states responsible for acts of their nationals and for international organizations of which they are members. Third, dispute has arisen regarding the minimum standard of universality that would determine whether an international organization of relatively universal membership satisfies the minimum standard. However, some question remains regarding the exemption of an organization composed of a limited number of governments.
Negate – they skirt the core controversy of the topic which is national vs private space activities – kills stasis point and pre-round prep and means we lose access to generics that rely on the motives of private companies differing from national interest proven by the fact that their advantage is functionally China space good/bad – competing interps and DTD on T, it's a question of models and we indict their advocacy